Politics and Powerpoint

My first event in the Writers Festival was a Powerpoint presentation. Or perhaps it was a theatrical event. Actually, it was a theatrical event disguised as a Powerpoint presentation. Quite the most hilarious Powerpoint presentation that I have ever seen. Actor Arthur Meek, playing writer Richard Meros, gave a rapid fire presentation On the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking Me as her Young Lover.

This theatrical piece is on a national tour and I highly recommend it. Being a Writers Festival, there were books for sale at the event. The piece is a stage adaptation of Meros's book, published in 2005, when it even rated a mention in The Guardian. However, after flicking through it, I wasn't especially tempted. I think that it would be a bit of a disappointment, even though absurdly satirical, after the stage show, which brought it brilliantly to life.

Christchurch City Libraries are also featuring the Writers festival on their blog. I received a comment yesterday inviting me to add Technorati or Flickr tags to my posts - I have no idea how to do that (and don't have a Flickr account anyway - at least I think I may have one, but I have never used it).

I guess those who are interested will either find me or they won't. If they don't find me, no doubt they will find plenty of others blogging on the festival.

On Not Writing

I noticed that Dana has me linked in her sidebar under "Bloggers Who Write Poems". And Kay has me linked under "NZ Writer Blogs" (along with some very much more well-known literary names). I feel a little guilty, since I haven't been writing much of anything lately.

I thought I might try to post every day in September, so that I'm at least writing something. (I noticed that yesterday's post, which I didn't actually manage to get posted until today due to blogger issues, actually bears the date stamp that matches when I first saved the draft - not the date I actually posted it).

I've been thinking of attempting NaNoWriMo this year. I've never dared to think I could possibly manage a whole novel until now. That's why I write poems, they're short. But then I actually had an idea. The trouble is that I keep thinking of bits of plot, and I'm worried that I'll be bored with the whole idea of it by November. We'll see.

In the meantime I have been reading. I was poking around in the library and by chance picked up a book called "On Trying to Keep Still" by Jenny Diski. I read it at the weekend while lying on my bed in the sunshine, in between trying to sleep off a nasty sinus headache, brought on, I think, by a sudden attack of warm weather. The warmth is wonderful, but it is the northwest wind that brings it, and it always takes me a day or two to adjust.

About the book, though - I was enchanted. It's a strange sort of mixture of memoir and travel book - or more accurately, "anti-travel" book. I went back to the library today for more of her work - she has written three memoir/travel mixes, and a number of novels.

A quote:
After I'd spent just a little time in the country, it seemed less surprising that the people of New Zealand should have embraced rather than resented their reassignment to Middle Earth, because there can't be a population in the world who so consciously feel themselves to be peripheral. My guess is that they would welcome being in Middle Anywhere. Everyone explained, almost by way of saying hello, how far away they are.
'We're so far away,' they kept telling me apologetically.
'Far away from what?' I'd ask, surprised, because they and I were both here, so far as it was ever possible to tell.

Jenny was in New Zealand for the International Writers' Festival (in Wellington).

Our Christchurch version isn't quite so grand, but I'm definitely looking forward to it. When I volunteered to usher (in order to gain free admittance), I thought that there would be such a queue of similar-minded volunteers that I would be assigned to one or two sessions at most. Instead I was asked to usher for four sessions. Then I bought tickets for half a dozen others - my limit given the high prices. By this time, the keynote session with Robert Fisk had sold out. So I was delighted to come home to an e-mail telling me that they had scheduled an extra session with Robert Fisk, and could I usher at that? And would I also like a free ticket to a sort of "theatrical lecture" ( a comedy) - "On the Conditions and Possibilites of Helen Clark Taking Me As Her Young Lover"?

Would I?

So, starting tomorrow evening, three and a half days of literary goodness.

For those not in the know, Helen Clark is our prime minister, soon to seek re-election for (I think) a fifth term.

And for New Zealanders abroad, do you intend to vote? This website, Every Vote Counts, has been set up to encourage you to do so.

About Town

I didn't take photos of the craft stalls at Craft 2.0, but I did take some photos of the area of the city nearby.

This is the building where the event was held - I'm not sure what the building's original purpose was, but it is now an information centre and exhibition area.



A detail of the building:



Robert Falcon Scott watches from the grassy riverside opposite. The statue is by his widow Lady Kathleen Scott. I always think it is quite appropriate that it is of icy white marble.



Spring is coming:



What is going on with blogger? I tried for 12 hours to upload the last image. Finally I quit my web browser, went back into my draft post and was able to upload the image with no problems. Can anyone explain why?

I'm glad I didn't sign up for a post every day in September, I would have been stymied already.

The Problem of Crafts

Besides meeting my daughter at the coffee and quilt shop last week, I also made time on the Saturday (that's the one just over a week ago) to attend Craft 2.0. This is an indie craft event that has been going on in Wellington for a while, every 3 months, but it was the first time it's been held in Christchurch.

I had fun looking at all the stalls. The sock monkeys particularly made me smile. Someone else had the neat idea of using old Mills and Boon books as covers for blank journals. There was handcrafted jewellery and much else. Many of the crafters also sell their work at Felt - just click if you'd like to take a look.

I can't help feeling that there's something fundamentally contradictory about craft shows like this though. I didn't take anything away except a bunch of business cards. There was a stall selling "World Sweet World" magazine which is aimed at The problem is that most of our spending is on essentials - food, transport, power, basic clothing. I love making things. If I make craft items, it is not just to get something unique, but also because I believe more than half the benefit of handcrafting is in the actual process of making - the creativity of the design decisions, the relaxation of handwork (studies show that sewing and knitting lower blood pressure), etc

Once people start to try to make a living from selling handcrafted items, all you have is an invitation to buy highly priced goods (because face it, labour in New Zealand costs a lot more than labour in China), and generally it is stuff that you don't really need. Of course there is room in our lives for a few beautiful things, just for their beauty, but if they are well-crafted and long-lasting, there's a limit to how much we can collect. I think there are way too many crafters around for the potential market (or anyway, for the size the market should be if we are to save the planet).

The sock monkeys have the same problem as the quilts I make. The pattern was originally designed during the Depression years so that mothers could make their children a toy out of old discarded socks. Now, of course, they are made of new socks, just as my quilts are made of new fabric. Sometimes I wonder why I do it. In my early quilting days, I used scraps left over from the clothes I made, but now we don't seem to make beautiful cotton dresses and shirts any more - most of the clothes sewing I do is either knit fabric (sweatshirts etc) or ball dresses (not really too many of those, but if the daughters have a special event, home sewing is the best way to get a unique dress at a reasonable price). None of those fabrics are very useful for bed quilts.

As for hand crafted journals, they seem to be everywhere these days, but I couldn't bear to use one for fear of spoiling it. The only way to get myself to write is to use basic, cheap exercise books ("notebooks" in the US, I believe). Actually, the paper in the "Mills and Boon" journals didn't look very nice to write on. Though there were some other Japanese fabric covered books that looked amazing.

There were also men's shirts selling for $240, made from vintage bed sheets. Looking at them, I don't think they were the good portions of used sheets - I'm pretty sure they were unused sheets. So why not just use them as sheets - by making shirts of them, a good portion would be wasted. Considering there seemed to be an air of environmentalism conveyed by the event, this is illogical to me.

More links:
World Sweet World magazine, an environmentally focused craft magazine who had a stall at the event
The Craft 2.0 blog (not very well spelled, but they are crafters, not writers!)

Catching Up...

Last week I didn't post much because I was busy doing interesting things. This week I didn't post much either, because I was busy doing less interesting things. Mostly, what I have been doing this week, apart from working, was putting magazines in envelopes, printing renewal notices, invoices etc, and carting box loads of magazines to the Post Office.

Now that they are nearly all mailed out, I thought I would take a break and write a blog post or two. I even took time to download last week's photos so that I could add some to my blog.

It's university holidays and my middle daughter, who went away to complete her last year of her bachelor's degree in another city, is in town. So I arranged to meet her for lunch one day at Memories Coffee and Quilt Store.



The owner of the store is Korean and makes beautiful quilts all by hand, many of which decorate the walls. She also sells fabric and all sorts of handcraft bits and pieces such as leather handles for bags. I tend not to buy fabric here. The colours of most of the fabrics on sale are rather muted, which is not what I usually go for. Interestingly, her quilts do often have brighter coloured fabrics in them, so I'm not sure why she doesn't sell any of these. There is a good range of indigo dyed Asian fabrics, though. The prices of the fabrics are quite reasonable, so I may return to buy some, since I'm thinking of trying out a more subtle colour scheme if I ever finish the current purple/fuschia/turquoise creation.



S was inspecting the detail of this quilt when I took the photo. She's carefully not looking at the camera.



This hexagon creation is stretched and framed and is not quilted at all. It takes up most of the wall of a side room which can be booked by groups who want a venue for "stitch and bitch" sessions.



A couple more quilts. I rather like the unstructured arrangement of the one on the right.

Does My Computer Have Alzheimer's?

It seems that no matter how many times I tick the "remember me" box on Google Reader and on Blogger, it still asks me to log in again every few days. I guess my computer has a short memory. (Which reminds me, it is high time I backed up my hard drive).

I find this mildly annoying. Also mildly annoying is the fact that I chose a cool user name on Blogger, and then when google took over, they insisted I use my e-mail address as my user name instead.

I haven't been blogging much, because surprisingly, I have actually been doing things this week (apart from work, laundry, cleaning etc, that is). Which gives me more to write about, but less time to write it. Further information may come in the next few days. Or it may just turn into such old news that I'll start afresh.

The Magic of Cloth

I thought I was ready to start putting my quilt blocks together, until I counted them and found I only had 40 instead of the planned 48. And I just couldn't bear the thought of putting the same fabrics together over and over. What could I do? I went shopping.

I'm trying to use up my stash really, not add to it. But I managed to find a couple of shops that sold really small pieces of fabric - in one case, the discarded samples fro the fabric companies.

I came home with a good range of purples, turquoises and pinks, given the small amount of money I spent. One piece with stylised flowers in blues and greens suddenly reminded me of a top I had in the sixties. I made that top myself, as I made all my clothes then, in the days before cheap Chinese imports. It had stylised flowers in several sizes and analogous colours of cobalt, turquoise, apple green, and violet. It was satin cotton, smooth to the touch. The remnants probably disappeared into one of my very early quilts, now long lost. Perhaps it was the "quilt" I made for my Girl Guide thrift badge - made from pockets of fabric stuffed with old nylon stockings, joined together with long strips of fabric appliqued over the joins. A pity. If I still had the scraps, they would be perfect in the current quilt.

I look at the army of people out there wearing black, and consider whether they have moments like these. Do they ever think "oh, look, black fabric. That reminds me of the black top I had when I was seventeen, and the black dress I had when I was twentyfour, and the black coat I had when I was thirty?" Somehow I don't think so.

Another Bloody Blog?

I've been trying to keep my computer time down for the last few days as I had a sore back. I sit all day at work so I took Friday off and made it a long weekend, and did lots of baking as I can do that standing up.

It seems to be a lot better now, and my boss swapped chairs around so I have a much more comfortable chair to sit in.

I have volunteered to help at the upcoming Writers Festival. This involves standing at the door taking tickets for a session or two, and has the bonus of free admission to that session. I'm always on the lookout for freebies these days, given that our income is not what it was a couple of years back. It's amazing how many ways there are to get little treats. I'll probably buy a few tickets once I know what sessions I have been allocated, especially for the poetry sessions.

One session I am not planning to attend is the session on literary blogging
- called "Not Another Bloody Blog". It's amazing how snobby writers can be about blogging. You don't for instance hear Olympic runners complaining that there are too many joggers out there. But I have heard writers express the idea that many blogs are worthless.

Well, certainly some deserve a wide audience, and others don't. But then, many are not written for a wide audience. They are written for friends and family , or just for the pleasure of writing. And probably for many more reasons besides. For instance, after our big trip last year, I recorded it day by day on my blog, with photos, mainly to fix it in my mind while it was fresh. In telling your life you get to experience it all over again - once by doing, and once by retelling. Of course, I peek at my site counter to, just to see if anyone else is reading it. And I have made some connections that I treasure through blogging, but I no longer worry about attracting dozens and dozens of readers.

It doesn't matter whether the whole world thinks my blog is "worthless", it is not worthless to me, any more than going for a walk would be - it improves my mental fitness just as walking improves my physical fitness.

Actually, many (not all) writers' blogs seem to be as boring as most of the others. "I have finished my first draft" or "my publisher has sent the cover mockups" is no more inherently interesting than "my first grandchild has arrived" or "I had scrambled eggs with chili peppers for breakfast".

A Little Craziness

Crazy weather we are having - click here

and some political craziness here

Hopefully the politicians will come to their senses and amend or repeal this legislation which seemingly puts an end to satire (how would "The Daily Show" get on if produced in New Zealand?)

Someone's a Little Confused

In New Zealand, roadside stock warning signs tend to show sheep and cattle. In Australia, they are just as likely to show kangaroos. In England and Scotland, especially in Scotland, they warn most commonly of deer or red squirrels (much rarer than the introduced grey squirrel and therefore worthy of protection). We also saw one sign which warned of badgers.

We didn't see the animals nearly as much as we saw the signs, and when we did finally spot a deer, it was in an area where there were no signs. The same happened with the squirrels. Which may just possibly explain this sign, which left us scratching our heads a little...



(Yes, it's a little blurred, since it was taken from a fast-moving car).

Carmi at Writteninc has posted the topic of Signs for his "Thematic Photographic" this week.

Wednesday Trivia

1. It's not a good idea to get baking powder in a cut. I found this out the hard way..

2. On this day in 1935, Allen Lane started British publishing house Penguin Books, "starting the paperback revolution" according to our newspaper.

He wanted to provide quality writing as cheaply as a packet of cigarettes. (Can anyone tell me what cigarettes cost these days? I have no idea.) He also wanted paperbacks to be sold not only in bookshops, but in railway stations, general stores and corner shops. Well, that has certainly happened. But I'm not sure what he'd think of the quality of books sold in those places, or in most bookshops for that matter.

In the big chains here, cookbooks and sports biographies seem to feature most prominently. And the paperbacks tend to be of the cheap thriller sort. Thank goodness for the few quality independent stores that still survive.

3. Also according to our local paper - someone has come up with the idea to put a basketball hoop on a rubbish skip. This is to be placed in an area with several fast food chains, frequented at night by youth, mostly inebriated. The idea is that they can "slam dunk their rubbish" - and that it will be attractive to pick up rubbish off the ground, if they can compete to get it through the hoop. Brilliant!

4. One of our major milk brands is running a contest in which the prize is a year's supply of low fat, high calcium milk. At least, it claims the prize is a year's supply. Then I read the fine print - "limited to 104 2 litre bottles".
In our household, we get through at least three times that much a week. When the children were younger, we got through twice as much as we do now. I'm afraid their prize (which works out at about a pint a day, a healthy amount for one person) isn't going to do much to help any household struggling with the sky rocketing prices of basic foods.

Monochrome

Over at Writteninc Carmi has taken to posting a photo theme for the week. This week's theme is monochrome.

Even though things still grow in New Zealand in winter, it seems an appropriate season for monochrome photos. Rain, bare trees, dark clouds.... yes, there is green grass (greener in winter than summer, even), and green trees, since most New Zealand natives are evergreen, but there is plenty of monochrome too.

I was about to capture a bare tree silhouetted against the sky from the supermarket carpark, when I caught sight of these trolleys. They looked a little forlorn in the rain. There wasn't too much colour in the picture, and Photoshop took care of the rest.

Book Awards

When I commented on Montana Poetry Day the other day, I didn't say that the winner of the poetry section of the New Zealand book awards was announced that day. It was Janet Charman for "Cold Snack".

I haven't yet read the book, which was out of the library last time I looked. I was surprised at the finalists, but put it down to being less familiar than I thought with the New Zealand poetry scene. It turned out I wasn't the only one.

The New Zealand Listener said:

"Everyone was so taken aback by the truncated shortlist for the fiction category.... , the three poetry finalists passed by unnoticed.... it wasn't long vefore eyebrows were being raised at the selection of Cold Snack by Janet Charman and A Long Girl Ago by Johanna Aitchison....from a field that had included much admired new collections from CK Stead...Vincent O'Sullivan...Jenny Bornholdt...and perhaps especially, Andrew Johnston."

Personally, I would add to those four Bernadette Hall with The Ponies

Anyway, Janet Charman was the eventual winner, although I was hoping it would be Fiona Farrell, the third finalist, for The Pop-Up Book of Invasions

And then there was the best first book award for poetry. The newspapers didn't bother to report this one so I had to poke around the website to find out. In previous years, there has been a shortlist for this category. This year there wasn't, and I wondered how it would work. Since one of the three poetry finalists was a first book (Johanna Aitchison's), did that mean she would be the winner? That's how it turned out for fiction - Mary McCallum for The Blue was on the short list. But the best first book for poetry went to Jessica Le Bas for Incognito.

I'm happy that she won as I have heard her read on a number of occasions, and she is a fine poet. Still, I'm a little confused that her book wasn't considered good enough to be nominated for the main award, but won over one that was. Perhaps it was a different set of judges.

It also set me wondering. I was very surprised that this was her first book, since she has been writing for a good many years. It seems that there are two sorts of poets in New Zealand - those who do all sorts of interesting and varied things in their lives (Jessica was in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s with the UN) and publish poetry later in life - and those who go straight from school to university, into the Creative Writing courses, and publish in their twenties. It seems the latter group get picked up by the university presses and publish their first books much more quickly. The non-Creative Writing course graduates have to rack up far more publications in various journals to establish their credibility before they can find a publisher willing to take them on.

I could be wrong of course, but that's my impression.

Here's a poem from Jessica - it may or may not be her best, but it's what I could find online:

Incognito my Love

Christchurch Writers Festival

It's nearly a year since our big trip to the UK, and I haven't really had a holiday since. One of my two jobs closed down for a couple of weeks over Christmas, but I worked right through at the other job.

I think that's why I was looking forward eagerly to the release of the programme for the Christchurch Writers Festival. I want some time off work, but I don't want to waste it at home the way I seem to waste my weekends these days. Supposedly, it was launched last night, with details in this morning's paper. The "details" turned out to be a decent sized article, with a listing of "highlights". We were directed to the website for the full programme. But the website said "coming soon".

I am such a patient person. I phoned the festival office, and established that programmes were in fact available at the libraries. So I collected one on the way home. (The website is now up and running. Apparently they had a few problems).

I'm about to peruse the programme more thoroughly. A couple of immediate observations:

1) The ticket prices. Way way up on what they were two years ago. Sigh. Isn't everything?

2) Poetry is definitely the poor relation. Two years ago, we had poets from several different countries - Ishle Yi Park (I'm not sure if I have the spelling correct) from New York, a poet from Chile, several from Singapore, Iggy McGovern from Ireland. Actually, it turned out it was done on the cheap. The Korean-American and the Chilean were living in New Zealand, the Irish physicist-poet was on sabbatical in Melbourne, Australia, and the four Singaporeans were sponsored by the Singapore Arts Council. Still, there was a good sprinkling of poetry from poets I hadn't heard before.

This time, most of the poets seem to be local, with a few from a little further away, but still New Zealanders. Now it's true that we tend to fall into the trap here of thinking overseas is necessarily better. The local poets are in fact very fine poets. Bernadette Hall, for instance, is a former winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. However, most of them are poets I have heard before. Novelists and non-fiction writers may be brought in from around the world especially for the festival, but poets are not. I think it's because they are just not supported by their publishers (not commercial enough?)

The upside to this is that the poetry sessions for the most part have much lower admission prices. Does this mean poets will take any opportunity to perform their work for very little reward?

Readwritepoem: Ekphrasis

Image by Rick Mobbs of Mine Enemy Grows Older

Portrait of Nanda
In an empty room, in the gathering dark
I sit in a green chair,
hands in my lap. I am still

thinking about the way that you left.
The wind and the rain blew in through the door
of the empty room, in the gathering dark.

the peach trees we planted grow by the road
where you drove away. You did not look back
at the trees, or the room where I am. Still,

I sit here, thinking about you, and the trees
which bore this summer one solitary peach.
I plucked it last night in the gathering dark

and thought of sap rising, and the veins in my body
like branching twigs, enclosing my heart
ripe like a peach. I am still

thinking of the juice of the peach,
and the worm inside, and you
far away in the gathering dark,
and like the trees, I am still.

Ekphrasis (poetry inspired by an image) for readwritepoem
I decided to make it a double challenge and write a villanelle - although I have interpreted the form rather loosely and dropped the rhyme scheme, and also repeated ends of lines rather than whole lines.

Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day in New Zealand. Which I almost forgot about, since I had to work. In some centres, they schedule readings in the evening on National Poetry Day, when those of us who work for a living can actually get to them. In Christchurch, the only people who organised anything were the university, and it was at lunchtime.

I could probably have gone if I'd remembered, except that I would have had to go by car to fit it in my lunch break, and it's really hard to find a carpark around the university in term time.

So, instead of poetry, I took photos of oil spills in the supermarket car park. I hope poetry had a good day without me.

Strange Phobias #1

Metrophobia: an irrational fear of poetry.
No, I didn't make it up.
See this poem here. (Scroll down, it's the first one below the bio).

A Sunny Interlude

This morning as I stepped out of my car where I work, I heard a bellbird singing in the nearby tree. This small native bird is not very colourful, but it's song is as beautiful as it's name implies. I couldn't help stopping for a minute or two to listen. (You can listen too, if you find the link in the sidebar of the page I have linked above - however this short clip doesn't quite do it justice).

At lunchtime I drove between jobs, stopping at the bank on the way. The edges of the panes of glass in the front windows acted as prisms, casting rainbow stripes across the pavement.

The sunny day, warm for winter, was a welcome relief after the snow, biting wind and rain, and miserable greyness we were experiencing a week ago. Which made it hard for me to act on this week's prompt at readwritepoem, which was to write a poem "celebrating" the more miserable aspects of summer.

So, I bring you an old poem from my files - one of the earliest I wrote, at the height of summer, using the prompts "river" "ice" and "drought" - hence, a mix of seasons

Drought

Here where the winter rain
froze in the cracks
and pushed until the rocks came tumbling down

Here where the spring swollen river
woth the strength of young love
swept me off my feet
and I fell into the cold, sharp shock

Here now the river has grown old
lies shrunken in a stony bed
the brown grass withered on the banks
and the rocks feverish in the hot sun

Winter Light

Chiaroscuro

Five o'clock. The bright interiors
of freight forwarders' warehouses
framed in the dusk like a Rembrandt nativity
on an old postage stamp. No camels.
No baby. Planes overhead. Men with forklifts,
ordinarily wise, load cargoes
for distant lands. A single soft flake
lands on my windscreen.
The evening's first star
grows brighter in the sky.

More light-filled poems at readwritepoem

Snow

It may be pretty but it's very cold!