This Fluid Thrill

Special Features: Old Sydney Street Substation

2012-02-11T06:30:00.000+13:00

The old Sydney Street substation, photographed by Rachel Connolly. Copyright NZ Historic Places Trust .

There may be some people out there who’ve read my column about the old Sydney Street substation in today’s Your Weekend magazine and were left wanting more.

Sometimes it’s impossible to do a subject justice in 500 words. (If you can do it justice in 500 words, it’s not worth writing about). In this instance, I really wanted to include some web addresses to help direct further enquiries, but alas.

I’m sure those sufficiently piqued could find everything via Google, but I’m going to give them (and Google) a helping hand by collecting the links together here.

The Building Itself

The Historic Places Trust’s register has a very thorough report, prepared by Adrian Humphris and Inka Gliesche, on the old Sydney Street substation on. It’s available online here ().

There was also an article on the old girl by Tommy Honey in Architecture NZ (Nov/Dec 2005). Not available online but I have a scan if your local library doesn't have the issue.

In my column, I mention the proposed Kate Sheppard Exchange development which could incorporate the substation. The development was in the news last year when people objected to the proposed size of the building. I emailed the developers, Redwood Group, seeking an update on the project but I didn’t receive a response before my deadline (and haven’t since, but can’t be bothered pestering them).

On Wellington’s Substations

The Architecture Electric, a photographic survey of Wellington’s substations, is available as a free e-book here.

I asked the architecture types I interviewed if they had favourite substations in town and received two responses.If, like me, you’ve developed a sudden interest in substations, you might want to check out some of these:

Tyson Schmidt (co-author of ‘The Architecture Electric)

1. Have a picnic and watch the planes at the concrete panel marvel that is the Moa Point Road substation (page 14 of our book)

2. Venture above Boyd Wilson Field to Victoria University's Te Puni Village to look at the wind sculpture atop the University Zone substation (page 109)

3. Be impressed by the massive steel doors on the Moore Street Zone substation behind ECC lighting (page 106)

4. Walk the tracks of Mt Victoria until you find the Hataitai Zone substation with its wall of mesh encasing the large transformers (page 105)

5. Enjoy the graffiti used to disguise substations such as 69 Miramar Road (p.73) and down Lukes Lane (p.72, great Keith Haring-inspired figures on that one)

6. Jog past the substation with clean classical stylings on the corner of one of Wellington's most expensive streets (The Crescent in Roseneath) (p.54)

Adam Alexander (architectural designer; wrote his thesis on Wellington's substations [available in hardcopy from Victoria University's libary])

1. St John St Substation (adjacent to Aro Valley Park)

2. Lower Tory St (between Courtenay Place and Cable St)

3. 10 Haining St (off upper Tory St)

4. Hankey St Substation (intersection of Taranaki, Hankey and Wallace St)

5.Salamanca Rd (Near top of cable car)

Research Roadtrip: Wildlife

2012-02-10T13:50:00.001+13:00

In this final instalment on my trip down south I will fulfil my promise (and then some) of posting bird photos .

Northern royal albatross, Taiaroa Heads, Otago

More albatross, plus hoiho, godwit, giant petrels and more, after the jump...

Yellow-eyed penguin, Oamaru

Godwits, Karitane

Stilts, South Island pied & variable oystercatchers, black-billed gulls, Otago Peninsula

NZ fur seals, Taiaroa Head

Royal albatross (I think this one was a Southern Royal...
I know we saw one, but can't be sure if this was it without seeing its back)

Northern royal albatross and a Hector's dolphon

Havin' a scratch

White-capped albatross (left) and a northern royal (left)

Giant petrel

Taiaroa Head, with Stewart Island shag colony
and viewing point for northern royal albatross nesting sites.

Nesting sites (the two white dots along the ridge line are also nests)

Northern royal coming in for a landing

Parent and chick

Research Roadtrip: Clay Cliffs and Earthquakes

2012-02-09T08:39:00.004+13:00

Earthquakes, Waitaki District

I went down south with a rough itinerary and a bunch of must sees (towns, museums, coastal stretches), but I had enough time to detour to places that sounded cool on the sign post or my GPS screen.

Two of these detours yielded fantastic results.

The first was Clay Cliffs, which is near Omarama. (I didn't acknowledge the aural similarity to my name at the time, but I can't rule out that it was a determining factor in my going there).

After leaving the main road and driving for ten kilometres (most of it gravel, punctuated by several gates for livestock) and walking for perhaps another k, you reach some, uh, clay cliffs.

They reminded me a lot of the Putangirua Pinnacles in the Wairarapa, except these formations were a sandy brown rather than cement grey.

The sun was shining. The nearby braided river slipped by. Rock pigeons swooped from ledge to ledge, behaving as they must in their natural habitats (there's nothing like seeing a city bird in the country to redeem it). Emerging from a niche in the cliffs I was met with this view:

Great stuff.

If you intend on visiting, I recommend visiting the Omarama i-site first to pay your $5, as Clay Cliffs is on a private estate (the money goes towards upkeep of the area).

Sheep, Clay Cliffs Estate

The next day I turned off the highway at Duntroon and headed to a township (as it appeared to be on my GPS) called Earthquakes. I knew nothing more than its name, but that was intriguing enough. What would a town called Earthquakes look like? Why the plural?

Turns out Earthquakes is hardly a township. More like two farmhouses situated close to the road (gravel once more). But, as you might expect from the name, the area is interesting geologically -- even if the cliffs and ravines weren't formed by earthquakes but a landslide thousands of years ago.

It also turns out the area is rich in fossils (there's even a Fossil Trail through the region), with a whale fossil on display about two hundred metres from the parking spot at Earthquakes.

The real highlight for me, however, was the landscape. The long, fine grass. The waxy coprosmas. The limestone cliffs. The green and yellow rolling pasture in the distance, leading to the freshly snow-dusted ranges.

Again, it helps it was a stunning day and that I was all on my lonesome in this magical place.

One problem with being alone and somewhat awestruck is there are holes littered eitherside of the path. At one point an unseen bird rustled in a nearby bush. I stopped to see what it was. The movement stopped. I stepped slowly toward the bush, then suddenly my left left was in a hole up to the hip.

The offending hole

If it had been a few inches deeper, I'd have done some serious damage. If it had been slightly shallower and the bottom more uneven, I could have badly twisted or even broken my ankle. Getting outta Earthquakes alone would have been fun.

But all I got was a bruise on my ankle and a lesson in birdwatching.

Research Roadtrip: MacKenzie Country and Waitaki Valley

2012-02-02T20:08:00.000+13:00

Sometimes I talk too much...

Lake Tekapo

Lake Pukaki

On the way to The Hermitage

Aoraki/Mt Cook, south face

Waitaki Basin

A glimpse of Lake Benmore

Benmore Hydro Station

Aviemore Hydro Station

The road from Cattle Creek

Research Roadtrip: Waimate

2012-02-01T19:43:00.001+13:00

Waimate is a small town in South Canterbury, 20kms north of the Waitaki River. The population of the Waimate District (which encompasses Waimate and a number of other smaller towns) is around 7,000 people.

And while things mightn’t be as bleak economically as in the 1980s, a walk around Waimate town will still yield a number of closed and boarded up buildings.

Tea Rooms: closed

Back of the main street: barren

Mr Whippy: sprinkled with graffiti

More about Waimate after the jump...

The main street does, however, have two second hand shops located opposite each other.

Second hand shops are never a good sign. The higher the percentage of second hand shops in your town, the more dire your situation. I swear, post-apocalypse it’ll be all cockroaches and second hand stores.

Cliffs/shags at St Andrews

The reason I took the 7km detour off SH1 to visit Waimate is it’s roughly halfway between Oamaru and Timaru. My fictional town of Marumaru South, which features in this story from Sport 38 and is a major setting in THE NOVEL, is located somewhere between these other –marus. But unlike Waitmate, Marumaru is located on the coast.

Coastal aside: this particular stretch of coast, around the Waihao Box and Wainono Lagoon, is very difficult to access… It’s either the crumbling, spotted shag-lined cliffs like at St Andrews, or the boggy paddocks, electric fences and wild rose embankments in the nameless farmland.

The inaccessibility was frustrating at the time, but it does mean I have some licence to plonk down whatever geographical features I want in THE NOVEL (within reason) as few people can dispute the picture I paint. So Marumaru looks a bit like Baring Head, which looks a lot like the southern side of the peninsula just south of Moeraki (I’m not sure what it’s called), which is only 70-odd kms south of the mid-point between Oamaru and Timaru. Time for a breath.

Anyway, back to Waimate. While its geography and history will differ from Marumaru, the town’s present is very similar the present I envisaged in '30 Ways of Looking at Marumaru South’ (and which continues to inform THE NOVEL).

Where Marumaru’s former grandeur is embodied by its boarded up department stores, Waimate’s biggest monument is St Patrick’s Church. It dominates the entrance to town from the North and seems to be kept in good nick (I’m basing this on the exterior as it wasn’t open for me to view inside the afternoon I visited).

There were a number of other buildings which seemed loaded with significance greater than their uses (past and present). Perhaps it was just because I was walking round with a camera (locals were non-threatening and standoffish). Perhaps it was because I came looking for certain things, for what you might call architectural metonymies.

But I challenge anyone to look at the shell of the Arcadia Theatre (which actually started life as a shopping arcade; plans are afoot to renovate and reopen it as a theatre) and not be struck by it. Whether it makes you feel wistful, or mushy, or maudlin – it makes you feel.

So, Waimate. I loved my time there.

Research Roadtrip: Urban coastal settlements

2012-01-31T20:25:00.001+13:00

Okay, so on Thursday morning I flew into Dunedin, which really means I landed 40 minutes outta the city in Taieri. I then picked up my rental car and gunned it to Port Chalmers for a look around (this may or may not be the first landing point in NZ for one of the characters in THE NOVEL).

On the road to Port Chalmers

Port Chalmers still has a number of buildings from the 1800s, but they were overshadowed by two large cruise ships that were in port.

The scale of the present collides with the past, Port Chalmers

More about museums, Oamaru and Richie McCaw worship after the jump...

On Thursday I visited three museums in total (Port Chalmers Museum, Otago Museum in Dunedin and North Otago Museum in Oamaru) and a fourth on Friday morning (South Canterbury in Timaru). Port Chalmers was understandably small and filled a nautical niche. I was a bit disappointed by the size and content of the North Otago Museum, but the very informative 10 minute video at the i-site down the road went some way to make up for this.

The Otago Museum was fantastic for what it is, a kind of generalist, Te Papa-style museum with local and national flavoured permanent exhibits (there’s a lot of stuffed birds and skeletons, which is a good thing in my opinion) and plenty of space for temporary exhibitions.

Haast's Eagle skeleton, Otago Museum
(I was surprised how small it looked, hence me shoving my hand in the photo for scale)

The real surprise for me was the South Canterbury Museum. I’d camped overnight in Timaru (just in time to catch the southerly blast and get soaked in my porous tent) and was in two minds whether it was worth waiting around until the 10am opening time. But the museum has an extensive exhibit about life back in the day (ranging from early settlers up to the 1920s/30s), with lots of kitchen and laundry implements, oral history excerpts and other tidbits which are very useful for a manqué novelist trying to fudge his way through his historical sections.

Despite my museum experience, I greatly prefer Oamaru to Timaru. Oamaru is more dramatic by virtue of its compactness and those limestone buildings (the result of a quick population explosion, a lack of nearby timber but an abundance of stone, and the sudden decline of the town’s fortunes in the 1900s which froze its Victorian centre in time for several years). Timaru is a nice place, don’t get me wrong, but it’s difficult to be inspired by it.

The current National Bank and former Bank of New South Wales, Thames St, Oamaru

Old Post Office (now council building), and steampunk motorcycle

Criterion Hotel

Looking towards Harbour St (note the front moving in)

Union Bank of Australia Building (sadly blocked up)

Whisky!

Steampunk HQ

I took a photo of this door because I wanted to make a dick joke,
but now I've lost the nerve

One thing I'm not so keen on in and around Oamaru is the idol worship of Richie McCaw...

I mean, it's like he's dead or something.

And was playing for Kurow Under 13s really the start of his greatness?

And this... thing, also in Kurow, baffles me.

It's almost like he never moved to Christchurch...

There Will Be Birds

2012-01-30T21:23:00.000+13:00

I’m back from my flying visit down south and it was faarking fantastic.

Rather than tackle it in one big post, I’ll knock it off in several smaller, image-heavy posts over the next week or so. There will be birds. There will be lakes and hills and beaches. There will be more birds and a poorly-framed hector’s dolphin. I will, however, spare you the roadkill wallaby I saw near Lake Aviemore.

But for now, here’s a photo of my favourite mid-size town, the Steampunk Capital of New Zealand, Oamaru, as the southerly front approached on Thursday:

Hills / Fielding / Bursitis / Work

2012-01-25T21:27:00.000+13:00

A short poem

Topographical

The hills you know were made slowly

Pushed up or carved out over centuries

For the day you buy a bicycle.

Things I tell the Internet but might feel weird bringing up in general conversation #1

My review of Chad Harbach's novel, The Art of Fielding, is in this weeks Listener.

This is my second paid book review. I enjoyed it slightly more than last time, but it's a time consuming way to make less than a hundred dollars after tax (read a 500 page novel then spend a day trying to say something substantial and useful in 400 words). I guess there's the free book thing, too.

My respect for good book critics continues to grow.

(I have an evolving fantasy of not writing any fiction in 2013 - or at least not working on a novel - and devoting myself to writing longform journalism. Just for shits and giggles. I'll snap out of it soon, I think).

Things I'd whinge about if you met me in person #1

I am suffering from bursitis at the mo. Specifically, olecranon bursitis, or 'student's elbow'. It's kinda hard to take a photo of my own elbow that does the freaky, deformed, bulbous, bruised thing justice, but here goes:

It was a lot worse yesterday: the size and hardness of a golf ball, which made bending the thing nearly impossible. It hurts a bit, but less than you might think.

I first munted by elbow while living in Edinburgh four years ago. Since then I've had about three recurrances, either from a substantial knock or too much leaning on my desk at work.

Is it just me, or does it feel weird to be talking about my elbow online?

Things I tell the Internet but might feel weird bringing up in general conversation #2

To the relief of my desk-averse elbow, I'm off tomorrow to North Otago/South Canterbury for a four day research mission. It'll be a mix of museum trawling, beach combing and hill climbing.

Not quite as adventurous as the events in THE NOVEL (thankfully), but should be fun. Here's the route I may or may not stick to:

Photos to follow.

Something I'd whinge about if you met me in person and share online

I’ve gone up from two days a week at the Ministry of Education to three days. The logic behind the move went something like this:

• I’ve got up a head of steam on THE NOVEL (correction: I had up a head of steam, then got married)
• my (revised) deadline is not till July/August
• my team at work has just lost two people and they need all hands on deck
• $$$ I would earn more money $$$
• one of my working days could be a Friday, meaning I’d get to socialise more with colleagues (also: my brother/flatmate has Friday’s off making it easier to be distracted at home on Fridays).

All solid reasons. I especially like the one with the $-signs. I also hoped that by increasing the scarcity of my writing time, I’d make better use of it.

It’s still too early to say, but today I had a Gawd, what have I done? moment at work. It seems the holidays are finally over and there are a dozen things that need to be done pronto. Doesn’t help that the last few weeks have been slow going with THE NOVEL.

There is no perfect day job/writing mix and I’m sure I’ll get comfortable with my 3/2 mix at some stage.

Another short poem

Out of doors

It’s so late the weather has disappeared.

The trees have regained their good posture.

Where has Wellington gone I wonder?

A trip to Marumaru South, aka Baring Head

2012-01-15T21:49:00.001+13:00

I can see Baring Head from my deck (I could see it from my desk right now if another house didn't intercede) but the view is particularly good when I'm walking home from the bus stop on a summer evening. Over the course of several such evenings two years ago I decided my fictional town of Marumaru South, located somewhere between Timaru and Oamaru, would actually look a lot like Baring Head, but with houses and streets.

Despite it seeming so close from the top of Mt Albert, Baring Head is actually an hour's drive from my house, followed by an hour's walk to reach the lighthouse and the views back across the harbour. And despite working on a novel set in Marumaru South for the last year, I had never actually been to Baring Head until today.

Before starting the walk to the lighthouse, M. and I drove to the coast, near the mouth of the Wainuiomata River. From the beach you can actually see the lighthouse and the hills you have to climb over to look back at Wellington.

After traipsing through sheep paddocks following the occasional orange triangle that marked the path, we made it up the hill and I was able to take the reverse of the photo above:

Baring Head is the windiest place in New Zealand, and it didn't disappoint today. Luckily the sun was out so it wasn't too cold. The sun, the wind, the pulsing grass in seed, the rocks and white-capped sea - it was all quite dramatic. Oh, and the sheep!

I'm not into lighthouses like some people (*cough* Marcus Lush *cough*), but there's a lighthouse in my fictional town and I was interested to see what Baring Head's lighthouse looked like up close.

Aside: I know I risk sounding a lot like the novelist in this article from the Onion:

According to Milligan, he spent seven months conducting in-depth historical research in order to conjure, as if out of thin air, the fictional and entirely bullshit universe of Connor's Cove, Massachusetts, including its utterly uninspired lighthouse...

I guess this is as close to operating on a knife-edge as we historical novelists get, eh?

Anyway, the Baring Head lighthouse (built 1935, so too recent to be much use to me) is a concrete design similar to the one at Cape Reinga, which I saw last month in almost zero visibility; you couldn't see the sea at all). Sadly there's a few temporary NIWA buildings behind the Baring Head lighthouse which ruin any lighthouse + sea photos.

Baring Head lightouse + sky - sea - NIWA weather station

Back from the lighthouse there are three boarded up cottages and another few small sheds/outhouses. The lawns had all been freshly mown giving the place a recent viral epidemic vibe.

Continuing on the loop walk yielded some great views of Wellington Harbour. Thanks to my zoom lens and some more digital zooming at home I've been able to identify my flat in some photos, but you'll just have to trust me.

Looking toward Wellington from Baring Head

So, how did my trip to Baring Head affect my thinking about Marumaru South? Well, I think there'll be more wind when I go through and do the second draft.

I'm holding off on any other changes as I'm going down to South Canterbury and North Otago in a fortnight for a four day research trip. It'll inform both my Marumaru scenes and the later 'flight to the hills'.

But for now, my trip to the real Marumaru has given my motivation to work on THE NOVEL a nice fillip. And who knows, maybe the exercise and new environment stimulated a bit of neurogenesis...

Short poems / Krypton Factor / Neurogenesis

2012-01-11T07:49:00.000+13:00

Short Poems

2012 is the year of the London Olympics. It is also the Alan Turing Year and the year the world might end.

But I’m calling it the Year of the Short Poem. I’m not sure why. I just wanna post some short (six or less lines) poems in my blog posts this year.

So here’s #1 (it's by me, by the way):

Youth
Children play on the floor.
The mothers are beautiful.
We negotiate the years, barbeque by barbeque.

To the Burnham Army Base! (and don’t forget your tracksuit)

There’s was a minor internet kerfuffle earlier this week over a pamphlet from an indeterminate date in which John Key appears to diss New Zealand writers, which is all the more baffling as the pamphlet is supposed to spruik a NZ literature walk. Here’s the full statement (source: Listener Online).

I have always believed we should enhance the literary skills of our young people and while our literary heroes may never challenge the glory and respect given to our All Blacks, we still need role models to inspire us.

This Literary Heritage Trail celebrates writers, poets and playwrights who have contributed to this young country’s cultural and historical life.

I hope you will take the opportunity to be part of this journey.

- Hon. John Key, Prime Minister of New Zealand.

Erm. Okay.

It’s probably true that for the majority of the population an average all black will be held in higher esteem than a great writer. But why bring up the All Blacks at all, John (or whoever in the PM’s office wrote his statement)?

Without presuming to being a literary hero, the statement does tempt me to organise a team of writers together to challenge the All Blacks to a Krypton Factor-style battle of brains and brawn.

Does anyone have Dougal Stevenson’s phone number?

Ghastly ghastly grows the purple blight

Around this time last year I wrote a column in the Dom Post about my hatred of agapanthus. I was pleased, therefore, to see this article online today (any discussion about the evil, ugly, insipid plant is helpful) but dismayed that the early poll results weren’t heavily in favour of banning it.

Maybe if an All Black spoke out against agapanthus??

Double Jeopardy

Something I missed while travelling: A Man Melting has the unusual privilege of being on the Sunday Star Times’ 2010 and 2011 lists of best books. The original December 4 2011 article not available online but the list features on Chch City Libraries’ website.

Here's what the article had to say about AMM: "The year's most outstanding debut. Assured stories from a young writer who knows how to vary his style to suit his subject: ranges from comedy to the really dour."

Kinda shows how small a splash AMM made in 2010, eh? The same can probably be said for 2011, but it’s hard to see how it can make it three years in a row in 2012… maybe an expanded third edition??

Caged monkey, sad monkey. Free monkey, happy monkey.

My current audiobook is Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. It looks at how famous writers and artists anticipated scientific discoveries, such as Whitman’s belief that emotions belonged both to the mind and body.

The connections between artist and science seems a bit tangiential at times, but the discussion of the science of umami (the fifth taste) or neurogenesis is facinating.

On the topic of neurogenesis, Lehrer describes how for a long time science held that the number of neurons in a primate’s brain was capped from infancy. But eventually experiemental science could demonstrate that our neurons could indeed divide and thus create new neurons. Part of the problem was that the lab tests used captive monkeys, and it has since been proven that captivity is bad for creating new neurons (neurogenesis). If you take the monkeys out of their cages, make them search for their food and give them a variety of toys, suddenly the brain starts bubbling with new neurons.

It has also been shown, so Lehrer informs me, that some anti-depressants stimulate neurongenesis and it is believed that new neurons rather than increased serotonin* could be what is making patients happy.

Combining these two findings suggests that the secret to happiness is a varied and challenging environment that’ll stimulate neurogenesis. Which provides a neurological explanation for why travel can make us happy. It can also explain why certain subjects (e.g. me) become maudlin when stuck in an office with little to do (or doing little despite a number of things they could be doing).

Now, if only summer will arrive properly, I’ll commence my neurogenesis routine!

__
*I originally spelt this 'ceratonin' -- one of the drawbacks of audiobooks is you aren't told/reminded how to spell technical words.

The year of the first person

I have two shortish (but not short-short) poems in Turbine 2011, which came out while I was roadtripping. And no, I’m not trying to start a new vogue for first person bio notes, this is just what I sent along with my initial submission (as in: “Hey, here are some poems and here’s a bit about me”). I never got asked for a proper bio note or got a chance to review this one, but I’m happy to let it stand.

Maybe 2012 can also be the year of the first person? Or does that sound too Biblical?

The Best Books I Read in 2011

2012-01-05T14:17:00.000+13:00

I know it's already five days into the new year, but here are the best books I read in 2011. As with my previous lists (2010, 2008), these books represent my best reading experiences of the year regardless of when they were published (for the record I read 13 books published in 2011 with three making my top ten).

1. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

(novel, audiobook,1838-9)

I mentioned this book several times this year (such as here,here and here); perhaps this is natural when you listen to something for 30 hours...

What I said about it in October: "I can't remember laughing out loud this much when listening to an audiobook... M. is also listening to the audiobook on her iPod, though she's about ten hours behind me. We talk about the detours into the lives of the Kenwigses and the Crumleses, the lesser villians like Wackford Squeers and Ralph Nickleby and the novel's great villain, Mrs Nickleby. It's all great fun, but is it great fiction?I think so. It's too flabby by modern standards. Far too many adverbs... But it's a pleasure to spend thirty hours of bus journeys and waterfront walks with Dickens' narrator (and Robert Whitfield, the audiobook's 'narrator').The question is, what can I possibly load on my iPod next that'll be this much fun?"

2. The Prestige by Christopher Guest
(novel, audiobook,1995)

Sometimes you read the right book at the right time, or inthis case, you listen to it at the right time.

What I said about it in March: "Where Priest's novel trumps [Christopher Nolan's 2006 film adaptation] is the degree to which magic is inextricable from the story. The diary of Alfred Borden is built upon the concept of "the pledge" - the idea that the magician shows you what is up his sleeve, and you are willing to believe there's nothing, and that when something is produced hence, it is magic. So too, the writing of the diary exists on two levels: there's the prima facie truth and the between-the-lines truth... Great stuff."

3. A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
(novel or linked short story collection - your call,2010)

What I said about it in July: "A Visit From The Goon Squad is about connections and disconnections, and the diffuse structure and disjointed narrative are how this is conveyed. Setting it in and around the music industry, which has always been fickle but over the last twenty years has seen drastic changes on the corporate side, the distribution and consumption of music, is genius.

"By the time I closed the book I had an appreciation for it, a respect even, and suspect it may creep onto my top ten list for books I've read this year...

"But it was a book I hated at several points."

You'll have to read the whole post to see what I hated, but it appears the passing of time has allowed it to more than creep into my top ten.

4. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
(novel,2010)

A real highlight for me in 2011 was my trip to Sydney in May the Commonwealth Writers Prize/Sydney Writers Festival and getting to hang out with some truly talent writers, including one Mr David Mitchell.

What I said about his book in April: "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is both a leap back to the ambitious, imaginative feats of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas days, and a continuation of the use of more linear and focussed plots exhibited in Black Swan Green...

"There is still some unevenness in this novel... but one can overlook a couple of odd pages out when the novel is as entertaining and transporting as 1000 Autumns."

5. 99 Ways Into New Zealand Poetry by Paula Green and HarryRicketts
(poetry/non-fiction, 2009)

I mentioned that I was reading this excellent book a few times throughout the year, but never summarised my thoughts because it's hard to feel like you've finished such a book. Green and Ricketts have sliced poetry up into various genres and movements and provided a chapter for each teeming with examples and places where to look next. A truly valuable introduction to poetry and New Zealand poetry that also functions like a Amazon-style 'If you liked this, you'll like...' set of recommendations for those who've read more widely but still have some gaps.

Special mention here to Harvey McQueen's anthology of New Zealand poems These I have loved (2010), which served both to bring new poems to my attention and remind me that I actually did read, study and enjoy New Zealand poetry at high school (early James K Baxter in particular, which I'd written off as imitative and easy to teach, but this is far too harsh a verdict for the likes of 'Wild Bees').

6. Tall Ships: The Golden Age of Sail by Phillip McCutchan
(non-fiction, 1976)

Sometimes you read the right book at not quite the righttime, but still time enough for it to be of use...

What I said about it in November: “Since [buying the booktwo years ago] I've read over a dozen books about sailing ships and leftMcCutchan's languishing on the shelf. Sigh. I could have saved myself so muchtime leafing through books that weren't quite right.”

Do I think you should all rush out and buy a copy? No (even if it were that easy to find a 36 year old book). It's a niche interest. But in a year full of non-fiction reading and research, it stands head and shoulders above the others in terms of my reading experience.

7. The Larnachs by Owen Marshall
(novel, 2011)

The first New Zealand fiction to appear on the list. All up I read ten books of fiction (novels and story collections) by New Zealand writers, after reading nine last year. While there were moments of great promise (Wulf) and polish (From Under the Overcoat, The Trouble With Fire) in other books, Marshall's novel was the most impressive for me.

What I said about it in October: "This is a marvellously written book. Marshall’s fiction has often employed a formal register, though this is his first attempt at an historical novel. The delight he has taken in the polished grammar of this bygone era is evident. I often read a sentence and paused to imagine Owen Marshall leaning back on his office chair, grinning, having just crafted it."

8. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
(novel,audiobook, 2011)

It's a rare Booker winner that makes it onto my top ten...

What I said about it in November: "The Sense of an Ending worked magnificently as an audiobook. There’s a single narrator, Tony Webster, who recalls specific moments in his life relating to a particular strand of memory: those relating to his friend, Adrian, who committed suicide in his early twenties. Tony weaves in and out of memory, digressing often on just what memory is and how it changes with time, but also finds the time to muse about the modern world, retirement, divorce and self-delusion. This is the kind of novel some agents might describe as quiet or slow, if you were to query them as a no-name writer, but I found it a thrilling and engaging story – thrilling, I guess, because it felt so intimate and real."

9. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

(novel, 2010)

At the other end of the spectrum from Barnes' slight novel is Franzen's ambitious, self-important doorstop.

What I said about it in May: "... it took me a good while to get sucked into the narrative – in fact, I thought about giving up after 50 pages and again at 100. Ah, at least I finished The Corrections...

"It’s clear J-Franz has it, whatever it is we’re all looking for in our writers: cajones, verbal alacrity and something to say, a deep moral vein and a finger on the pulse of kids these days... but there’s always the push and pull of his fiction and his FICTION, of the story he’s telling and the book he’s writing, of the look at my characters and the look at me.

I went on to call it a good-to-great novel and a sure bet to make my 2011 top ten. Seems it just squeezed in.

10= Western Line by Airini Beautrais andSpark by Emma Neale
(poetry, 2011 and 2008)

I read twelve collections of poetry in 2011, which comes to one a month. No doubt I could and should have read more, but the cream of this year's crop were Beautrais' second and Neale's third collections.

I enjoyed Beautrais' collection of prose poems, Secret Heart, about as much as I can imagine enjoying such a book (don't get me wrong, I love a good prose poem, but find myself maxed out after half a dozen), but Western Line manages to keep that 'An odd thing I noticed today' feel while wielding ancient forms of poetry (curses, charms, love poems) with modern aloofness.

What stands out for me in Neale's collection in the crispness of voice. There are a lot of poems (and prose-y bits) about preganancy and motherhood, which in years gone by or in the hands of another poet might have left me completely untouched, but Neale manages to present her 'Odd baby things I noticed today' in such vivid and seemingly simple ways that I went along for the ride and enjoyed it.

*

Some other statistics:

In 2010 42% of the books I read were New Zealand books. In 2011 this dropped slightly to 40%. Anything between a third and a half sounds about right. Any less and you're either missing new books that come out or aren't chipping away at those classics you'll read one day. Any more and you risk become too cloistered in your reading.

I listened to 10 audiobooks, which is down from previous years, but when you consider I listened to both The Brothers Karamazov and Nicholas Nickleby, both very long books, I think I did okay. It's interesting to note that my top two this year were both audiobooks. I think after several years of listening and reading to books, the distinction between the two is now quite small.

I read one eBook on my iPad, Jack London's Call of the Wild. I have downloaded a bunch more, but there always seems to be other things to do with the devise besides reading Chekhov. Gimme paper, I say.

Finally, I read nine short story collections to 26 six novels, or roughly one short story collection for every three novels. In 2010 this ratio was slightly higher (13:21).

*

Reading targets for 2012

First, an excuse. I have to read between 120 and 160 short stories as a judge of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize between now and May. This is something like 5 to 7 books worth. And while this won't be the same as reading for leisure, I'll surely eat up some of my leisure reading time.

But here are four targets which I'll report back on at the end of the year:

Read 12 poetry collections (one a month): hopefully there's a new Geoff Cochrane collection coming out around Writers and Readers Week like in '09!!.

Listen to 12 audiobooks, including at least four non-fiction books.

Read at least twenty New Zealand books.

Read at least six Australian books of fiction.

Read at least six books I already own.

To the birds

2011-12-29T10:57:00.003+13:00

Please pardon my absence from the interwebs these past five weeks. No, I didn't heed Anonymous of Wellington's advice to STFU, I got married and have been honeymooning/showing my German friends around the North Island of New Zealand since I last posted.

Over 3,000 kilometres later, here I am back in Wellington, back at my PC. I'm not quite clear of the Otherwise-committed Woods (got to visit family in Chch in a few days), so THE NOVEL will have to idle for a little longer. But here are some photos from my honeymoon...

Person's eye view of kereru in flight

Shining cuckoo, Mt Taranaki

White-faced heron, Pahi, Kaipara Harbour

Kokako #1, Tiritiri Matangi

Kokako #2

Kokako #2 in flight

Rifleman, a.k.a. Difficult Buggers to Photograph Well

Saddleback in flight

Whitehead

NZ dotterel, Front Beach, Coromandel

Dotterel chick, Cooks Beach

Male dotterels in territory dispute, Cooks Beach

Blue penguin at Cathedral Cove

Black-billed gulls, Taupo

Barnes v Trapido / Conductor / Offshore whore / Lockout poetry

2011-11-21T14:25:00.001+13:00

Recent reading

I recently finished listening to Barbara Trapido’s novel Sex and Stravinsky on my iPod and quickly followed this up with Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker Prize this year.

Trapido’s novel clocked in at a normal 11 hours and change, while Barnes’ was over half the time. It was a nice feeling to finish two books in quick succession after two and a bit months of listening to Nicholas Nickleby (however much I enjoyed that book).

The Sense of an Ending worked magnificently as an audiobook. There’s a single narrator, Tony Webster, who recalls specific moments in his life relating to a particular strand of memory: those relating to his friend, Adrian, who committed suicide in his early twenties. Tony weaves in and out of memory, digressing often on just what memory is and how it changes with time, but also finds the time to muse about the modern world, retirement, divorce and self-delusion. This is the kind of novel some agents might describe as quiet or slow, if you were to query them as a no-name writer, but I found it a thrilling and engaging story – thrilling, I guess, because it felt so intimate and real.

Sex and Stravinsky on the other hand, was not as well suited to the audiobook format. Trapido’s third person narrator inhabits at least eight different character’s perspective during the novel, and while the third person is kept up throughout, the voice of the narrator often transmutes into the perspective character’s voice (especially when we’re following the two adolescent girl characters). I found this mix of third and first person techniques confusing in an audiobook, as the narrator adopted the voice of the difficult teenage girl while still referring to the girl as Kat/her/she. Also, the reader, Jan Francis, had the difficult task of managing English, Australian, South African (three sorts: English settler, Afrikaner and Zulu), French and Italian accents.

The most engaging part of the novel for me were the parts about Caroline’s mother, who ranks up there with Mrs Nickleby in the pantheon of aggravating mothers in fiction. Unfortunately, after Caroline’s mother dies (to the delight of the reader), Francis's voice for Caroline alters and becomes a bit too similar to her shrewish mother. This is no fault of Trapido, of course, but it is difficult to think about the text objectively without thinking about the slips and tangles in the audiobook version.

Having said this, I’m still a big advocate of audiobooks. In my experience there are far more successes (like Barnes’ and Dickens’ novels) that problem children.

Still a paperboy

The paper book I’m reading at the moment is The Conductor by Sarah Quigley. I’m about halfway and have to say I haven’t really been sucked in just yet. Perhaps it’s the musical chairs the narrative plays with it’s three perspective characters (of which only Shostakovich was known to be beforehand). Perhaps it’s the fact I’m saving the CD recording of The Leningrad Symphony until the point it appears in the story. Perhaps it’s that I’m not really in the reading headspace all that often at the moment with all the wedding guff that crowds out my leisure time?

For completists

Last month I blogged about the bad review I received (belatedly). I also wrote a column about it for the Dom Post but it wasn’t posted online (there’s no real logic I can see to what is and what isn’t posted on www.stuff.co.nz). I include a scan of it here for posterities sake.

Common ground

You’ve got just over a week left to submit your short story for the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, for which I am one of the judges.

For those who’ve submitted or are still thinking about it, I wrote something about my experience with prizes for the Commonwealth Writers website: basically, don’t just enter competitions, revise your stories, submit to journals, get better, get published. Simple, eh?

I also wrote about my favourite bricks and mortar bookshop, Unity Books on Willis Street, for which I expect at least a high five next time I come a'browsing!

Offshore whore

I spoke to Julie Green of the Griffith REVIEW about my story, ‘Offshore service’, and my time spent in Queensland. You can read the interview here.

Side-effects of the NBA lockout

It looks like the chances of an NBA season this year are slim to none. This is terrible news for arena staff in the states and some lower level employees of the teams who rely on basketball games for a paycheck. Spare a thought also for the basketball journalists, who have had to stake out bargaining sessions between the players and the owners which have stretched into the wee small hours (and inevitablty end with both sides unwilling to make detailed comments at the ensuing press conference as negotiation is still ongoing).

Some writers are turning their attentions to other basketball leagues around the world (where a small number of NBA players are also looking to supplement their incomes). They appear heavily reliant on Google Translate to file their updates – today Yahoo Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski tweeted that the Houston Rocket’s Marcin Gortat had signed with a Turkish team, then hastily tweeted a retraction that the two parties were in fact still negotiating and the confusion stemmed from Google Translate.

Much more exciting to me was the news from SB Nation blogger Tom Ziller (@teamziller) that when you throw a Chinese box score into Google Translate it tells you there is a statistical category “was invaded” ('turnovers' to you and me). Ziller also points to a headline which translates as "Yi Jianlian floating in the sky watching JR violence of his four years of a button changes."

I’m feeling a James Brown- (NZ poet not US soul singer) style poem coming on.

Novel update

I heard back from my editor last week after she read the first c.50,000 words of THE NOVEL. She referred to it as the embryo of my novel, which might be another way of putting it. Anyway, she liked it (it would be unfair to quote embryonic praise as there’s a lot that can go wrong between now and the final manuscript) and I am to push on and finish the beasty but it looks like it won’t come out till February 2013. This means I’ll only get to publish one book in my twenties. Oh well. It does give me a few extra months next year to really make it the best book I can. And to write some short stories and find them homes before the birth of THE NOVEL. And find a friggin' title.

Looking for the next best thing

2011-11-11T09:22:00.001+13:00

Blue Friday

I got up early this morning to go blue penguin spotting at Tarakena Bay. Turns out it's light already at 5.30am. I'm still not sure about the local blue penguins nesting cycle, but I think I'll have to be there by 5am if I'm to spot one ambling down the beach to go fishing.

It was a beaut morning anyway and I went up the Poito Track, passed Poito Pa and Rangitatau Pa, though both were destroyed by raiding Northern iwi in 1819-20 and no obvious traces remain.

I suspect one of the pa sites is now this flat area covered with wild fennel and the woody stalks and umbels of last year's flowers.

Looking south from Palmer Head to the Cook Strait

Looking east.

Ataturk memorial (left) and Baring Head (right)

Low Self Estima*

M. and I bought a '92 Toyota Estima van on the weekend. A bit early in life for a people mover, granted, but we intend to sell it again after the summer. Will be great to tour the North Island in while on our double honeymoon with our German friends. Even better when we're joined by two more friends for the Northland leg.

Excitement.

I just wish this wedding thing was over with...

*I stole this joke from a Facebook friend.

Some fennel facts gleaned from Wikipedia

The town of Marathon, which gave its name to the long distance run, means 'The place of fennel.'

Prometheus used a fennel stalk to steal fire from the gods.

The type of bulb-like fennel you buy from Moore Wilsons and slice up for salads is the inflated leaf base of Florence Fennel or finocchio. (Something Wikipedia won't tell you: Finocchio is also Northern Italian slang for a homosexual - not sure about the link between the two).

Fennel was once one of the three main herbs used in the production of absinthe (the others being grande wormwood and green anise).

Antlered antics

Tomorrow is my stag do. I don't know what we're doing because my brother/flat mate/best man (same person) won't tell me. We need to be at the Porirua Train Station at 10am and a change of clothes would be a good idea.

Hmm.

Hopefully it's more fun that the other pre-wedding activities that have been keeping me from writing this past week: making a slideshow, doing the music, finding a reading for my step-sister to read at the ceremony, writing the vows (or thinking about it deeply, or thinking about thinking about it), sorting out where people will sit, re-arranging the table settings, picking up my wedding ring, filling out forms for the wedding licence, re-re-arranging the tables.

Wild South

Though progress on THE NOVEL's wordcount has been non-existent since I sent what I had to my editor to have a read (still no word back), I have had two great research moments in recent weeks.

The first was finally getting around to reading Phillip McCutchan's Tall Ships, which I bought at the Downtown City Mission's annual second hand book sale over two years ago. Since then, I've read over a dozen books about sailing ships and left McCutchan's languishing on the shelf. Sigh. I could have saved myself so much time leafing through books that weren't quite right.

Tall Ships has lots of pictures and includes chapters on tea clippers, the 'Australian route', and the Roaring Forties.

Better late than never I guess.

The second hallelujah moment came on Volume One of the Wild South series on DVD. The very first episode, first broadcast in 1980, is called 'The Island of Strange Noises' and focuses on Antipodes Island (one of NZ's subantarctic islands). Half an hour of squawking and close-ups of light-mantled sooty albatross: not as good as being there but the next best thing.

Via polarconservation.org

Addendum at the eleventh hour

My gran always used to ring me up on days like today and ask me what the date was. I remember a lot of calls in 1991, the year of the palindromes...

After I posted the above I was reading through a friend's poetry manuscript and I looked down, noticed the time and date, then noticed the page I was reading. Had to screenshot it.

A place I have been and know well: an interview with Breton Dukes

2011-11-04T14:00:00.000+13:00

BretonDukes’ first book, Bird North (Victoria University Press), is acollection of seventeen short stories. The blurb on the back cover isn't shyabout promoting the maleness of the collection: “Breton Dukes stands in thegreat tradition of New Zealand writers—Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, OwenMarshall—who have looked at men’s lives.” There are several other interestingthings going on in these stories, so I thought it was about time to add to myseries of published email conversations with Kiwi short story writers (click these linksfor interviews with Pip Adam, TinaMakereti, Sue Orr and AnnaTaylor).

But now,time to talk to Breton...

—

CC: There are a few common strands Isee running through your collection, one of them being a preponderance of maleleads, but there’s also a starkness to the stories, one that is perfectlymatched by their stripped down style. All but three stories are narrated in thethird person, readers are granted little access to the thoughts of charactersand small things like the repeated use of a character’s names instead of apronoun create a distancing effect. Was this a style that came naturally toyou, or did it evolve out of the stories you were trying to tell?

BD:I've always written in a stripped down style. I started reading Hemingway andCarver pretty early on, so I guess that's where it comes from. I try and makemy descriptions as clear as possible. Same with dialogue. And as you say Ithink that style fits with the tone of my stories, and with the way mycharacters would think and speak. There are a lot of action scenes in the bookand I think they benefit from being stripped down. The stories I wrote a bitlater on (and what I am writing now) contain a little more poetic stuff, but itdoesn't come easily to me.

Duringmy MA I experimented with a few different points of view and always seemed tofind that my stories worked best in the third person. I like having thatdistance from character and events and then being able to dip in and out of acharacter's mind. I never feel comfortable writing in the first person. I getsqueamish and claustrophobic - I always doubt what it is I am saying.

CC: In his Listener review,Sam Finnemore described Bird North as, “Confident, nuanced andunselfconsciously local”. Was it a conscious decision to set stories inrecognizable New Zealand places like Te Anau, the Coromandel, the East Coast,Dunedin and Johnsonville, or was this more a case of writing what you know? Howimportant is place in your writing?

BD:When I write a story I have a very clear picture of where the events are takingplace. I can't write without that picture. I have to have a house or a beach,or a street in my head. A place I have been and know well. The characters canbe pliable and the events too, but not place. So yeah, it's definitely a caseof writing what I know.

Ifigure if I am using a place like Tunnel Beach or Johnsonville as the setting,why not name it? It would seem strange to me not too. And I've always got areal kick out of seeing 'New Zealand' in movies and on telly. Maybe that hassomething to do with all the local stuff too.

CC: I know what you’re saying aboutseeing ‘New Zealand’ in movies and TV. Even if it’s just an episode of America’sNext Top Model or The Amazing Race, it’s hard to resist seeing what these unrealreality TV people think of our country. But it’s nice afterwards to watchsomething made locally, or dive into a book by a Kiwi author, and get somethingthat breaks through the surface.

I’m interested in your endings. A storywill often have a concluding chunk that jumps ahead in time, switchesperspective or voice. Characters suddenly have children, cows fall fromclifftop paddocks, pods of dolphins strand on beaches. ‘Maniatoto’, astory set in the present day, concludes with a paragraph about the miners inthat region one hundred and forty years earlier. The reviewer in North and South said something to the effect that there’s a fineline between illumination and non-sequitur, but even if some endings are moreinscrutable than others, I think they all succeed in prompting the reader toreconsider what has come before it. Was this type of ending inspired by aparticular writer or story you’ve read, or was it something you arrived atorganically?

BD: I can't beexactly sure where those endings come from. I read a book of stories by EdwardP Jones (All Aunt Hagar's Children)when I was doing the MA. It had a big effect on me. There were often greatshifts in time and in place. Alice Munro goes for that sort of thing too and Ihave read a fair bit of her stuff. Sometimes, like with the falling cow, Istarted writing the story having that as something that would happen, and inthe writing of it, it seemed to fit best at the end. Regards the dolphin thing:I was thinking about working in the big city and the big city being so close tothe harbour and the dolphins I had once seen in Wellington harbour... I don'tknow really. I like endings that really open things up. It's that freedom aboutwriting that keeps me going though.

Also what I thinkI was aiming to do with some of those endings, 'Maniatoto' especially, wassuggest the vastness of the world. Sounds grand eh?! But I remember a DenisJohnson story, it had three guys in a car, one dying in the back seat, and theywere driving this road and then there is this line which refers to theirgeographic location and how thousands of years earlier the valley they are driving was formed by glaciers receding. Orsomething like that. It lifts you out of the tightness of the short story worldand makes a great sweep. In a few short pages you feel like you are reallyseeing something.

CC: Have you always been drawn to short stories?Were there any writers in the early days that, when you look back now, got youhooked into fiction?

Always.Hemingway got me going I think. I liked the content of his stories. When I wasvery young I used to like Wilbur Smith books and the Willard Price series –South Seas Adventure, Antarctic Adventure. Roger and Hal I think the chapsnames were. Ray Carver was very important too. I liked the suburban aspect ofhis writing.

CC: One of my favourite stories in Bird North, ‘Racquet’, startsoff discussing the alterations a couple has made to their backyard. I’ll admitwhen I started the story I thought, I hope this gets more interesting. I onlyreally appreciated the relevance of the opening when I reached the final scene,where the drunk husband is hiding from his wife in the backyard. I finished thestory and went right back to the beginning and read it again. Do you thinkreaders need to take a second pass with these stories to get their full effect?

BD:I guess some of the vagueness in my writing does often necessitate asecond reading. I frequently have no idea where a story is going when I start. ‘Racquet’was a good example. It initially ended with the prostitute going down onLeighton, but people told me that didn't quite cut it, so I kept writing.

Ioften read a story twice. I think that is okay, even desirable. A good oneshould have plenty going on, plenty for the reader to think through.

CC: Yeah, I agree. As a reader, I likethat sense that the writer is trusting you to work some things out. As awriter, it’s about finding that balance between giving the reader workto do and shirking work you should be doing, eh?

BD: Yeah,and I have been guilty of shirking in the past. That criticism in North andSouth got to me a little – because I agreed with some of what the reviewersaid. I do worry my work is too bleak and that the stories have no purpose. Butthen, even if I don’t always get it right, I feel I am on the right track, thatmy method of storytelling is valid and interesting.

CC: You’ve spoken about your desire toavoid clichés and male stereotypes in these stories (like in this Radio NZ interview). When the reviewer,Nicholas Reid, wrote about your collection on his blog, Reid’s Reader, you posted a comment listing the nineinaccuracies in his review. In subsequent comments it seems you andNicholas agree to disagree on the importance of these smaller details. Why isit important that you to steer clear of ‘grotty student flats’ and ‘cheapmotels’ in your stories?

BD: Ha! My first ever review. I couldn't stopmyself from replying to that one. I actually really liked the review - he wascomplimentary about my writing, but hated the content. I didn't mind that atall. It's my first book and what I feared most was people pointing and laughingand saying, "You write like a child!" Anyway, I think in the mistakeshe made and in his language, 'grotty flats' etc I felt my writing wasbeing pigeon holed as a certainkind of fiction: bleak crap that trades in shock and testosterone. I don't like stories where characters fit into thestereotype of drug user or whatever. What I like most about my stories is thehumour, unpredictability and their openness. What he wrote seemed to besquashing that stuff, so I had to speak out!

CC: Good on you. I know of a few writers who got avicarious thrill from that wee exchange (me included). How’ve you found therest of the post-publication world?

BD: Verystrange. A friend sent me this by AL Kennedy: it sums it up for me.

CC: What next for Breton Dukes thewriter?

BD: At the moment, thanks to CreativeNZ, I am working on a second collection of stories. Fairly similar to Bird North, but I am hoping to write somestories that are longer and have stronger plot lines.

CC: I look forward to reading them. Thanks for the chat, Breton.

—

You can read Breton's story, 'Johnsonville', here.

For more info on Bird North, check out VUP's website.

Wellington and Perth Festivals / Chairs / Nautical Superstitions

2011-11-03T17:11:00.001+13:00

Get with the programme

I went to the launch of the 2012 New Zealand Arts Festival's programme last night at the Opera House here in Wellington. You can now view the programme online here.

There's a bunch I'm looking forward to, including Britain's all-male theatre company Propellor performing The Winter's Tale (my novel-in-progress features a Vaudville vignette of Act Five Scene Three, so will be interesting to see it performed live again).

The music portion of the programme looks particularly strong, with banjo and piano accordion maestros, indie darlings Bon Iver and the 'desert blues' of Tinariwen.

And of course there's Writers and Readers Week 9-14 March. I'm stoked to be appearing in sessions at The Embassy and in Masterton, in part because it means I'll get to go and see Tim Flannery, Germaine Greer, Thomas Friedman, Jo Nesbo, Alan Hollinghurst, Kelly Link, Ron Rash and others... for free. Hopefully I'll bump into Kim Scott again too, after hanging out with him a bit at the Sydney Writers Fest (and now that I've read and loved That Deadman Dance).

The full programme for Writers and Readers Week doesn't come out till January, but there's plenty in the main programme to salivate over until then!

Out West

A couple of hours later, the Perth Festival launched it's program(me), which is also exciting for me as I'll be flying over there to take part in the writers festival. Again, the full programme won't be released until Jan, but there is info about the event I'm most looking forward to, The Feast of Words on 25 Feb:

Indulge in a gourmet three-course feast of food and Watershed wines as literary stars complement each dish with specially chosen readings. Set by the Reflection Pond at UWA's beautiful Whitfeld Court, Feast of Words has all the ingredients for a perfect summer night: good friends, great food and some of the world's most intriguing authors.

Join UK novelist Barbara Trapido (Sex and Stravinsky), Irish poet Dennis O'Driscoll (Weather Permitting), NZ's 2011 Commonwealth Writers Prize winner Craig Cliff (A Man Melting) and Norwegian sensation Johan Harstad (Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?)

Now that's something to salivate over!

Some nautical superstitions (via failedsuccess.com)

Never start a voyage on the first Monday in April. This is the day that Cain slew Able.

Don’t start a voyage on the second Monday in August. This is the day Sodom and Gommrrah was destroyed.

Starting a cruise on Dec. 31 is bad. This is the day Judas Iscariat hanged himself.

Avoid people with red hair when going to the ship to begin a journey. Red heads bring bad luck to a ship, which can be averted if you speak to the red-head before they speak to you.

Never say good luck or allow someone to say good luck to you unanswered. If someone says “good luck” to you, the only to counter the bad luck is by drawing blood. A swift punch in the nose is usually sufficient to reverse this curse.

Behind the scenes

Now, for those of you who think the life is a writer is all trips to Perth and Masterton, think again. It involves a lot of sitting at your desk. A lot. The back of my desk chair broke last week and I had to run out an buy a new one the next day after an eight hour writing session killed my back.

M. encouraged me not to skimp on the cost of a replacement, considering the amount of time I'll spend sitting on it, and I gravitated to those leather 'executive' chairs with the high backs. I ended up finding a comfy one that didn't cost the earth, got it home and found it was too wide to fit under my desk. It would fit if I took the handles off, but the handles held the back on. Disaster.

I've since taken it back and purchased a bog standard office chair. No arm rests. No leather. I think it's for the best. The closer my set up at home is to the set up at my day job, the easier it will be to slip into 'business mode' when writing. That's the theory anyway.

Who wants to read something someone wrote in an executive chair? Next think I'd have a Newton's cradle on my desk.

Bullet dodged, I reckon.

Just because I can...

Tuatara that I spotted today at Zelandia

Female papango (scaup) just after a dive (notice the droplets of water on her feathers).

I also spotted the above plaque at Zealandia. Harvey McQueen was a New Zealand poet and anthologist who passed away last year. He kept an entertaining blog in his final years, which often reminded me of Maurice Gee's Plumb, if George Plumb had a blog (and was less irascible). This is a compliment, in case it doesn't read like one.

Nameless purgatory

I mentioned last week that I'd be sending a chunk of THE NOVEL off to my editor on the first... well I did (at 11:31pm). I gave it a working title. It sucked. Back to the drawing board. And back to the grind... plenty more to write before I hear back whether I'm wasting my time or not.

But enough of me

Tomorrow I'll be posting my interview with Breton Duke's, author of the story collection Bird North. Check back after 2:30pm...

Both ways is the only way I want it

2011-10-28T08:28:00.002+13:00

Checking In

It’s been a bit quiet here ever since I lost my mind.

I don’t think I’ll ever try to write 6,000 words on the one piece of fiction in one day again (though I may achieve the fact unknowingly). I’ve hardly written a fresh word since. I’ve either been too zonked to focus or forced to jigger with existing parts of the novel to make sure my giant jenga tower of words doesn’t topple over (much like this extended metaphor promises to if I go on any longer).

I’ll be sending off the first chunk of THE NOVEL to my editor next week. (I may have come up with a title for it today, though it may just be another working title.) By the time of my wedding/the general election (it’s the same day, David) I should have a new roadmap for completion… just in time for a non-metaphorical roadtrip around the North Island.

You may be pleased to know that I intend to post at least one interview with a Kiwi writer next month.

I’ll also work on my annual ‘The Best Books I’ve Read This Year’ post, which will pop up here in December. I might even be in a position to do a similar post about music; the first time in three years I could probably say this. See my Dom Post column from last year for some background. Unfortunately, at the moment I’m working on the playlist for our wedding day (big moments, background music, dance floor boogie), which involves listening to a lot of Billy Joel and Elton John and asking myself, ‘Is it really worth it?’

Recent Reading

Both ways is the only way I want it by Maile Meloy (short stories)

Great stories in the Richard Ford mould -- there was even a preponderance of male protagonists / male perspectives, despite Meloy being female -- but I didn't tire of the collection in the same way I do (used to?) when reading large numbers of Ford's stories in one hit.

Only one sore thumb story, 'Agustín', which is set in aristocratic Argentinean circles (the rest are set in contemporary USA, often Montana). Not quite as out-there as Wells Tower's Viking story in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, but 'Agustín' still struggled to hold the ground its fellow stories had won.

Meloy has some interesting things to say about the ordering of short story collections on the book's Amazon page.

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (audiobook)

Technically, I have 27 minutes left to go, but it's been a marathon 30 hours to get to this point and all the plots are being wrapped up. I can't remember laughing out loud this much when listening to an audiobook (to be fair, it's three times the length of the standard audiobook, so maybe I've LOL'd this much with three books, but I try not to make a habit of looking like a crazy person on the bus). I'm filled with glee whenever the boring, satisfied counting house clerk Tim Linkinwater appears. Perhaps if I hadn't done my share of drudgery in financial services I would not warm to Tim as I have.

M. is also listening to the audiobook on her iPod, though she's about ten hours behind me. We talk about the detours into the lives of the Kenwigses and the Crumleses, the lesser villians like Wackford Squeers and Ralph Nickleby and the novel's great villain, Mrs Nickleby. It's all great fun, but is it great fiction?

I think so. It's too flabby by modern standards. Far too many adverbs. I suspect if you cut and paste the text into Microsoft Word most sentences would have a green squiggly underline for committing the (perceived) sin of 'wordiness'. But it's a pleasure to spend thirty hours of bus journeys and waterfront walks with Dickens' narrator (and Robert Whitfield, the audiobook's 'narrator').

The question is, what can I possibly load on my iPod next that'll be this much fun?

A surplus of sentimentality

If finding the right songs for THE WEDDING (yes, it's officially become as ominous as THE NOVEL) was a tricky, it seems finding some words without music to beef up our non-religious, not-overly-sentimental ceremony is bloody hard.

I've got to find something for my step-sister to read out, but it seems it's either God or schmaltz when looking for 'wedding readings' (what a terrible, repulsive phase to be Googling; surely I should have a piece of writing I cherish which will suit such an occasion... um... can't think of one...).

Ugh. For now, thought, I'm running back to music:

Live blogging the Day of (at least) 6,376 words

2011-10-20T08:25:00.004+13:00

Background in yesterday's post.

8:20am: Wordcount: 1,247. Was at my desk at 6am. At this pace it'll take about ten hours to reach 6,376 words. Best not to think too much about it. Better to think of all the bird photos I'll post late this evening!

Typos made and detected: 'allowed' for 'aloud'. Typos made and not detected: TBA.

Hot drinks: one cup of tea (large mug, double-bagger).

Times checking emails: two.

Musical accompaniment: The Zombies, Begin Here. Bob Seger, Greatest Hits vol. 1.

10:46am: Wordcount: 2,775. 44% of the way there. Time elapsed: Four and three quarter hours. Time remaining if current pace holds: Six and a quarter hours. Expected time of completion (allowing for meals, sanity breaks, etc): 8pm.

Drinks: one large cup of green tea. Cold water.

Snacks: two prunes and four pieces of chocolate.

Musical accompaniment: Foo Fighters, Wasting Light (aka Wasting Everyone's Time), The Outfield, Big Innings.

Square brackets left so far: twelve, the longest being: "[whatever it’s called when they rappel down theside of ships to paint them, etc]"

Time for a shower.

1:18pm: Wordcount: 3,610. 57% complete.

Slower progress the last couple of hours as I've run up against a few question marks that cannot be square bracketed. Plus got a bit distracted by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trindade_and_Martim_Vaz.

Also, general sitting-on-my-butt-for-seven-hours fatigue.

Recent distraction: our bogan neighbours in the downstairs flat have moved out (yay) and left the place in such as state that the unseen owners have had decorators around most days the last two weeks. Yesterday they ripped all the carpets out. Today there's a lot of banging I can only imagine means they're tacking the new carpet down.

Musical accompaniment: Kaiser Chiefs, Entertainment, Kyuss, Blues for the red sun.

I'm off for a walk and a bite to eat, then back to it.

2.35pm: Wordcount: no change.

Back from a walk down to Lyall Bay, listening to Nicholas Nickleby on my iPod. Beaut day out. Hard to get back into it.

Checked my emails. Checked twitter. Seems I've been found out:

Guess I have to push on.

(I'm honestly not doing this as an attention grabbing exercise -- I don't even think it's very interesting, someone writing about how many words they've written -- but it sure is a good productivity tool...)

4:07pm: Wordcount: 3,780.. so hardly anything. Still 2,600 words to go before I can post bird photos / go to sleep.

Musical accompaniment: Spoon, A Series of Sneaks. Spoon, Transference.

Yeah, I totally blame Spoon for me only writing 170 words in the last three hours.

What have I achieved since lunch: inserted a chapter break. Read the first story in Breton Duke's collection, Bird North. Washed the dishes.

Yeah, cricinfo's got nothing on me!

5:17pm: Wordcount: 4,507. 71%. 1,869 words to go.

Ugh! Brain-mush. Lemon and Ginger Tea. Inappropriate Capitalisation. The Stone Roses, The Complete Stone Roses (I'm not sure how I feel about them reforming; in isolation I think it's cool, never having had the chance to see them live the first time around [not that I'm planning a trip to Madchester anytime soon], but along with every other fucking band from the last thirty-eight years that ever released an LP...). Finger fatigue. Poor paragraphing. Can you get cauliflower ears from headphones? Time spent on Flikr looking at Rockhopper Penguins (can't link, bird photo). I have some great NZ Falcon shots, dammit. Back to work.

8:06pm: Wordcount: 4,841. 76%.

Um, yeah, so that bit back at 10:46 where I gave my ETC as 8pm... I was wrong.

Which means we've come to the point in the evening where I look to bend the rules and find easy ways to increase the word count (this post is about 700 words long at the mo, and would have counted under my 2008 rules, but not today). In the words of Mr Mantalini: 'Demnition!'

I took a sizeable break to cook tea (pasta with basil and fresh tomatoes). I like cooking but I loooove cooking when I should be writing.

But I've been hard at it the past hour or so. The problem is, I've written eight pages of text today and I'm having trouble keeping all the implications of the decisions I've made to put those pages together in my head in order to make the next set of decisions. For example, the main character met a character today who seems nice but this could just be an act. I wrote the scene so it could go either way, thus giving the reader a bit of intrigue. Now that things have moved on a bit, I'm at that point where the new character reveals if he is nice through and through or a duplicitous bastard. I wrote a couple of sentences with him as a baddie, then decided maybe he can be nice [like the Cheeryble Brothers? Newman Noggs? Kate? Nicholas? Smike? Nicholas Nickleby has a lot of pure-hearted characters, they almost seem to outnumber the blackhearts].

Anyway, I've been re-reading a lot of what I've written to make decisions like this.

NB: He either needs to be a blackheart and live or a pureheart and die. That's fiction folks.

Musical accompaniment: Television, Marque Moon. Temple of the Dog, Temple of the Dog.

Thanks for the comments and encouragement along the way. My better half even kept herself scarce this evening (actually, all I got was a text saying she'd be home late... if I wasn't so written out I might have gotten the wrong idea).

10:27pm: Wordcount: Ahem... 6,425. Yes, that's more than 100% of 6,376.

You know what that means?

Karearea (NZ Falcon) at Zealandia

Musical accompaniment for the last push: Toad the Wet Sprocket, Dulcinea. Vampire Weekend, Contra.

Sustenance for the last push provided by a vanilla cornetto (thanks Daz).

Inspiration (if such a lofty word can be applied to an arbitrary achievement / incremental progress on a novel that might be total tripe [or maybe just the 6,000 words I wrote too quickly today...]) provided by my kindly commenters (and the other silent visitors, all 63 of you... even the one from Miami who came here after Googling ""Billy Preston" AND "Nothing from Nothing" AND "play list" OR playlist AND party -lyrics") and... BIRDS!!!

Mummy karearea being swooped by recently fledged karearea chick (it was hungry).

Some conclusions: It's sixteen plus hours since I first sat down at this computer. That's far too long. I think if I stopped at 10:46am that would still have been a solid day's writing SO LONG AS I sat down the next day and churned out another 2,775 words. But that's just not how things have been going for me and THE NOVEL lately. I needed to beat it into submission. My poor fingers certainly feel as if they have administered a beating to something.

The question remains: how much of today's 6,000 or so words will remain after the final edit? Right now, they're all my babies. And I need some sleep.

Birds!

Fledgling karearea.

Afterword:

I just consulted my wordcount spreadsheet from 2008 and it turns out of the 6,376 words I wrote on 10 December that year, only 3,374 were on short fiction (presumably all on 'Unnatural Selection'). The remaining 3,002 words were expended on blogging (my best books of 2008 post I guess) and poetry! What a rogue I am. Spending twice as long on the one project than is healthy in the one day! (I kinda suspected this might have been the case, that's why I didn't check until just now).

(Wordcount of this post: 1,256)

Judge, Jury and Executioner

2011-10-19T15:41:00.001+13:00

In Her Majesty's Service

The Commonwealth Writers Prize has relaunched in its amended form, along with a new website, http://www.commonwealthwriters.org/, with some content from past winners. There’s even an online writer in residence, fellow short story supremo Katrina Best.

I’m really excited about the revamped Commonwealth Short Story Prize. It used to be a 600-word limit (winning entries were intended for radio broadcast) but now the canvas is much larger: 2000-5000 words to be exact.

I’m honoured to be one of this year’s judges, which means I’ll get to read the freshest writing from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, South Asia, the UK and of course the Pacific.

NZ is also represented in the Best First Book judging panel, with Emily Perkins signing on (where does she find the time?).

Turn The Page

I’m already in two minds about Bob Seger after Friday's hasty declaration.

Reprint! Reprint! Reprint!

Random House is reprinting A Man Melting. A modest number at this stage using a short-run system, so the foil on the cover will just be printed in colour. It'll be interesting to see how much of a difference this makes…

There’s still some foil first editions in NZ/Aus bookstores if you want one, but get in quick! For the rest of the world, it’s a matter of taking your chances ordering online (see info in the sidebar ---->) or buying the eBook (definitely no foil).

Bang Bang Bang: Musical interlude

Promises, promises

Tomorrow, Thursday 20 October 2011, I will write 6,376 words of THE NOVEL.

I know I can do it. I wrote 6,376 words on Wednesday 10 December 2008, that being the year I tried (and failed) to write one million words in a year, and the 6,376 words being my best word count for a single day.

That day I was working on the short story which became 'Unnatural Selection', which closes A Man Melting. So it's not like I was writing total nonsense (though I can't say for sure how many of those 6,376 words survived in the final 10,000 word story; the first draft was a flabby 13,000 words).

Why am I setting myself this lofty goal? Because I'm spinning my wheels at the moment, spending hours inserting historical detail and agonising over how Scottish my Scottish characters should sound (must I type 'doon' for 'down' whenever they speak?), and I really want to break new ground.

So tomorrow I will rise at 6am, slip on my slippers and write like stink, leaving square brackets willy-nilly and powering the story out into the open seas and closer to the inevitable calamity in the Southern Ocean.

And if I fail? Um. If I fail I promise not to post any bird photos on this blog for 12 months! Yeah, I know! The things I must resort to.

Excuse me while I erect my petard.

Other things I need to do in the next few weeks:

Come up with a title, even just a working title, for THE NOVEL, by 1 November (suggestions welcome, the less relevant the better).
Submit something to Turbine by 21 October.
Get a haircut.
Buy a wedding band (M. has hers sorted already)
Give Bob Seger another chance.

Bob Seger during his short-lived Snuffleupagus phase

Griffith Review / Bob Seger / Travel Pity

2011-10-14T12:35:00.001+13:00

Islands in this dream

A thick package containing two copies of Griffith REVIEW 34 (the annual fiction issue, the theme of which is 'Islands') arrived yesterday. My story, 'Offshore Service', leads off the issue, which also features Favel Parrett, who I saw talk about surfing and fiction at the Melbourne Writers Festival last month, and Amy Espeseth, who I shared a jug of Pimms with one evening during the festival, as well as a bunch of other Aussie writers who I haven't seen in person but I'm sure are lovely...

I'm stoked to be in this issue for a number of reasons. Firstly, Griffith REVIEW is, in my view, the most consistently engaging of the Australian literary journals. Secondly, it's always nice to have a little coverage in Australia... I had two stories published in Etchings a few years ago, and my story 'Touch' from A Man Melting is supposed to appear in Sydney's HarbourView at some stage, but I've always felt that the line in my bio about having fiction published in New Zealand and Australia was cheating slightly. Not now!

And it's always nice to be paid for a short story in Australian dollars.

But I must damp down these feelings of Trans-Tasman Brother-and-Sisterhood for the footie on the weekend! Here's hoping my fellow Manawatuvian Aaron Cruden has a flyer.

Still the same?

At the risk of sounding like a Michigan steel worker (are there any primary or secondary industries still going in Michigan?): Bob Seger is awesome.

No, not his hair. Or his backing singers, which seem to up the schmaltz-quotient both live and in the studio. But when you get past these trifles... woh!

I got his greatest hits CD out from the library yesterday and it's funny how many songs I knew and were suddenly great when listening to them on a CD rather than hearing them on 2ZA or Solid Gold, or whatever radio station plays Bob Seger these days.

'Night Moves'. 'Still The Same'. 'Against The Wind'. Three of the greatest songs ever written right there.

Plus there's 'Hollywood Nights', 'Mainstreet', 'We've Got Tonight' and 'Turn The Page' (which Metallica rocked-up and, though I'm not a big Metallica fan, I have to concede is probably a notch better than the original...). Oh, and the second most popular jukebox song of all time: 'Old Time Rock & Roll' (a bit too obvious for my tastes, but it does what it sets out to do).

I see what's going to happen now. I'll go and search out Seger's studio albums and litter blog posts with Seger YouTube clips for the next six months.

Where will he sit on the podium of American singer-songwriters when this honeymoon period of discovery/rediscovery is over? He won't topple Warren Zevon, surely (I also borrowed Insides out by Zevon's son, Jordan... one day I might write something about the children of artists and how we respond to their works...). Will I realise how uncool it is to proclaim my love for a middle of the road seventies mid-Western rocker and issue a retraction? Nah, I'm beyond caring if other people like what I like, or trying to have a cohesive ~~record collection~~ iTunes library.

Travel Pity

I wrote a column a few months back about travel envy. This morning I picked my brother and his friend up from the airport after their three week jaunt in China. They were tired and smelly and had a load of washing that had been rained on on their last day in Beijing that they needed to get out of their packs and re-wash.

It was nice to sit on the couch as they sorted out their gear, did some final accounting about who paid for what and who owed whom, and began to sort through the masses of photos they'd taken to ensure they both had copies (and they can subject me to a slideshow later).

Staying home has it's advantages.

If M. and I end up buying a house I might have to re-read this post often to soothe my itchy feet...

Bird / Hip / List / Book

2011-10-12T07:58:00.000+13:00

Okay, that’s long enough to have that review at the top of this page...

Time to say something worth the price of admission*...

But first, just to annoy Laura, a photo of a kereru eating broom leaves:

Putting the poaka in kereru

Does this photo (taken Sunday at Zealandia) remind anyone else of those pigeon gangsters on Animaniacs?

Tragically Hip thematic link: Pigeon Camera (1992)

It wouldn’t be a blog post without a picture of a bird and a YouTube link to a Hip song...

I guess that means it's now time for a list...

To Do List: By 2016

Get a poem included in Best New Zealand Poems
Get a story published in The New Yorker
Watch another Sacramento Kings game (Damn you David Stern!)
Write a thriller featuring a forensic document examiner and an expert in animal DNA using a pseudonym
Write a children’s book featuring magical beings that live in flax bushes
Write a blog post that compares all of the covers of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights that are available on YouTube
Earn as much money in a year as I did when I was 22 and working in an entry-level public service job in Brisbane
Go on a junket... anywhere
Photograph a rifleman (and a tomtit, and a black-billed seagull)
Turn something down

Speaking of To Do’s

It’s less than three weeks to the first of November. Back in March I kinda sorta committed to send my publisher a first draft of THE NOVEL on 1 November. This still left a few months for “refining” before “serious editing” (i.e. someone else holding the red pen) and hopefully publication “towards the end of 2012”.A month and a bit later I went down to two days a week at my day job, but also got a bit distracted by my first two writers festivals (Auckland and Sydney) and some of the stuff that came after that. But still, I managed to make some good headway with THE NOVEL.

When I gave my editor (and y'all) a status update on 1 August I said, “I should have between 70 and 80,000 words by the start of November. The question is whether 70-80k will represent a finished draft, or if the novel will be a bit longer (it won't be War and Peace or anything). As I get further into the next section, I should have a clearer idea of the shape.”

Soon after this I cut 7,500 words from the opening and found out my second section was actually my third and had to write a new second section, which poured molasses all over the momentum I’d built up.

This past week I have been forced to research things such as the symptoms of lead poisoning, what cargo, if any, tea clippers took to China and whether figureheads were hollow in the 1870s. The research is still kind of fun, which makes me think I must be doing something wrong. The fact I’m not adding to my word count significantly most days is a frustrating, though. And if it all means I miss my window and the book isn’t ready in time to come out in 2012, that’d be a bit stink. But all these current labours are necessary. Cutting those 7,500 words back in August was necessary. The massive rewrite of some section I’m currently okay with but will wake up one day and realise needs to change will be necessary. Because there’s no way I’m rushing this story between two covers if it isn’t ready. If it isn’t right.

Or as right as I can make it.

*Although, as many tweets proclaimed after the latest raft Facebook changes, ‘If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product’... In this case I think it’s more likely: ‘If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product of my imagination.’

Breaking Bad: A "new" review from 11 months ago

2011-10-05T11:28:00.000+13:00

Okay, so turns out I have some connected people who read this blog (well, at least one) and now I have the full text of the Taranaki Daily News’ review of A Man Melting that ran on 6 November 2011, which I mentioned yesterday.

To refresh your memories, I got a Google alert last week saying there was this review from back in November, but the link didn’t work.

The question is, why had no one brought this review to my attention?It couldn’t be bad, could it?

And it’s not, insofar as the review is clearly written, doesn't sit on the fence and is full of strange, eminently quotable put-downs...

A Man Melting, Reviewed by James O'Sullivan, Taranaki Daily News, 6/11/2010

This is the first collection of stories from up-and-coming New Zealand writer Craig Cliff. Cliff is another product of the Bill Manhire MA writing degree in Wellington. Debate lingers as to the merits or lack thereof of such institutions. Do they nurture original and thought-provoking writing, or do they create a processed Mc-Literature? Reading this book, I am surprised I wasn't asked if I wanted fries with it.

Cliff writes well enough. At least he steers clear of the literary excesses that plague a lot of New Zealand fiction. But too many stories in A Man Melting left me wondering what Cliff is trying to say, or even what he is trying to do. Stories ramble and go nowhere, leaving hapless readers wondering why they invested the time and cash into this book.

Cliff's angle is realism; stories include couples having relationship troubles, a young professional having a career crisis, kids suffering from the bullies at school and so on. Some of the stories reflect Cliff's personal experiences, travelling, working in offices and living in Scotland. But there's another element. In one story, a man starts to melt. In another, extinct species start to come back to life. The thing about writing these "weird" kinds of stories is that if you're not Franz Kafka, you're probably not going to pull it off. Cliff is no Franz Kafka.

A typical story from this collection is Fat Camp, where a couple start up a camp for overweight children in Scotland. It's long, meandering and offers nothing more than the trite "trying to get through to the difficult kid at camp" storyline.

Cliff does have writing skills, but he seems betwixt and between with this collection. There's just not enough in these stories for them to be good literature and yet they don't have enough dramatic plot or action to fit into a safe genre. Cliff needs to figure out what he wants to say and find the right way to say it.

Burn!

Actually, I laughed out loud a couple of times when I first read it.

My reaction might have been different if I’d read it back in November, but a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then.

I’d just like to thank James O’Sullivan for holding no punches and giving me something to write about in my next column (I’ve already Googled Mr O’Sullivan and it seems he's written a few short stories in his time...).

For now, I just have to decide which quote to put up on my website...

‘Cliff is no Franz Kafka,’ perhaps?

‘I am surprised I wasn't asked if I wanted fries with it’?

Or the delightfully backhanded, ‘Cliff writes well enough’?

All gold.

JAAM 29 / Book Groups / RWC2011 / Odd Names

2011-10-04T20:37:00.000+13:00

JAAM time

My copy of JAAM 29, edited by Anne Kennedy, arrived today. It features my short story 'The Bartender's Glass.' It's the detective story I mention sometimes when I talk about the stories I liked but couldn't find a way to include in A Man Melting as they didn't 'play nice' with the other stories...

Anyway, JAAM 29 looks like it has some great stuff inside and I look forward to reading it properly over the next week.

*

Attention book groups

You can now read online the Book Group Compass piece on A Man Melting that featured in the Winter 2011 issue of Booknotes.

*

New item for to-do list inspired by a tweet on Sunday: write the great rugby league novel before Pip Adam does.

*

You learn something every day

The Niagara Falls did not look like this when I visited in 2009. In fact, it looked like the banner at the top of this page (it’s a photo of the horseshoe falls, taken near the gift shop on the Canadian side).

*

Sport, take II

I went to the Argentina vs Georgia Rugby World Cup 2011 game in Palmerston North on Sunday. My one and only RWC game I’ll go to. (Mostly went up to Palmy to visit whanau and check out the Argentinean asado, but the barbeque wasn’t ready when we had to leave the square).

Great atmosphere in FMG stadium and the Square beforehand.

The Square being invaded by Pumas supporters.

The Argentinean supporters got quiet in the first half when their team kept knocking on and missing their penalty kicks (Georgia led 7-5 at half time), but Los Pumas picked it up in the second. Phew!

Lots of handling errors, lots of scrums, lots of hands on hips.

I haven't been to a rugby game for a while,
but the amount of non-players on the field was ridiculous.

But in the end, a good time was had by all.

*

From the archives

I was looking through my emails from a few years ago and found this…

Top 10 CDs I borrowed from Brisbane City Library in 2005

1. Sleater-Kinney 'One-Beat'
2. Bob Dylan 'Highway 61 Revisited'
3. Iggy and the Stooges 'Raw Power'
4. Rolling Stones 'Let it Bleed'
5. Television 'Marquee Moon'
6. Elliott Smith 'XO'
7. The Fall '50,000 Fall Fans Can't be Wrong' (2CD best of)
8. Love (best of)
9. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (best of)
10. Elvis Costello (and the Attractions) 'Best of'

Clearly my musical education was a work in progress in 2005.

*

New-old review?

There might have been a review of A Man Melting in the Taranaki Daily News on November 8, 2010. Yep, that’s almost a year ago, but I just got a Google alert about it now. Sadly, the site it links to doesn’t work. Did anyone read this review when it came out? Do I need to go for a road trip to the New Plymouth library, or is there some other way to get a hold of a copy?

*

What the Dickens? II

ODD NAMES.

The names conjured up by Dickens are more than matched from the subscription list of a certain New York newspaper : — Maria Pickles, William F. Peterfish, John J. Cowhog, Laura Loofborrow, Maggie Mussmaker, J. Tyranny, Minnie Bighost, Fannie Vinegar, Susie Souse, Nora B. Freelove, Mattie B. Toogood, Mollie M. Whiteneck, Phenia Sufficool, Effie Blunk, Cora Coon, Viola Eyestone, Raytie Shivers, Pearl Shad, Frankie Somple, John George Dingledog, O. D. Pancake,Dick Turnipseed, and Cynthia Neiderfrankensteinhauser.

Article from Evening Post, 6 November 1886, via Papers Past.

Some things I wrote about writing a novel over the last week and have decided to finally post

2011-10-03T18:36:00.001+13:00

A writer who knows what he is doing isn't doing very much -- Nelson Algren

All images in this post by Jean Lowe, via Juxtapose

Looking Back, Looking Forward

No one ever asks me, ‘Why do you still keep a blog now that you have a column?’ Maybe I'm the one one who wonders about this sometimes. Because for long stretches of time there’s not a lot to write about in a writer’s life. At least not this one’s.

When I go to work for my 2-day working week, people often ask me how THE NOVEL is going, which is a fair question, but difficult to answer, especially if they’ve asked you this the week before and again the week before that. I think they’re all waiting for the day I say, ‘It’s finished’ and they can ask about the sexy stuff like covers and sales figures. Hell, I’m looking forward to the sexy stuff. But for now it’s drudge drudge drudge, and there doesn’t seem a lot that’s blog-worthy (or column-worthy) about this.

Something I can talk about with a certain amount of perspective is my old book (it’s only in the last four months that A Man Melting has felt like my old book, not my only book). I received a royalties statement from my publisher a few weeks ago that made interesting reading. The statements come every six months and this was my second one, covering sales from Jan-June this year (so sales from 6-12 months after A Man Melting was released, but covering the period I won the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize [March] and the overall Best First Book [May]).

The good news: I’ve earnt back my advance and last week got a small (3 figures) royalty payment.

The rub: This isn’t saying much when my advance was very small to begin with. To put it in perspective, I’ve earnt less (advance + royalty payment) from 12 months of sales of my 320 page, 18 story collection than I have from selling one 6,000 word short story to the Griffith Review in Australia. Of course, A Man Melting opened a lot of doors (it helped get me my column, it’s taken me to Australia three times and Auckland twice, it won some prize money, it helped get a Creative NZ grant to assist with writing THE NOVEL, etc etc) but in pure sales terms, it’s small biscuits. Which is fine. For some reason people don’t buy short story collections in the same numbers as they buy novels. Maybe it’s because after reading a collection of short stories it’s hard to read novels as they seem so flabby and gratuitous… Maybe that's just a reflection of where I'm at with THE NOVEL.

More good news: I’ve sold roughly as many copies of A Man Melting in Australia as I have in New Zealand. Not many first time NZ authors can say this.

The rub: Australian sales are classed as exports, so I get a smaller royalty percentage. (Also, NZ sales figures are relatively small, so it's not that hard to equal a small number). But I’m grateful to have had the support of Random House Australia when I’ve been over there the last two times and it seems there are some of my books in Aussie book stores, which is pretty cool.

I keep having to remind myself that I didn’t expect any Australian sales when the book came out in July 2010. I've mentioned on this blog already how I expected the whimper of noise around the book to die out back in November 2010 and that it was time to muscle up with the next book. But I’ve been lucky and A Man Melting kept popping up in various places.

I was looking forward to the post-publication world and it hasn’t disappointed. The scary thing is meeting raised expectations (mostly my own) for the next book. It seems wrong to think about the post-publication world for THE NOVEL right now and use it as an incentive to finish the damned thing, but I’ll take whatever works. And thinking about finding the right title and giving it the perfect cover (no long haired women in period costume!!) and talking about it as a finished piece of story telling… well, that does just enough for me to stop blogging and return to 1919…

Delivering the Goods

To counter the sense of drudgery and general mire my novel writing had entered, I started mixing up the music I listen to while I write.

You can get a sense of what's generally on heavy rotation as a write from the playlists I post here from time to time. As a rule: not a lot of heavy metal.

To counter the general seriousness and po-facedness of how I've been feeling, I went to the Wellington City Library and got out Best Of compilations for Judas Priest, KISS, Iron Maiden and Rush, as well as Iommi featuring Black Sabbath axeman Tony Iommi with various vocalists.

And you know what? It seems to be working. The music is bold and adolescent enough to loosen the tension I might have felt had I been persisting with Radiohead (I honestly haven't liked an album of there's since Amnesiac, but I can't delete anything off my hard drive because I think I might one day come around) and Bill Callahan and Wilco.

Playlist for a teenager trapped in a novelist's body

Run to the hills - Iron Maiden
Flame on - Iommi and Ian Astbury
Love gun - Kiss
Breaking the law - Judas Priest
Limelight - Rush
Heaven and Hell - Dio

What the Dickens?

Last year I wrote about those cloud-burst moments while writing a novel when everything becomes clear and you know which way to take the story (see here and here). It's worth noting that these two posts were in relation to ‘Novel B’, which I later abandoned (actually, I’ve decided to carve it up into a couple of short stories, the literary equivalent of selling a car for scrap).

Work on THE NOVEL, my current beast of burden, has been quite different from work on Novel B. For one, THE NOVEL is historical and required/requires a lot of research, whereas Novel B was contemporary and stuck pretty closely to what one might expect of the experience of a middle class NZ male in the 21st century.

The roadblocks I encountered with Novel B were related to narrative voice (the narrator was fine for a 8-10 page short story but he wasn’t built to carry a longer narrative, he enjoyed stopping and ruminating too often) and a gnawing concern that as I writer I was taking the path of least resistance.

The roadblocks with THE NOVEL have been more to do with a lack of knowledge of time and place or not quite knowing how to tell the story (rather than one first person narrator, there’s a mix of first and third person from varying perspectives).

Some weeks, when I’m in the first draft flow, I can churn through scenes quickly, happily littering square brackets throughout the text where period detail needs to be checked or an example found. For example, there’s a scene in the first historical section where there’s a vaudeville show, which includes two real-life singers performing a duet. When I first drafted the scene, I was happy enough to write something along the lines of: “And then they sung [song title] as a duet.” A few weeks later I spent a day finding the details to fill in all the square brackets in this scene.

At other times, I seem to get stuck on these small details and can’t push on with a scene without filling in the blanks. Whether or not I get stuck seems to be more to do with my mood/headspace than the details themselves.

Sometimes the things in the square brackets are more significant than a song title or a type of horse-drawn carriage. Last month I was working on a section which is told in the form of a diary, written by a sixteen year old girl. She’s led a cloistered life and most of her knowledge of the outside world has come from books. I knew that on top of describing the action of this part of the novel in daily chunks, she’d also be reading a book in the downtime and would be likely to remark on it in her diary. So as well as adding sense of realism to the diary and consistency in her character, I thought this 'ther book' could be a useful tool to a draw out some of the substrata of this diary section (and/or later sections).

At first, I thought this other book might be one that I make up, so that I could make it link to those parts of the diegesis I wanted. I got as far as coming up with a name, The Voyage of The Penobscot, and liberally sprinkled square brackets through the diary entries saying: "[something about reading Voyage of the Penobscot]".

Aside: I had a little internal battle over including a character reading another book, real or made-up, in my own novel, because I know it happens too often in fiction and can be symptomatic of what you might call exogenous writing (writing that draws it’s power from the outside associations it draws into it’s own frame) rather than endogenous (writing powered by its own motor, though it can certainly make connections to other works). In the end I felt satisfied that I’d been led down this path of having a character read a novel by the fact my character is a novel-reader, and this character trait is a direct result of the cloistered upbringing, which in turn comes about as the result of a decision of her father, which is the key decision in the novel and the motor that drives the plot).

One thing that happens all the time when writing, but especially when writing longer works, is that you find what you need from what’s going on in your real life at the time. Having written a few failed novels already, I know to be wary of incorporating too much fresh thinking into the structure or plot of a novel that you’re part-way through. But for the small details, it’s perfectly fine to mention a TV show you’ve been obsessing over in your time away from the desk (if you’re writing a contemporary story). A novel is a patchwork of real-time thoughts, ideas and associations thrown over the pre-erected framework of your story. Sometimes you need to bend and adjust the framework so it supports the patchwork you’re creating, and that’s fine so long as it’s being driven by the characters you’ve created and the decisions they’re making, rather than your fervent desire to write something about ponaturi (sea fairies).

So I've been listening to Nicholas Nickleby on my iPod these past few weeks and noticing how certain elements mirror, albeit imperfectly, elements in the diarist’s life. And I thought: 'Could she be reading Dickens’ novel rather than The Voyage of the Penobscot?' In many ways her reading her own life into Nicholas Nickleby would mirror my own reading/listening experience, looking for points of similarity and difference with the novel I'm writing.

There are pros and cons both for using q real book and q made-up one. But right now I feel like it’s better to have the book she reads imperfectly reflecting her life than risk it being too perfect for the novel (even if she doesn’t pick up on the true significance of everything at the time).

Serendipity, controlled imperfection, drudgery: three things that should be on your shopping list if you plan on baking a novel.

Away From The Desk (and I feel fine)

2011-09-24T18:21:00.003+12:00

Soundtrack: Springtime in ~~Vienna~~ Wellington

I'm struggling with THE NOVEL at the moment. More to the point, I'm struggling with my attention span. To counter this I've been trying to get out of the house more so it doesn't feel like I'm permanently in front of a screen (over winter, I pretty much was).

Last Friday I went with my brother to the Karori Sanctuary to bush walk and take photos of birds.

Photographic Evidence:

Kaka eating some kind of nut

Hihi (stitchbird) - male

Korimako (bellbird)

Last weekend M. and I went for a walk with friends from the Brooklyn Windmill to Red Rocks. It took four and half hours or so and was pretty awesome.

The South Coast from the Radome Track

Makara Wind Farm, Cook Strait and the South Island

Our lunch spot

View of the South Coast from above Red Rocks

In terms of wildlife, we saw goats, seals and ostrich (though these weren't exactly wild...

Ostrich doing the Boredom Dance

Last night my mum was down from Palmy so we went out for dinner and checked out the RWC2011 Fan Zone on the waterfront (Aussie was playing USA in the Caketin at the time). It was also the first night, I think, of the festival of lights. Different designs were projected on buildings like the boat shed, St Johns and the Stock Exchange Building.

Jazzy St Johns

Burlesque Stock Exchange

Stained Glass Stock Exchange

Ivy League Stock Exchange

I've also been to the Otari-Wilton's Bush twice in two weeks. The first time was an unplanned stop and I didn't have my camera, so of course I saw two karearea (NZ falcon) which I've yet to photograph, and a keruru (I didn't spot any of them in the Karori sanctuary on my recent visit, though I've seen plenty before).

Today I had my camera, so of course all I saw were tui and grey warblers (too quick to photograph) and robins (too dark to photograph). Thems the breaks.

Tui at Otari-Wilton's Bush

True Stories Told Live coming to Wellington, 6 October

2011-09-22T17:56:00.002+12:00

How's this for a line up:

Elizabeth Knox - winner of Deutz Medal for Fiction at Montana Book Awards, American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults (twice), Arts Foundation Laureate and ONZM

Kate De Goldi - winner of the 2011 Corine International Book Prize Young Readers Award and a Montana Book award in 2009, and another Arts Foundation Laureate

Neil Cross - lead scriptwriter for BBC TV show'Spook' and the creator of 'Luther', as well as the writer of several best-selling crime novels and a memoir

Duncan Sarkies - winner of a number of playwriting awards, co-writer of the film 'Scarfies' and author of 'Two Little Boys' which is being (has been?) made into a movie (also wrote episodes for Flight of the Conchords)

Jenny Pattrick - author of two of New Zealand's best selling novels of all time

Chris Bourke - winner of everything he could (best book, best non-fiction, reader's choice) at this year's NZ Post Book Awards.

And if that embarrassment of riches isn't enough, it seems the NZ Book Council have managed to wrangle one more big name for their 'True Stories Told Live' event in Wellington on 6 October... a certain Craig Cliff.

Okay, so maybe I'm not as decorated or famous as the others...

Okay, not nearly as decorated or famous, which is partly why I'm so chuffed to be taking part.

The only problem is the 10 minutes I have to fill 'unscripted'... and telling the truth!

I have my annual mole check up that morning, so hopefully it's good news or else it'll be an uncomfortable ten minutes for everyone.

The details:

Where: St Andrew’s on The Terrace, 30 The Terrace, Wellington.
When: OCTOBER 6, 6.00pm.
Tickets: $20.00 or $15.00 for NZBC members, on the door or online at www.bookcouncil.org.nz.

Top Ten New Yorker Fiction Podcasts So Far

2011-09-19T21:22:00.001+12:00

A preamble of lists

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast has been going since December 2006. There have been 52 so far, with a new one appearing online every month. Each podcast follows six clearly defined stages:

1. Theme tune [bum-bum-bu-bum, bum-bum-bu-bum, an earworm that has become a Pavlovian trigger for mental salivation].

2. Intro from The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, stating the name of the story from the New Yorker’s archives, the author of the story, the New Yorker contributor who has selected the story and a snippet of the contributor reading it.

3. Brief discussion between Deborah Treisman and the contributor about the story (Why did they select it? Where did they first come across this writer? etc).

4. Contributor (or, in a few cases, someone else) reads the story.

5. Longer discussion between Deborah Treisman and the contributor about the story, often covering any connections with the contributor’s own work.

6. Credits and another dose of bum-bum-bu-bum.

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The top three reasons why I have compiled a list of the top ten New Yorker Fiction podcasts so far:

1. To promote the podcasts in general – they’re great, especially if you like to get out of a short story, kick the tires and look under the hood.

2. To promote the best podcasts in particular – if you're only willing to risk downloading one episode, make it one of the ten below and it should be worth your while.

3. To show, in a roundabout way, my tastes in short fiction at this point in time (I’ve listened to all the podcasts in the last 6 months or so) which might then illuminate other things I write about books and short fiction on this blog (or, heaven forbid, my own fiction).

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I didn’t come up with any criteria before ranking the podcasts, but if I did, these are the four main criteria I might’ve used:

1. Quality of the story

2. Quality of the discussion (a close second, especially when it's a story I've read before)

3. X-factor factor (usually relates to hearing one writer I like/admire talking about another writer I like/admire, or the fact the podcasts brings to my attention a writer I wasn’t aware of or hadn’t got around to reading yet)

4. Quality of the reading (not all writers are born to read aloud).

Bonus criteria: No writer can have more than one story in the top ten. Just coz.

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The Top Ten New Yorker Fiction Podcasts So Far (according to yours truly)

1. Paul Theroux reads Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Gospel According to Mark” (listen here)

A student stays with his uneducated cousins on the pampas. They have long since lapsed into illiteracy. When he starts reading to them from the family Bible, he is elevated to dangerous heights in their eyes...

I tried reading Labyrinths while I was an undergrad, but felt more muddled than inspired by stories like "Library of Babel". Perhaps it's time to return to Borges, because I found "The Gospel According to Mark" simple, sharp and memorable.

2. Julian Barnes reads Frank O’Connor’s “The Man of the World” (listen here)

A young boy who has trouble getting beyond the surface appearance of things, spends the night at a friend's place to catch a glimpse of the young couple next door...

I've read several of O'Connor's stories (he pops up a lot in anthologies with titles like 'Great Short Stories From Around the World'), but hadn't come across this story before. I wonder why, since it is perfect in almost every way.

3. Donald Antrim reads Donald Barthelme’s short story “I Bought a Little City” (listen here)

The narrator buys Galveston, Texas and sets about making some changes...

Classic Barthelme. Outlandish conceit with stylistic implications. No word seems out of place. A close second is Barthelme's "Concerning the Bodyguard", read by Salman Rushdie, which is told almost entirely in questions. Rushdie's reason for chosing the story is probably the best response in all the 52 podcasts (he's spent his far share of time with bodyguards), but it's Antrim's voice and the opening line, "So I bought a little city," that shades it.

4. Richard Ford reads John Cheever’s short story “Reunion” (listen here)

A son meets his father for lunch in Grand Central Station. In him, he sees "my future and my doom"...

I'm a sucker for father-son stories. This one is so concise, so patterned, so understated, so heartbreaking. It's one of the podcasts I have listened to multiple times and quote sometimes in bars to the bemused faces of everyone else ("Two Bibson Geefeaters").

Cheever’s “The Swimmer", read by Anne Enright, is another great story and podcast. Very different from "Reunion", much more to chew on, more metaphysical, but "Reunion" is a five minute wonder and gets my vote.

5. Cynthia Ozick reads Steven Millhauser’s “In the Reign of Harad IV” (listen here)

The King's miniature maker's pursuit of excellence takes him beyond the what the eye can see...

This is an interesting podcast. Ozick's reading is stitled and can be hard to get into, but her poetic advice to readers more than makes up for this. Millhauser's story is itself a perfect miniature of an antique, magical world. A kind of "The Emperor's New Clothes" from the tailor's perspective, except there's no shortage of skeptics here.

6. Joshua Ferris reads George Saunders’s “Adams” (listen here)

The narrator finds his neighbour, Adams, looking in the direction of his kid's room in his underwear...

I love me some Saunders. "Adams" isn't my all-time favourite of his stories, but it's good enough to make it onto this list. In fact, it works better aloud than on the page (all the talk about "wonking" Adams). Much credit to Josh Ferris' reading. Ferris' "The Dinner Party", read by Monica Ali, sadly suffered the reverse fate: a story I loved when I first read it in 2008, but it felt less fresh when hearing it on the podcast. Thems the breaks.

7. Tobias Wolff reads Stephanie Vaughn’s short story “Dog Heaven” (listen here)

Reflections on life growing up as a kid on military bases, featuring a talking dog...

This podcast brought Stephanie Vaughn to my attention. Such a rich, intricate story of childhood. As Wolff comments: it's a kind of childhood that I haven't read about before.

8. Tobias Wolff reads Denis Johnson’s “Emergency” (listen here)

The narrator and a hopsital orderly get mashed on mystery pills; meanwhile a man walks into the emergency ward staffed with a knife sticking out of his eye...

Wolff couldn't choose between Vaughn's story and Johnson's, so he twisted Deborah Treisman's arm and got to do two podcasts. Well, I don't blame anyone because I have trouble choosing which story/podcast I prefer. Unlike "Dog Heaven", I'd read "Emergency" before, first as a set reading in an undergrad writing workshop, then as part of Jesus' Son. It's a great story and stands up well in this new environment.

9. Sam Lipsyte reads Thomas McGuane’s “Cowboy” (listen here)

A ranch hand with a shady past finds a steady job where they ask no questions...

I read this as part of the anthology Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work, which I reviewed for The Listener earlier this year. At the time, I'd started working my way through the podcasts, but hadn't made it to Lipsyte's reading. Hearing it again soon helped highlight the great tenderness at the story's heart and cemented its place in my top ten.

10. Louise Erdrich reads Lorrie Moore’s short story “Dance in America” (listen here)

A dance teacher stationed in the midwest goes to dinner with an old friend and his new family...

What am I thinking? This story needs to be higher. This is a story I'd tell people to read if they needed to be won over by the short story form. Same goes for the podcast. But what stories can it leapfrog? Ask me again in a couple of months and this might be number one... For now, it's number ten and only just edges out the honorable mentions: Jennifer Egan reads Lore Segal’s “The Reverse Bug” and Thomas McGuane reads James Salter’s “Last Night.”

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So, that's my top ten. What's yours?

Going West / Reading / Killing Moon / Columnist Godfather

2011-09-13T20:37:00.000+12:00

Going West

The view from my bed & breakfast in Titirangi

I was in Titirangi, West Auckland, on Saturday and Sunday for Going West Books and Writers Festival. It was a real contrast to Melbourne the previous weekend, with a lot of aspects being in Going West’s favour (see the view above).

I didn’t connect with any Canadian musicians this time, but I did meet a student who has recently moved to NZ from Nigeria who told me he’d heard of me before he came here (the Commonwealth Prize is a big deal over there, with Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche being a more recent overall winner) and even read a review of A Man Melting in a Nigerian newspaper. I’m not sure if this will ever be verified (the internet is silent in this instance), and it’s not likely anyone in Nigeria would by a copy… My Nigerian friend in Titirangi told me that he waited until he moved here, then borrowed a copy from his local library. Oh well.

My session, ‘Early Days Yet’, with Tanya Moir, author of the historical novel La Rochelle’s Road, went well. It was ably chaired by novelist Tina Shaw, who had clearly read and engaged with both books. Interestingly for me, Tina’s questions focussed on some stories I haven’t been asked to discuss often (if at all): ‘Oh! So Careless’, ‘Parisian Blue’ and ‘Fat Camp’. I had intended to read a section from ‘Oh! So Careless’ (which is one of the few stories I’ve yet to read from in public) but we kinda covered that passage in conversation, so I hastily chose a section toward the end of ‘Facing Galapagos’, which got a few laughs (hoorah!)

Recent Reading

I’m struggling to find the time to note down my reactions to the books I’ve been reading. I’m also conscious that a hastily dashed off and poorly thought through ‘response’ can and will be misinterpreted as a review by many. But here goes, hyper-speed styles:

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart – Similarities with Visit From the Goon Squad’s futuristic sections and Shteyngart’s previous novel, Absurdistan, which I really liked, but SSTLS isn’t as good as either of these. It never feels like much is at stake (despite the fact the US economy is imploding and martial law is breaking out). And I’ve never read a book where characters sweat so much (expect, perhaps, Absurdistan). Verdict: interesting but not engaging.

Classic Crimes of Passion (audiobook) – a short story anthology featuring Guy de Maupassant, Wilkie Collins, Louisa May Alcott and others. A strange wee collection. The approach to short fiction seems quite dated in these stories. One might call it pre-Chekovian. I think that was part of the charm… though I was glad to move on to something else when it finished.

Traitor by Stephen Daisley – A difficult novel to pin down because it floats through time in the fashion of memory. Another taciturn Kiwi male looking back, in the mould of The Hut Builder, but more poignant. Strangely felt more compelling during the NZ sections than those set in Turkey, despite my almost-meltdown when I visited the peninsula a couple of years ago.

New Yorker Fiction Podcasts – 52 stories in all (I think). Will be the subject of a separate post/arbitrary top 10 list.

Lots of books about NZ’s subantarctic islands (research for THE NOVEL). Seemed fitting to read during our cold snap. Might have to fill bathtub with ice during the summer months to finish the subantarctic section of my book.

Erewhon by Samuel Butler – I’ve tried starting this twice, but still haven’t made it past page 50. Back on the book shelf now.

The Call of the Wild by Jack London – I’m reading this on my iPad. First time reading an eBook in this way. Didn’t buy an iPad to be an e-reader and glad I didn’t coz the backlit screen can get a bit taxing. But it’s useful to have on hand for small bursts of reading. As for the book: the word ‘silly’ springs to mind. I prefer London’s The Sea Wolf, which I read earlier this year. Same themes, but with a human main character instead of a dog.

I’ve just started listening to Nicholas Nickleby on my iPod. The only other book by Dickens I have read is Great Expectations, which sort of put me off reading any more. But I’m loving Nickleby. Although I do tend to love the first 60 pages of older books – the hasty biographical sketches of the main character’s forebears, the dextrous narrator who can address the reader directly… but often find my enthusiasm wanes as the book proceeds, e.g. The Brothers Karamazov. Hopefully Dickens can keep it up for the next 28 hours of book-time.

Earworm of the month, or Getting ahead of myself

I’ve been listening to Pavement’s cover of Echo and the Bunnymen’s ‘Killing Moon’ (a.k.a. that song from Donnie Darko) a lot these past few weeks. What a fantastic five minutes and change.

I have been wilfully mis-singing the line, “So take him to the end of his temper” (around 3:40) as “So take him to the end of this tableau” because it fits better with THE NOVEL, which has a way of bringing things into its orbit and bending them to its will.

Mark this down as a song for the book’s playlist once it’s finished and ready to enter the world.

Invitation to a beheading

If my brief Going West summary above isn’t enough, you’ll be pleased to know I compare and contrast Melbourne and Going West festivals in whatever detail 500 words can afford in next fortnight’s column in the Dominion Post.

Which reminds me: one of the best sessions I attended at Going West featured columnists Deborah Cone-Hill and Jane Bowron, chaired by fellow columnist Steve Braunias. It was fascinating to watch three seasoned practitioners of THE COLUMN (the regular deadline means it can be just as imposing and obstreperous as THE NOVEL and even more interminable) discuss the craft.

At the cocktail party that evening, held to celebrate the announcement of a new writers residency in Maurice Shadboldt’s old house Titirangi, I had a delicious Turkish Delight cocktail and a brief chat with Mr Braunias (who was stubbornly drinking beer). He clearly didn’t recall our one minute conversation at the Auckland Writers Festival, but seemed interested in the fact I also wrote a column. In fact, the next day he told me via Twitter he’d been reading this very blog (he liked the stuff about birds, so that makes two of us!) and asked for a link to my columns.

One hesitates at such moments. Steve Braunias is New Zealand’s most famous columnist but he’s also famously acerbic. Giving him a link to my columns could end in so many terrible ways: sudden silence and a claim to not remember me the next time our paths cross; featuring in one of his own columns as a no-talent upstart (‘The Secret Diary of Cliff Craig’… oh, how it stings); or a joke at my expense he shares with his literary chums that somehow finds its way back to my ears…

But I sent the link (luckily only a handful of my columns appear on Stuff.co.nz, and not all of them are filed in the same place).

It’s not like the guy can’t Google.

My Melbourne Writers Festival 2011

2011-09-06T21:12:00.000+12:00

I flew to Melbourne on Friday afternoon, arriving in time to meet up for dinner with Eleanor Catton (with whom I was to appear in a session on Sunday), Ellie’s sister, and NZ writer Julian Novitz who’s been living in Melbourne for the last five or so years.

We went to a fantastic dumpling restaurant in China Town. I felt a bit like I was in a Sarah Laing comic, they were some good dumplings… My brother’s going to China in a few weeks and now I have another reason to be jealous.

Ann Patchett's session in BMW Edge

My two sessions at the festival were not until Sunday morning, so I had Saturday all to myself. I went along to ‘in conversation’ sessions with Ann Patchett (Bel Canto, State of Wonder) and Maile Meloy (Both ways is the only way I want it). Both were great, though I was particularly interested in Meloy’s comments about writing a novel after starting out with short stories, and her latest book, The Apothecary, which is for younger readers but based on the reading she gave it sounds as great as the rest of her quote-unquote adult work.

In the afternoon I explored downtown Melbourne and bought an iPad2 from JB HiFi (thanks to Australia’s Tax Refund for Traveller’s scheme it was a lot cheaper than in NZ, and duty-free prices are just a joke), before catching a session on surfing in fiction with Malcolm Knox, Gretchen Shirm and Favel Parrett.

At 10am on Sunday I appeared along with David Morley in the festival’s final (free) ‘Morning Read’ session. We each had 8 minutes each and I led off with most of ‘A Man Melting’ (that is, the title story of my book, rather than most of my 320 page book… I’m not the Micro Machines man!). This proved a good segue to David Morley’s poetry ("[Like the character in ‘A Man Melting’] drinking and poetry are the only things that keep me alive"). One of the poem’s he read was ‘Marriage Vows of a Rom to a Gadji’ which I read with interest when it was published in the Guardian in April along with a heap of other vows, not because I cared about Kate and Wills’ nuptials, but it falls on my head to write the vows for our wedding in November as the writer-in-~~residence-~~relationship.

Morley was followed by Hannah Jane Walker, who recited a poem from her show, The Oh F**k Moment. Next up was Chinese-Australian poet, novelist and translator Ouyang Yu, who read a number of poems. Whether by design or chance, the poetry was bookended by another prose writer, Felix J Palma, who launched into a detailed explanation of his novel, The Map of Time in his native Spanish. He then gave his eight-to-ten minute reading... in Spanish. It was lovely to hear him read and my traveller’s espanol was truly tested (I got that there was time travel between the year two thousand ten and Victorian England, and the main character’s name was Shackleton). Then Palma’s translator stepped to the podium and explained the novel and repeated the reading in English – which got a lot of laughs this time, so clearly I wasn’t the only one missing the nuances the first time around.

So in all, a lovely session. My only problem was it ran well over time, and I had another session starting at 11.30 and needed to meet the chair for the first time, get mic'ed up and all that. But it all worked out fine and there was no need for el tiempo de viaje.

This next session was ‘New NZ Fiction’ featuring me and Ellie Catton, chaired by Sue Green. We each gave readings of about 5 mins: Ellie from one of the Saxaphone Teacher’s speeches early on in The Rehearsal; me Part 3 (on rejections) from my love letter to Wikipedia, ‘Orbital Resonance’.

Ellie Catton, Sue Green and moi at 'New NZ Fiction'
(taken by Antonia, my assigned Random House Australia publicist... I think the dreamy, spectral look is in this Spring)

We were then asked to tackle the question of what it means to be an NZ writer (and who qualifies as an NZ writer)... which is quite a difficult topic for anyone to grapple with, let alone two twenty-something writers with one published book each to their name. One inescapable fact was that, despite the quality of books being published in NZ (something we both had to stick up for!), it’s hard to find many NZ books in Australian book stores, let alone countries further afield. (Heck, it's hard to find my book in New Zealand!). My view (again, I’m not the best qualified person to comment on this), is that it boils down to distribution models as much as it does market appetite: you can't buy what you don't know about or can't get a hold of.

(After the session I met up with the guy who edits the NZ Society of Author’s magazine and I might be writing something longer and more considered about the opportunity new distribution models present NZ (and other small market) writers to break-out rather than waiting for a Booker nomination or a feature film based on one of your books.)

Anyway, it was an interesting discussion, but afterwards I wished we had had more of a chance to talk about our own work. Luckily, I got to talk to Ellie quite a bit outside of the session: it seems we’re both writing novels that are set in the past but aren’t entirely comfortable with them being called historical novels because of the connotations this carries. (Basically, I’m trying to write something that isn’t a romance in period costume; while the action in Ellie’s novel sounds like it has a lot to do with, of all things, astrology...).

In the afternoon Julian Novitz and I went to two panel discussions: Beyond White Guilt with Sarah Maddison and Tony Birch, and Things They See Coming (about dystopian fiction) with Steve Amsterdam, Meg Mundell and Max Barry. The latter reminded me of this post NZ reviewer Nicholas Reid made on his blog a few weeks back on utopian/dystopian fiction and might provide a good addendum to anyone else who attended the session.

After which it was time for happy hour in the green room, followed by the wrap party for festival volunteers (and thirsty writers who just don't know when to call it a day). At the party I got talking to a Canadian writer called Dave Bidini. Gradually I learnt that he was also a musician and was, in fact, a founding member of the band The Rheostatics (I have their album ‘Whale Music’, which has been voted in the top five Candadian Albums of All Time; but mostly knew of them as the band that opened for The Tragically Hip on their live album Live Between Us).

I told Dave about my Tragically Hip fanaticism (including my framed set list from a Paradiso gig in Amsterdam in 2008) and he offered to put me in touch with the Hip’s front man Gord Downie, who’s a voracious reader, so I could send him a copy of my book.

Pause for effect.

Now, I was several free drinks into the evening and I know I have a tendency to talk too much about pet topics in this state (later that evening I described my kiwi tracking expedition, complete with full-volume kiwi calls) and the morning after I was like, there’s no way Dave’s gonna follow through and hook me up with Gord f’n Downie. Not because Mr Bidini didn’t seem like a nice, genuine guy (we also talked about hockey and he convinced me that fighting in hockey is unnecessary and should be eliminated from the sport’s culture like drink driving… something I had previously thought was one of the best things about the sport [the fighting, not the drink driving])...

But today I received an email from Mr Bidini:

C: Gord's reply below, Holmes.
He will be sending u an email.
Don't shit yr pants.

And then a bit later -- to the sound of Handel’s Messiah and in a flood of heavenly light -- an email from Mr Downie himself arrived in my inbox. I will be sending him a copy of A Man Melting tomorrow! This is a big deal because, among other things, I listened to over 1,000 Hip songs during 2008, when I wrote most of the book and there are at least two song titles (‘So hard done by’ and ‘Yawning or snarling’) embedded in the text.

Gord also said:

‘We - the hip - are about to reconvene for a record we've half-finished. It's gonna be a good one, I think. Perhaps, I can reciprocate by sending you an advanced copy in the new year?’

I managed to keep from shitting my pants, but my head totally asploded!

So yeah, that was my Melbourne Writers Festival. My third ever fest as a participant (after Auckland and Sydney in May). One should never forget about the readers/audience members, as that the reason any of it happens, but making connections with other writers and booky-peops is surprisingly fun...

I’m off to Going West Festival in Titirangi on Saturday. It promises to be a different, more intimate festival experience. M’s coming with me this time, we’re being put up in a lovely bed and breakfast and have a rental car for the weekend.

But first it’s time to bash out a few thousand more words on THE NOVEL…

Farewell Peka / Names #2 / Joe Cocker

2011-08-29T21:41:00.001+12:00

Farewell Peka

I still can't bring myself to call him that ridiculous name starting with H.F. The penguin I caught up with on Pekapeka Beach on June 22, has set sail this evening for the sub-Antarctic on board the Tangaroa. I took this photo of the vessel leaving Shelley Bay from my deck just after 6pm this evening.

In the foreground is the new ASB Sports Centre in Kilbirnie. I was one of the 15,000 people who visited on its open day on Saturday. What a fantastic facility and a great community asset! Lose a penguin, gain a stadium... Yeah, we'll be fine.

Naming Characters #2

On the subject of crap names and fantastic names, here's another article from Papers Past

ODD NAMES [Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XLII, 13 September 1907, Page 1]

We publish hereunder a [slightly slimmed down -- CC] selection of Odd Names. All the names are genuine, and not invented for the purpose of publication. The majority of them are taken from the records which are to be found at Doctors' Commons, Somerset House, the Probate Court, etc. England.

Temperance Dry.
Thomas Jolly Death.
Friendly Churches.
Dover Beetles.
Jonas Whalebelly.
Young Fry.
Frederick Smallbones.
Leicester Midland Railway Cope.
John Richard Pine Coffin.
Sabbath Church.
Robert Rainy Best Best.
Pickup Pickup.
Nelson Monument.
Winter Frost.
Butter Sugar.
Morning Dew.
Wilde Field Flowers.
John the Baptist Arrighi.
Christmas Day Jones.
Daft Coggins.
River Jordan.
Urbane Cheese.
Carolina Gotobed.
Petronella Frederika Mess.
Brown Fox.
Time o' Day.
Lesser Lesser.
Bride Best
Parsonage Pope.
Urbane Cook.
Christmas Day.
Honour Bright.
Jolly Death.
Henry Hot Coddlings.
Queen Victoria Burr.
Peternal Hole.
Randalina Seedlum.
Moderina Belmontina Kimberina Robertson.
Ivynest Cowmeadows.
Choice Tippling.
Ambulance Bunn.
Only Fanny Thomas Jones.
Maher-shalal-hash-bas Sturgeon.
Lily Margarine Sturgeon.
Agathos Everley Alexander Eager.
Mabel Helmingham Ethel Huntingtower Beatrice Blazonberrie, Evangeline Vise-de-lon de Oreliana, Plantagenet Plantagenet Todemag Saxon Tollemache Tollemache.
William Rains Kneebone.
Emma Sheepwash.
B. L. C. Bubb (Beelzebub)
J. L. Bird (Jail-bird)
Through Great Tribulation We Enter Into the Kingdom of Heaven Slappe.
Hurry Riches.
Diehappy Harper.
Merelthalfcar Lamb.
Kerenhappuch Death.
Jacob Choke Lambshead.
Styleman Percy Bell le Strange Herring.
Hephyibar Hibberdine.
Philbrick Frank Colechin Elliott.
Naaman Napper.
Waples Canwarden.
Tamar Anna Manship-Ewart.
John Hadnot Kiss.
Rose Shamrock Anthistle.
Baron de Roths Child.
Ann Bertha Cecilia Diana Emily Fanny Gertrude Hypatia Inez Jane Kate Louisa Maud Nora Teresa Ulysis Venus Winifred Xenophon Yetty Zeus Pepper.

Peka Post Script

I felt conflicted about going up to Pekapeka in June for a number of reasons, a big one being that it was a 'writing day'. In the last two months, however, I've discovered that THE NOVEL will have a portion set on one of New Zealand's sub-Antarctic Islands. Probably not Campbell Island, which is where Peka will be dropped off (or nearby), but close enough. So there'll be penguins in THE NOVEL (probably not emperors, that risk 'The Shangai Knights effect' -- or whatever the animal equivalent is?), meaning it was totally research.

Phew!

Palmy's Pushkin

I have nearly finished listening to all of the New Yorker Fiction Podcasts. Get excited because I'm going to do a meaningless, subject-to-personal-taste top ten stories from these podcasts when I've finished (and probably once I'm back from Melbourne).

Anyway, today on the way home from work I listened to 'My Russian Education' by Vladimir Nabokov, read by Orhan Pamuk. In the story (which is actually from Nabokov's memoir... is there such a thing as a non-fiction short story? I reckon) Nabokov mentions his father's passions: butterflies, chess problems and quoting Pushkin -- three passions Vladimir Vladimirovic inherited.

As I walked down Houghton Bay Road I thought about what passions I might have inherited from my father. He wasn't a prominent politician like Nabokov's father (nor did he get assassinated), he was a polytech lecturer in New Zealand's sixth or seventh biggest city (depending on when we're talking about and who you ask). He didn't quote Pushkin, or any poetry, but he did 'quote' Joe Cocker (and Brian Wilson and Lennon/McCartney and Captain Beefheart...).

He took me (and my mum and his mum) along to see Joe Cocker at the Rainbow Stadium. My first ever concert.

In honour of the fifth week of disruption at my flat as the landlords put in a new bathroom, and my musical inheritance, here's Joe Cocker 'quoting' The Beatles...

A Close Reading

I went to the Wellington launch of Ian Wedde's new novel, The Catastrophe, at Meow on Friday. The next day, my column appeared in the Dom Post about Wedde's poetry, specifically 'CO Products Ltd'. You can now read my column online here, but you'll just have to ferret out a copy of Good Business to read Wedde's poem (although you can read Metalworx Engineering in Best NZ Poems 2009).

The book launch on Friday was immediately followed by a concert featuring Lawnmaster, the last ever gig by The Tenderisers (featuring poet John Newton and music reviewer Simon Sweetman), and The Close Readers (lead by writer Damien Wilkins) who claimed to have only had two rehearsals but sounded pretty tight. I'm not sure if I've ever been to as literary a gig (or as musical a book launch).

Naming Characters / Breaking News/ Run TMC / Going West

2011-08-23T21:31:00.002+12:00

Naming Characters (the first instalment of many)

I’ve been on the hunt recently for names for secondary characters as THE NOVEL moves into a new frontier. Naming characters in semi-realistic fiction is tricky because you can’t be too outlandish or too overtly symbolic, as this diminishes the sense of (semi-)reality you’re labouring to create.

In the course of other fact-sourcing and fact-checking adventures, I came across this article on Papers Past:

ODD NAMES Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 70, 24 March 1937, Page 18

Even the name "Appendicitis," which Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, of Oklahoma, have bestowed on a newly-arrived daughter, is no more eccentric than some to be found among English gipsies [sic] seventy years ago, says the "Manchester Guardian." Talking to a gipsy woman on Stanmore Common in 1864, Mrs. Brightwen, the naturalist, learned that her name was Trinity Smith and that her family of daughters included Levise, Centina, Cinnaminti, Cinderella, Sibernia, and Leviathan. Asked why the youngest child had been given so weighty a name, she was informed, "Well, ye see, it were the name of the big ship (the Great Eastern was at first named Leviathan), and we thought it such a pretty name that we'd give it to the next boy we got: happened it come a girl, but we thought it didn't matter much, so gave it to her."

Breaking news #1

Victoria University of Wellington study reveals psychopaths prefer commerce degrees.

Hmm. I wonder how VUW feel about its psychology department taking a dump on the university’s cash-cow?

Excuse me while I control+F and delete all occurrences of “Bachelor of Commerce and Administration from Victoria University of Wellington” from my CV…

Breaking news #2

Apparently lots of people don’t know about ctrl+f . I struggle to believe the figure is as high as 90%, and I can say for sure that kids in NZ schools are being taught this skill and a bazillion other techie things in the inquiry-based curriculum... but still. Everyone should know ctrl+f! Otherwise you might as well just write everything by hand and read, like, paper!

Paid Work

The full text of my review of the anthology Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories About Work, edited by Richard Ford is now online at The Listener’s website.

Dream Teams

Geeky-sports moment: If I could choose any two NBA teams from the past to control in a video game they would be:

1. 1990-91 Golden State Warriors, aka Run TMC (Run Tim (Hardaway) Mitch (Richmond) and Chris (Mullin). It’s telling the entire team is summarised by a 3-man moniker, because Tim, Mitch and Chris basically were the Golden State Warrior’s offense for three seasons (they accounted for 70+ points a game, still a record for three team mates) and, like all GSW teams, they played no defense. Mitch Richmond is my favourite NBA player of all-time and I recently brought a vintage 90-91 Richmond #23 jersey to hang on my wall (to go with my Richmond #2 Kings jersey from circa 1995).

This adorns my bedroom wall.

2. 2001-02 Sacramento Kings. I actually had a copy of NBA Live 2002 and played a full season with this squad, but 10 years hindsight and the advances in graphics and gameplay mean this team is still a tantalising proposition. And the chance to right the wrongs of history and trounce the 01-02 Lakers? Priceless. From this approximate era, I have Chris Webber and Peja Stojakovic jerseys.

My office, featuring Peja 'Antique pistol for a head' Stojakovic

So, it was with much gasping and desk-slapping that I read about NBA 2K12, which is due for release later this year. It includes 30 classic teams from the past (lots of Celtics and Lakers…) but also, if you preorder, you will get codes to unlock two additional teams: the 1990-91 Warriors and the 2001-02 Kings.

Run TMC baby!

Meta Moment

Anyone ever noticed how I tend to rush up hodge-podge posts shortly after bearing my soul as a writer in order to push said soul-bearing further down the front page? Me neither.

Breaking news #3

Boys don’t read as much as girls.

Okay, that’s not so breaking (except heart-breaking, perhaps?). Actually, I found the article above
from Robert Lipsyte (Sam’s father!) interesting.

Inspired by my outreach events in Sydney, my Next Year’s Resolution (patent pending) is to get out to more schools and juvies and prisons and talk to young people, especially male, and show them that books aren’t all written by old people (or women).

First order of business, donate some copies of A Man Melting and Jesus' Son to Mt Crawford’s library!

Wicky Wicky Wild Wild West
The programme for Going West Books and Writers Festival 2011 is now online. I’m appearing in the session ‘Early Days Yet’ with Tanya Moir, author of La Rochelle’s Road (you can read an extract of it here) on the morning of Sunday 11 September.

Not long to go now...

This Fluid Thrill (a.k.a. the self-titled post)

2011-08-22T21:09:00.000+12:00

This will all make sense in time,
via EVRD

From the moment I committed myself to building a literary CV from the ground up* sometime in early 2007 life has been one long (at times glorious) waiting game. I would send off a few poems or a short story and wait for a yay or a nay from the publication. As the yays started to accumulate, I was lucky enough to have a few requests come out of the blue: Do you have a story for me? Can we print this story in our anthology? My consistent response: yay!

In this post-A Man Melting world, I’m still submitting poems and stories (most recently I have 6 poetic things in Pasture no.1 and a short story forthcoming in JAAM). But I’ve also had a lot of OOTB** requests: Do you wanna write a column for us? Do you wanna come and speak to my creative writing students? Do you wanna come to our writers festival? Do you wanna review a book for us? And then there are the people reviewing/talking about me, which are always kind of OOTB (you hope to get reviews, but aren’t sure which places they’ll show up in; you also have no idea what they’ll say). And then there’s the prize aspect. I’ve only been short-listed for one prize***(and just so happened to win), but that was Yaysville to the max (and also largely OOTB).

When taking stock of all the acceptances and OOTB bonuses, it seems like a steady stream of good news has been rolling in. But day-to-day, there’s a lot of silence: stagnant inboxes, fruitless self-googles (sounds like the worst confectionary ever), voicemail messages that turn out to be wrong numbers.

Which is fine. What can one expect? But the thrill of acceptance is so great, as is the thought that someone you’ve never met might think enough of you to track you down and send you an OOTB email, that I have become a good news junkie.

On Friday morning I was blessed with a freshet of new emails in my inbox from interesting-looking senders. One of these emails contained an invite to a writers festival early next year (I’ll be a bit cagey about where because sometimes they don’t like these things being announced until details are finalised). It was a true W00T moment. An OOTB fix.

Once I had sent back my speedy acceptance, however, it was difficult to return to THE NOVEL, which right now feels like THE SLOG (or THE LOG or THE SOG or THE SLUG). One set of good news got me thinking about the unthinkables: the submitted poems and short stories for which replies had not been received, the other festivals that might OOTB me…

There’s only so much picturing Grizz Wylie (‘Get your head in the game, you muppet’) you can do before you push back from the keyboard and watch a mindless movie (in this case, MacGruber, ugh).

'Get your head in the game' (Not a scene from MacGruber)

Good news is bad news for productivity. I’m sure long term all of these OOTB gems will help sustain whatever faith I have in myself and whatever drive I have as a writer and distortionist, but short term I think I’m better off feeling like an underdog when I sit down to write.

Worked example:

I had a chip on my shoulder in late 2006 when I sat down to write a story about my father’s two wedding rings. I’d been through the IIML’s MA blender (the delirium of the first few months slowly dying down to allow small doses of reality, culminating in 2 out of 3 lukewarm examiner’s reports [with a bonus lukewarm response added for good measure]) and I wanted to prove I could write a straight-laced, hit 'em where it hurts, literary short story like some of my workshop colleagues.

That story turned out to be (or turned into) my story ‘Copies’. What started as an imitative/I’ll-show-you gesture managed to degrade into something similar to what I’d been writing before (high concept symbolism holding the story together rather than character or plot)… but it was better than the failed novels or any short story I’d attempted previously because:

a) I was determined it would be better (I even edited it in Tracked Changes because I thought, arrogantly, that in time people would want to see how the story evolved) and

b) I started from a point outside my general field of play (trying to write all literary-like instead of being arch or hip from the get-go).

I was not interrupted with any positive OOTBs during the composition and editing of ‘Copies’****. There was nothing to break the flow of inspiration and motivation. I got it done and sent it off to a competition… and it didn’t get anywhere. But then I got asked for a story OOTB and sent ‘Copies’ and baddabing baddabang, a monster was born!

Of course, writing a short story is different to writing a novel. Don’t remind me. THE SLUG takes a lot longer, and it's harder to keep on top of it (alternative blog name: Riding The Slug; aja!) through good news, bad news and no news because, well, there’ll be more news.

That’s the way things work. There will be distractions and depression, elation and invasion. The novelist’s credo must be: Get it done. I’m just not a very good novelist. I get distracted by seabirds and stories of people cutting their toes off with limpet shells and want to write about them now!

Picture Veruca Salt trying to write a novel (minus the orangey-red dress and long, lifeless hair) and that’s me.

'Daddy, I want to write short story now!'

But I will persist. I'm a big boy now and can control my impulses. I will ride THE SLUG, will stick to my time period, my patch of turf and my narrators. I will survive without another OOTB fix; if one comes along I won't let it disrupt me. I will finish the novel. Soonish. I promise.*****

-------

Footnotes

* Until this point, I expected to knock one out of the park on my first (and second) at bat. One = novel.

** Pronounced Oh-Oh-Tee-Bee. Not to be confused with ‘Oh-o, T.B.’ which is number four on the list of Ten Phrases You Don’t Want To Hear From a Doctor (especially if it’s Out Of The Blue).

***Trivia time: I was long-listed for the 2010 Frank O’Connor Prize, but so were the other 56 writers whose books were nominated by their publishers…

****I’d actually started the story before receiving the MA examiner reports which counted as bad news and fuel for the fire.

*****

Polar Blast / Dear Diary / Naked Lunch / Melons

2011-08-17T21:21:00.002+12:00

Mini-playlist for a Polar Blast

1. 'Hail, Hail' - Pearl Jam
2. 'Sleet' - The Futureheads
3. 'The Ice Covered Everything' - Shearwater (no clip on You Tube, but here's their almost-as-apropos 'Snow Leopard')
4. 'The Snow Fall' - Band of Horses (no clip on YouTube but you can listen to pretty much all their songs and imagine snowflakes falling...)
5. 'Similar to Rain' - Warren Zevon (argh, I had to pick the most obscure one... oh well, there are plenty more Zevon tracks I can link to that fit the theme: 'Steady Rain', 'Fistful of Rain, 'Frozen Notes'...)

Dear Diary

Roger Hall had an interesting piece on diarists (or the lack thereof) in the Sunday Star Times over the weekend. One thing it failed to address was where blogging features in the mix. The big difference between a blog and a diary is that one is immediately public (though may not be widely read...) while the other is only ever published after the writer is famous and prepared to publish, or more likely, famous and dead. (I guess there’s a third category of diarists who weren’t famous for much but, like Samuel Pepys, their diaries serve as important historical documents and gain personal fame posthumously).

While a blog and a diary do slightly different things, I’m sure no one does both. There's only so much time to reflect and rehash!

I’m sure there’ll come a time when I’m talking to the younger generation about weather events and might find it useful to retrieve some evidence at the recent one-in-fifty year snow-dump (okay, snow-sprinkling), so here’s some photographic evidence (which is pretty blah compared to some of the stuff people have posted on Facebook; my excuse: it took me over an hour to get home on the bus on Monday – the #23 only just made it up the hill past the zoo and I think all buses thereafter just dropped passengers off at the bottom and expected them to walk the rest of the way – and by this time it was dark and the southerly was ripping up the road which meant I couldn’t hold still enough to take a video that wouldn’t induce motion sickness)…

Snow falling in Thordon, Monday morning.

Monday night, Melrose

Then on Tuesday my bus didn't make it up Manchester Street, but it wasn't due to snow but a sudden heavy pelting of hail which froze as a layer of ice. About a dozen cars were stranded ahead of the bus. I know because I had to walk up the hill and the rest of the way home.

Cars stuck heading up Manchester St, Melrose, Tuesday 16 August 2011

Snow-laden clouds rolling in from Antarctica

I also saw snowflakes land on the sea and melt at lunchtime on Monday as I walked along the waterfront (on my way to Writers on Mondays at Te Papa).

Those white dots? Snowflakes! (photo taken on my phone)

Okay, so nothing to compare to snowier climes, or even the South Island. According to the internet, this is what it looked like in Christchurch:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/geoftheref/6044523385/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Not quite a namesake, but

I have a thing for Jimmy Cliff. I have a thing for covers. So it was cool to hear Jimmy's version of The Clash's 'Guns of Brixton' here. (It was also uncanny timing, what with the rioty carry-on in Londres last week.)

No Troubles With Fire

On Saturday I spoke to Fiona Kidman's class of budding memoirists, auto- and bio- graphers (and I'm sure some closet fictioneers). It was an interesting situation for me as guest speaker, having made my name as a distortionist and liar (a.k.a. short story writer*). So I spoke a lot about selective truths, careful omissions, mashups and wilful distortions, as well as answering questions about the general stuff like routine, my route to publication, and writing a fortnightly column (which should be more truthful than fiction, but in some ways is not).

The day before I had just finished reading Kidman's new book, the short story collection, The Trouble With Fire. Here I was, trying to field questions about being a writer and Dame Fiona, she of the decades of writing and catalogue of accolades who has no doubt tried everything I've tried on the page and then some, is sitting there, quietly interested. I managed to bring the conversation around to linked stories and Part Two of TTWF and it was interesting to hear Kidman's thoughts on the value of linked stories (turns out we're both big fans of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge).

I really enjoyed The Trouble With Fire. In a strange way, it reminded me of Sue Orr's From Under The Overcoat, which came out earlier this year. I say 'strange' because if influence flows one way, it should be from the more senior Kidman to the newer kid on the block in Orr; but I'm not sure the link is one of influence, but rather sensibility. Both writers seem to steer stories in quite deliberate directions. In Orr's book, each story is inspired by a famous short story from the golden age (to lapse into comic book lingo). In TTWF, it's more to do with genre: there's a travel story, there are the linked stories, there are two historical stories (quite different to each other). All of them twist a little in their generic suit without being overtly experimental or loudly subversive. But just when you think you're in for a nice polite tale, she'll drop the c-bomb!

(The) Naked Lunch

I also recently finished listening to the audiobook of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Now there's a book you hope people can't overhear while on the bus. Taken en masse it's not obscene, it's actually quite moral in a strange way, but try explain that to the Sister of Mercy sitting next to you.

I have now read the three most heralded works of the beat generation (On The Road and 'Howl' complete the triumvirate). I find each invigorating in small doses, but I don't find the prospect of reading any more Beat prose particularly enticing. Conclusions: 1. I can deal with more confusion in poetry than prose. 2. I'm not crazy about pharmacologically-centred fictions. 3. While there's a lot in each of Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg that was ahead of its time, there's also something dated in their transgressions (though some of where we've got to in gender politics might be traceable back to these same transgressions...).

"The Next Generation of Melons"

From paper book to audiobook to film adaptations: critic David Larsen has posted parts one and two of a promised four-part digested take of the Harry Potter films, having watched all seven again with his children in the week before the final film hit cinemas.

So far, so interesting. Actually, I'm getting antsy for part three (it's been over a day!), but I'm not sure if I'll read part four... not having seen HP7 part II.

I had never watched any of the films until earlier this year, when reading/listening to The Prestige got me thinking about magic in fiction. I have not read any of J.K. Rowlings' books. Maybe once I have kids... But for now, watching the films in quick succession was enough to fill me in on the basics. I now know about muggles, mudbloods and port keys, and for that I feel slightly less of a social outcast.

It's interesting to read Larsen's take on the various directors of the HP films and their relationships with the texts. It doesn't make me a) want to watch the films again in a hurry, or b) read the books, but I feel wiser for having read his thoughts, which is a kind of criticism that isn't all that abundant at the moment. (Yeah, yeah, I'm just looking in the wrong places.)

Anyway, this has all been a long and serious way of letting me post this gif of hilariously inept subtitles from the HP films (HT: @paulverhoeven):

Click on the picture and you'll get a series of gaffs and head-scratchers.

---

*Footnote: It has been bugging me for sometime that someone who writes novels is a novelist, someone who writes poems is a poet, but someone who writes short stories is a short story writer. Short storyist? Short storet? Of course, there's always plain old 'writer'. But I might try 'distortionist' on for size when the opportunity presents next.

Other Craigs / Daily Positive / Cigar Store Indians

2011-08-10T20:43:00.002+12:00

Doubles

Out of the blue yesterday I received this email, sent via my Google Profile:

I am a 62 y.o. Grandmother. I am sending you a note to tell you my Son's name is Craig Cliff. That doesn't seem like a common name. I will tell you that my son is an artist. He is older than you but I do notice similarities. We all agree that Craig [Redacted] Cliff can do anything. He is a musician and everyone says he can do everything. I'm a proud Mom and I bet your parents are very very proud of you. My Craig was born Sept. 5, 1973. Just had to communicate with you. Cheerio! [Redacted]

Not all Craigs are created equal

Okay something actually about me, or Status downgrade

I tempted fate, didn’t I? Almost as soon as I posted my wee status report on THE NOVEL last week, things slowed down. I take some solace in that it was not all self-inflicted. My landlords are having a new bathroom put in our flat, which means a lot of sawing gib board and banging pipes outside my office door during my writing days at home. I have headphones and I should be disciplined enough to work through such a distraction. But the biggest problem was they turned the water off to do their plumbing business so I couldn’t make a cup of tea or use the toilet, two crucial activities in my writing routine.

After battling through one unproductive day at home with the workmen, I decided to work the next day in a library. I chose to start the morning at Karori Library as it had free parking spaces nearby and opened half an hour earlier (9.30am) than the other libraries that day. I left the house before the bathroom men arrived (otherwise they’d block my car in with their vans) and this left me an hour and a half to explore before the library opened. What’d I do? Took photos of birds of course!

Pipit on Red Rocks Walkway

Dunnock (not a sparrow, note the narrower beak)

Oystercatchers, post coitus
(I have other pics, but I hope to keep this blog's G rating)

I got quite a bit of work done in the morning upstairs at Karori Library (no internet access for my old laptop is a blessing). After meeting Marisa in town for lunch, I tried Newtown library in the afternoon, but a lack of free parking or anywhere decent to set up my computer put the kibosh on writing there. Over the hill in Kilbirnie, however, I had more luck. Not quite as good a set up as Karori, but I did discover a great stash of NZ Memories magazines (great for research).

On Friday I tried Island Bay, but there was nowhere to set up, so I went back to Karori (with a birdy detour en route).

NZ Robin at the end of Holloway Road, Aro Valley

I spoke with the bathroom man today and it's going to be another week and half (3 weeks all up) before they're done. Karori here I come!

Something for Craig's Mom

I came across New Zealand's page on Daily Positive the other day, and was surprised to find I rate a mention:

May 21:
Craig Cliff, short story and poetry writer from New Zealand, won the prestigious Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2011 in Overall Best First Book category for his book "A Man Melting". The winners of the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize were announced on 21 May 2011 at The Sydney Writers' Festival in Sydney.[5]

I'm the only entry for May 21. In fact, there are only 18 entries total for New Zealand. And what a weird collection of trivia I'm a part of. The rediscovery of part of the pink and white terraces (Feb 2) (but not their initial destruction). Helen Clark recieves a Champion of the Earth award from UNEP (April 22). First sheep introduced to New Zealand (May 20). NZ launches first commercially viable biofuel (Aug 1).

Of course, there are some (some) of NZ's big moments on the list: NZ women getting the vote (Nov 28), Ed Hilliary and Tenzing Norgay reaching the summit of Everest (May 29), Alan McDiarmid winning the Nobel Prize (Oct 10), the All Blacks winning the 1987 Rugby World Cup (June 20).

I'm not one to meddle with wikis, but those who are of such persuasion shouldn't have to look far to find other significant dates that have been overlooked.

(My birthday is 10 January!)

Got a spare $150 bucks?

The trouble with doing a lot of research for THE NOVEL is you're never done. There's always some other source you should have consulted, some other aspect you never got and had to fudge, some book you wanted badly but couldn't justify the costs (even if tax-deductible).

Today's book: The Shipcarvers' Art: Figureheads and Cigar-Store Indians in Nineteenth-Century America by Ralph Sessions. I can safely say this is the only book-length exploration of the link between ship carving and cigar store figures and it would yield very little in the way of my current novel, but I love books like this!

The Ministry of Magic

I’ve been sitting in a different building recently during my two days of paid work and a few people have come up to me in the kitchen to say, “I enjoy your column in the paper.” It’s nice to hear, but I wonder how much of this is down to the Ministry of Education connection? It must be interesting to have someone talking about the place you work (generally; remember this is a whole different building) in the midst of gardening tips, restaurant and book reviews and features about the dangers of sitting down (damn you Tom Fitzsimons, you’ve ruined my favourite pastime).

There are those at work who go beyond the “Love your work” comments and tell me what I should write about next. Most of it won’t fly for a wider audience, though I'm sure it would thrill the Ministry-heads about town (and probably lead to my swift exit from the workforce). However, I am gathering enough Things People Say I Should Write A Column About to write a column about the things people tell me to write about. Phew, I need a breather after that sentence.

Real writing is rewriting, or Recent brainfarts detect while revising

'Right on queue'
'Moving sheik' (instead of 'moving chic')
'Phased' for 'fazed'

Of course, some brainfarts can be useful. Last week I misread the headline of a magazine article as 'Eeling for Daylight' when it actually said, 'Feeling for Daylight'... The image of trying to capture an elusive strand of daylight may just be something I can use one day.

Settlers Creek and The Larnachs

2011-08-08T20:54:00.000+12:00

Preamble: My first book review for money is published in the New Zealand Listener this week so I feel compelled to spell out that what follows in not a freebie review. This is a freebie blog post. Just me, as a writer and blogger, keen to capture my response to certain books and aspects of those books as I go about my own fiction.

Settlers Creek by Carl Nixon
The Larnachs by Owen Marshall

Settlers Creek, the blurb: Box Saxton just wants to bury his teenage stepson's body in the churchyard near the farm where Box grew up. What happens, though, when the boy's biological father, a Maori leader, unexpectedly turns up in the days before the funeral and forcibly takes the boy's body? According to Maori custom the boy must be buried in the tribe's ancestral cemetery at the small coastal town of Kaipuna. According to the law there is very little Box can do. With no plan and little hope, Box gets in his old truck and drives north, desperate and heartbroken. Settler's Creek explores the claims of both indigenous people and more recent settlers to have a spiritual link to the land.

This is brave territory for any writer to wade into, and I think Nixon is able to present his personal-versus-cultural conflict in a powerful way. The protagonist, Box Saxton (*name cringe*), is presented in such a way that it's hard to view any of his actions as racially motivated. He is powered by a very personal sense of what is right (and it should not be forgotten he is acting under the duress of sudden grief and hardship).

In the later stages of the novel, however, there are walk-ons for a couple of characters who are allowed to air their dodgy views. Again, these views are rebutted by Box, both overtly (he denies his effort to retrieve his son has anything to do with 'sticking it to the Maoris') and by the general positioning of the narrative itself.

However, I think this book fails to be truly enlightening because it remains wedded to one perspective. It's clear that, in the rare glimpses into the world of Tipene and his whanau, Nixon knows more about Maori taonga than his protagonist, and yet it is quite something else to ask a pakeha novelist to present both pakeha and Maori perspectives with equal weight in the novel. But if I am to applaud Nixon's bravery for tackling a tricky issue, I must also point out that he could and should have gone further.

Politics in fiction is not about National versus Labour (even in a roman a clef like Charlotte Grimshaw's The Night Book). So often it comes down to narrative structure and perspective: who is given a voice and who is shut out. There are a number of novels that deal with this kind of narrative politics directly -- J.M. Coetzee's Foe, for example, which give voice to the woman excluded from Daniel DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe story, while keeping the silence of the black Man Friday (his tongue is cut out) -- though these books tend to be good for little more than dissection in undergraduate EngLit courses.

Settlers Creek hammers home the point that European settlers can have strong and valid connections with the land and that one culture should not overrule another simply by default. The book's blurb might invite debate, but the book itself does not provide a forum for this debate. It feels instead like the Wizard of Christchurch holding forth in Cathedral Square: a one-sided diatribe that is superficially entertaining but hardly convincing, a spectacle that is somehow detached from reality. Settlers Creek feels quaint and nostalgic (speaking to a world where men in bush shirts communed with nature and didn't know two words of te reo); though it is set in the present and rife with personal turmoil, it's impact remains limited to one person when it might have been about two people (pun intended, somewhat uncomfortably).

The Larnachs by Owen Marshall is, in this respect, the inverse of Settlers Creek. It is set in the past and yet, by virtue of its narrative politics, it feels the more immediate and comprehensive book.

The blurb: In 1891, after the death of his first two wives, William Larnach married the much younger Constance de Bathe Brandon. But the marriage that began with such happiness was to end in tragedy. The story of the growing relationship between Conny and William's younger son, Dougie, lies at the heart of Owen Marshall's subtle and compelling new novel. The socially restrictive world of late nineteenth-century Dunedin and Wellington springs vividly to life as Marshall traces the deepening love between stepmother and stepson, and the slow disintegration of the domineering yet vulnerable figure of Larnach himself. Can love ever really be its own world, free of morality and judgement and scandal?

Marshall takes two verifiable facts as his start and end points: the marriage of Larnarch and Conny in 1891 and Larnach's dramatic suicide in 1898. There were rumours about an affair between Connie and Dougie at the time, but with rather less fact to go on Marshall is given the freedom to explore this relationship imaginatively.

The narration is handled in turn-about fashion, with Conny taking chapter 1, Dougie chapter 2, Conny chapter 3 and so on. Dougie's chapters follow Conny's but deal with the same time period as described in the previous chapter: in this way the reader is often given two perspectives on certain events, and always two perspectives on the relationship that is developing.

This is a marvellously written book. Marshall’s fiction has often employed a formal register, though this is his first attempt at an historical novel. The delight he has taken in the polished grammar of this bygone era is evident. I often read a sentence and paused to imagine Owen Marshall leaning back on his office chair, grinning, having just crafted it.

Similarly, there is mastery at work with the depiction of time and place through the deployment of historic details: Conny's respect for the writer Margaret Oliphant and sadness when she dies; the buggy rides from Dunedin to The Camp; the evenings spent with Seddon and Ward in Wellington which inevitably end with all gathered around the piano.

Despite the appearance of many figures and event which are still notable in our 2011 sense of NZ history, this book does not succumb to the “Shanghai Knights effect” (see here for an explanation of this common failing of historical novels). Larnach was a big player in colonial politics and banking and it seems only right that he (and Conny and Dougie) rub shoulders with the movers and shakers of their time. It also works when the Larnachs see Mark Twain’s lecture as he toured New Zealand in 1896, because it is believable people of their standing in Dunedin would have attended, and nothing pivotal hangs on this outing. Compare this to the fear that Boden Black’s mother has died in the Tangiwai disaster in The Hut Builder or his chance meeting with Sir Edmund Hillary later on in the novel. The presence of well-known people is part of the texture of Marshall’s novel, rather than the nodes around which the narrative is constructed.

However, while the choice of the two-handed, turn-about narration gives us a nuanced, multi-faceted view of the Conny-Dougie relationship (and also does a good job of painting the apex of the love triangle, Daddy Lanarch), there are down-sides.

While each chapter roams around the narrator's recent past, the narrative only moves forward in time every two chapters. As such, much of the novel feels static. There are very few scenes, in the traditional sense, and hardly any direct speech. In place of dramatic action, pages are given over to musings of the narrator, which, however well written, tend to drag after a while.

And, despite the laudable narrative politics displayed by the structure of the novel -- giving voice to the two members of the rumoured love triangle for whom we have only had rumour -- there is something disingenuous about how Conny and Dougie tell their tale. What exactly are these chapters? There is a distinct epistemological feel, but each character lays bare their innermost secrets -- discussing their love for the other before making their first moves; describing their sexual encouters -- that they'd never write in a letter to another person, not even to each other. Nor would they risk writing it down in a journal. Besides, what would prompt each to set down the events of the last few months or years at the same point in time?

So who is the audience?

Hold that thought.

Each chapter bears the outward appearance of a discrete, individual narration. That is, Dougie is not aware of the thoughts Conny has expressed in the previous chapter. However, on closer inspection, there is clearly another force mediating what each narrator tells us and how. For example, Conny explains in detail William Larnach's installation of a telephone exchange at The Camp and how he makes Dougie man the exchange when he'd rather be out inspecting the Alderney herd. Then, in the following chapter, Dougie mentions the exchange in passing without glossing it for his interlocutor, whomever they may be. Of course the reader knows about the exchange already, but how does Dougie know we know? Same goes with the buggy incident at Anderson's Bay, and a dozen other events or details.

So who is the audience of these chapters? It’s all for you, dear reader. It is the novelist’s hand you see again, intruding here and there to ensure the chapters serve the greater narrative rather than being hermetically-sealed monologues delivered to the ether.

Marshall is conducting the séance. His talent with pulleys and magnets is often, but not always, enough to overlook the fact he’s moving the Ouija board to his own ends.

Two more quibbles (and lets keep things in perspective here, this is a fantastic book, and quibbles < qualms < objections):

One: Conny dominates Dougie if we are to truly examine the equality of the narrative politics. Her chapters come first and are longer (often by virtue of Dougie not having to explain so much about what has been happening).

Neither character is that likeable (when are starcrossed lovers ever likeable?) but Conny is the more intriguing: an intelligent, strong-willed suffragette who discovers love with Dougie after marrying William for other reasons. Dougie is simpler, earthier and more insufferable. Whether it’s due to Marshall’s innate preference or design, it’s a good thing we readers spend less time with Dougie. But is it fair to him? Not really.

Two: Their voices are often indistinguishable. There are brief moments when Dougie resorts to earthier vernacular, but both narrators generally speak the same mannered 1890s dialect and both are prone to Marshallian aphorisms. Don't get me wrong, one of the reasons I read Marshall's work is for these aphorisms (it's one of the things that separates his books from the likes of Settlers Creek).

I noted down a number of these pronouncements as I read...

'How multifarious life is, and yet we assume our own activities and feelings to be the sum of it.'

'The best and worst of human behaviour can be so close together.'

'All that's long gone, but memory is beyond conscious control. We can't choose our past, or ever quite bury it.'

'Strange in a way, for otherwise I would not wish to spend much time in Brisbane. It is a thrusting, practical place that still bears much evidence of its origins...'

'Every day marks some cataclysm for people somewhere in the world, yet presents a benign countenance to all the others.'

'Life often means a strange, almost comic, loss of dignity, but what the hell.'

The problem is I cannot instantly identify which of the two narrators said the above (apart from the last one).

Again, the writer's hand is showing, if only slightly.

But what do I want, really? How could Marshall have repeated the telling of the Anderson's Bay buggy incident in full from Dougie's perspective without boring the reader? How could he resist the urge to say something as neat and poignant as 'Like you young princes, we accepted it all as our entitlement,' just because Dougie was talking at the time? To fix one problem would surely have created another.

I said Nixon was brave to wade into the subject matter of Settlers Creek, and I must be even handed and point out the bravery at work in Marshall tackling historical fiction based on the lives of real figures. He comes close to the rocks of romantic (historic) fiction at times, but manages to avoid catastrophe because of the very structure I have nitpicked. The Larnachs is not so much the story of an affair as the anatomy of one. Spending time with these narrators is less about vicarious thrills and more about dissecting motives and actions in order to understand the human animal.

No narrative choice is perfect and there is no such thing as perfect narrative politics. There must be winners and losers, gaps and deficiencies, in every novel. The fact remains, however, that some novels are fairer-handed, fuller and closer to perfection than others.

Pasture / Bruce Cockburn / Status Report / Melbourne

2011-08-01T20:49:00.002+12:00

Out to pasture

I have quite a few poems and micro-stories appearing in the brand spanking new, hardback literary journal, Pasture, which is out this month. Pasture is the sister journal to Starch which started earlier in the year. All of Kilmog Press’s books are gorgeous specimens and I’m looking forward to my copy of Pasture no.1 arriving in the mailbox (and reading the work by the other contributors, such as Elizabeth Smither, Karen Zelas and Helen Rickerby, naturally).

Monday Earworm

Not quite the year of a million words

I gave my editor a status report on THE NOVEL today. In the interests of sticking to the intent of this blog to open the door every now and then on the creative process AND not wasting too much time blogging when I should be working on THE NOVEL, I hereby cut and paste portions of my status update for the world to see (and hold against me when I miss my deadlines):

Things are going reasonably well.

Early on I had a bit of trouble finding a way to incorporate a modern voice / perspective into what is, on the face of it, an historical account. But I've found a way to do this now by having a framing story which is set in the present day.

I'm now 20,000 words in (revising as I go, so it's a pretty polished 20k) and building up steam every week.

Working two days a week is going really well and the next three months are relatively clear of commitments (aside from Melbourne and Going West writers fests in Sept; but that's just 2 weekends out of action).

So, unforeseen roadblocks notwithstanding, I should have between 70 and 80,000 words by the start of November. The question is whether 70-80k will represent a finished draft, or if the novel will be a bit longer (it won't be War and Peace or anything). As I get further into the next section, I should have a clearer idea of the shape.

It might seem a bit optimistic to go from writing 20k in the last two & a bit months to 60k in the next three months, but the first 20k are always the hardest.

Bonus content for blog readers: In July I wrote 12,000 words on the novel. In addition to this I wrote a 6,000 story (from scratch to submission) set in the present day (my helicopter story); three columns for the Dominion Post; a fifteen minute speech about basketball and fiction for Brooklyn School’s appetites evening; and wrote and/or revised several poems.

I don’t intend to write any more short stories in the next three months, so there are 6,000 more words that can be transferred to novel-writing per month. Keeping up a pace of 18,000 words a month for three months would seem achievable.

Excuse me while I knock on every piece of wood in my flat…

Speaking of Melbourne

The programme/program is now online for the Melbourne Writers Festival. I'm doing a reading with a bunch of other writers at 10am on Sunday 4 September (the last day of the festival; hopefully festival fatigue has come and gone and everyone's on their second winds!). After a quick break, I'm appearing in the session New NZ Fiction with Eleanor Catton, chaired by Sue Green (Lower North Islandians may have seen her profile of Stephen Daisley -- another MWF2011 guest -- in Your Weekend on Saturday...).

There are some big names slated to appear in Melbourne, the biggest perhaps being Jonathan Franzen. I read Freedom over Easter and described it as a good-to-great novel. Sadly he's appearing in the festival's first weekend, while I'm only there for the second weekend.

There's also a syndicate of big name crime writers - Lynda La Plante, Michael Robotham, Tess Gerritsen, Peter Temple. Other highlights include Shaun Tan, Craig Sherborne and Don Watson (to pick three odd amigos), while there are a few 'big names' in the programme that are a bit misleading. There's a Katie Holmes, but it's not one half of TomKat. And there's a Dennis Glover, who is not, unsurprisingly, the deceased NZ poet (yes, I know our Denis had only one 'n').

See You Zeg / Covers Playlist / Koru Milo / NZ Post Book Awards

2011-07-27T21:36:00.000+12:00

Georgia on my mind

The other day I received an email from a friend currently teaching English in Georgia (the country in Eurasia rather than the US State) trying to introduce a Georgian word into English usage, at least amongst his circle of friends back here.

zeg = (n) day after tomorrow, in two days time.

Its brevity appeals. I also rather like the sound of it. ‘See you zeg.’ Sounds kinda hepcat, kinda Brave New World.

In my brave new world of working Monday-Tuesday and writing full-time Wednesday-Sunday, I’m often losing track of which day of the week it is. So promising to check the oil and water zeg means I can gloss over the fact I can’t remember if it’s Thursday or Friday.

Bi-fold playlist for a week in which you doubt your own originality

Side A: Originals Whose Fame Has Been Surpassed By Covers
Torn – Ednaswap
Nothing Compares 2 U – The Family
Tainted Love – Gloria Jones
Mad World – Tears for Fears

Side B: Covers That Make Being Not Entirely Original Seem Cool
You’ll Never Walk Alone – Gerry And The Pacemakers
It Ain’t Me Babe - Jan and Dean
Throw Your Arms Around Me – Neil Finn
The Letter – Joe Cocker

Side C: Spotlight on Manfred Mann (& Manfred Mann’s Earth Band)
Do Wah Diddy
Quinn The Eskimo
Blinded By The Light
For You

Side D: Hey Joe. Hey Joe? Hey Joe! Hey, Joe? Hey! Joe!
Hey Joe - The Byrds
Hey Joe - Patty Smith
Hey Joe - Brant Bjork
Hey Joe - Tim O’Brien

Kiwi As

What's more New Zealand than a koru pattern in a mug of Milo?
(And yes, my desk is normally this messy)

2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards

Tonight the winners of the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards were announced. Thanks to the live tweeter from the NZ Book Council (@nzbookcouncil) I can tell you that winners in the four categories were:

* General non-fiction: Chris Bourke - Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of NZ Popular Music 1918-1964

* Illustrated non-fiction: Damian Skinner - The Passing World: The Passage of Life: John Hovell and the Art of Kowhaiwhai (also winner of most coloned title)

* Poetry: Kate Camp - The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls

* Fiction: Laurence Fearnley - The Hut Builder

Chris Bourke's Blue Smoke also won the people's choice award... and the Book of the Year (so he cleaned up, basically). Congrats to Chris!

The short-lists for each category can be found here.

As I post this, there haven't been any press releases on the winners (embargoed until 10pm I think), so I'm like, totally breaking news here for you non-Twitters. (The first book award winners were announced ages ago; press release here).

And now for the comment portion of this mini-post: Meh. It's late, I'm going to bed (before I say anything that I might regret; if not tomorrow, maybe zeg, or the day after zeg).

National Poetry Day 2011

2011-07-22T01:01:00.003+12:00

Today is National Poetry Day in Aotearoa / New Zealand. There are plenty of events on in towns around the country, but for those of you looking for an instant fix, here's a poem from me:

---

The Sherlock Holmes of the Body
Eugen Sandow / Friederich Mueller (1867-1925)

He flexed on film for Thomas Edison
And wrote books with Conan Doyle
But it is in photographs,
Of which there are plenty,
That the shadow of Sandow is closest to
The man who willed himself into marble.

Take this one, from the Chicago World’s Fair.
See him dusted with chalk, posing in a box
Lined with a coffin’s black velvet,
Emulating Hercules or David or Samson
(the caption doesn’t say),
In a cheetah print loin cloth.
How much like death these photos.
How much like myth
Or like perfection.

And like all myths, all deaths,
All flashes of perfection,
One cannot stare too long
the grain emerges
the backdrop sags
the moustache irks.
So let us flick through quickly
Then pull the shade on Eugen Sandow.
Give the marble god a chance to blink.

---

You can see Sandow posing on Edison's Kinescope strip from 1894 here.

I wrote the first (much longer) draft of this poem back in 2008 when I was working on a series of poems based on Vaudeville and freak show entertainers from the late nineteenth / early Twentieth Century. In researching Sandow, I learnt he toured New Zealand for six weeks in 1902-03. The man was a sensation long before the days of YouTube and his visit was built up to such an extent that one woman in Wellington was famously overhead proclaiming: "Why, he's just a man!"

An early section of the novel I'm currently working focusses on the arrival of Harry Rickards' Vaudeville Company (also known as the Number 3 Company), of which Sandow was the headliner, to a small South Island town.

Slightly Peculiar Love Stories

2011-07-21T10:02:00.000+12:00

'...the story of love fulfilled is no story at all; it’s in the gap between longing and completion that the narrative appears' -- Penelope Todd in the foreword to Slightly Peculiar Love Stories

As of 5.30pm NZT yesterday, y'all can buy a copy of Slightly Peculiar Love Stories in your preferred eBook format from Rosa Mira Books.

SPLS features stories from 21 authors from New Zealand, Israel, the Philippines, the UK, the USA, Greece, Argentina, and Hong Kong, including Tania Hershman, Tim Jones, Tina Makereti, Maxine Alterio and Sue Wootton.

Oh, and me!

My story, 'Statues', was written specifically for the anthology and may be more than slightly peculiar (an Italian farmer falls in love with the statue in his town's piazza). I wrote about the inspiration behind the story on Rosa Mira's blog last month.

All weeks are not created equal

2011-07-18T19:12:00.000+12:00

Playlist for the week just been...

Nothing Ever Happens - Del Amitri
Nothing To Say - The Kinks
Nothing - Nada Surf (bonus points)
Nothing From Nothing - Billy Preston
William, It Was Really Nothing - The Smiths
Nothing Ever Happens Down Here - Gerry Rafferty
Nothing Ever Happens - Manfred Mann
Nothin' - Townes Van Zandt
Nothing Ever Happened - Deerhoof

And the song that was actually stuck in my head today but turns out doesn't have 'nothing' in the title:

Not all weeks are as interesting as the one described in my previous post. Take last week for example. No wildlife encounters or research expeditions outside the confines of my home office. No public appearances. No home videos worthy of posting on YouTube.

About all I can share is this link, which'll let you watch my panel discussion with Richard Glover, Brendan Cowell and Mark Dapin on ‘bromance’ from the Sydney Writers’ Festival back in May. (I actually knew about this prior to my last post and could have included it in my interesting week rather than my uneventful week, but I forgot). Thanks to the ABC (Australia) for making this and a number of other interesting sessions from SWF2011 available online.

What else? Um, I went to an engagement party on Saturday and didn’t know many people there. Word filtered back to me that someone was like, ‘Where do I know the guy over there standing next to the girl in the red top from?’ And one of the engagee was like, ‘That’s Craig Cliff, he’s—', and the guy was like, ‘The dude from the paper.’ He was then too shy to turn around for the rest of the night. I guess that means I’m famous, right?

Of course, the great thing about boring, uneventful weeks is that there’s plenty of time for writing. After a brief interlude in the present, I’m back in 1903. I should be finished with 1903 by the end of this week, then it’s back-back to 1869, the year the Suez Canal opened and the tea clipper trade collapsed, before whizzing through to 1921 (or possibly 1919…).

Things will heat up again the end of August when I'm off to Going West Festival in Titirangi, then Melbourne Writers' Festival the next weekend. Not sure what I'm doing at Going West, but last I heard I was doing a reading with a bunch of other newer writers in Melbourne, then being on a panel called "New NZ Fiction" with Eleanor Catton. The festival programme may or may not read: "How do two of NZ's rising stars see the state of fiction in their country? Hear from award-winning writers Eleanor Catton and Craig Cliff as they discuss their books, and their relationship with fiction." Hmm, I think that calls for a reshuffle of the pile of books on my bedside cabinet.

The good news (in it's own strange way) is that I will still have the anticipation before reading Timequake for a couple more months...

Tim Doyle, Got to Be Kind

The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese

2011-07-11T21:56:00.002+12:00

The title of today’s post is a line from ‘Somewhere Else’ by Grace Paley. The rest of this post is stuff I’ve been up to over the last week (and has nothing to do with cheese).

Kay One Double-Ewe One

On Tuesday evening I went to the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary (aka Zealandia) to observe a researcher recording kiwi calls for a Dom Post column I’m writing. It was the first time I’ve ever seen a kiwi without a pane of glass between us (I saw five; the closest was probably a forty centimetres from my foot). It was also the first time I’ve been called upon to use radio telemetry (I picked it up quickly, apparently). I will withhold my ra-ra ‘the sanctuary is a precious asset’ carry-on for Your Weekend in a little under three weeks.

Appetite for Deconstruction

On Thursday evening I graced the podium at the Brooklyn Masonic Lodge. Twas a strange old place, secluded up a winding drive, the main hall had a small square dance floor (3m x 3m maybe) in the centre for post-initiation jigs and burning Dan Brown books (I guess).

But no goats were slaughtered on Thursday. There weren’t even any secret handshakes. No, I was there along with poet Jenny Bornholdt, children’s writer Philippa Werry and TradeMe guru and columnist Mike O’Donnell to talk about “Appetites” (however we chose to take that theme) in a fundraising evening for Brooklyn School.

The event was chaired by Radio National’s Kathryn Ryan (it was strange to hear her, let alone see hear, outside of the 9-noon window). There was mulled wine (it was a howling southerly), nibbles and a raffle (M. came along and won third prize: result!). Funds raised from the evening went toward buying books for the year ones and twos. Philippa Werry quoted Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel acceptance speech where he said that learning to read was the most important thing that ever happened to him. True, true.

I spoke about my appetite for basketball, which was stoked by the rejection encountered as a third former (Year 9) when I didn’t make one of my school’s three basketball squads, and how this passion is essentially the same as my passion for writing (basketball as a 13-year-old involved a lot of making up stories on my driveway while I wore through another nylon net, with regular doses of rejection when ever I came too close to the real world). To frame this discussion I read from my story-in-progress (or story-for-which-progress-stalled-some-time-ago) ‘The Wishing Cave’, which I included in my Abandoned Blog Posts post last month.

Time’s A Goon

On Friday I signed 1,020 stickers for the Commonwealth Foundation. The stickers will be stuck inside copies of A Man Melting (if they end up buying 1,020 that’ll do wondrous things to my sales figures) for the head of the Commonwealth Foundation to give as gifts (along with 2011 Best Book winner, A Memory of Love) to ambassadors and other embassy-types.

[Aside: In an abandoned passage from an abandoned novel, I once wondered what if every reproduction of a famous painting, say Lady with an Ermine, was another pair of eyes for the original artwork, which by virtue of it being a masterpiece possessed a kind of sentience. What would Lady with an Ermine conclude about humanity from its 1,000 vantage points and four centuries of surveillance? How would this differ from The Madonna of The Rocks' views? I was reminded of this 'What If' when considering what sort of hands my book might end up as a result of this Commonwealth Foundation gifting. Wouldn't it be a funky art project to install tiny spycams in the spine of each book and watch the goings on in consulate drawing rooms (and oxfam second hand stores)? Yes, but unfortunately it'd also be considered espionage.]

My brother flexed his photograpic muscle and made this timelapse film of my 67 minute signing vigil (an average of one signature every 3.97 seconds), complete with tracking shots and sunset over the bays, Kilbirnie and Miramar.

I asked Damien Wilkins if we could use a song off The Close Readers’ fabulous album, Group Hug. He replied: ‘Another of my goals achieved: to be background music!’ The song used is: 'What Did I Do Right?'. You can find out more about the Close Readers and buy their album here.

You know how sometimes your activities over a given period are coloured by the book you’re reading at the time (and how the book is coloured by what’s going on around you)? Well, the compression of 67 minutes of mindless, OOS-risking activity into a 1:17 timelapse seems to me emanently linked to the theme of A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which I blogged about yesterday.

Below Ground Above Karori

On Saturday I went on a tour of the Wrights Hill Fortress, which was built hastily during WWII when fears of a Japanese invasion were at their peak. The tour was a tie-in with Wayne Barrar’s exhibition of underground photos from around the world, ‘An Expanding Subterra’ which is on at the Wellington City Gallery until this weekend. Barrar was there with his camera and tripod, but the tour was led by Mike Lee, the chairman of the society looking after and restoring the fortress.

The complex is surprisingly huge. So huge that Lee and his dedicated team have only managed to restore one of the three gun placements (though no guns as they were sold as scrap to Japan (!!) in the 1960s) since 1989. We were also taken to the unrestored parts and the contrast was huge. I really hope that the unrestored parts remain that way. The wetas also seemed to prefer the decayed to the done-up.

If you’re looking for better photography than my snapshots, you should check out my brother’s new blog (he’s good with the photoshop, not so much with the proof reading; when our powers combine, we are Captain Blogger).

The Vestigial Ess

I’m not one of those editor-types who knows the hard and fast rules of grammar and keeps a copy of Strunk and White beside my PC. In musical terms, I learnt to write all proper-like by ear. As a result my foundations are always shifting. I go through phases with punctuation: at the moment I am emerging from a reliance on em-dashes (and finding room for parentheses); I once vowed never to use a semi-colon.
At the moment, without any scientific basis or proclamation from a higher authority, I find myself removing the terminal “s” from words such as “towards”, “besides”, and “backwards”. This is a recent evolution of my move away from “whilst” to “while”.

[Aside: There a dude who runs training courses at work who says “while-ist” which is incredibly distracting when you’re trying ever-so-hard to focus on what’s new in Microsoft Office 2007; it’s also inefficient.]

The thing is, I still type “whilst” and “towards” most of the time and I’m trying to take note of what I actually say in conversation (unconcious usage being the self-taught grammarian’s bible). But for now it’s farewell to those superfluous susserations and hopefully hello to a cleaner, simpler voice on the page.

Helicopters

On Sunday I spoke with a helicopter pilot and the director of a helicopter training and tour operator at the Lifeflight offices by the airport (they run the Westpac Rescue Helicopter). I had questions to ask about choppers because I’m writing a story for The Griffith Review (“the leading Australian journal of ideas and analysis” according to their own press, but this accords with my knowledge, especially from my time in Australia 2004-2007) sort of on spec. They asked if I had something that fit the theme of their next issue, which is “islands”. I said not really, but I have some unfinished pieces which I could scrub up. They liked the sound of my helicopter story and said I had till the end of July… which meant I needed to get my head around helicopters pronto.

The two guys I spoke to yesterday were generous with their time and most helpful (one even offered to read through what I write, though I'm not sure I'm up for that kind of technical scrutiny). This week I’m going to devote my AMs to chugging on with the novel (Parenthetical Progress Report: going pretty well right now, maybe 15% done with 3.5 months of amazing productivity ahead of me, hohoho) and churning out my chopper story in the PM.

Country and Western (Poetry)

Today (Monday) I walked to Te Papa in my lunch hour (it was surprisingly dry and unblustery) to listen to Jenny Bornholdt, Airini Beautrais and Bernadette Hall read and discuss their latest poetry collections, chaired by Bill Manhire. It was the first of twelve Writers on Mondays sessions for the year and I hope to make it along to all that I can.

I've been meaning to do a poetry collection / anthology reading summary post since February... It's been so long that I've read two Airini Beautrais collections in that time (Secret Heart and Western Line) and haven't yet raved about them (though I did mention her in my interview on Unity Books' website).

The reading today was a bit, I dunno... umph-less. I'm not sure the experiement to have the other two poets comment on their favourite poems in the collection of the poet who just read worked. There didn't seem much scope for conflict or discussion.

It may have been the audience (and/or the lack of mulled wine), but I felt like Jenny Bornholdt got a lot more laughs on Thursday night; and I was expecting Airini Beatrais' charms and curses from Western Line to kill.
(When I read these poems, I tend to hear Kim Hill's voice rather than Airini's [Radio NZ interview here]; maybe the audience felt similarly confused).

Not a wasted lunchtime venture by any stretch, but something a little short of magic.

Trailing Off
Tomorrow I'm on the 6.30am flight to Auckland for work... School visits: yay! Early start: boo!

Finally, A Visit From The Goon Squad

2011-07-10T16:55:00.001+12:00

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

This was a book I have been meaning to read for the last twelve months, ever since it started getting reviewed in the U.S. (e.g. this rave from the NY Times from July ’10), but then I had to wait for it to arrive in New Zealand and other books leap-frogged it in my reading queue.

Reason for my interest #1: In my bottom drawer I have an unpublished quasi-satirical rock'n'roll novel (which doubled as my MA thesis).

Reason for my interest #2: Structure. The book is basically 14 loosely linked chapters focussing of different characters, none of which would really stand up too well as a traditional short story. The chapters deal with different times (from the 1970's to 2020's, but not necessarily chronologically), different places (mostly the US, but also an African safari and Naples) and employ different narrative approaches (first, second and third person narrators; faux-journalism; a girl's diary in powerpoint slides). How does something like this work? And why would something like this be attempted?

I now have some answers.

One could say the hub of the vortex of voices in the novel is Bennie Salazar, who we see at various points as an aloof boss, a struggling father post-divorce, a struggling husband pre-divorce, a teenage rocker, a hot ticket in the music industry and a pariah of the same industry years later.

Or perhaps his one-time assistant, Sasha is the hub (she gets centre stage in the opening chapter and her whereabouts drives the action of the novels final paragraphs, though the reader knows where she is from the preceding chapter).

Or perhaps there are two hubs, Bennie and Sasha, which seems perfectly reasonably.

But the true locus of the novel is its obsession with time. As one of the characters says, "Time's a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?" (Hence the title). The novel evokes an almost Proustian dread at the passing of time; the fact that things change so suddenly and arbitrarily, that security and succour aren't necessarily the recipe for happiness. No one character can be central in a book about the dispassionate river of time.

A Visit From The Goon Squad is about connections and disconnections, and the diffuse structure and disjointed narrative are how this is conveyed. Setting it in and around the music industry, which has always been fickle but over the last twenty years has seen drastic changes on the corporate side, the distribution and consumption of music, is genius.

I enjoyed touching down at various points in music history, be it the days of San Francisco hardcore in the 1980s (Dead Kennedys, Flipper et al), grunge (Bennie Salazar's big find, the fictional band The Conduits, were probably part of this wave in the 90's) and the near future where 'pointers' (pre-verbal children) buy music via handheld devices and drive the industry towards simplified songs.

This image from the NY Times Review from July 2010 is a better representation of the novel than any plot summary.

By the time I closed the book I had an appreciation for it, a respect even, and suspect it may creep onto my top ten list for books I've read this year...

But it was a book I hated at several points.

I hated the first chapter, where Sasha is lying on her shrink's couch and recounting her latest bout of kleptomania, which occurred on a first date with Alex (who will not feature in the book again till the final chapter, and even then he'll struggle for pages to remember her name and if they slept together or not). The reader is held at one remove from the action (we keep getting pulled back to the shrink's couch when we want to be there on that date) and it was a feeling that was kicked up several times throughout the book.

I hated the section told in the second person, because I hate everything written in the second person. Rather than pulling me closer to the story because it is about me (You do this, you do that) it re-enforces my distance from the narrative. Because no, my name is not Rob, I have not recently slashed my wrists with a box cutter and I never had sex with a football teammate in my car. Why was this chapter in the second person? Because there had to be a second person chapter in such a grab-bag novel. It just felt so mechanical, and cynical. But this is probably me reading with a writer's eyes, and is therefore this is invalid.

I hated some other, smaller moments like the unconvincing Scotty Hausmann concert in the final chapter which is supposed to come off as revelatory and uplifting but the reader is not given enough of a taste of the music or the moment to be impacted in any way beyond the native adrenalie we all feel when there are only a couple of pages of a book remaining.

But as I say, I appreciate the book now. Perhaps a second re-reading will iron out any of these wrinkles because I'll know that the contraption called A Visit From The Goon Squad is not interested in individual lives, not Bennie, not Sasha, not you/Rob, not Scotty Hausmann, because time doesn't care about them. (Hence the distancing techniques: Oh, I know you want to get close to Sasha, get inside her head and follow her for the next 200 pages, but that ain't the game we're playing). And yet, as we see in the best chapters, there are ways to wrestle meaning from the abyss.

Such as the chapter told entirely with powerpoint slides. This may surprise some after my allergic reaction to the gimmickry of second person narration (but note: I've prepared a fair few powerpoints in my time in the public service). These slides, compiled by Sasha's daughter and telling, in their own way, the story of her autistic brother's obsession with pauses in rock songs, speak simply to the questions at the heart of the novel. How did we get here? Where are we going? The song pauses are false endings, reminders of mortality but also a temporary retrieve from it; a high concept metaphor which is made to work in the low concept powerpoint presentation. The drama in this chapter is ripe with the fact that parents were once children, and children will become parents. The family live on the edge of a desert that used to be lawns and parks and golf courses, and is now dominated by a forest of solar panels that must even capture the moonlight to power the powerpoint presentations of the world.

A Visit From The Goon Squad takes risks, tackles the big questions, has its successes and it failures. I do not think it is a great book. Yet.

Bits of Babel, Books, Birds, Base/Bass & Basketball (#94)

2011-07-01T16:45:00.001+12:00

Babel Building Blocks

The writer Isaac Babel is said to have asked women he met if he might rifle through their purses to inspect their contents. Some accounts have him paying for this privilege, fewer still suggest that he paid prostitutes for this (and this alone).

"A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story."
— Isaac Babel ('My First Fee')

“How late I learned the essential things in life! In my childhood, nailed to the Gemara, I led the life of a sage, and it was only later, when I was older, that I began to climb trees”
— Isaac Babel

"I grew up wishing that someday, somewhere, a door would open and my father would come in. We would recognize each other immediately, and without seeming surprised, without letting him catch his breath, I would say: "Well, here you are at last. We've been puzzled about you for so long; although you left behind much love and devotion, you bequeathed to us very few facts. It's so good to have you here. Do sit down and tell us what happened."
— Nathalie Babel (Isaac's daughter, quoted here)

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Anniversaries

Today marks one year since the book launch for A Man Melting (and one year and one day since getting engaged; still a few months to go before November!!). The book was officially released on 2 July 2010...

I'm working like stink to get a book together that might be able to come out in the second half of 2012, but there are a lot of things outta my control (and even the things that are in my control I might not be able to manage), so for now it'll do to look back on my first launch and the solid twelve months me and A Man Melting have had, including: 10 positive reviews (0 negative), 2 end-of-year best book lists, 1 "hot writer" appellation, 1 "best dressed", 3 appearances on radio NZ, two appearances on TV, a prize, a number of newspaper articles about me, 21 columns published in the Dom Post, 1 travel article published and 1 fiction review submitted and set to appear shortly.

And 1

And it's nice (in a strange way) to have my words being picked up and mangled by spammers. Here's the latest:

"She was only a newcomer (her solo moody was 4 years later) and described herself as 'a pouch of potatoes'"

- misquoted here, original here.

The word and the image

a little thing, made big from not knowing when to leave off:
gone past all need except need, enough never enough.

I only started noticing starlings after reading Tim Upperton's poem, 'The Starlings', two years ago. Until then, I guess I didn't bother to distinguish them from blackbirds and thrushes, despite the fact this now seems ludicrous: the metallic glints of their feathers, their electro-squeals, the packs picking through seaweed or muscling out sparrow and chaffinch on the freshly sown lawn, even their silhouette (short tail, thin beak) - how could it be anything but a starling?

The pursuit of knowledge is like the starlings' drive to reproduce in Upperton's poem: never-ending and perhaps even pointless. But once you start, it's harder to derail a certain fascination.

It wasn't until this year that I took note of the difference between a summer starling and a winter starling. And it's all thanks to my new Canon 550D and its image stabilised 55-250mm lens which allows me to get close-ups of birds and capture them in motion while still keeping the images clear. Before this starts sounding like an infomercial... it's time for pictorial illustration.

Because I only got my camera a couple of months ago, I don't have any summer starling photos, but here's a nice illustration courtesy of http://www.g1art.com:

Winter starling (top) and summer starling (bottom)

In winter, a starling's plumage gets all spotty and they look a lot more sinister, to me at least. I think the sinisterness (?) is directly proportional to the starling's immediate environs...

In a tree: moderately sinister.

Peering down from a powerline: quite sinister.

3 puffed up brutes keeping lookout from a Sky aerial: highly sinister

Controlling the national grid: terrifying!

Okay, I know I've already lost most of you, but does anyone else think a starling in winter looks like a dalek?

Am I right? Fine, next topic...

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I like you're old stuff better than your knew stuff

When I lived in the UK I really enjoyed watching Masterchef, which was a 30 minute show every weeknight which pitch 6 amateur chefs against each other. Every episode there were 3 challenges and one person left standing at the end of the episode. Then it was quarterfinals, semis and a week long final where the final few went of the the jungle or something.

Now of course every country has their bastardised Masterchef - none of which I can stomach. The Australian one, which runs before the TV1 news here in NZ (so I am destined to catch the last 2mins of every episode) is the worst. At the moment they are working their way through the top 50, kicking out people every two challenges. On average it seems to take 1.5 episodes to finish one challenge (and these are 60 minute episodes). And the challenges seem to mostly be them all cooking the same freaking dish! No thank you.

So I was delighted to see this video on YouTube (via Twitter) today that took me back to the good old days old Greg and John on the original Masterchef:

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Locked Out

The NBA has officially locked out its players as negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement with the players union have stalled. NBA.com has also gone into lock down mode. It's looking like some or all of the 2011-12 NBA season will be lost. The last time a labour dispute affected a season was back in 1999, when they managed to come to an agreement in December and held a 50 game regular season (as opposed to the standard 82).

The maths is simple for most: a full season > a partial seasons > no season at all. Sadly, most might not include the owners (several of whom are losing money, so no season means less loss) and some of the players. But sucks for the fans.

It especially sucks for Sacramento Kings fans (like me), after the Californian capital managed to keep its franchise for one more season, but needs to increase attendance and get a deal for a new arena done in order to insure the long term viability of an NBA team in Sacto. Add to this the fact that in the last week the team has acquired three new potential starters: Jimmer Fredette (#10 pick in the 2011 draft and the latest great white hope), John Salmons (via a trade with the Milwaukee Bucks) and JJ Hickson (via a trade with the Cleveland Cavs). And the Kings probably aren't done revamping their roster. Whenever the lockout ends and free agent signings can commence, they should be targetting another big man from Nene, Tyson Chandler, Marc Gasol, or resigning Samuel Dalembert.

I was talking to a friend the other day who said he just can't get into basketball because to him the game seems relatively static and repetitive. I can totally see this, but once you buy in to the narrative of American sports (in which statistics and economics play major parts) it's difficult to disentangle oneself. There's always some drama going on, most of it off the court, or between possessions. The loss of an entire season does toss a wrench or two into the machine (how will the draft order be determined if no season took place? what happens to players in the final year of their contract who don't get a chance to play their butts off in 2011-12 to earn their big payday?) but it also threatens to break that narrative thread. The NBA could lose a lot of fans in the next 12 months as people find new time sponges. I know I'll certainly notice the extra 2.5 hours 3 times a week that'll free up with no Kings games to watch on NBA league pass. Will it make me more prolific? Meh, I'll probably just play angry birds.

But, while there's still some Kings news to report, I'll just wish Omri Casspi well with the Cavs. If only you were as devastating in purple as advertised!!