I’m just back from a nearly month-long trip to Australia with Sylvia. It was, in part, an academic speaking gig. We were in Melbourne, Sydney, Cairns, and the Great Barrier Reef. I’ll blog some of my travel notes and trip photos over the coming days.

[Carved “fairy tree” in Fitzroy Park in Melbourne.]

Flying into LA at night on the trip down was impressive. It’s an image I’ve seen in films, the great grid of lights— but to be there in person felt…epic. In a plane you can also look straight down and sense your height—it’s not just a panoramic view. You’re embedded and, to some extent, at risk. I was thinking of all the things people were doing down there at that very moment—eating, watching TV, fucking, getting high, arguing, with one or two even in the process of dying or being born.

[In the Victoria Market buildings in downtown Melbourne.]

We left on Tuesday and arrived early on Thursday morning, thanks to the International Date Line. We’ve been busy Turing ants the last two days, leaving trails hither and yon, scavenging scraps of food, culture, shopping. In some ways it’s like the U.S., in that it’s a young country, but there is a European feel as well. In the downtown part of Melbourne, there’s quite a few impressive old stone buildings, and an old shopping arcade with a tiled floor and a fancy ceiling. Indeed, many of the blocks have interesting little alleys or “laneways” cutting them in half, often with cafes on the laneways.

[“Luna Park” amusement park entrance in St. Kilda district of Melbourne.]

The city of Melbourne is pretty big, 3 million, and there’s many faces to see. Many fair British types, but lots of Chinese and Vietnamese, and some Indians and Indonesians as well. Some of the Brits are pasty and lumpy, but many are handsome or beautiful. From 1901 to 1973, the country had a “White Australia” policy of excluding non-white immigrants—ironic, of course, in the face of the fact that the Aboriginal natives are dark-skinned. You hardly see any Aboriginals in the cities of Melbourne and Sidney by the way—they seem to live up north or in the central and western deserts.

We rode a streetcar to a funky beach suburb, like Santa Cruz but grottier and bigger. St. Kilda. At the beach it was 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the bay water was listless and utterly flat, with dead blue jellyfish on the shore. We had a nice lunch in a beachfront place, glad to be in some air conditioning, I had a Pacific fish called trevalley, it was good. After lunch we went wading and suddenly a squall was whipping up waves and blasting us with blowing gritty sand. The wind was maybe 70 mph, with some rain in it, and we all hid inside. And then the squall was over and in that half hour, the temperature had dropped to about 75. The Australians didn’t seem surprised.

It’s interesting to keep on exploring the city. Cities are like fractals, or like Nature herself—as you delve deeper, you keep on finding new details. We were in Melbourne so long—eleven nights—that it started to feel like when I spent a semester in Brussels a few years ago. It moves beyond sight-seeing and becomes a matter of living in a new place.

[Kangaroos lie on their backs and scratch like dogs.]

Being on vacation, at first I didn’t feel too much like writing, which means that I felt a little blank. Writing wakes me up, centers me. But not feeling compelled to write is kind of relaxing. Like I’ve retired from life.

[Federation Square is cool.]

We’re sight-seeing, doing things like having a chai latte tea at the Riverland pub terrace between the Yarra River and Federation Square. The teapot is full of pods and seeds and leaves floating in steamed milk. I have a special sieve for straining this invigorating ichor into my cup.

[A Shrine of Remembrance for the war dead in Melbourne.]

All in all, this is one of those trips when I don’t really know what I’m doing or why I’m here. It’s all kind of pointless and random, like, why am I giving these talks, and why Melbourne? Well, because they paid me to come. It’s nice to be out of my normal life, with a new city and so many unusual people to see.

[Street scene in Melbourne.]

Everyone has been very friendly in Australia, I feel it’s a similar to Canada in the sense that it’s an English-speaking country that isn’t so conflicted and torn by internal contradictions as is the U.S.

I’m going to take a break from blogging for a few weeks. Heading down the foggy road.

I sent in version three of my autobiography to my publishers, and I’ve written a new outline for my novel, Jim and the Flims.

And now I’m ready for a break from the computer.

By the way, I took today’s pictures near the Skyline trail above Los Gatos and Saratoga. It’s good to get out into the woods and away from the keyboards.

Last night we watched the 1932 Boris Karloff film classic from Universal Pictures, The Mummy, I borrowed it from the library. Great, great film. And great research material for me, given my interest in spicing up the plot of Jim and the Flims with some Egyptian spells and a mummy.

In the first scene, it’s 1922 (echoing Carter’s opening of King Tut’s tomb in 1922), and two archaeologists are in their field quarters, studying their haul. In the corner leans an open sarcophagus with Karloff mostly wrapped in mummy-bandages, and with a wonderfully wrinkled face. He’s the mummy of Imhotep, a priest from 3,700 years ago. A handsome young Oxford-educated archaeologist is studying a little box with an inscription of the lid along the lines of, “Whoever opens this box will die from the mummy’s curse.”

So naturally he opens the box, and within is The Scroll of Thoth. Thoth is that Egyptian god who has a skinny bird’s head, an ibis head. The hieroglyphs are so old that they’re pre-Dynastic. But our dreamy archaeologist copies some of them out, and begins trying to read them, reciting the text in a low murmur.

In his casket, Karloff/Imhotep, twitches an eyelid, opens his eyes, moves his hand. Cut to blond archaeologist youth still studying the Scroll of Imhotep a few feet away. A crufty hand comes into the frame and rests upon the scroll. On one finger, the mummy’s hand bears a ring with a scarab in it. The mummy leaves carrying the Scroll of Thoth. The Oxford boy backs off to the side of the little room and—begins hysterically laughing.

“He laughed until he died in a strait-jacket the next year,” we learn from the romantic-lead-type archaeologist in the next scene, which is set ten years later.

Karloff reappears, he’s still the walking-mummy Imhotep, but he looks fairly cleaned-up, thanks to magic. He’s wearing a fez and presents himself as a local named Ardeth Bey. He guides the romantic-lead archaeologist to the untouched tomb of Princess Ankh-es-en-amon, a so-called “Vestal Virgin,” from the good old days.

A quick jump forward and now Ankh’s mummy and all of the statues and ornaments from her tomb are in Cairo museum, Karloff/Imhotep/Bey goes there, lights a lamp, kneels, and recites a spell from the Scroll of Thoth, which he still has.

“Ankh Salaam. Ankh Salaam. Ankh Salaam,” chants Karloff, which is kind of great, as he’s using, like, the only two vaguely Egyptian words that anyone in the U.S. audience knows.

Not far away, in downtown Cairo, a flapperesque half-Egyptian girl at a nightclub hears the psychic call. She (played by the dishy Zita Johann) is the reincarnation of the Princess, she carries the ancient ba and ka. She’s peppy and languid by turns, depending on whether she’s under the Mummy’s spell.

And now there’s some back and forth. The romantic-lead archaeologist wears an Amulet of Isis to protect himself from the Mummy. Close-ups of Karloff’s wrinkled, triangular face, eyes huge, glaring hyptnotically. To cast a spell he holds out his hand with the scarab ring. To kill an distant enemy, he clenches his hand, and sends an old duffer to the carpet with a heart attack.

The Mummy wants to kill the flapper and then to use the Scroll of Thoth to revive her to be his wife. They’ll hang out with the sun god, Amon Ra. Karloff calls this transformation The Great Change. But a statue of the goddess Isis saves the flapper.

And in the last scene Karloff does the classic Mummy-movie thing of turning back into a skull. And now the lovers can get it on. Yeah, baby!