blue acres

on the move

2009-07-18T22:39:00.001+12:00

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

2009-07-17T22:20:00.001+12:00

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

2009-06-09T14:37:00.001+12:00

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

2009-01-29T18:43:00.008+13:00

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.

2009-01-19T15:54:00.008+13:00

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

2009-01-03T22:21:00.001+13:00

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

2009-01-03T22:19:00.001+13:00

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

2008-12-14T23:27:00.000+13:00

[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

2008-12-14T23:25:00.000+13:00

[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.

oddments

2008-11-01T22:57:00.004+13:00

a couple of weeks ago I found myself, through no action of my own, included in the email prayer circle of some right-wing US evangelicals, who were praying for a godly resolution to this most 'terrifying' of elections, as well as to an assortment of urinary and prostate complaints. it's only sympathy for the urinary complaints that has stopped me from responding in persona as the Jen Crawford they think I am, but it's nice to fantasise. what would you say?

*

Reading Shakespeares on behalf of some high school students I'm tutoring at the moment - Measure for Measure (BOO!) and Richard III (YAY!). It's hard to teach the former - I can't find its depth, and so far can only stand outside it and try to point at its questions and answers and the gaps between these, as well as the gaps between then and now. Richard III, on the other hand, yanks you through its trains of thought, and despite being a history play seems to require so little social translation to make sense in the present. It's in danger of replacing King Lear as my favourite. I love the way it's opened up by the sheer number of its active characters, and the way it falls into weirdly stylised and repetitive mourning refrains that seem to shift its genre to another time & place altogether.

*

Edit: Measure for Measure made a lot more sense and became a lot more entertaining when I remembered to activate the COMEDY chip in my brain.

Laura Riding & Lisa Samuels

2008-09-28T13:34:00.002+13:00

There's an interesting interview over here at Waggish with Lisa Samuels, in which Lisa discusses Laura Riding & her own poetics. The interview's in three parts - first part at the bottom.

from the mouths of babes

2008-09-15T16:51:00.002+12:00

I recommend the full screen button (bottom, second from right) for maximum cognitive dissonance.

Plerosis

2008-09-06T23:36:00.010+12:00

I don't know what it is that makes me want to take out yet another stack of library books when I am surrounded by great piles of marking (not to mention the other stacks of unread library books). Maybe it is to help with a sense of perspective. Anyway, today I finally got to Jorge Luis Borges's 1955 essay 'A History of the Tango'(in Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger, Viking, 1999). This gave me context for a lovely quote I'd never seen the source of - 'I would say that the tango and the milonga directly express a conviction that poets have often tried to voice with words: that a fight can be a celebration.' It also contains this beauty: 'What was once a devilish orgy is now a way of walking.'

Borges's intent is to discuss the violence of tango, ahead of its sexual nature, which 'has often been noted'. So he reads it in relation to the history of swordfighting, of the 'dance of swords', telling a history of the dance as a masculine and competitive enterprise. The impression is supported by almost every piece of detail he selects: from tangueros each asserting their own homelands as the birthplace of tango, to his memory of pairs of men dancing 'since the women of the town would not want to take part in such lewd debauchery', to the tales of gaucho knife-fights and their place in Argentinian national identity - the identity of the rebel.

It is a little alienating to come into this perspective when one is used to thinking about the dance as being about love, about men and women. But it's also illuminating, if one doesn't miss the connecting premise: that the sexuality and violence are 'modes or manifestations of the same impulse; in all the languages I know, the word for "man" connotes both sexual potency and combative potential, and the word virtus, Latin for "courage," comes from vir, meaning "male".'

So there is a layer of the essay that I appreciate very much, which opens an understanding of masculine love through the metonym of the fight: a man opens a contact with another man through a letter of respect and praise, crosses the country to be with him, to fight with him, to cut off his hand and then die with belly ripped open by his sword. The music of the tango conjures up an 'apocryphal past, simultaneously stoic and orgiastic, in which I have challenged and fought, in the end to fall silently, in an obscure knife fight.' I can understand these things. I think anyone who thinks about passionate love can. Masculine love? I think there is something to be gained for women in reading ourselves into this mythology, in order to understand our own violent hearts (as well as men's) & our readiness 'to kill and to die' in love as a kind of godliness - and yet I don't want to dismantle that mythology's history, the particular extremity it has acquired through its gender sanctuary.

So then I picked up Anne Waldman's Iovis (Coffee House Press, 1993), and found her writing, in her introduction:

'"Iovis omnia plena" from which Iovis springs is a phrase from Virgil--all is full of Jove. & I wanted that sense of filling up: "plerosis." How that is both a celebration and a danger.'

political action

2008-09-04T17:22:00.003+12:00

I couldn't help but think of Ashurbanipal when reading about Putin saving a TV crew from a Siberian tiger. I wonder if Putin was thinking about Ashurbanipal too.

taxonomy

2008-09-02T11:22:00.004+12:00

last night I dreamt that I looked out the window to a large section next door, where our neighbours were trying to herd their animals together for a photo. They had about twenty great black maine coons, about ten great black chow chows, and about ten great black standard poodles. at first sight I took these ALL for cats, and was both alarmed and delighted at the size of them.

This dream harks back to when I used to live in Clareville - on Sydney's Northern beaches - with my friend Lucy. We lived there with, among others, Lucy's beautiful black chow Miqua, and often on walks along the beach we would encounter a black standard poodle with a dreadlocked tail.

Once we were followed home from the beach by a duck we named Albuquerque Duckless. It's strange being followed by an animal. You feel privileged by the unwarranted trust and attention, and caught between wanting to cultivate this and to disabuse the duck/puppy/... of its misconceptions. this I think must do odd things to your body language.

performable crit

2008-09-01T12:27:00.003+12:00

I made some interesting discoveries by trying something new to me in a third year poetry class last week. I had a tricky situation where I needed to both continue our usual workshopping cycle and also to get the students thinking about and working with performance, but with very limited time.

Students had, as usual, already read and written notes on all the poems to be workshopped. So I got them into groups of two or three, assigned each group another student's poem, and gave them fifteen minutes to devise a performance around this work that would bring forward some aspect of their critical observations. They were allowed to make new versions of their assigned poem - to excerpt from it, to rearrange it, to make cuts or repetitions or extensions. They could perform together or have one group member perform. They had performance objects available to them that their lecturer had asked them to bring along.

The results were wonderful. I was unsure whether they would have enough performance vocabulary be able to communicate their critiques in this way, but almost every piece was incisive, two or three of the six startlingly so. The performance mode turned their feedback into a genuinely constructive - as in productive, creative - act - an act of the imagination & one of many possible - rather than a reduction or a correction.

Working with a classmate's poem seemed to allow them to try performance with more gusto and generosity than they might at first be able to give to their own work. And it became clear as we talked through each performance that it was of great use to the poets to see and hear their own work as it was encountered and reinvented through the attentive readings of others.

It's certainly something I'll do again, but it's also got me wondering how it would fare as a flat-out replacement of the standard workshop-feedback model over an entire course. And what other response methods could be invented alongside it.

mamma power

2008-08-13T09:36:00.004+12:00

Dr Mattie Moss Clark is the mother of the Clark Sisters of the previous post - some of them are singing here but the clip opens with her.

I love these clips partly because they show so much about the environment from which these songs, and these voices, come. it's like each singer has the whole church of response beside and inside them. the listening is intense and totally active. sometimes as a teacher I wonder if it would be more productive to just generate a class full of 'hell yeah!' than to base response around critique & analysis. I suppose these are performances, not lessons, but then I suspect these people learned what they do primarily through singing their hearts out all day every sunday rather than through lessons. I don't know.

sister power

2008-08-12T20:47:00.007+12:00

This is the Clark Sisters doing 'Is My Living in Vain'. I believe this clip is from the 1983 concert movie Gospel, directed by David Leivick and Frederick A. Ritzenberg, and that they sing this towards the end of an extremely high-energy medley lasting about 20 minutes. Press the full-screen button and hang out till the end.

2008-07-27T18:17:00.001+12:00

this really was the best part of the show, and when I was a kid I would be frustrated if I didn't catch it. I wanted to just keep cruising along that bridge endlessly - it held that promise - and the music is about as mellow as a plum in the grass.

2008-07-26T00:00:00.007+12:00

finished my 'factory' time today, though the last three days were on-site, doing the most relentlessly repetitive task I've ever done. if I had been in a small room doing that the quality of the task would have been utterly different. instead a huge office shell, almost empty of furnishings (a broken phone here and there) & partitions (slowly becoming), looking out onto traffic and trees on one of the city's main roads. piles of wood & heating ducts & tiles all around me. quiet except for men wandering through, singing sometimes or shouting good-humoured nonsense. occasional hammering or the metal saw screaming. dim on my side of the room, the far side, away from the windows, and especially towards five o'clock, when almost everyone else was gone & the only lights were a row of temporary bulbs along the centre of the ceiling.

I'm happy to leave. it's seemed important to keep writing little bits of this even when I've been sick of the whole thing. I wanted to record that point when I would rather not, as part of thinking about the nature of this work when it occurs as an apparently optionless experience. despite my liking of physical work, my pleasure in new environments and my high tolerance for 'meditative' states it only took me about three weeks to feel I really didn't want any more.

2008-07-23T21:12:00.002+12:00

today I got sent on site, as a testament to my ability to cut a straight line. 'site' was a downtown office building. I stood at my little makeshift table, cutting and cutting and cutting, while offices were assembled, one by one, out of the open space around me.

Winter Warmers Reading

2008-07-18T17:34:00.000+12:00

Umm, due to some confusion about confusion, the previous cancellation is cancelled...

That is to say, I am pleased (if a little embarrassed) to announce that I WILL actually be talking and reading tomorrow for the Winter Warmers Series at the Art Lounge. The error(s) are mine, the programme is below!

Thank you for your forbearance! And I do hope that I will see some of you there tomorrow after all.

May the fairy of public klutzing visit us each only rarely.

Winter Warmers

Venue: the Art Lounge, corner of Lorne and Wellesley Sts, next to Pathfinders Bookshop.

Time: 1pm, Saturday, 19th July.

Features
Anna Rugis and Jack Ross – Traffic in Gold 1-2 pm
Following the theme of Anna's recently released album, these poems woven through songs speak of the solitary experience of exile and the way feelings and ideas are recorded in word and song to be "read" in another time.

Anna Rugis is a singer, songwriter and poet, formerly a backup singer for Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, and the Kinks. Her recorded CDs include Reconciliation, and Cave Songs, and the new release Traffic in Gold.
Her poems appear regularly in poetry magazines.

Jack Ross's latest novel, EMO, came out from Titus Books in June 2008. He is the author of two previous novels, two books of short fiction, and several volumes of poetry. He edited, with Jan Kemp, the trilogy of audio / text anthologies Classic, Contemporary & New NZ Poets in Performance (AUP, 2006-8).

Jen Crawford - Pop Riveter 2.15-2.45
I will be reading and discussing new work emerging from recent travels and stints as a factory worker, as well as samples from my recently released Titus Books collection, Bad Appendix. And answering questions, which may or may not include 'what the hell happened there?!'

Linn Lorkin, Hershal Herschal and Anna Rugis - Songs from Chanson from 3pm

skite

2008-07-13T16:01:00.002+12:00

I can drive a forklift....

(but actually, if you can drive a manual, you probably could too.)

2008-07-10T19:04:00.003+12:00

aches and pains yesterday afternoon, dizzy and blocked up this morning - just couldn't make myself go to that cold, cold place. stayed in bed, will regret it when the payslip comes in but better to sleep now and get rid of it rather than getting really sick. or going in and busting something - have one black knuckle today from squashing it between the heat press and the pinch roller yesterday. caught up on some sleep now & feel better though. a day off from itching doesn't hurt either. spent some nice mindless time writing ocarina notation for the Coronation St theme instead.

2008-07-08T18:02:00.004+12:00

Took time off on Monday for a funeral and a hospital visit, and it was hard to get back into the swing of things today. Frost this morning meant the factory was extremely cold pretty much all day. We made sure everyone had a cup of tea nearby for the first few hours, to keep our hands mobile. The bosses were away on a sales trip so at one stage we had our elected Afghani 'Prime Minister' forklift our worktables out into the carpark, where there was beautiful sunlight, and we worked there until trucks arriving made it impractical.

the highs so high

2008-07-04T17:47:00.008+12:00

today was good, hiffing sheets of gib board around, only a bit glassy, then working on quite a lovely job that involved stroking large sheets of warm black fabric, no fibreglass, just a mild hot glue aroma. plus the tantalising suggestion of a forklift lesson....

we clock in and clock out; the printed sheet advising us to do so reads 'C OCK IN, C OCK OUT FOR YOUR LUNCH BREAK'. poetry is irrepressible. managing my physical energy - feeding this defamiliarised machine - still requires thought - but I found today went a lot smoother on account of a big egg sandwich at morning tea and a smaller lunch - no perceivable crashes. other temporal increments are hidden; it's the guys who do this their whole lives who get the problems; we're only going to be here a while. maybe a couple more weeks.

I 'got' my position in a chain newly today too - something had been sent back from a building site to be redone. & I remembered all the cluckings over the state of the NZ building industry today, and realised I was making its materials.

in other thoughts, what about the lyrics to 'Islands in the Stream'? I've secretly loved this song since I was eight years old, which is why it's a bit of a shock to actually hear the words:

islands in the stream
that is what we are
no one in between
how can we be wrong
sail away with me
to another world
and we rely on each other, uhuh...
from one lover to another, uhuh...

uhuh? No one in between the reliable islands that sail away together.... I don't know whether to feel excited or betrayed.

low

2008-07-02T19:18:00.005+12:00

glueing sheets of fibreglass to fibreglass panels, then die-cutting the panels down. puffs of glassy air on my face and neck every time we dropped them down. the hardest tool to use is the tape roller but I think the trick is keeping it absolutely straight. I can't remember what we did before morning tea, something different. went and got lunch, went and got a second lunch. overtime. my ears hurt, maybe from the tape roller screech, maybe a bug.

if I lived in Siberia....

2008-07-01T21:12:00.008+12:00

took all day today to finish on the huge MDF pieces - they weigh around 50kg each - impossible for one person to move, bloody heavy for two. this morning, just as we thought we were nearing completion the boss came down & let us know he'd agreed to send them in protective packaging for an extra fee - damn - packaging them up then took about 60% again of the time and just as much hauling as making them had.

you begin these things by getting quite excited when you're finishing a job. you get some satisfaction that it's done, done well, & you get to see the back of whatever its particular nuisances were. then the next job comes up. and it turns out it's also heavy, or itchy, or it gives you a heat rash, or it's just plain monotonous. but one of the advantages of working in a small, workshop-type factory is that the jobs change reasonably regularly, and another is that they involve a certain amount of (for want of a better word) workmanship, though 'craft' might be overstating the case. and one of the privileges of this being a temporary gig for me is that for now with the new jobs the sense of novelty holds. I like finding the rhythms, the pleasure of making the work much faster or easier just by clicking the techniques into place.

the other thing of interest to me is the reinforcement of a couple of those odd counter-intuitive equations; the bad: the shittier the job, the lower the pay; the good: the expenditure of physical energy leads to the generation of physical energy. I feel great (at least, I do as long as I remember to eat like a horse).

in lieu of Monotonous, here's Eartha Kitt singing C'Est si Bon:

gravediggers

2008-06-27T20:53:00.007+12:00

walking into Erik Nussbicker's exhibition at the Paris Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature/ Museum of Hunting and Nature was very uncomfortable - I wasn't expecting anything in particular and so felt very disrupted - reactively offended - to see artworks and musical instruments made of human and animal skulls and bones. Possibly I missed some of the preparatory cues, such as the exhibition title (L'Etre et le Cerf/ Being and the Stag?? help me out, French speakers), by being in a different language. Later I was glad of the language barrier; I was able to stay with the works for a while without being 'corrupted' by the written info around - I know I shouldn't read that stuff at exhibitions because it often destroys things for me but I can't help it.

anyway, soon the quiet space and the invention of the instruments overtook my first reaction. I don't know where Mr Nussbicker sources his bones or what kind of spiritual arrangements he makes with their original inhabitants, but there was no shame or glam in the works, just receptivity and fearlessness.

This is one of the 'psychopomps' that was in the exhibition. it's a kind of swinging skull flute, hung from strings - when the skull is set in motion it hoots softly and rhythmically, gradually becoming quieter as the swing decreases. there was also a human skull attached to a spine, attached to a (horse?)hair tail - video showed this swung in a circle, fast, to make a much more frenetic sound.

my first thought was of Rilke's 'Primal Sound' essay (click for pdf) , where he imagines a phonograph that plays the sound of the coronal suture. these seem to be made of something like the same impulse, but in a more 'timeless' form.

I ended up thinking of the artist as a kind of a gravedigger figure; someone who lives in that realm that's always a part of life, but is usually veiled. & when you have to enter there, you're glad there's someone already present and comfortable with the scenery.

& of course they got me thinking about breath and vessels and bodies in a different way, with some interesting results in a couple of quiet sessions with the ocarinas.

*

linked in theme but quite different in tone were Jan Fabre's works, scattered through the Flemish, Dutch and German galleries at the Louvre. though these were also meditations on death - and declared a conscious push towards the necessity of a new human relationship with death - they were much more 'fun' on first sight.

The coffin and bassinet here are made of beetle carapaces. so many of these works were arresting in some way, and the ideas were interesting - but they kind of curdled rather than digested in my afterthought. I don't know what that new relationship with death is - and this article just seems to confirm my feeling of being at the hands of a series of non-sequiturs. it may be that I don't understand. the extravagance of the materials in many of the sculptures seems to invoke a much more distant, objectified (fantasy?) relationship with death than the Nussbicker's work. I think I mean here that one seems to generate remains for the purposes of representation (a kind of terminal relationship - a beautiful funeral) while the other returns to them, reinhabits them (a recycling; the kindness of a functional relationship through the slowness of disintegration, degradation).

2008-06-27T20:29:00.003+12:00

started work in the factory again on wednesday. hopefully this might last till semester starts again in a few weeks. began with fibreglass panels but now working with full sheets of mdf - 3.4 m long, I think. it's a bit more comfortable in that they don't itch, but they are heavy. I'll get some muscles again. it's nice this week, just two of us working quietly together. my co-worker is patient, slow-moving, thorough, like me. an Afghani father of nine. so it's very peaceful. he doesn't need a radio and neither do I - but things drift over from the other side of the factory - the Doors and the Clash and Supertramp, etc. music for folk of a certain age and right. Q hums along sometimes, and I hear his tonal structure is different to mine. it's been storming and storming; we roll the door down, turn the heater on; today the roof leaked a few spots of rain on our fabric and the lights blew. it's nice to just keep moving and keep moving, making things, following the procedure.

2008-06-25T22:44:00.004+12:00

There was a little bit of discussion over on Jack's blog about this poem of mine, from Bad Appendix:

--

primary school, port kembla

I walked along electrolytic street
and beyond the shadow of the stack
found broken bricks and patchy light,
mottle-leafed roses
and the stumps of old walls.
I lay down and gravel
pressed into my cheek.
beetles ran over my arms.

when I sat up the horizon wobbled
then settled and the ships
kept on sliding, one end
of the pen to the other

the smelter
clicked and hummed

from here roads lead
out to the station, to the dunes,
the ankle-deep pool,
the mild veneer lake;
to Hill 60 – a cloth of grass
between sweating tunnels
and martial houses; to Wentworth Street;
to the doorway of the pub
where in the beery cool a sparrow hunches,
watching but not moving,
& when I step too close,
doesn’t fly

--

I guess in addition to what Jack's said, and Richard has added, I would want to stress the (social) documentary aspects of this poem. There is a street in Port Kembla called Electrolytic Street, and it does lead under the copper smelter stack to the old disused primary school.

I don't normally hold with this sort of comment as poetic justification - it doesn't matter if something's 'true' or not, one's still chosen to use it out of the seamless reality one's surrounded by - and so Jack's comments about the transformation of landscape and the pathetic fallacy are very valid.

But it still leaves me wanting to say that this one, and what I think of as its companion poem, 'port dispersal', were written probably first as a record of this place - and that elements of the poem might be invisible without some acquaintance with the place. I lived there for a couple of years - some of the only recent years when that copper smelter was commissioned and functioning. The primary school had at that stage been closed for decades because of the dangerous emission spikes from this stack.

(dial sky on a spike day)

So I'm afraid that the poor sparrow was likely suffering much the same complaint as Voula's budgie, rich under the romas, which appears in 'port dispersal'. There was a spate of budgie deaths as I arrived in the suburb, just as production in the smelter went on-line again. OK, so this is perhaps *not* purely the hopeful note it might otherwise have seemed! but that note is still there, I think, in that moment of (imagined) shelter and contact.

But part of what interested me in this landscape - and in so many landscapes - is the way that humans not only read themselves and their internal/social worlds onto them - but the way that they *make* those landscapes accordingly. And pretty much all of our landscapes are artificial in this way. My last chapbook, 'Admissions', I saw as primarily about this - hospital as a great big external body. Port Kembla occurred to me in a similar way, which is why Electrolytic St seemed a good place to start this poem. (Incidentally, I'm now back working at the factory - I get there via 'Reliable Way' - love those industrialists.)

did, have

2008-06-24T23:02:00.002+12:00

An excerpt from a longer poem I've been working on called 'did, have'




my mum, being this, terribly emotional, also some part, egalitarian, 
‘I give him six months, then he won’t be, any longer. and she.
who is afraid of the mobile 
telephone

under clock water when the print reverses, St Pancras, the Hardy 
Tree necked in hours, of roots, of entry, oublié, headstones
clicking crabclaw 
telegraphy, un 
addition, s’il vous plait

while him, happening to die on an aeroplane, indeed did, have

an operation in Cyprus, she, who was not afraid
in Sinai, though he was, Jehovah’s witness

from the Republic of Whangamomona
the moebius road. thin as a saddle
and wet with rain. left flank
thin as a saddle, wet with
nausea, slipping. right flank
thin, as a saddle, wet, with
adoration, slipping. ‘this is how
I remember, completing

the round stone          in the clay
half visible         the round stone
in the clay             half visible

Jack Ross's EMO

2008-06-24T22:56:00.002+12:00

I had the pleasure of introducing Jack Ross's new book EMO - which follows Nights with Giordano Bruno and The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis in his Random Excess Memory trilogy. Here's what I said:

Many of you already know Jack Ross as a friend, as a teacher, as a prolific poet and fiction writer, an editor, critic, translator, publisher, blogger, and as a warm advocate for some of the more under-explored reaches of New Zealand literature. (I think the relevant epithet that turns up in EMO is “the Sheriff of Freaktown”.) A number of us know that we’ve directly benefited from his work in those roles; I could say we all owe him something, because we’re recipients of the literature to which he so generously contributes his energies and talents – and without his work mapping and making that literature it would be considerably narrower.

Having said that, at first thought it seemed a little bit of a daunting prospect to introduce this book, EMO. There’s a passage in EMO where Jack describes one of his source texts, The Thousand and One Nights, as more of ‘a literature than a unified work’ – and this is also true of EMO itself. It’s more a library than a book. The book is one of a trilogy, the Random Excess Memory trilogy - yet it stands alone. Within EMO is another trilogy – the books of Eva, Mars and Ovid – or Earth, Mars and Otherworld - EMO. Behind this internal trilogy, ghosting through its pages is another set of texts – palimpsest texts – that include translations of Ovid and Sappho and Paul Celan, a comparative reading of the Thousand and One Nights, collections of Jack’s original poetry, and so on. One can also read these texts on a series of linked websites, which (as websites do), lead us on to other websites, just as the books within EMO lead us to other books, both internal and external to its pages.

In other words, this is a book which isn’t satisfied with being self-contained. It reaches beyond its own covers, beyond its author, inviting you into one of the great endangered pleasures of literature – which is the sense of its endlessness, the way one book can open another book for you, like a friend giving you a private gift; perhaps the key to a room you can now share – a room, of course, which would have many other doors.

So EMO, with its layered texts, gives us a visual realisation of the narrative manifold that is, to my knowledge, entirely unique (and I should just offer kudos at this point to both Jack and to Titus Press that this is so well realised: there’s no visual strain in reading this, which is quite a technical feat – there’s a lot of love and care gone into its production). The awareness of historical and characterological tensions that are created by these palimpsests is extraordinary. But I’m wary of making the book sound like something it’s not – it’s not a comfortable intellectual rehearsal of post-structuralist concepts.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that ‘Eva’, the protagonist of the first book, is an android clone of Eva Braun; that the middle book is a post-Sadean detective story set on Mars, that in the third book Ovid hallucinates his exile in Auckland and his vampiric enslavement at the hands of a succubus nurse.

So it’s a very moving book.

I’m quite serious about that. Jack quotes Borges writing about The Thousand and One Nights – ‘keep reading as the day declines and Scheherazade will tell you your own story’. For all the weird schlock-genre fun that EMO allows us to indulge in, it is very much about our own stories. It’s the most outlandish fiction, and the most unsettling fiction, because it won’t quite sit down and be fiction. Or it might be more accurate to say that it won’t quite sit down and let its readers – or its writer – be real. So however much I appreciate Jack Ross’s contributions to literature, I’m no longer entirely convinced that he’s not actually a three-dimensional simulacrum of a fictional Reno private eye. Having read the fragments of Eva Braun’s diary, which Jack includes here, and having read the heartbreaking letters of Eva Android to her lost sister, Eva Braun, I’m pretty sure I know some other members of the Eva clone-clan – in fact they are disturbingly familiar.

One comes away with a deep consciousness and a deep wariness of the way that people become stories and that stories recur: Beauty and the Beast; Scheherezade and Shahryar, the wives of Bluebeard, Eva and Adolf. But Eva, however quietly, insists: she is a clanswoman, not a clone. This is one of the great beauties of this book and of Jack’s work in general. Among the stories are so many of the generic horrors, generic pleasures, generic loves we live and dream – but the generic is never blindly presented as ‘the way things are’ - nor is it dismissed as meaningless repetition. The power of its unities is openly encountered; the insistent delicate variety of its individual manifestations, and of its metamorphoses, is uncovered.

So this is a serious book. It’s a book that suggests our stories – those we return to over and over, those we read in the dead of night, those we hide under the bed – especially those we hide under the bed - are not incidental. They’re not accidents, they’re not outdated, and they’re certainly not irrelevant to the more ‘serious’ matters of our human condition here and now. I want to read you a short passage from the Mars section, where two clinicians contemplate how to interpret a patient’s story:

“It was useful to get the whole story out of her, but all it can do now is confirm that she’s been living in a fantasy world for quite some time, and that parts of it still seem quite real to her.”

“Observe and treat accordingly then?”

“You’ve got it. I was like you once, you know. Keen to take up the cudgels for each new patient – trusting their stories, hunting down the corrupt officials and cops who’d victimised them. It doesn’t make you any friends, for one thing. Nor does it really help your patients, longterm. The trouble is their stories just aren’t plausible, in the final analysis. Either you believe we live on a knife-edge of sanity in a world of seething bestial indulgence and mass-murder, or else you accept that a few wounded souls have difficulties with the stress of modern life…”

Eva Braun’s presence in this book doesn’t really allow us to accept the second alternative as all there is to it. How we handle the possibility of the first alternative is, of course, a perennial problem. But EMO reminds us – shocks us - into a new consciousness that we are not without means, not without tools, not without a language for understanding and engaging with the full substance of our world, if we choose to acknowledge it. Because we have our stories, and our stories are talking to us.

Launch reminder

2008-06-17T11:13:00.002+12:00

Bad Appendix (by me)
Enclosures (by Bill Direen)and
EMO (by Jack Ross)

are to be launched this Thursday, June 19th, 6.30 pm
at Alleluya Cafe, St Kevin's Arcade, Karangahape Rd. All welcome!

There will be readings from all of the above and live music from Bill Direen too. Our MC will be Scott Hamilton.

I love St Kevin's Arcade. I love that there's a saint called Kevin. I love those big fat neo-classical windows over Myer's Park, and that you can scoot down through there onto Queen Street. And I love these books - I think they do a nice kind of justice to St Kev's particular elegance. See you there.

2008-05-29T10:17:00.001+12:00

To be launched June 19th, Allelujah Cafe, alongside EMO by Jack Ross and Enclosures by Bill Direen. More details soon.

2008-05-24T10:38:00.004+12:00

Mona Lisa among the Pestiferes

uno momento-
touch the bubo!
click click click
click click click

tonight we had a vietnamese meal in shoreditch with workmates of Nic's. we were discussing archiving, how archiving has become easy enough that its purpose has changed - people used to record moments that were meaningful, and now we record moments just in case they are meaningful. we record as many moments as possible in order to defer - some time later we (or someone) will edit these records, decide what is meaningful then.

we finished the meal, and as we stood up to leave the man next to me also stood up, stepping right out of his seat to let me out of mine easily, rather than just shuffling over. I thought that was nice, & looked at him to thank him. It was my first boyfriend, Patrick, circa Mt Albert, 1991.

update

2008-05-11T06:21:00.003+12:00

Monday I start a new two week temp assignment; I'll tell you what it is when it's done. then I'm on my way home at the end of the month. Nic's plans are a bit vaguer; he's working part time from this week on, but we won't know how long for until it happens. He shouldn't be away much longer than me.

it will be very good to get home to the cat. despite fine care she's had a rough time of it, with a couple of bouts of serious illness, the first of which I'm pretty sure was stress-related, a response to the change. we try to send her love through the ether but I have to say I'm much more convinced that this works human to human (especially when you can TELL the person concerned you're sending them love through the ether) than human to animal. I believe she understands the physically immediate and the habitual, and emotion as manifest through these, in reasonably complex and very rational ways. I think she's very astute at responding to mood and predicting (and manipulating) behaviour according the minutiae of gesture and action - more so than many humans. but I don't think of her understanding as encompassing long-range hope. that seems more like a dog thing.

what do you think? what do your pets understand?

snappy paris 2

2008-05-07T10:11:00.005+12:00

at the church of st merri

snappy paris

2008-05-07T09:35:00.006+12:00

the temperature of the sacre coeur (from bill d and sandra b's place)

near & far from the pompidou

the mona lisa

you can click on these for (much) bigger versions but this will make my lack of photographic skill very evident.

2008-04-29T22:01:00.006+12:00

saturday we spent boating up and down the thames. london finally acquired a personality for me - like it does mean itself to be considered from the river, or by the river. at one end we saw the blakes & turners at the tate britain and at the other lay on the hillside at greenwich in the sun. on the way home we had the tube carriage to ourselves until a group of five or six people in their late teens or early twenties piled on. much voluble chattering, a hurried decision to jump off again - but one young woman was somehow out of the loop on this - didn't want to - calling out as they jumped off, laughing and arguing with them but not following - moving nearer the doors as it was almost too late, excited - No! I'll be stuck on here on my own! - but not jumping off - then hooting, apparently shocked, as the doors closed and off we went. Still laughing at her situation, checking her phone to realise that it doesn't work underground. turned to us, imploring, delightedly performing a horror over this - what should she do? wait at the next station, or jump on a train in the opposite direction, or, or? we laughed too. so many possibilities.

now I'm off to paris for a few days. no plans exactly, but will stay with friends & follow my nose.

we're closing down orchard

2008-04-26T04:51:00.004+12:00

my leaving presents two warm handshakes and a little chip of glass
~~a huge garden of names~~ VERY PRIVATE DO NOT USE
the word BATCH denuded of barnacles & limber now
also
draw-down sinking-fund clawback balance-breakdown suspense
account
&
to be perfectly honest
at the end of the day

to be perfectly honest
at the end of the day

at the end of the day
at the end of the day
to be perfectly honest
at the end of the day

and sum

the bill is in the post.

2008-04-25T05:16:00.007+12:00

here at blue acres we have for some time been suffering from critically low doses of Bill Pitt. Fortunately, and in the nick of time, relief has arrived - he sends these beauties - if you click the pictures they get bigger but the poem stays the same size. (actually, sorry about the text size, trying to preserve formatting).


The Long Dark Trip Through Woolies of the Soul

Remembering forty years inland for no reason i can see
mullet gut
slice through scale and silver to vivifying stink of rot
similar, the beautiful “leathery”
Leatherjacket
serene periscope glide up to long shank
and its gut in the kitchen green grit slime and gas
               how intensely clean that was
       nothing so thorough as time to purify
Take the black bakelite telephone for example
Kiwi Polish the Herald and the polka dot pegboard walls
Dad’s shit Brother’s shit Mum’s shit and the sound
of the concrete tank far up on beams in the garage above
filling in the exhaust fume high of Mercedes gone to business
fifteen twenty minutes ago and far below
the blue tranquility of Yowie Bay all its life
gliding beneath cerulean and french-grey clouds
       you exist in this echo
               once
Beneath next-door’s lawn was a midden
charcoal and shell fragments
species gone the perfect place
the view through gaps of she-oak
       what did they call them? who? the fish? the trees themselves
       the people before? the people after?
       the shopkeepers plumbers carsellers investors
       the birds the clouds the spirits Casuarina
       the English Roman botanist types landing
       twenty minutes by car to the north Cook’s bum boys
       the tobacconists
We dropped a six pound breaking strain Woolstar line
number one splitshot and number three hook
carefully rationed pinch of prawn to capture
this wriggling greygreen prince of wonder
And we ate the flesh so sweet
down to its transparent
corrugated backbone

got lost #3

2008-04-20T21:49:00.000+12:00

One winter day after school when I was fifteen or sixteen I went down to the dairy for chocolate and helped a little old lady over the pedestrian crossing. She didn’t let go of my hand when we’d finished walking, so we kept going. I was looking for the right moment to get away but she was talking and mumbling and clutching quite hard. She paused at an old piece of white paper, thoroughly stuck to the footpath, and started prodding at it with her stick.

‘What is it?’
‘Just a piece of rubbish.’
‘It shouldn’t be there, it’s dangerous, someone should pick it up! What is it?’

I was embarrassed for her. I moved her on, asking her where she lived. ‘Yes, just down there, down that street’ she said, but it was just Balmoral Road, cars, petrol station, park, fences. We kept walking.

Every time I asked her something more disintegrated. She stopped and looked up at the sky, became very fearful and distressed, started crying about the planes coming over which there weren’t. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, we’re fine, everything’s all right,’ I said, but couldn’t see where she’d come from or how I was going to get her body somewhere safe before it failed. All the houses had their back fences to us, or their drives were empty and blinds shut.

Eventually there was a sidestreet, a townhouse, a car, lights. The woman who answered took us in immediately, clucking and reeling. She smelled boozy, was middle-aged, looking after a toddler. She asked the old woman her name and the old woman said it, but by the time she got on the phone to the police she had forgotten it. The three of us had forgotten it. We were all very privately irritated.

They said they’d come round. There was nothing to do or say while we waited but the boozy woman kept talking. At one stage she leaned in to the old woman, spotting a dried scab on her face – ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ she cried, as though it was dirt on a child’s face – I was so angry but couldn’t find anything to say as she picked it off.

The police came. Young men, huge shoulders up there, not interested in the talking. One called me ‘the little girl here’ as they made their notes. It seemed weird; he wasn’t making a joke. Then the middle-aged woman said they had to drive me home after dropping the old woman off, because it was now after dark, so I went with them.

I told them to go left onto Ruapehu St, then left onto Douglas Road. When we got there one said ‘Oh right, would you like us to go down the driveway too?’ and I realized I should have walked, or just got them to drop me off on Balmoral.

got lost # 2

2008-04-13T10:31:00.002+12:00

when I was five we lived in Wellington for a year, in Buller St at the foot of the Te Aro hillside, in a house that was slated to be knocked down by the council but is still there.

we were quite brave: I remember my brother and Richard Ratoa jumping off the roof of our garage; all of us taking turns to spin each other in the spin dryer; dressing myself in my mother's clothes and walking off to church (I was very curious, though I didn't make it the whole way); begging my step-dad to let us sample his liqueurs, running in burning horror to the next room, running back for more.

I remember dreaming that the door and door knob in my bedroom were completely, horribly the wrong size; that there was a small rail network on my ceiling, and fairies, some small and good and some large and evil, were making synchronised stops - it was a matter of time before an evil fairy was going to make it to the stop above my bed and drop its bomb; and (before I started school) that my family and all the school community were lined up behind Darth Vader in the playground, while Darth and my brother's teacher beckoned me to join them. I remember thinking in the dream that Mrs Campbell wasn't quite scary enough, and discolouring her teeth for the right effect.

I remember being confused when I choked and coughed after putting my head under water at the pool - being told that people can't breathe under water - disbelieving, knowing that I had done it before myself. I remember carrying a box in a basement with two hands, reaching out and opening the door with a third. Explaining to the women at the creche that while ordinary J's might curl up that way the J in my name went the other way. Being shocked to learn that the notes on the left hand side of the piano were considered 'low' notes, and on the right 'high', when the opposite seemed much more correct. Also hearing the notes as brown and yellow.

after school one day I went to play at my friend Michele's place. We sat on her top bunk and she showed me these books - I don't remember the names of the characters, but they were lovely wobbly oval things, like those toys that always pop back up to upright. she told me a secret - that she had wet her bed, and told her mum that her little brother had climbed in her bed and done it, and that her mum didn't know.

I think ordinarily her mum would walk me home, but that this day she couldn't as their dad wasn't there. she said 'but you know the way, don't you? you've done it heaps of times', and I said yes. I think what happened along the way was that I reached a road I didn't recognise, and knowing that the school was up the hill, I turned up the hill, thinking I would find the school and my bearings. I didn't, but eventually I found a place where I could look down the hill, and saw our street, and where I was supposed to be, though I couldn't see the streets to get there. And I was too scared by now to turn in any other direction, so I went through - through back fences, down bushy banks, quickly out front gates - until I made it to the street I recognised.

and no dogs bit me or even barked at me, no one caught me and yelled at me for being on their property, and I wasn't in trouble when I got home.

small worlds

2008-04-08T05:38:00.002+12:00

eerier still to spot, on the serial display shelves of the Saison Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre at Royal Festival Hall - a copy of the humble Landfall 214. I confess I moved it from the bottom shelf to one at eye-level. Also copies of Overland and Westerly there, but I didn't spot any other NZ journals.

2008-04-06T02:55:00.004+13:00

we went down the road to the laundrette this morning, cos our machine is broken - and went for a wander round the park nearby while the clothes washed - the 'park' turned out to be the St Pancras Old Church yard, apparently one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in Britain, dating possibly to 314 AD - and there sitting quietly with little red potted flower on it was the headstone of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and Godwin's second wife, Mary Jane. this was where Mary Godwin used to have secret trysts with her boyfriend, Percy. next to Wollstonecraft & the Godwins is the grave of Dickens's schoolmaster, William Jones - memorialised for his 'unflinching integrity.' then we spotted the very strange & lovely [Thomas]Hardy Tree - we don't have photos yet but there are some good ones & a description over here.

2008-04-05T06:16:00.003+13:00

my dear friend Lucy is writing a serial novel over here -
yes, here -
interesting in its own right and so cool to watch it develop as it develops - writing as an act, not a product.

at lunch

2008-04-05T05:45:00.003+13:00

a russian waitress took, from a delivery man, a cream porcelain jug, filled with tulips and tied to a silver helium balloon. she looked embarrassed, tried to put the treasure in the dumbwaiter to send it upstairs, but it wouldn't fit, so had to leave it on the counter for everyone to see. not so bad.

2008-04-03T20:05:00.004+13:00

london feels odd partly because it's so familiar - familiar in terms of how much of its audio-visual presence has already been pre-digested for us antipodeans, and in terms of how much of its culture nz appears to share. it was a bit unnerving, for example, to encounter a big picture of Bill Manhire on the cover of the latest Poetry London.

Small-time finance is a true experience in cultural tourism, though. I thought at first that my positive/negative errors were dumb, but actually the whole system works like... like this -

- a layered structure of absolute inversions, you have to know precisely where you are in the structure at any given moment to know whether the world is black or white and how to move accordingly - like spending a few weeks in a mirror maze and trying to figure out which side of your face to scratch.

but it is a culture in which it's possible to orient yourself through perfect documentation. yesterday I heard someone say, in a discussion on how to correct an error, 'you can't just erase history like that' and 'everything single thing we do has to be visible in the narrative.'

to my surprise, this seems to allow for a certain calmness about mistakes, and a certain kind of creativity in problem solving. whatever happens can be reversed. if the documentation is perfect, there is remarkably little data loss, remarkably little erosion or damage caused by error. Black becomes white and white black. £100-£200=£-100. This sense of reversability comes partly from my position in working first with internal accounts - but I see it elsewhere too - the security of a well-tended audit trail - tension is generated not by error of action, but by error of record.

new work

2008-04-03T11:26:00.003+13:00

the first time in so, so long that I've started new work without some other bigger more pressing project lingering in the background.

working first on just generating blocks of text that are to function texturally - I'm calling them 'carpets' - but I'm struggling with the right voice. I like the repetitions of pronoun, and of simple s-v-o syntax, and the way that foregrounds process & action. but there's an imminent danger of getting more stylized than I want, of throwing the emphasis onto the voice as a product of character, which is not what I'm interested in here. and once I move beyond process descriptions, into what I'd intended to be carpets of setting & other stuff, I'm lost. I don't know how much I can actually separate these. in these very early stages I wobble between excitement and puzzled disappointment all the time.

2008-03-25T11:47:00.004+13:00

conceptually the tube is a scary thing; you go down underground with hundreds of people to where it's dark and dirty and there are rats and mice and huge hurtling machines and electrified rails and limited space and limited escape routes. but maybe it's the hundreds of people treating it as normal business that make it seem functionally safe. most of the time I find I'm just looking at people's clothes. The carriages order you so that you are part of a row of people that is looking at another row of people about three feet away. If you are watching peoples' faces they are instantly aware of it, so it's clothes instead. this is not something I'm usually very tuned in to, but it's very interesting - so many people here make such detailed and conscious decisions about the coordination of the colours and textures of everything on them, from handbags to hairclips - it's quite wonderful. I suppose it's partly money that allows this.

We fell out of our default sense of safety momentarily the other day. We had just got down onto some central city platform - maybe Kings Cross or Euston - and it was very busy, there were maybe a couple of hundred people around, enough that one had to just move with the swarm on the stairs. We heard a man's angry shouting from behind us, then an explosion - I looked around in time to see the man storming forward down the stairs, and a light cloud of dust rising behind him. I think he may have thrown a bottle against a wall hard enough for it to smash into dust. The whole platform became instantly silent but people kept moving. We moved with them, then as quickly as we could and without looking back slipped through the partition onto the adjacent platform, as in a dream of escaping.

2008-03-25T10:04:00.000+13:00

I didn't know
that seagulls keep flying when it snows.

bibliomancy

2008-03-24T03:50:00.003+13:00

As if intoxicated, she continues the silent quarrel with Jean-Marc and declares: What judge decreed that conformism is an evil and non-conformism is good? Isn't conforming a way of drawing close to other people? Isn't conformism the great meeting place where everyone converges, where life is most dense, most ardent?
-Milan Kundera, Identity. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.

this book drove me crazy - I really liked it for the first two-thirds, grew more and more dismayed for the last third, in which it seemed that the imaginative labour was over, had given birth only to the dogma that preceded it: that a woman is necessarily and rightly trapped in love. the intensifying surrealism (at what point does Chantal's freedom become just a scary dream?) struck me as a pretend way to question this dogma, to suggest that more was open than the deeper preconditions of the plot allowed. no, no, no, no, no.

you can play too. the meme comes via Jack Ross's blog.

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people: (nah)

Bad Appendix

2008-03-22T22:46:00.005+13:00

I am joyous indeed to officially announce that my poetry collection Bad Appendix will be published by Titus Books this coming June. It's a delight to me to see this work together as a whole, and to think of it in the company of other works that I really love. Thank you to all at Titus, and to all who have read, commented on or even published poems from it during its making.

I think this is the appropriate clip:

and while we're talking Serbian brass orchestras, have a look at this:

2008-03-20T06:38:00.002+13:00

walking home through camden past the bong shops, strawberry stalls & punks waving signs I catch myself in that dream again - that there once was a time when not every part of our energy came from money and returned to money, & that money eats that time. I see a man with a drawn face, sallow skin - dreadlocks piled hugely on top of his head like a creature that has for a long time been sucking more and more of his life and thinking into its body. the man has a deep frown, & his eyes are bright blue but resigned.

2008-03-05T06:31:00.006+13:00

where last week there were plastic dinosaurs on the ledges, this week there is scaffolding jamming the windows open. this week is very cold, and the sight makes me feel a bit sick and sad.

where am I part the 46879th

2008-03-02T11:56:00.003+13:00

last night a private members club filled with various media & movie types. huge zebra print armchairs & expensive haircuts all around. the waitress took an order of drinks & meals for about ten of us without pen & paper, without flinching or repeating anything, & then served them perfectly without checking who'd ordered what. I guess this is what you get for the eight hundred pound membership fee. & a dj playing numbingly bland acid jazz. & the company of a tired & stressed folk at the end of their 60 or 70 hour weeks. & access to nicely mixed cocktails at nine pounds each. I guess the zebra print and the surrealist paintings are to make the anaesthesis slightly more oneiric.

2008-02-25T06:09:00.003+13:00

we've been trying out a variety of tango classes, and are about to go to our second lesson with Bianca, a passionate and stern woman in her thirties, trained in ballet and contemporary dance. last week she commented on the frustration one feels when a dance partner is unaware of one's centre of balance. a student asked her what she does in that situation - she became quite embarrassed - 'oh... please don't ask me that... I am quite extreme...' she said.

Her teaching is rigorous and intelligent. Last week she had us trying out each of the steps we worked on as both leader and follower. This was excellent for me - I've made feeble attempts at learning to lead before, but nothing sustained. I've always known that tango is more difficult to lead than follow, but SO DIFFICULT. It seems obvious, as the follower, where the lead should come from, how it should manifest in the body. As leader it is deeply mysterious. HOW do I convey my intention that he should move in a particular way? Which muscles, what pressure, where, precisely when??

But how beautiful to do this with my partner. As I started to figure it out - my body started to figure it out, bypassing my brain - I watched him close his eyes and synchronise - with me, my signals, and overwhelmingly with the music. I saw he was able to relax in a way that I hadn't seen before when we are dancing. I wanted to keep leading. I had to lift my eyes the ceiling so I didn't cry, and this buggered up my floor navigation....

METAL RULES BOOTS

2008-02-25T05:49:00.006+13:00

so, I'm a rental accountant.

every morning I wake in our clean and kempt Victorian flat, a couple of blocks from the main street in Camden. I dress in my office clothes, and then I walk through the busy streets to work, past the goth shops (CHAOS... THE DARK SIDE... METAL RULES BOOTS...), past the calm, calm lock and the burnt out canal markets. To the accounts department of a community housing authority. I spend the day reconciling rent deposits against bank statements. I try to remember which way round the plusses and minuses go, and I try not to destroy the paper shredder. I get distracted by the plastic dinosaurs on the third story window ledges opposite mine - some days they are there, some days not - and by the accents of the black staff, oscillating between very British and very Caribbean, according to whether they are conducting business as usual (British), teasing one another or telling someone off (Caribbean). In the evenings I catch the tube to Covent Garden, push through the crowds to Nic's office, and then try to smuggle him out past the film director in time for a tango lesson or practica at seven or eight or nine. We get home at ten or eleven thirty, eat some kind of instant meal - often something from Sainsbury's involving a meat substitute called 'quorn' - and go to bed. I do feel rather like I've stepped sideways, across a dimension, into somebody else's life.

blink blink

2008-02-08T02:35:00.000+13:00

So, my dear neglected bloglet, I'm in London.... In Camden, and for almost the first time in a week, out of bed. Wretched norovirus felled me when I was just peeking out from under the jetlag. so I haven't seen or done anything much yet.

England wants to move to Adelaide, if the telly's to be believed. They're obsessed by it; every third tv show suggests it's a good idea. The others are cooking shows (which may or may not feature Jason Donovan) and hock-the-family-heirloom shows. I guess one has to fund the ticket to Adelaide somehow.

Fortunately for Adelaide's water supplies, England may soon get the Adelaide experience without having to move very far at all. Spring has come about six weeks early this year. The yew trees are puzzled into greenness. The local tortoise sanctuary has been 'thrown into chaos and confusion' (BBC) by the early end to hibernation.

I'm cold, but I'm really not that cold. It's a worry.

early golden gate quartet

2008-01-10T19:44:00.000+13:00

just a fragment, sadly. you can hear the influence on elvis, obviously, but also maybe some hiphop roots. such beautiful articulation.

the swan silvertones

2008-01-08T20:28:00.000+13:00

can I get some help I'm gonna lift up

2008-01-08T19:32:00.000+13:00

I'm up in Whangarei at the moment doing an a cappella gospel singing workshop run by Tony Backhouse, who is a singer of remarkable range and control, a delightfully perceptive director and a very welcoming teacher.

It's kind of deliciously odd to come from almost no singing background into total immersion. The last time I sang seriously was Form 2 choir and I have bugger all skill; I don't even sing in the shower. Here we're going from 9 till 4 each day for 8 days. We are a group of 12 or so - some with a great deal of musical experience (eg letters in singing) and some like me. Here at the end of day 4 we sound much like an actual choir - at least to my untrained ear. The weak threads get twisted into the rope with the strong and the whole sounds great.

I'm gradually getting better at hearing myself amongst other voices, which is necessary for controlling my voice. Something I found impossible to begin with was remembering and sticking to my line when I could hear others around me singing other parts. I'm slowly getting the hang of this too. I feel like superwoman when I manage it even on the occasions when I'm the only one in my part. Then occasionally I hear others join me, as I join the nearest liferaft when I'm lost and can't find my note. It's a lovely sensation, like contributing to a whole that needs you.

Something that's surprised me is how much singing is a form of dancing. so so so much easier when you activate your whole body. I discover that all those different tones and strengths and energies are stored in different parts of the body. we move around a lot and I find different things.

my favourite part is an extraordinary kind of improvisation/meditation we do each day. we sit with eyes closed, listening to everything for a while, then Tony kicks off a simple repetitive line. & we just kick it around, do what we want with it for minutes on end, all the while listening listening listening. with eyes closed one's voice is just a voice, not one's own voice. I get very surprised at some of the things that just come out of my mouth - but it's entirely natural when the emphasis is on listening. very much like improvising in tango, which often feels just like a process of hard listening.

Betty Davis

2007-12-27T15:40:00.000+13:00

the Davis comes from Miles, to whom she was married in 1968/69. turn it up really, really loud.

2007-12-02T21:10:00.000+13:00

Tuesday last week I got a quiet word about the speed of my work. Apparently I was moving too slowly, though there was apparently some question over whether I was actually too slow or whether I just looked like it. Anyway, I got quite despondent over this, as I'd been feeling proud of my new skills. Still, I dug deep within me and found a more frenetic physical energy, and a resolute face, and everyone seems satisfied.

Friday we finished the job with the fibreglass fabric - it was good to be on the end of the job. So I got retrained - the new job involves spraying fibreglass tiles with Ados and covering them with decorative fabric, working a heat-&-vacuum, pressing & trimming the fabric. I am frustrated that I can only cut the fabric snip by snip. I don't seem able to slide the scissors along as a dressmaker might (and the previous person on this job did). This might be to do with being left-handed. If I play with the tension of the fabric it might come to me, but I think I will ask to see the previous person do it so I know how he gets the right tension.

2007-11-27T21:41:00.001+13:00

some of what is ordinarily unpleasant in this kind of work is mitigated for me by the fact that a number of the staff and management at my factory are also members of my extended family, which is making the logistical arrangements more casual and friendly than they might otherwise be. I'm working 8-10 hr days at the moment, starting at 7.30am, but by choice - in the sense that no one is breathing down my neck about time keeping. if I want to start or leave earlier or later, or to take a longer lunchbreak to go pay bills etc, that's fine, I just clock in and out. It would be a very different job without this autonomy.

speaking of small differences with large leverage, yesterday we changed to a different brand of fibreglass fabric; a different weave means it sheds much less - less dust, a lot less itch. I don't know the brand names of the fabric nor their relative costs. is this a large market? are there other brands? do they shed more or less? Is there a catalogue? does a salesperson come round? I don't know.

I got irritated this morning to discover that I haven't been putting enough glue on the pegs we staple to, which means that some of the stapling was less secure than it should have been. I had been feeling quite proud of my craftliness; now I care a bit less.

I hear stapleguns

2007-11-26T17:50:00.000+13:00

2007-11-25T12:00:00.000+13:00

I started work on Wednesday at a factory that makes sound insulation tiles. currently I'm spending my days fixing fibreglass fabric to the back of ceiling panels, though I also spent time on Wednesday cutting freehand circles, as perfect as I could make them, into a fibreglass board for a prototype panel.

this kind of work suits me a lot better than some of the present alternatives - cafe work, for example, would send me into a flat panic very quickly, and I need a break from any kind of teaching right now. This is very methodical and kind of soothing for it, though I'm well aware of how that will change. at present I like the physicality of it, like touching the materials and learning how to handle them best. The fibreglass fabric is silvery white, and glows under halogen very prettily. It sits where you put it and doesn't like strain, but is a little resistant to being rearranged - so first thought, best thought in terms of laying it down. I got a kick on Friday out of making straight lines of staples with my right hand as well as my left.

the factory itself is pretty good as far as factories go. there's a friendly, familial atmosphere. it's not too smelly or noisy, though I've started bucking the trend and wearing earmuffs, because I'm conscious that the staplegun, compressor & sellotape sounds are probably a little higher than ideal. also started wearing gloves, unlike everyone else, just because I found myself a bit self-conscious about blackened lizard hands when it came to dolling up for dancing - the glue is unmovable.

the big downside is the fibreglass particles, which of course get into everything and itch like crazy.

have spent a lot of time so far working on my own, which I really like as I can feel my brain regenerating. lots of new staff coming on over the next week though, so that will probably change.

2007-11-10T12:09:00.000+13:00

an abundance of cool stuff up on the evolving Jacket 34, in which I'm happy to have a poem.

in other news:

if he can't say it no one can

2007-11-02T18:51:00.000+13:00

a present from Bill.

2007-10-22T12:22:00.000+13:00

The NZ International Tango Congress has been on this weekend, so I've been doing a lot of dancing. Several workshops with visiting Argentinian teachers, and I went to watch the national champs on Friday night.

I was curious about the competition because it seemed a kind of paradoxical thing. I became interested in Argentinian tango partly because it seemed private. That is, when I was a kid I understood dance to be about performance, and every movement around the ballet and ballroom that I learned was designed to enhance spectacle. When I first saw salon tango it was so obviously different, a revelation. The circuit of interaction was primarily between the two in the couple - I could see this intense concentration, and I knew that whatever it was producing was not firstly for the audience. Because I didn't understand the nature of the improvisation at that stage I couldn't really visually get what was happening, just that the nature of it was totally different and unknown and inviting to me.

So I was curious to see how this could be done on a stage, for competition, evaluated and ranked. And yeah, I didn't like it much. There was some good dancing in the salon comp but to me the whole event had this edge of awkward self-consciousness to it - exactly what I love the absence of when I watch people dancing at milongas. I guess there is a level of skill at which this disappears even under competition conditions, but still, I am left wondering *why* one would want to make a competition out of something so deeply collaborative. Beyond the possibility of winning a trip to Buenos Aires - but then, that is quite inviting.

The 'stage tango' competition was something else again. Choreographed routines, acrobatic lifts and leaps and leg kicks - not my bag at all.

phew.

2007-10-05T20:35:00.000+13:00

two great reliefs today. One is that - but for latecomers - I've finished & handed back that huge pile of portfolios.

The other is that Bella is home from a night at the vet with a very expensive clean bill of health. She has seemed a bit under the weather lately, had dropped some weight, and what with a lump here and a limp there, I was worried. after a thorough check-out it seems that, mild arthritis and a boring old cyst aside, she's just fine. both grumpy and forgiving about the disturbance.

the portfolios were the heftiest marking load I've had to date, but were also the most varied and exciting - lots of neat stuff, lots of cool surprises from the quiet students. we gave them lots and lots of freedom with the requirements (ie, not making them write *about* anything in particular, nor in any particular form (beyond 'poetry' or 'fiction'). this seems to me to have had much stronger results than asking everyone to submit a villanelle, for example - and 80 portfolios of random stuff is much easier to stomach than 80 of any given kind of stuff.

they have done lots of exercises, though, and some of the new ones I tried on them have had interesting results. a couple I will use again:

a) write a piece of fiction with a chosen affective centre (eg paranoia, curiosity, fragmentation...). shift the affective centre from/to character, setting, and some other textual site (if not character or setting, what could this be?) - in any order.

b) think of an emotion, experience or concept which you really, really wish another person could understand, but which you've never been able to adequately express. Write about this but use no known words - use the aural and visual elements of your language, voice, page.

this second one had particularly strong results, some of which were performed beautifully (heartbreakingly!) in class. & the written results were as distinct as fingerprints. I'm calling it the Ohh Ohh g. Ugg. exercise, after Janet Frame's Scented Gardens for the Blind.

c) an in-class exercise that led to great hilarity: I got them to bring materials that would allow them to write without pen (or pencil) or paper. carrot sticks, face-paint, runes, elvis cards, pasta, eyeshadow, mobile phones, mr potato-heads, wool, mud, sequins, skin....

there will be one more equivalent set of portfolios in three weeks' time, but by then teaching will be finished so they will be easier to get through. In other words, the hardest part of my semester is done with, and I can turn my attention to other pressing matters. like the dishes....

a lot

2007-09-30T19:20:00.000+13:00

I just want to say
how much I love Marvin Gaye.

privacy

2007-09-27T15:26:00.000+12:00

I find it's good to watch other people dancing - one's partners and other partners. good to watch their feet and good to watch their faces. it seems like I'm learning when I'm watching their feet and sometimes I am. when I watch their faces I feel I should be ready to look somewhere else if they open their eyes or look up and see out of there. although sometimes I don't mind if they look back in with me - like they could be the tide extending and it makes sense to be a boat as well, just part of the way that movement will keep on going.

2007-09-17T09:56:00.000+12:00

I got back to dancing on Saturday night; all the ground I'd gained in the three or four weeks before getting sick seemed to be lost; very frustrating. I couldn't jibe with anyone. I danced with a woman I'd not danced with before (quite a few of the experienced women lead beautifully, but tend not to unless there's a shortage of male leads) - she said 'you're all up in the air, I can't feel you!' and 'you don't need to be in such a hurry!' I thought she smelt faintly of pot, or someone was smoking outside.

I was pleased to make it to the last follower's technique class yesterday, to have some time getting my balance again.

bill's diary page friday september 7 2007

2007-09-13T19:06:00.000+12:00

otherwise known as pookieonlounge0001.PIC.jpg. Bill notes that the scan goes out of focus at the notebook's gully. yes, that is cool.

it is necessary

2007-09-11T18:25:00.000+12:00

'And so his strategy of risk began to develop: it is necessary to invent a culture, a poetics of risk.'

I came across this quote today, from the Solanas film 'Tangos: The Exile of Gardel'. Apparently the film is out of print; I wonder how I can find it.

I like the quote because it suggests the need for self-rupturing structures. Does this mean extreme plasticity or - (plasticity = deformability without rupture?) - its opposite? Actually I think it suggests mobility between planes, the ability to invest in a structure wholeheartedly and at a moment's notice step outside it and survive - be amphibian, multiphibian. The embrace of exile - what's being discussed in the film - would be one but surely not the only way to make such a culture.

But I'm thinking of Len Lye's animated films too, the way the music holds all those ruptures in a form, not just mobility between states but simultaneity of states made possible by... um, synaesthetic links, by affective chunnels.

excerpts

2007-09-09T20:05:00.000+12:00

'...we were born in a series.'

'We distribute origin across the virtual.'

'Laugier tells a simple story: the retreat from lucid pleasure to protective opacity, then to willed structure.'

from Lisa Robertson's 'Playing House: A Brief Account of the Idea of the Shack' (in Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, clear cut press, Astoria.)

blasted spotty tonsils!

2007-09-09T13:02:00.000+12:00

no dancing today for me. :(

and things are about to go quiet again around here.... school starts again tomorrow. I have thirty mss to read, a lecture to write, 80 portfolios coming in on Wednesday and a dusty pile of review books staring at me balefully from the corner. every time I trip up they run over and kick me with their pointy little boots. actually, it's all work I love, but I'm going to need diligent sauce on my diligence over the next while.

2007-09-08T11:34:00.001+12:00

have this stupid bug that's been keeping me low the last few days. no dancing wednesday night, no dancing last night, and no dancing tonight, which I totally begrudge.

I'm hoping I'm ok tomorrow for a women's/follower's technique workshop I'm enrolled in (billed as women's technique, meaning follower's technique). Went to the first of this series of three last week and it was very useful - but mostly intellectually so far - and I've not been able to practice to get to the stage where I'm applying it well.

The focus is on balance, walking technique and adornments - that is, steps that are not led by one's partner, but which are self-led by the follower in embellishment of the led steps. I find adornments difficult, and prefer not to do them, hence enrolling in the workshops. At first I thought I struggled with this out of self-consciousness, and because it entails a mental shift out of that receiving mode and into something more independently generative. But actually now I think it's all just about balance. When you are really really sure of your balance, it comes naturally to respond with more freedom to the partner, music and floor. Because all response is generative anyway, and all generation responsive. god, I should be writing the tao of tango.

---

edit: hilarious.

2007-09-06T20:27:00.000+12:00

A couple of years ago, heading on for three, my friend Charlie deliberately electrocuted himself and died.

I'm thinking about him whenever I walk along K Rd, where he lived at that time. He had moved into that place a few weeks beforehand and put me down as his emergency contact person. Like receiving a kind of delivery. When we cleaned out his apartment I stood where he used to stand to have a smoke, and saw two pieces of tagging up on the roofs opposite - I remember making them out to say 'No/Charlie' and 'Charlie/No' - that seems unlikely now but I haven't checked.

I'm thinking about him when I walk through the Domain. The other day I walked past the little grove where we scattered some of his ashes, and they have put up a beautiful new sculpture just by there, called something like 'Mathematics is the Language of Nature'. It looks like a tessellated quilt - he would have really liked it. He wasn't a mathematician but he had just started work on a PhD in artificial intelligence, working on a project to make robots dream. Dreamers need warm, tessellated quilts.

I wrote this poem about him but nothing else that survived. Sometimes I want to write all about it and feel this huge pressure but before I begin it becomes really pointless and wrong.

---

Once when I was very new to driving I drove up the Southern Freeway behind Bill - this huge sweep of a road. I just watched him ahead on the curve, and the anxious part of me rested. Bill has sent me this poem to post here. It makes me think yeah, we need each other, need poems.

---



Had a best friend


who crashed his head
against my passenger window
again and again i remember
him for that
He kissed my hand that night like i saw him
kiss his lover in firelight similar
to the windows and signs along Oxford street
the way we rebelled against all authority
the way nineteen seventy nine caught
a grey mouse in his hand quicker than nature
could ever prepossess
because we were heroes
listening again and again with the batteries he bought
three miles walk or was it four
or five down a dirt road under summer heat
red dust rising in your face when a family car went by
like (a bit like) cicadas
straight through your head
singing one note wonder         wish
                                                  wish
                                                         wish
       you were still alive
and merciless in your black infamy
banging your head against
       one night broken
and another night drawn
on paper that would crisp and blacken
colour not being relevant anymore
windows
               windows
                               windows who cares?
your eyes
               those juries
                               and prize your freedom
                                     to bang your head against
your window flying
through streets
       extinct
         of
         passion



               ii

He swore he’d kill me swore
I’d turn around one day and he’d be there
It was the day he held a fishing knife to
Ben Martin’s throat and Ben in his death throe
desperation jabbed fingers hard up his arse
(I never had a more impotent moment than
when I stood there stoned to hell witness to this
silent, deadly and Ben flew up the steps
forever alone - he swore one day)

30 years later silent still
Rose’s voice with the news ringing in me
stood in the same bloodless spot
– ropes hanging from the boatshed beams
voices trapped in the possum apex
redcake mangrove mudcake eight-inch glass square window thrashing
cobweb varnish sail echo voice branch whisper marriage breath tobacco
gauges  .
               .
                       .
                                see you lapse
                                       .
                                               .
                                                       .
                                                               from just enough
to a killer’s bloodbet smile
Stood vacant as a tide and heard you

       turn to all that can ever remember
           fear
               and a carriage took us
               deep into forest of red leaf wood
               where all we are is an axe
               going down down down on a treestump
               and primitive rots
               a southeast wind
               untamed and encouraging

draft - all other lands are cyclones

2007-09-05T14:25:00.000+12:00

concrete bus-stop in the snow.
inside,
a ribbon, fluttering.
a hand.

I came the long way
round to this.
took a long time

for the windows to be
just pictures, slabs
of a glowing blue
and a swallowing blue

for the wind to be a kind of a man, tall,
frenetic, dancing close to the walls
not letting go between tunes
and somewhere else, a wife

who cries out
when you reach to touch
her beautiful diamantes
before she understands.

it took me a long time to be sleepy
although I was so tired.

under the hand
I’m very small.

2007-09-02T11:19:00.000+12:00

a most excellent Bill Direen gig at the PR bar last night - with very fine support by Jamie Stone, and by Dead Men Rising.
--

spent a little time this morning trying some experimental tango; I've always wondered about the tangobility of the Stranglers' Golden Brown and Dave Brubeck's Take Five. As far as I can figure out they are both in 5/4 timing(?) - which should liberate a whole lot of syncopation, & myriad possibilities for shifting between tango & tango-waltz configurations & emphases. so far Golden Brown works easily, but I can't find our Brubeck record and the youtube versions I've found are all too fast for me to work with yet. maybe I'll make a cd.

--

last week went with my sister to the schools' lecture on King Lear delivered by Michael Neill. Neill quoted Michael Ignatieff's essay on Lear, 'The Needs of Strangers', connecting the heath scenes to refugee catastrophes - the experience of being pushed out of the social order. It was weird, but not exactly surprising, to hear almost the same phrasing and tone in the Ignatieff essay (no home, no food...)as appears in the first half of the Nina Simone clip below (I don't yet have the essay itself, so can't quote directly).

So I was looking at the end of Lear again, wondering what is Lear left with, in place of Simone's (almost) sober catalogue of the bodily. Is it wrong to compare Shakespeare and a song from Hair? I think so, but Dr Simone makes it right.

In IV:vii, a painful uncertain return to physicality as he becomes conscious - 'you do me wrong to take me out o' the grave'; 'mine own tears do scald like molten lead'; 'I will not swear these are my hands:-- let's see; I feel this pin prick.'

In V:iii, a fantasy of body, voice and breath - 'We too alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing I'll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies...' - but followed by an extension of the fantasy into omnipotence & eternal life - 'And take upon's the mystery of things as if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out in a wall'd prison packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon.'

I take this fantasy as another rejection of the body's humilities. And maybe here again - 'O, you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them that heaven's vault should crack.'

But it's weird how the negation becomes a kind of positivity (I don't mean cheerfulness), giving Lear a one-line precis of the Hair song - 'No, no, no, life!'.

This is why negativity (I don't mean gloominess) interests me - because it IS something.

--

There's a tango step I keep thinking about, but don't know the name for. If one is leading, one steps forward and into a half turn, then back, into a half turn, and forward. So the three steps proceed in the same direction, but because of the turns, one of them is nominally backwards. For the follower this sequence is two back steps sandwiching a forwards step, into the leader's space. But when one is following backwards is often forwards.

The sequence is a physical double negative. It's very strong, a lot of momentum from both partners, and can get you easily out of very tight corners, because the turns add a great deal of manouvreability. They also add another dimension - because you're flipping out of one state and into another, and then back, simply to keep on going.

mmm.

2007-08-14T16:16:00.001+12:00

tango update

2007-08-12T11:28:00.000+12:00

I went to a milonga last night - a social dance. I've been to a couple of cafe nights, but no previous milongas outside the studio where I've been learning. I had a lovely time - a warm & friendly bunch of people & plenty of dances, which was nice because I knew almost no one there. but I'm frustrated, dancing with people from foreign lands I'm almost a beginner again, and I don't want to be! I want it to be seamless. feeling extra awkward at the moment because I've had some foot trouble over the last couple of months, aggravated by prague cobblestones, and in order to rest it I've not been doing much yoga (good for balance & body awareness) or extra practise. But the foot feels healed now, so I think I will gear up. I like partners who take a few moments for tuning in before dancing. I like the way that sometimes if I can tune in I get some kind of image for a partner - a butterknife blade in a drawer, or a flooding river.

and yesterday.

2007-07-31T15:30:00.000+12:00

Bill sends us today, still warm. making me happy. click on it for closer.

downstairs notbbk drawing 79

2007-07-23T18:25:00.000+12:00

the third of Bill Pitt's notebook pages. I find this image particularly eerie because I remember this staircase - it is exactly right.

from Bill

2007-07-19T09:38:00.000+12:00

Village

Three in the morning There’s a hole in my heart
A jet has flown through it Its wings have cut a keyway
A bunch of words hang from a ring of images
All of them fit And not one of them turns

Just as well If the bivalve could open
the creaking might wake the neighbours
A mad bear might run out and smash everything in sight
before tearing my head off with its claws
scooping my brain out like mashed potato
and licking its fingers
before it fell asleep

Three o five in the morning There’s a cave in my head
A body wrapped in bandages is murmuring
sounds that resemble little broken bits of songs
There’s a quick short echo like a dry telephone voice
pingpong back to me Then breathing and a lone car
Streets and streets away with an old sounding engine
Say from thirty seven years ago Vanishing like a finger

Three sixteen The couple in the bed upstairs move once
It creaks my ceiling Nothing happens It’s morning
somewhere Lunchtime somewhere else Afternoon
Dinner time All at once It only just struck me
And then once again It’s merciless
And then it stops So what
The flat next door’s exhaust fan comes on Their toilet
doesn’t have a window

photo essay

2007-07-19T09:26:00.000+12:00

panelaks w/ skybridge & clock

2007-07-18T19:49:00.000+12:00

draft - prague tango

2007-07-18T15:24:00.000+12:00

prague tango




balance infinitesimal, meaning           some pigeons don’t want that
higher heels                             they fly
                                         all the way to the guttering
                                         then drop back down


boleo kick a web from its fastening forget this now. pressing 
through the close walls to the allotment. sandpit echoing at 
three and leaf shadows. that wall the colour a frankfurt 
departure board clicking cairo prepare. may i sit here? 
a cigarette, a camel. it’s ok, forget this now. it was close, 
giro, giro, my cheek was hot. a sweetness turning around 
a centre. this shirt like a field, rabbits, sunlight, 
and deeper than that, pigeons heaving in the airvent. 
before the karlov most lowering your voice. saying you were 
ivory coast you did not miss the largeness. nor were you 
homesick, given a sailor suit and a locked canal. lowering 
your voice not the brochure. so I don’t touch the relief 
of a drowning man, I just stand nearby. and when we come 
too close to a wall the cradle turns us back into the room

2007-07-17T09:36:00.000+12:00

between Prague and here I managed the purchase of a wooden embroidery hoop on trademe. I've kind of wanted one for a while for quilting, but I've also been getting interested in the possibility of embroidering poems. the inclination grew stronger seeing embroidered pieces in exhibits at Terezin. some of these were decorative gifts, but some were documentary scenes, recording the camp and people. the medium seems to insist.

there were, of course, some spectacular samplers at the Museum of Decorative Arts, but actually my attention was stolen by Emilie Palickova's lacework. this is a lot more minimal than the pieces I saw there, but shows her extraordinary ability to stylise:

2007-07-12T08:09:00.000+12:00

today I spent at the Museum of Decorative Arts - in five hours or so I only got around the paper room and the fabric room. maybe I'll know what to write about this later.

skipping back to the National Gallery visited last week - spent most of my time on the 'foreign' floor, & it was extremely embodying, sometimes uncomfortably; I wasn't expecting this. had no idea how big Klimt's The Virgin is (1913), swirly hypnotwatic eyes, the unhealthy flush, corruption creeping up under the skin, & jumping from that to Oppenheimer's Operation (1912) kind of funny because the composition echoes so closely, the circle of teeming bodies here as teeming organs, and that evil eye connection pulling you in. can't find an image of this online, unfortunately.

There was a neat collection of fluxus stuff, but so badly framed and presented, cramped space & mislabellings kind of suit the mood of something like Deiter Roth & Robin Page's Arse Itch Pong Wad (which was a winner, made me want to run screaming from the room but I laughed myself silly instead) but don't do justice to Jackson Mac Low, or Dick Higgins' visual poems. Al Husen's Woman out of burnt cigarette papers kind of prepared the way for (leaving fluxus) Herman Nitsch's Action photos - lamb or goat being slaughtered over a woman's body & (seemingly forcibly) exposed genitals - well, it's been a long time since I've felt offended by an art work, and that did it, before I'd had time to think about it. not so much an axe for the frozen sea within as just an axe (ok, for the wound...), even on reflection.

totally contrary reaction to Wolf Vostell's installation, which included video footage of a couple of (clothed) women doing a endless truncated tango with animal carcasses chained to them... again, fluxus variety appeals to me, this made perfect sense in concert with the concreted piano & the dismemberment of a pine tree, the branches used to cover the pianist while a woman painted her own body, incredibly slowly, with one finger, & two opera singers sang three or four notes over & over... I liked this a lot, like the way in these spaces after Cage one is not rushed.

2007-07-12T07:50:00.000+12:00

still no photos of panelaks, but there's this great mosaic in Usti that seemed to perfectly express the vision behind tenement living. we didn't have the gear to photograph the whole thing adequately, but -

people move together, don't need space to move in contrary motion. farmers, soldiers, revolutionaries, glass blowers, cosmonauts.

page2notebk79

2007-06-25T19:08:00.000+12:00

another from dear Bill. I intend do a couple from mine too when I find a way around the lack of a scanner. but not till I get back from Prague in a couple of weeks time - leaving in the morning. send me one of yours? xx

2007-06-18T10:53:00.001+12:00

every day we touch our hands to your shell.
we tell the stories of when you were warm.
'if this is not my memory certainly
it is the memory of my neighbour.'

pages

2007-06-13T23:32:00.000+12:00

So, prompted in part by Richard Lopez's lovely chapbook, 'parts of the journal: night', I thought I would like to put scans of pages from journals on here.

I asked Bill Pitt, and this beauty is the first of those he sent me.
If you click on it you can see it larger.

Two verses

2007-06-12T23:36:00.000+12:00

of 'He Waiata Aroha, naa te wahine mahue, noo Ngai Tawhiri, Turanga' (A Love Song, by a deserted woman of Ngai Tawhiri, Turanga). As collected in Sir Apirana Ngata's Ngaa Mooteatea (but with double vowels substituted for macrons)-

1

Kaaore hoki e te poo nei
Tuarua rawa ko Te Huirori;
Ko taku hoa moenga ka riro kee,
Ka maunu kee atu he puta kee;
Ko te whakawerawera o taku poho,
Kaatahi tonu au ka maatao, ii.

2

E noho maroke ana taku kakii
He kore wai tata iho noo runga nei.
Paanukunuku atu te korirangi,
Te taha koia o Tainakore.
Ka whakatakoto au hai arano waka
Maa Tuangau, e too mai nei,
E tapa noa raa ko'i taahau ngeri;
Poouri, pootango, i te tinana, ii.

Ngata's translation (CORRECTION: this was collected by Sir Apirana Ngata, but translated by Dr Pei Te Hurinui):

1

This night has brought to me
Twice a vision of Te Huirori.
My sleeping-mate has gone elsewhere,
Departed to another lover;
Removed is he, who warmed my breast,
It is only now I feel the cold.

2

My throat is parched
For lack of water from above;
The lump in my throat moves up and down
And to the side of Tainakore.
I lay me down as a canoe-skid
For Tuangau, chanting there,
Reciting her launching-song;
Dark, intensely dark is my lot.

My translation:

1

How could this night return
Te Huirori - twice!
My sleeping-friend has already gone,
ebbed away, turned to that other opening.
He warmed my belly
that only now is cold.

2

My throat's still parched,
no water falls near from above.
The cloak slides away
to the side of Tainakore.
I lay down as a canoe-roller
for Tuangau, dragged here,
mumbling his launch song -
this body is dark, so dark.

There are another couple of verses, but they perhaps developed later - I couldn't find the same kinds of resonance in them. Apparently laying down for a canoe was once an accepted form of human sacrifice (and maybe suicide?). I think it's worth explicitly pointing out one of the puns in the original - 'he puta kee' means a change, but puta is also a word for vagina (and kee, as you can hear, a shriek). Hence my reading of 'poho' as belly, rather than breast... to me these connections also open the possibility of the launch as a birth, as well as the sacrifice/suicide.

Tete y Silvia

2007-06-03T16:46:00.000+12:00

2007-05-13T13:19:00.000+12:00

Nic's an hour or so into his flight from LA to London now; sent me, via txt, tired notes on 'yucky US apples and yummy chemical fruit punch' from transit. his photo and fingerprints have been added to the database. I have cleaned the lounge. it's a sudden introduction to winter- last night required pyjamas, all the blankets, the cat and the microwaveable bear. at around six I even thought about putting a hat on, but it's only May.

reading The Karamazov Brothers... still... sort of wishing that Ivan would shut the hell up and Zosima would die. but I think that's because I've been distracted, so have read around in circles the last while. onward... lots to get through in the next few months.