saturday was sweet, a pleasure - everyone rolling into the gallery from a walk around chinatown, which is like a solar oven on a day without clouds. I get a hug from a loved former student - mine's stronger than hers though - it seems that she's lost the hopefulness of a year ago, that school teaching is not what she imagined, that the loss of the possibility of grad study has flattened her sense of future, that she can't SEE how she'll continue to write when the kids at home and the kids at work and the personality politics at work do this to her mind. then there's another former student, still sparking with ideas because he's jumped into another dreamer's course, has the money from somewhere, and we're excited to see each other but decidedly we don't hug, just grin and fall into a conversation about the Beckett play he's in - hates it - he wants to PLEASE an audience, why do this to them? but he knows, I say, he knows what he's doing to them, he knows what he's doing to you, couldn't it be the beginning? And 'is there an end to suffering', and don't we have to ask?

the aircon's not strong enough and even as we're quietly writing people start to fall asleep - they've been walking in the oven, then there was lunch. So I make up a game to wake us up. I have copies of a couple of Calvino 'Thin Cities' to discuss. I screw up a napkin to use as a ball. One player is to describe a detail they'd seen on their walk, then throw the ball to another player, who describes the transformed detail as it appears in their own 'thin city'. And so they see a city from above, the buildings burning down like joss sticks, the ash covering the land like snow. They see coffee rivers and children hiding under cardboard boxes. at the end the last woman drifts right away while she's talking - 'relocation notices, layers and layers of them lining the ground...' she says, then 'layers of dead bodies...'. I try to clarify, get more detail but she chokes and says 'it just came out.' we sit quietly for a while after that.

someone on the assessment panel for this programme had complained that one of the application ms's was too dystopian, like this kind of vision is just strategic political grumbling. I'm glad he is in the room to see it happen.