gone feral

The night before last, I dreamt that I was in some sort of vastly important competition, for which I had to organise the catwalk show for Karl Lagerfeld's new collection. Half an hour before it started, someone stole all my staging. My show included an animatronic dinosaur that hatched an egg with a real, live, slippery green baby dinosaur inside. I woke up just after climbing a several-dozen-feet-high part of my hastily rebuilt set, in the process of falling spectacularly to my death.

Then last night I dreamt that while doing stunts for both the Harry Potter and James Bond films, I got accidentally shot and accidentally drowned.

You'll understand then why last night it was rather a relief to dream of nothing more than the lovely Jonathan Pryce, with not a lot going on except a bit of your standard worshipping.

In other news, you'll see from the photo that some of the sock yarn has finally gone feral - here it is nestling happily amongst some of the crap that I hauled out of the garden on the weekend. I was stern, though, and rounded it up mercilessly, for these yarns will be joined together in harmony for the final pair of socks of 2008. They will be knit simultaneously, so that the double striping effect will match, and will bring together the spirits of all the socks I've made during the Year of the Foot, into one uber-pair of socks.

Sweet dreams.

Socktoberfest

What Wellington also has is yarn.

This here is possum/merino yarn, which is my new absolute favourite. It is soft and warm, and when knitted up the item has a sort of halo effect around it because it is so fuzzy. Possum yarn is quite big here in New Zealand. Possums are pesky varmints, introduced by some clown back in the 1900s when all New Zealand had for native wildlife was pretty birds, many of them flightless and near-blind. The possums saw to them pretty quick-sharp and now the native birds are all protected species and the possums are fair game.

I don't know if possum yarn comes from those that the Dept of Conservation traps and disposes of, or if there are possum yarn farms (can you imagine the shearing sheds? Big guys hanging in harnesses wrestling possums to the floor and attacking them with miniature barbers' clippers and then sending them back out, naked and surprised, into the barn?), but either way, the reason it is so exceptionally warm is that possum fur, as is, is hollow. This is difficult for me to get my head around; it is obviously on some sort of nano-sized level with which my brain is not really comfortable, but the hollow fibre gives a couple of atoms' width of trapped air and keeps the possum nice and toasty.

The presque-finished sock on the needles in the first photo is turned over and hidden, cos it is a gift sock, but this is a sneak preview of the astonishingly lovely cable pattern I picked from Handknit Holidays by Melanie Falick. I love these socks like you wouldn't believe. I wish I could make them for every single person I know.

Happy Socktoberfest.

unoriginal

It's not the most original observation ever made about Wellington, but: boy, is it ever windy. So windy that on the day we were due to go, they almost cancelled our flight because the airport was closed (100km/hr winds). So windy that the wee plane teetered crazily as we came in to land, prompting the children aboard to squeal with delight as if we were on a roller coaster. So windy that, on walking along the waterfront, we both got facefuls of sand and spent ten minutes sputtering and blinking and wishing we had a hanky. So windy that, on turning a corner onto the parliament hill, we and every other pedestrian on the street took three giant steps backwards and then looked around for the nearest lamp-post to hang on to as we all got buffeted by huge gusts. We took photos on the sea front of our amusingly slow progress into the eye of the gusts. On parliament hill, we couldn't even get the camera out.

It was windy.

Though you wouldn't think it from this serene bee at the botanic gardens (not my photo - are you kidding? have you seen my photos? Chris took this).

And this.

The tulips were just about over, but they were pretty impressive nontheless.

More on What Wellington Has tomorrow, when it's stopped raining here long enough that I can take a photo of What Wellington Had That I Brought Back.

Wave the Flags; Bang the Drums…Something National This Way Comes

"A country's literature is a crystal ball into which its people may look to understandtheir past and their present, and to find some foretaste of their future." – Robertson Davies

With this higher purpose in mind, I write with a suggestion to the UK book industry. Let’s celebrate an English Book Month, to champion our national literature. I suggest it be in March, when the weather is at its most English. This national celebration can manifest itself in any or all of the following ways:
* Book tours of English authors discussing what it is to be, and write, “English”. They’ll talk about how being known as an “English author” can damage their chances on the world stage; how the national qualifier might relegate them to the fringes.
* A website with a discussion forum on which author most encapsulates Englishness, and how our national literature explores our cultural identity as English people. Noted English authors to blog on the national book scene; an online vote on the “top 50 English books”; celebrities pick their favourite books from our native literature. English-only, mind, and no, Bill Bryson doesn’t count, much as we might like him to.
* Posters, book lists, reading guides, and t-shirts to be distributed to all bookshops, for displays highlighting authors from this country.
* Have a poll on whether Germaine Greer is allowed to be part of the celebrations.

I suggest also a special English Book Month publication. Let’s find, say, six examples of new English writing talent, short stories set in England or essays on Englishness; we can call it The Six Pack in comical reference to our national penchant for beer, and sell it for six pounds.

It all sounds rather ridiculous, doesn’t it. But replace the word “English” with the words “New Zealand” and you get…

Yes, here down under we did all of the above (apart from the Germaine Greer bit, although I did push for it). Even the t-shirts and The Six Pack. Our bookshop windows screamed with kiwiana. Penguin publishers gave independent kiwi bookstores a nod by printing a limited edition of Commonwealth Award-winner Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, complete with signed bookplates, which they’re not even allowing the big chains to sell. Already a bit of a collector’s item; if Jones wins the Booker, it’ll be a major kiwi coup.

Here in New Zealand, Jones is flavour of the month – their first home-grown million-dollar author (incidentally, the Kiwis pronounce his title “Mustah Pup”, which as a Brit I find inappropriately amusing). Yet Jones recently talked about not wanting to be known as a New Zealand Writer. Look, is Toni Morrison, he asked, called an “American Writer”? We strive, we hope, he said, one day to be called just “Writers”, on a level playing field. In fact, in a country such as New Zealand, whose very identity is founded on avoiding tub-thumping – indeed, ridiculing our Big Noisy Neighbour Australia for her nationalistic jingoism – must we insist upon wheeling out National Book Months or Weeks or Lists or Festivals?

Having also spent a few years in the Canadian book industry, I see New Zealand Book Month rehashing arguments I’ve heard before. Why do we harp on about CanLit/ KiwiLit? Why are Margaret Atwood and Yann Martel Canada’s only “writers” while Carol Shields still comes with the qualifier “Canadian”, or worse, “Prairie author”? Is it really necessary to localize and nationalize and trumpet the Canadian (Kiwi) Novel? After all, as (Canadian) poet David Helwig says, “any country is only a way of failing/ and nationality is an accident of time/ like love”. If it seems absurd to look at all English authors’ writing as first and foremost an example of Englishness, then why not in New Zealand and Canada and the Caribbean and Nigeria and all the other nations that are still identified primarily by the term “Commonwealth literature”? Isn’t it time we stopped dividing up literature in English by thumpingly unhelpful national boundaries?

Douglas Coupland makes the same noises as Lloyd Jones. His beef is that Canadian “national literature”, of the sort that gets funding from the likes of national arts councils, is pigeon-holed to exclude his type of urban writing – it must instead be about roughing it in the wilds of Ontario while the Canada geese fly overhead and the Inuit teach you the ways of the ancient ones. If that’s the case, this enforced nationalization can only be reductive.

As technology makes the world smaller, and Gen X makes way for “GenXPat”, according to (sometime Canadian) author Margaret Malewski, National Book Month begins to look like a celebration of the past rather than the present and future of a country’s writing. After all, we stopped using the term “post-colonial” and moved onto “Commonwealth”, which in itself now seems a designation increasingly out of date. As Margaret Atwood pushes her “LongPen”, signing books in North America from London via a robotic arm, as the book industry moves closer to download-on-demand titles for customers to read on portable ibooks, national boundaries should become irrelevant. We little high-street booksellers are forever lamenting the internet juggernaut that will eventually put us out of business, but it could be our biggest grassroots weapon. All a local author will need – whether from Watrous, Saskatchewan, Whakatane, NZ, or just plain Watford – is a few bloggers and the odd Facebooker on the bandwagon to become better and more quickly known internationally, than any publisher or distributor could afford to make them. Slap a Print-on-Demand machine – already lowering in price – into your bookshop and you’re all set for the next century.

In the end, New Zealand Book Month’s biggest publicity has come completely inadvertently and has not the slightest thing to do with our national literature. The logo on the Book Month t-shirt represents what one would see looking end-on at a book open on its spine, its pages fanning up and out. The combination of this with the chosen logo colour of green prompted numerous customers and schoolchildren to ask if it’s National Weed Month. The t-shirts, as you can imagine, have improved the image of the average school librarian considerably.

I’m a newcomer here down under, and a true GenXPatriate: a British citizen with Canadian residence and a New Zealand work permit. With a British/Canadian mother and a Canadian/Kiwi dad, living in whichever of the three countries we’ve called home so far, our future children already have an acronym awaiting them: “TCKs” (Third Culture Kids). And I wonder, as I fold up my National Weed Month t-shirt and take down the New Zealand flags, what their national literature will be.

shame

It's been a while, and I'm sorry. We went to Wellington (on which more in another post when I do the photos). Then we left the computer's power cable in Wellington. And we've been waiting for it to be mailed back to us. So, not a lot of juice left, but I have to share with you quickly my shame from yesterday.

I don't go to Starbucks often. There are local coffee and tea places with good, regular tea that's called "tea". A couple of them even make chai, though not with tea leaves like in Saskatoon or at home, just with chai powder, which is okay. And they call it "chai".

Anyway, for one reason or another, yesterday we went to Starbucks. And now I feel sort of deflated and as if I need a wash. Aside from the fact that it's Starbucks, there is all the following to contend with:
1. My drink was named a "blackberry green tea frappucino (with the copyright mark) blended cream" which meant it took longer to say than to drink. This has got to be the epitome of crazy Starbucks names.
2. It was made with green tea powder and blackberry syrup, so it saw neither real tea nor a real blackberry in the making. It was bright green.
3. Although I did not have a pile of whipped cream on the top, they still gave it to me in a takeout plastic cup with one of those balloon-shaped tops they have for protecting your pile of whipped cream.
4. I drank it with a plastic straw that had been wrapped (though, at least, in paper).
5. The whole thing cost more than six dollars. (although obviously, six bucks NZ is about 50 cents Canadian or US; still, that is the most ridiculous amount I've ever handed over for a drink of tea; in fact, a drink of any kind).

and
6. It tasted pretty good.

I'll be over here, wallowing in my shame.