on the move

I've been thinking about the last time I emigrated - to Australia when I was eighteen, for study. Once I made it to the Gong I stayed in a boarding house while I sorted out a flat - I remember a crazy woman tipping her dinner over the TV because she objected to Home and Away, and reading a letter she dropped on the floor when she got kicked out - from a friend of hers, telling her to keep on the move because no one could be trusted, and even those who seemed friendly were likely to be working against her.

I remember listening to the Lemonheads on a tape player in my little room. Hauling my huge heavy bags (tape player, tapes, books...) on and off the trains, always worried I wouldn't have time to get everything in or out the doors. And trying to get change from a shopkeeper for a public phone, knowing I had just a few minutes left in the working day to try to organise a phone connection for my new flat, but he wanted to make fun of my accent instead of giving me the "fufty cint piece". I got the change, walked out and THEN had a cry, and I cried in fear a couple of nights later looking out at the lightning storms on the horizon - I had never seen a storm in the distance like that and to me they looked like explosions.

But I loved walking and walking and walking around with my map, getting lost and figuring out the way. Deciding on the flat in Fairy St, mostly for the street name, and sitting and writing and reading at the table with the hours I had to myself. Changing the way I introduced myself from "Jenny" to "Jen" because it was easier to make myself understood. When my boyfriend joined me six weeks later I found I had mostly lost my sense of being with him.

It's hard to believe this move in comparison - being met at the airport and taken to the executive centre which is largely paid for by the school, having warm, helpful faculty people at arm's reach, having everything taken care of simply by filling in forms or sending emails or asking questions. We had lunch today with friends who live here, and they were lovely and congenial and showed us where to buy shoes, and we have a date to eat next weekend in Little India. And I have Nic, whose instinct for finding and employing pragmatic information is beyond compare - he had the bus and train routes sorted before we even got on the plane.

But I know there are other uses now for my excess self.

We Are The World

We arrived in Singapore last night.

This morning I went into my office and unwrapped my brand new chairs and all my new stationery. The building is brand new too, its furbishment still in progress. My back wall is all window, looking out onto an atrium where today I watched eight young men and one young woman, all in business suits, conferring over a Japanese fan. Then they moved just out of eyeshot and sang "We Are The World" together.

This afternoon Nic and I went to the most local mall, Jurong Point, and did stuff like get SIM cards and blister plasters and unfamiliar fruit. Later we'll go out for chili crab with some work colleagues.

Every now and then I get a surge of over-familiarity, physical sensations from things I have known before and long forgotten. The word 'canteen' and the noticeboards there; a swarm of red biting ants; the smell of the fruit in the bus terminal at the mall.

Brief 38

Dear all,

I'm guest-editing the next issue of Brief, and would like to invite you to submit poetry, fiction, critical and creative non-fiction, reviews, art and/or less classifiable work for its pages. Brief (formerly A Brief Description of the Whole World) is a New Zealand print-based journal, and is newly under the general editorship of Michael Arnold.

A Brief Description of the Whole World was founded in the mid-90s by Alan Loney, who aimed to make a space in NZ for writing informed in one way or another by post-structuralism & L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E innovations. Over the years, though, the magazine's been through a few editors (John Geraets, Jack Ross, Scott Hamilton, Brett Cross) and that purpose has diversified.

The magazine remains a home for work that takes aesthetic and conceptual risks. I am particularly interested in writing that is linguistically and visually curious, that inhabits international and multimedia forms and identities, and that is emotionally and philosophically inventive. Both Michael Arnold and I are keen to open up the contributor list and the readership, and to welcome in new people and thoughts.

Subscriptions can be ordered at the Titus Books website, here: http://titus.books.online.fr/html/OrderForm.htm

Please send anything you'd like considered for the forthcoming issue to jencrawford@gmail.com. Submissions will close on July 15th, 2009. I prefer Microsoft Word or RTF attachments.

Feel free to pass the invitation on to anyone else you think may be interested.


Best wishes and happy writing,

Jen

autographs 2

More from my great-grandmother's autograph album. Eruera has his heart on his sleeve - but then it was April 1st.



Various wisdoms:











Sign of the times, perhaps:



Wish I knew what this says:







Granny Crawford died when I was three, I think. Before that we used to visit her in the flat she shared with her sister, our (great-great) Auntie Meta, who inscribed this (by Marie Corelli). I do remember both women - they made absolutely delicious shortbread.





This is from Shelley's "The Sensitive Plant". The final words are "a mockery" - to me the script looks like tagging.

My Nan and Pop have passed on to me an autograph book that belonged to my great-grandmother, Grace Taylor - Pop's mother. I hadn't seen this particular treasure until yesterday. Here are some pages:














Entries from a couple of suitors (guess which one was successful!):






I might post more of these later - it's full of treats.

for understanding

My nan told me this afternoon that she was struggling to understand lots of the poems in Bad Appendix, but that she'd had no trouble with the ones she'd heard me read at the launch.

I said I thought maybe they weren't for understanding, but that sometimes by just reading them aloud a bit or reading them over you could feel them.

"I did that!" she said, "And it worked! I could feel them and understand them perfectly!"

The thoughts that she didn't understand and that she did were just moments apart, which might seem strange but I've had a version of this conversation a few times before. I wish I'd always known to say 'they're not for understanding.' The relief people express is a relief to me too, and so far it's always been followed by connection - people tell me, then, that the work has affected them in some way - our mutual alienation is replaced by recognition.

What is it that we THINK about understanding a poem that means we don't know it when it happens?

theatre

I gave my niece and nephew their Christmas present yesterday. I knew this was a cool present, but to my delight it worked even better than expected.

I'd decided to make them a puppet theatre partly to save money, but also because it made sense for their personalities. Tessa is six and has got into reading and writing stories in a seriously big way, but also loves to draw and make things. Julian is four and spends as much time as possible with his face pressed to the floor and one eye closed, so he can better see the train stories he's playing out. Their parents have always had a great passion for roleplaying games, from Dungeons and Dragons to World of Warcraft.

I'd decided on the theatre but not got very far with it when we went down to Pop's funeral, and on the way just happened to find some finger puppets in a $2 shop in Taupo. This was such a boon - I'd thought I would have to make them - and it also decided the theatre setting for me, because the puppets were a princess, prince, fairy, witch, dragon and scarecrow.

I made the theatre itself out of a cardboard box. I cut out a decorative facade for the top and hung some gold embroidered curtains (sari offcuts from the quilting box) from dowel suspended behind the facade. I covered the outside of the box with strips of bright and shiny coloured paper, then painted blue sky and green grassy hills on the inside. I used leftover box cardboard and felt pen to make props - a castle, a tree with lots of red apples and one golden apple, a well, a lake and a train track.

I fitted each of the puppets with a length of dowel, and there are strips cut out of the bottom of the box, to allow the puppets to be moved around from underneath. Today we sat the box on the edges of two armless chairs, but there are probably better ways to facilitate this. I also made a playbook with lots of blank pages, so that Tessa could write down their plays.

I thought we would have to spend some time explaining how it all worked to them, but as soon as we set the box on the chairs the kids jumped in and began the task of liberating the princess from the spell which turned her into a dragon at night - of course, this required the magical golden apple, but it also required the princess ignoring the witch's instruction to find the apple inside the dark hole in the tree.... It was great collaborative action; Julian was just eager to add to the action as Tessa, and together they easily moved the story to a resolution.

After the first cycle of plays, Tessa started contemplating the book, and told me it would be useful for them to write the stories down so they could do the same play several times for different people. I was in the kitchen a short time later when there was the most wrenching wail - she was trying to write it all down as Julian and my brother played things out, but they were going too fast and she couldn't keep up. Her dad explained that it was extremely difficult to write that fast, and that it would work better to write down the plays beforehand or from memory afterwards. That restored equilibrium, and things got better still when grandma dug out a little dictaphone.

As I was leaving I explained to Tessa that she could make more props for it, and she said she was going to make more trees for a forest, and a bucket and winch for the well so that it would be a magic well. Julian, on the other hand, was hugging the traintrack - as much as he loved the rest of the present, I have to admit he would have been absolutely delighted just to receive that one strip of cardboard with lines drawn on it in felt pen....

crossovers

[cross-post of a facebook note]

Dancing made it easier for me to write by giving me creative movement under some very different conditions to those writing imposes - in close company, within a firm external structure. Writing is so entirely self-generated, & so much is in question all the time - nothing is imposed by a blank page except the desire for invention. Under the wrong circumstances that can be exhausting.

Now the energy of my writing somehow bounces from the energy of dancing - it's not exactly that dancing makes me want to write, though that is sometimes true - but that it provides some kind of secure framework that wasn't easily accessible to me through writing alone. When you hit a problem in a tango your bodies figure it out together. Familiar patterns and the music guide you and keep you moving. There's no time or room for fretting. I guess I learnt better how to do this, and now I do with less fretting all round.

practice

[cross-post of a facebook note]

Lately I've been having a few sessions just to myself in the dance studio. the luxury of an hour with all that space, mirrors and barres and music....

I started out by using this mostly for exercise - starting with, say, twenty minutes of yoga with Piazzola - especially the Five Tango Sensations (Asleep, Loving, Anxiety, Awake, Fear) - a good time to move with their looseness and absorb their complexity. Then I can easily fill up the rest of the hour just with walking, ochos, voleos. I enjoy the repetition and simplicity, how much there is to work with in that very small palette: balance, posture, step length, the position of my knees, the shapes and pressure and speed of my feet moving on the floor or in the air.

I have always found repetition & rote learning very centering. Repeated actions become a meditation, and it's a satisfying way to build strength while keeping the mental pressure low. No, no one ever yelled at me to practice my scales... in fact I think it's criminal that people do this instead of teaching their kids to relax and enjoy practice, to tune into the fine detail. Having said that, I was unable to do this for a long time with my writing - the interruptive power of anxiety. Dancing helped me retrain my mind to be okay with it again.

Today I shifted my focus a bit. So far I've been using the exercise time to get more familiar with music I don't know (Troilo, among other things) but today I put on some things I know very well, and found myself making a shift (an awkward shift) from exercise to dancing. Wow, am I used to being led.... It took me ages to get even a little orientation in this new mental space of exploration, continuity, variation. It was hard at first to stay connected with the music as I worked out a new palette, still based on the patterns of exercises but extending from them across the whole studio floor, into different and unpredictable rhythms and variable trajectories.

A rich field of work ahead.... I finished with a big smile on my face, which I usually think of as a side-effect of dancing with others.