Trendy But Casual

Heroics

 

Tomorrow (Sunday 10th September) I'm going to be interviewing Witi Ihimaera, Tina Makereti and Hemi Kelly at the Going West Festival in Auckland: we're talking about their recent collaborations on Black Marks on The White Page and Sleeps Standing. The latter is a novella - written in English by Ihimaera and translated into te reo Māori by Hemi Kelly - about the battle of Orakau in 1864, and the book includes historical testimony from some of the Māori who fought there.

Yesterday I realised that my story 'Heroics' - the first short story I published in New Zealand, back in 2000 - includes a section on Orakau. It was published in the journal JAAM. I didn't include it in my collection, Forbidden Cities, so these days it's even more obscure than the rest of my early work.

So here it is - very short, and in three parts. 

HEROICS

by Paula Morris

I

At Orakau we built a pa on a low hill surrounded by peach trees and fields dusty with maize. We raised high walls and dug deep trenches. Rewi led us there, and promised to lead us out.

The soldiers came before we were finished and bombarded us with their cannons and grenades. The air was filled with smoke and the sound of women wailing. The guns roared for two days, but the fortifications stood. Soldiers poured into our trenches and we picked them off like fish washed onto the beach in a storm. But they were ten times our strength and the pa was encircled.

By the third day, the water was gone. There was nothing to eat but raw kumara. We had no ammunition for our rifles except for peach-stones and pellets made of wood.

The General stopped the shooting and sent a man forward to speak to us. He sounded hoarse from the smoke and the noise of the guns. He shouted over the ramparts, telling us that the women could leave. The women chose to stay.

The General called on us all to surrender. The voice of his interpreter rose up, saying we could leave with dignity.

We chose to stay.

Rewi shouted back to him: Ka whawhai tonu ki a koe - Ake! Ake! Ake!

The General’s interpreter told the soldiers that we would fight on forever, forever, forever.

There was a lull, because we had no more bullets and the soldiers had lost spirit. They didn’t want to keep fighting because they thought the battle was won. They didn’t want to lie in the dirt for another night, or scramble into our trenches to be clubbed to death or pelted with rocks by our children.

Rewi summoned us together. He told us to leave as we had arrived, free and united. In one surge we poured through a breach in the pa and down the hill, three tribes moving as one wave to where the soldiers lay dribbled around the edge of the swamp. They watched us with open mouths before lifting their guns, as though they couldn’t believe their eyes.

Half of our people were mowed down in the fire. Shots toppled many of the women face first into the buffalo grass, their howls still swirling in the air. People fell like sticks around me. Those of us still running waded into the swamp where thickets of mangroves blocked the bullets. The spirits of the dead journeyed north to the Cape, where the oceans meet, and sprang light-hearted into the other world. The living crossed the Puniu River with Rewi and found cover in the hills.

This is how we gave up the fight without surrender. This is how we left them nothing but an empty fort and dead bodies scattered like rushes drying in the hot sun. The last thing those soldiers saw were our buttocks, black with mud, slipping from their grasp like eels through the mangroves.

II

Passengers on the ferry Kawau witnessed a daring rescue one December afternoon in 1922, when young Mr. Frank Cummings, of Mt Eden, dived overboard to save a drowning man. The incident occurred around tea time on a Friday, when the ferry, headed for Warkworth and Leigh, was packed with people returning home from Christmas shopping in Auckland.

The Leigh Scout Troop, on its way back from camp, took credit for raising the alarm when a fellow passenger, later identified as Mr. Jack Renwick, of Whangarei, plummeted into the Hauraki Gulf three hours out from Auckland.

“I heard the boys shouting and told them to put a sock in it,” said scout leader Edward Clay. “They’d been carrying on all day.”

Responding to the shout of “Man overboard,” Mr. Cummings stripped off his jacket and shoes and, with no thought for personal safety, executed a perfect dive from the Kawau’s crowded deck. He reached Mr. Renwick in half a dozen strokes and dragged him back to the ferry, where the drowning man was hauled to safety by members of the crew.

Miss Virginia Hepa, a visitor from Te Awamutu, and her cousin Tahupotiki Andrews, of no fixed abode, were riding horses down to the dock at Leigh Harbor when the Kawau pulled in.

“Didn’t see it,” she said, pulling her cardigan tight around slim shoulders. “That water must have been pretty chilly.”

Captain Jim Sinclair, skipper of the Kawau, shook Mr. Cummings’ hand after the boat docked at Leigh. “Very brave,” he said, lighting his eighteenth cigarette of the day. “I would’ve let the bugger drown.”

A rumored shark sighting near Little Barrier Island, alleged by Mrs. Beryl Gloucester, whose son Vincent recently dissected a baby hammerhead washed up on Matakana beach, was later discredited.

Mr. Renwick was neither relieved nor grateful to be saved, and was led from the scene by the Wellsford police screaming his intention of flinging himself from the nearest bluff the following Saturday. Miss Hepa, by contrast, thought Mr. Cummings looked quite dashing in his wet shirt and turn-ups, and offered him a drink from her cousin’s hip flask. Mr. Cummings declined, but boldly invited Miss Hepa to the tennis club dance next weekend, an offer she accepted with alacrity.

After three cheers and a round of “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” from onlookers, Mr. Cummings was handed his jacket and shoes, and given a ride home in the greengrocer’s van. It was only after he had a hot bath and a cup of tea that Mr. Cummings checked his jacket pockets and discovered that, at some point during the watery rescue, his wallet had been stolen.

 

III

When I was a kid, I spent every summer at my auntie’s farm. There were three cousins who lived there all year round, and the rest of us traveled up from the city in the holidays. All the boys slept in one room. The rule was first up, best dressed.

Auntie’s real husband had run off to the Waikato with a fruitpicker, but we called the man who lived there Uncle Ben. Uncle Ben had a vegetable patch, which he said was a Victory Garden, even though he only grew kumara and tomatoes. The tomato plants were always getting smashed during our cricket games. He’d chase us off into the next paddock, but we liked the back garden best for cricket; the grass was shortest, and the fence stopped the balls from bouncing into cow pats.

When he wasn’t bent double over his garden, Uncle Ben’s job was to kill chickens for meals. Tama, my eldest cousin, had to catch the chicken first. He was a rugby player and took this responsibility pretty seriously, like he was facing a scrum of Springboks instead of a yard of twittering chooks.

After Uncle Ben swung the chicken onto a pine stump and whacked off its head with an ax, he’d lose his grip on it. The chicken would slither off the block and sprint away, spurting blood and flailing its wings. Someone had to catch the chicken before it ripped itself to shreds on the fence or got so bruised it was inedible. The first summer I spent there I was only six, too small to run after it. But the next year my turn came.

“One of you boys—get a move on!” Uncle Ben shouted, wiping his ax off with a tea towel. Tama stood smirking, arms folded, propped up against the outhouse.

“Eru,” he said, gesturing towards me with his head. “If he’s not a chicken himself.”

Everyone snickered, and I felt my face sizzle. Tama thought he was pretty smart, just because he was starting grammar school after the holidays. But I wasn’t afraid of a chicken, even if it spouted blood like a killer whale. I took off after that chook as fast as I could.

Some chickens get confused and eddy around in circles; this one raced off in a straight line. It ran smack into the shed and bounced off again. The other boys howled from the back steps, telling me to head the chicken off on the far side of the shed. I panted around the back and saw the chicken slam off a fence post. One of its wings was hanging off, and it had left a bloody trail of feathers all along the barbed wire fence.

I threw myself onto it with all my might, grabbing its twitching wings with both hands. The chicken’s blood squirted up into the air. I opened my mouth to yell for Uncle Ben and got a gullet full of gore.

“Not bad,” said Tama, and helped me wash off my hands and face with the garden hose.

Nowadays I spend summer holidays in Australia, over on the Gold Coast. A few years ago, I was flying there with my family for a few weeks after Christmas. Everyone else on the plane was served Chicken Kiev for dinner, but I haven’t touched chicken for years. I’d ordered a special meal, and knew it was the right one when the steward put the tray down in front of me. On the paper someone had scrawled: “No Chook.”

 

 

Back in the COIC

The COIC = The City of Iowa City.

And that's Herky, the mascot, for those of you unfamiliar with Hawkeye lore.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m typing this post in the Java House coffee shop in downtown Iowa City – conscious that the phrase “downtown Iowa City” makes it seem a grander and more sprawling place than it is. I’m here for the next week to teach at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, to earn some money and hopefully to read some good work.

Iowa City is in sluggish summer mode right now, the campus quite deserted. The Iowa House hotel, where I’m staying, is a university-run venture in the Iowa Memorial Union, its cafes and offices closed, a dust-blown construction site outside. The building looks west over the river, towards the hospitals and big houses, and south over a small park – more of a sports field – where the sprinklers already seem defeated by browning grass. Beyond it, through gaps in the pine trees, I can spot the red-brick crenellations of the ugly building that houses the English department, where every Wednesday I used to read submissions for the Iowa Review.

My room has neither a western or southern view, by the way: it looks into the angular concrete void in the middle of the building, and if I don’t keep my blinds closed everyone else can see into my room.

It’s ten years since TM and I left Iowa City, Tom driving a huge moving truck that one of my students, the very able Joyce Turner, had to back out of our long driveway. I think it may be eight years since I was last here. Some of my friends are still here, all with children now that they didn’t have eight years ago. Many of my friends have moved on, and it’s strange to wander the grid of leafy streets, thinking of the houses where Becky and Brandon lived, or Sarah and Bob, or Tracy and Corbin, or Gallaudet and David … And our house, too, of course, on Governor Street, which looks much scruffier these days.

The big tree outside where the cardinals nested is gone now, damaged by the big tornado that crumbled the sorority house on the opposite corner. There's a satellite dish in its place now. I stood there for sometime gazing at the house, by the way, before realizing there was a youth on the porch, lolling in the hammock.

Some things change – new people, new restaurants, a ton of new construction along the highway – and some stay the same, like Prairie Lights Book Store and the gloomy caverns of the Java House. Atlas is still here, and I plan to have a mojito there some time; the sushi place where Sarah Rogers marched us weekly for early half-price dinners has gone. John's Grocery is still here, thank god.

There are some places, e.g. the Foxhead, that I’m content to gaze upon rather than enter again, even though the smoking laws have changed and they no longer pose an immediate risk of lung cancer.

Iowa City is still a real American college town, to the point of parody, almost. Sheets pinned up in windows, barbeques and bicycles in front yards, porches a jumble of found furniture. On Saturday morning I walked past one porch where an earnest guy was playing guitar, and the girl with him started singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

The Farmers’ Market is twice as big as it used to be, spilling out of the parking lot into the street now. Most of the Amish sellers are gone, replaced by sturdy young people in headscarves selling organic this and vintage that. The guy at the baked-goods stand we used to frequent remembered me – that I was a New Zealander, that we’d moved to New Orleans, that we worked at Tulane! – and promised to put some brownies aside for me next Saturday, because he’d sold out. I’d forgotten my Iowa ways, and thought the market wouldn’t open until ten AM. It opens at seven.

Among the growers selling rhubarb and kale and asparagus, there are new stands schilling organic coffee, wine, cheese, or salsa. And, reassuringly, there are still stands offering Iowa’s number one meat product, pork.

 

This week I’m teaching every afternoon, so will be spending most mornings here in the Java House, I suspect, drinking iced tea and working on my book. Some evenings I have friends to see, and I’ll have manuscripts to read as well. There are c. 1000 TV channels available on my hotel set, which I will try to resist.

Hopefully here in the COIC I can leave the stress of the past month behind me, all the racing around, the festival appearances, the marking, the bad news and nasty letters, the axes of deadlines swirling around my head. By the time here, my Rome book will be finished, and I'll be in a good frame of mind to take up the residency at the Brecht House in Denmark.

Happy to see there's a little bit of Louisiana here in Iowa City this week, too.

Resolution

New year, new intentions. Or old intentions (get more work, do more work, earn more money) dressed up in optimistic spring shades, swishing their skirts. Plus some abandoned intentions from last year, of course. My short-story-a-day promise collided with my post-surgery indolence, and that was that. I managed to scrape to 236:

226: ‘Music in the Bone’ by Tomas Mac Siomoin
227: ‘The Colonel’s Daughter’ by Robert Coover (2013)
228: ‘A Few Problems in the Day Case Unit’ by Georgina Hammick (1986)
229: ‘My Heart’ by Semezdin Mehmedinovic (2011)
230: ‘Crazy in the Stir’ by Chester B. Himes (1934)
231: ‘Before the Breakup’ by Balla (2005)
232: ‘The End of the Party’ by Graham Greene (1929)
233: ‘When the Glasses are Lost’ by Zrko Kujundziski (2011)
234: ‘The Face’ by Dragan Radulovic (2007)
235: ‘Sugar Cane’ by Derek Palacio (2013)
236:  ‘Last Summer in Marienbad’ by Kirill Kobrin (2011)

Not quite the 365 I intended, but 236 new stories isn't too bad.

Maybe that was the story of 2013 for me: not quite, but not too bad. We got to travel to Hamburg and Berlin and Rome again, to Monterrey for my nephew's wedding, and to Spain for Tom's birthday. I went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, courtesy of a Carnegie Grant, to research Jean Rhys for a play I want to write. In May I went home to New Zealand for the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, and we spent Christmas in Tom's hometown of St Louis. I attended the Man Booker Prize in London. We visited friends there, and in Wales, York, and the Cotswolds; we met up with my English cousins in Newcastle, Sheffield, York. With Tom's mother we went back to Whitby and to the Lake District. The Devlin sisters stayed with us (without parents) for the first time. Other firsts: Rievaulx Abbey, Fountains Abbey, Haddon Hall, Bakewell, the top of the Shard. We spent our anniversary in Liverpool, one of our favourite places.

In 2013 we flirted with insolvency; I flirted with cancer; we both got very cosy with the NHS. I escaped the worst colleague ever and a job that pushed me to the edge. We made the happy move to a new job in Sheffield and a flat in an old cutlery factory alongside a noisy little river. In Glasgow I hosted a baby shower for my friend Doris; in Auckland I co-hosted a bridal shower for Martha, now married to my nephew. At the University of Sheffield, Tom took (and survived) a CELTA course in a long, hot July, and I studied Spanish this autumn. We saw more plays than movies. We watched almost all of BREAKING BAD. (The last few episodes have been saved as a new year's treat.)

Two new books published: a YA novel and my first children's book. Two stories commissioned, and a few poems published. A little manuscript fixing and ghostwriting. Too many false starts, conference calls and proposals that went nowhere in particular. Rejections and acceptances. Literary festivals, school visits, and talks via Skype. Interviews with Donna Tartt (phone) and Carlos Ruiz Zafon (in person). Self-doubt, despair, bursts of enthusiasm. Stories and schemes jostling in my head.

Two sparkling friends no longer here: Sarah Mohl and Sarah Doerries. It still feels implausible and wrong to write those words. They're ahead of me now, with my cousin (and godfather) Laly Haddon, and my mother's dear friend Cron Crosby, two towering men who didn't see out 2013.

This year I wasn't planning to make any new resolutions, but today a name swirled into mind: Graham Greene. I'd like to read more of his work, and I'd like to try my hand at writing every day, as he did - though I won't stop mid-sentence when I've reached 500, his usual goal.

So that's my 2014 resolution: Graham Greene. It's all I can manage, given that ongoing resolution - write, work, earn - mentioned above.

Tom Moody and I ended 2013 by getting very dressed up in Mexico. We may not look so well-groomed in 2014, and I will almost certainly not be wearing false eyelashes again at any point. But we'll keep on being happy, and trying to make something of ourselves, in our own haphazard way.

 

David Sedaris is a Good Guy

One of my former students, Eddie Brennan, sent me this story today. Eddie was on the postgrad (MLitt) program I set up in Stirling, and is a very accomplished comedic writer. David Sedaris is one of his big heroes and influences, so recently Eddie went to hear him read at the festival in Edinburgh.

Eddie reports:

"I met David Sedaris again on Saturday and had an amazing ten-minute chat with him before his show. We were talking about the MLitt and he was really interested in it so I gave him one of my stories, Poseidon. Would you believe it, he shook my hand and thanked me for it! 

It's the last story in my dissertation and suitably crude and silly. I told him it was a sort of homage to one of his stories called Big Boy. 'Oh! That sounds fun,' he said, laughing. 'Seriously, I'll read that later.' That was 40 minutes before the show.

After his reading he always holds a Q&A session with the fans. Someone asked him if he'd learned any new interesting Edinburgh words this time in Scotland. Sedaris keeps a little notepad in his shirt pocket and he pulled it out. I nearly wet my pants when he consulted it and said, 'Yes I have. I just learned the word "jobbie!" That's a turd, right?' Jobbie was in the second line of my story! Isn't that just amazing! 

Then, when I read how he signed my book, he had written, 'Eddie, we meet again, author.' How cool is it when your hero is just actually so decent, so down to earth and so worthy of being your hero?"

I like David Sedaris.

Some new posts up on Everybody Needs Two or Three Friends, y'all. I'm much more assiduous over there.

 

It's Not About You

I need to write some sort of extended article or essay on the various uses of second-person narrative in fiction. (Yes, I really need to!) Maybe after I finish writing this novel - novels pay better than rants on point of view. But yesterday I was moved to write to the Comments editor of the Guardian about a piece on second-person in that day's paper. Though it pains me, here's the link to it.

The writer of the piece (Iowans: remember how Marilynne Robinson used the word "piece" when she didn't want to concede something was a story?) is mainly talking about blogs, but gives various examples from fiction and seems to suggest that the 'internet' is culprit for the use of second-person in stories and novels. Much as I love to blame the internet for its many crimes - like me knowing anything at all about the Kardashian family, or students being able to contact me at weekends and to address me as "hey" - I don't really think we can add use of the second-person to its list. Can't we just go back to the good old days when everyone blamed Lorrie Moore?

Anyway, here's what I wrote to the editor, for filing in the Guardian's bin:

Dear Comment Editor,

Morven Crumlish in today's paper (Saturday 6 July 2013) is making a very basic error: misreading second-person fiction. The "you" in a second-person story by, say, Junot Diaz is not supposed to be you-the-reader. It's a narrator who's talking about him- or herself, but in a way that suggests alienation from the events described, or emotional/ironic distance.

When Diaz was asked why he'd chosen second-person for his story 'Miss Lola' - published in the New Yorker last year - he explained: 'I really needed distance from this story. Every time I wrote in the first person it was just too close. Tried third person, but that flopped as well. Second person ended up being the only way to get through. I guess I wanted my narrator to be “in” the story, but also to be able to comment on his younger self a little.'

A famous example from the (pre-internet!) 80s is Jay McInerney's BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY. The opening lines are: 'You are not the kind of guy who would be  at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.'

We readers aren't supposed to think that WE are the person at a nightclub in NYC, taking vast amounts of cocaine and about to lose our job, etc. The second-person narrator is observing his own out-of-control life, unable to cope with the trauma he keeps hidden from readers for most of the book, the death of his mother.

Sure, Lorrie Moore - also famous for using the second-person before the internet 'inspired this shift in writing style' - employed it in a different way in her 1985 collection SELF-HELP: she told the Paris Review that she used 'the mock imperative of the second person' in part 'to satirize formally the idea of advice and a culture of advice.' But again, I don't think someone reading 'How to Be an Other Woman' (for example) will think it's about anyone but that character, Charlene, and her particular situation. Again, here's the opening: 'Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim’s Fifty-seventh Street window, press your face close to the glass, watch the fake velvet Hummels inside revolving around the wing tips; some white shoes, like your father wears, are propped up with garlands on a small mound of chemical snow.'

When we read stories like this, we do not have, as Morven Crumlish contends, the 'understanding that you are in the same clique as the writer.' We don't have to relate to things we're reading, or identify with characters in a story or novel. As she points out, we should not only read 'content that speaks so directly and without conflict to your own experience.' But I doubt that Junot Diaz is expecting us to live the life of a Dominican-American young man, or that his (very wide) readership is part of his 'clique.' I doubt that Lorrie Moore cares whether the reader is a woman or has even been to New York. Most fiction writers want as many readers as possible, not just readers who happen to share an age, gender or geography with a particular character. Like much good fiction, these stories bristle with vivid and particular detail, bringing into focus worlds that may be very alien - in time, place, experience - to a reader.

I can't address the 'confessional journalism' to which Morven turns in her piece, but please reassure her about the second-person narrative in fiction: it's not all about us!

Best wishes,

Paula Morris
Fiction Writer-in-Residence,
University of Sheffield

Oh yes - I invoked the job title! This always works in Britain. When I taught in Scotland, I sent a job-titled email to the Edinburgh Lit Festival, asking to chair some sessions - based on my experience at chairing writers (like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Monica Ali, Tash Aw, Peter Ho Davies, Tea Abreht, Kate Grenville, etc) in other festivals - I received ... hmm, no reply at all.

 

New Zealand in Berlin

TM and I are just back from Berlin, where I was taking part in an event called the Berlin Sofa at the English Theatre. Peter Rider, the New Zealand ambassador to Germany, invited me to join him so we could present a short program on NZ lit, with lots of readings and chat.

We divided our presentation into four sections - The Edge of the Universe; This Sporting Life; Islanders; and Flying Kiwi.

The Edge of the Universe - our unique place in the world

‘New Zealand begins with sea and ends with sea. Understand this and you begin to comprehend New Zealand and the New Zealander.’ Maurice Shadbolt

 Poems by Bill Manhire (‘Milky Way Bar’); Allen Curnow (‘House and Land’), and Denis Glover ('Home Thoughts'); part of the story ‘The Doll’s House’ by Katherine Mansfield; the final page of Making Peoples by historian James Belich; and two novel excerpts: The Matriarch by Witi Ihimaera and Tu by Patricia Grace.

This Sporting Life - our national obsession

‘Apart from history, there are only two spheres in which New Zealand has been a world superpower. One is the export of protein. The other is sport.’ James Belich

 Excerpts from two novels - The Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones and Lovelock by James McNeish, and my father's favourite poem,  ‘Referee’ by Hinemoana Baker.

Islanders - voices from the edge

“In a country inhabited for a mere one thousand years, everyone is an immigrant or the descendent of an immigrant.” Michael King

An excerpt from the novel Going West by Maurice Gee, and poems by Selina Tusitala March (‘Guys Like Gauguin’); Sonja Yelich (‘talking to a brick wall’); Tusiata Avia (‘Aunty Lapo’a calls Nafanua and talks about her holiday’); Alison Wong (‘Chinese Settlement, Arrowtown’ and ‘One Hundred Pounds’); and Karlo Mila ('Sacred Pulu').

Flying Kiwi - writers (and books) that roam

“The islands are moving.” Dylan Horrocks

Excerpts from two novels - The Conductor by Sarah Quigley and Rangatira (by me) and from the essay ‘NZ Return’ by the late, great Nigel Cox.

In addition to the readings, we showed various clips, beginning with clip of the All Blacks' haka (there was method to this madness - believe me: we wanted to talk about oral traditions, and also about exploring NZ BEYOND the All Blacks), then a short film about our books and writers made when New Zealand was invited to be 2012 Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair. At the end of the second section, just before the break - for a good deal of NZ wine - we showed an amazing clip of Jack Lovelock winning the 1500 metres and breaking the world record at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, with a commentary by Harold Abrahams. At the medal ceremony, by the way, the anthem played was God Save the King ...

During the 'pause' we played some footage from the Diversity Stage at Polyfest, so people could see the range of cultures and languages represented in Auckland high schools. You can see the 2012 performances here. At the very end of the programme, after we talked about possible futures for NZ lit, and emerging new voices. So of course we couldn't resist ending with a clip of Joshua Iosefo's 'Brown Brother' speech. You can see the original and the TV3 version on YouTube.

The event was quite a success, I think, with a good-sized audience of both native English- and German-speakers. Peter Rider was an excellent reader, and I hammed it up, as ever. Lots of audience members wanted to hang around and talk afterwards. We wanted to include more excerpts, but time was limited, of course. The audience especially liked the third section, even though there were numerous cultural references (and words from various languages) that were new to them. People were willing to make the imaginative leap, and to immerse themselves in the unexpected, the unfamiliar ... Unlike a certain profoundly ignorant Danish politician.

I loved being in Berlin. I like the way cities jolt me out of routine, the way they swarm over me with their new noises and sights and smells. (And tastes, too: let's not forget currywurst.) The picture above is us in the dome of the Reichstag. Below are a few more Berlin pictures - random, of course, as I can't seem to manage anything orderly these days.

 

Hamburg I

Last Monday I went to Hamburg for the first time, to talk to a group of journalists about New Zealand, NZ lit/writers, and numerous other topics, which may or may not have included the various international versions of NEXT TOP MODEL. (I wasn't the one who brought this up. Or was I?)

It was a warm and mostly sunny day, which was a relief after so many days/weeks of dire weather in the UK. It rains pretty much every day at the moment - not just in Glasgow, but everywhere. I flew out of Heathrow that morning in the drizzle and returned to a rain storm.

In Hamburg the lunch I was attending with the fabuous Tanea Heke took place at Au Quai down on the harbour. I only had a short time to wander around before lunch, so the pictures (below) are all taken just steps from the restaurant, or from the terrace of Au Quai. Sorry they give such an abbreviated view of the city.

I'm calling this post 'Hamburg I' because TMiddy and I had already planned a trip to Hamburg later this year, for his birthday at the end of November. Then we'll have more of a chance to explore its waterways and parks and museums, I hope, and all its Beatles-related history (TM), and all of its Weihnachtsmarkts (PM). The pieces of Hamburg I glimpsed on this trip were by turns impressive and beautiful and grand. And it wasn't raining.

 

 

This week we're back in Glasgow, and I realized that it's been c five months since I spent every day of an entire week in Glasgow, without bolting up to Stirling, or making one of my endless excursions further afield. In fact, it's Tuesday night now, and I haven't even left the house since Saturday. I keep waiting for the sun to come out, so I may be here for some time.

 

Frankfurt (I)

Earlier this week I was in Frankfurt to speak at a press conference about New Zealand's literary and cultural programme at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair (where NZ will be Guest of Honour). An impressive 120+ members of the media attended. Equally impressive: the Frankfurter Buchmesse building, a serene mix of old and new, with big windows and secret courtyards; everyone in the press conference putting up with English speeches, and asking questions in English; and us lazy English speakers getting a live translation whenever director Jurgen Boos spoke in German. (Less impressive: three people hired to dress as a Hobbit, an Elf and one other LOTR creature - not sure who insisted on their presence, but I'm sure it wasn't the Book Fair.)

Afterwards I did various interviews while everyone else enjoyed a barbeque in the sunshine. By the time I made it out into the courtyard everyone was eating these odd biscuits, which were masquerading as pavlovas:

I've been to Frankfurt a number of times in my life - at different phases of my life, I guess - and every time it seems like a completely new place to me, perhaps because I've rarely had the time to just wander around.

My first trip there was in the late 70s, with my parents and brother, when we were visiting family friends who live in nearby Offenbach. I don't remember much that was Frankfurt-specific from that trip, because we went to a number of places in Germany and my chief memories from those visits are a) placing everyone's orders at breakfast, lunch and dinner in my third-form German; b) buying gigantic grapes in a market (and eating them); and c) beginning my life-long love affair with German Christmas decorations and the shops that sell them. Did we go to the Goethehaus? I don't remember. At that point in my life I didn't realize that Goethe stayed absolutely everywhere, or that any inn that housed him for a night would nail up an historic plaque the next day. Really, you could be in Amarillo, Texas, and discover that Goethe had spent the night there once. Schiller might have popped by as well. They are the Muck and Brass of German lit.

I digress. When I was in my 20s, and a university student in England, I went back to Frankfurt with my brother and sister. (My sister was studying in Freiburg for a semester.) It was grey and cold - November or December, maybe. I have a photo of my brother standing outside Kaufhof and grinning. My sister was pregnant (with my nephew), and all she could keep down was a McDonald's filet o' fish. All WE wanted were the delicious sliced dumplings that Mrs Bauer made, remembered, with fond greediness, from our visit in 1978.

After that Frankfurt was reduced in my life to an airport I passed through while travelling on business, especially once I'd moved to the US. For a time I was working for a German company based in Munich, and as well as attending meetings there I had to go to a festival in Badenweiler in the Black Forest every year. Frankfurt was the place my bags went astray. In those days my first impression of Frankfurt airport was always the same: smoke. (You can't smoke in the airport anymore, though this didn't stop the Korean men in the immigration queue with me on Sunday buying and carrying vast quantities of duty-free cigarettes.)

When that phase of my life (happily) was over, I went back a few times to stay with my sister and her family, who were spending six months living and working there. In the summer we went to the Botanical Garden for my nephew's tenth birthday; in the winter, when my niece turned seven, we set off for Sleeping Beauty's Castle. In the weeks before Christmas we drank Gluhwein in the Weinachtsmarkt, where there were real-life miniature ponies in the carousel.

Frankfurt was my setting-off point for train trips to Prague in the summer and Italy in the winter, and the city I was delighted to see again after coming down with a nasty flu in Italy, getting stranded by a train strike, and being told, by an Italian travel agent, that I couldn't use a credit card to buy a plane ticket back.

Frankfurt was a place of calm and order after the chaos of that particular trip. I was so happy to see my brother-in-law and nephew waiting for me at the airport, and to go home to the cheery comfort of their one-bedroom, seventeenth-floor flat. My sister was conducting an experiment into how many visiting friends could be squeezed in for an overnight stay. I think the most at any one time was four adults and four children, with my poor nephew in the hallway behind the front door. Once when I was there, two people - New Zealanders, needless to say - were sleeping outside on the small terrace. When the landlady came around, we tried to pretend everyone had just dropped in for a cup of tea.

Back then TMiddy was a boyfriend rather than a husband (or indentured servant, as he would no doubt say), so he didn't come to Frankfurt with me. Whenever we got stuck playing 'Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?' we would ring him, until he found out his phone bill was out of control and had to throw himself on the mercy of AT&T.

His first visit to Frankfurt was just last year: we flew there to meet my niece, who was studying in Heidelberg. Another birthday: this time, her 20th. (It felt like one minute since we were driving off to Sleeping Beauty's Castle in Sababurg for her seventh birthday: now we were driving to Zurich to visit friends, and she was more keen on a Zara gift voucher than Barbie's Vet Office.) TM's only interaction with a Frankfurter, aside from the guy at the rental car desk, was a typical encounter for us at the end of a trip when we're trying to return the car. Because we can never find a petrol station nearby, we end up driving too far into the airport; getting ensnared in its one-way system; finding ourselves snagged in traffic or trapped by barriers or herded into a carpark; and relying on the kindness of a stranger (usually uniformed) to point us in the right direction and let us off whatever fee we'd incurred by driving into some security zone. Frankfurt was no exception, but the difference was the perfect English of the uniformed stranger.

Visiting Frankfurt this week felt odd, in part because I stayed at a hotel rather than with family or friends, and in part because I was here for the first time as a writer, getting the chance to talk about my own books rather than coming to Germany to sell other people's creative work. Euro 2012 is going on right now, so the day I arrived, Diana (my minder - you can see her in the 'beer' picture below) and I wandered the streets, looking for a place to sit outside and watch that night's game. Every bar and restaurant had multiple TV screens, so we were just trying to secure a decent view. We found somewhere in the end - a place to sit in the street, cheer for Germany and eat currywurst. And, of course, to inhale vast amounts of smoke from everyone sitting around us. The airport may have banned them, but German smokers persevere.

The pictures below are Frankfurt, or a very small sliver of it, over two sunny days in June 2012, when Germany beat Denmark and all was well with the world. I'm looking forward to coming back in October for six days during the Book Fair, and for seeing and doing much more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RANGATIRA: the German cover

Here's another new book cover to reveal: this time it's the German-language edition of RANGATIRA, which will be published in hard-cover by Walde+Graf this September. Very excited about this, as you can imagine, and about the upcoming trips to Germany this summer. (TM and I planning our Goethe/Schiller double act.) Also excited to be writing a "roman" ... sounds so much grander than "novel."

 

The Scudder Road Circus goes to Edinburgh

Don't get excited: the Scudder Road Circus & Literary Journal isn't performing at the Edinburgh Festival this year. Transporting all the animals and printing presses on the train from Glasgow would be complicated, and Edinburgh is very crowded in August, with little room for us to unfold the Big Top. It's hard enough for TMiddy and me to wrangle ourselves, anyway, especially with the weather this changeable. But a visit to the Fringe Festival seemed like an essential office outing, so off we ventured yesterday morning to the Far East.

It's less than an hour on the train to Edinburgh, but over there it's a different world, really. The train station is crammed with tourists. The streets are lined with cashmere-and-kilt shops. The bagpipe buskers play 'Scotland the Brave', not 'We Will Rock You' as they do in Glasgow. "Now I feel like we're in Scotland," TM observes. He foolishly draws my attention to a commemmorative Princess Diana tartan, and then manhandles me down the street before I have time to distract myself with royalist tat. We don't have time for Scotland right now: we need to collect our booked tickets - for five shows - and find the first venue. As it takes us fifteen minutes just to find the right way out of Waverley Station, we're already running late. (I've slipped into present tense, I know. It makes the whole day seem more dramatic.)

Picking up the tickets at the Fringe Festival Office is also complicated, because much of the Royal Mile is thronged with desperate people brandishing flyers, trying to drum up audiences for their shows. This is necessary, because there are too many shows. Evidence:

Many of these show-hawkers are in costume and/or aged 18. If they're not shoving flyers at you or shouting FREE SHOW! or TWO-FOR-ONE! or FOUR STARS!, they're dancing around on makeshift stages, waiting to dance around on makeshift stages, attempting to out-bill-sticker everyone else, or handing out paper masks (that may or may not be ironic) to a dubious TMiddy.

We pick up our tickets (tip: book online in advance, so you don't have to stand in the endless queue) and try to make sense of the venue map. It's hard to do this when you're being accosted by people wanting to know if you would like to see a great/free/four-star show that day, or if you would like to buy a copy of the Scotsman and get a free I Heart Edinburgh bag.

We only have four different locations to deal with today for the five shows, so it's not as bad as it could be. The tightest change-over time is 15 minutes. I've picked our shows based on various strict criteria. Anything we see today must be: a) recommended by my friend Deborah Keyser, who comes here every year for ten days, seeing six shows a day, so she can book acts for theatres and arts centres in Wales; OR b) randomly selected because it sounds sort of interesting.

 

Ever since I spent an evening at the Osmond Family Theater in Branson, Missouri (in 1998, while travelling to every place Laura Ingalls Wilder ever lived), I have appreciated the power and time-saving efficiency of the medley. So the first show of the day is a medley, of sorts - Mervyn Stutter's Pick of the Fringe. This show runs every day for ninety minutes, and seven or eight acts get a chance to do a few songs/dances/jokes and promote their own gig. Every day the show is different. As we're not British, we haven't heard of Mervyn Stutter, but apparently he is the Comedy Voice of the Baby Boom Generation. He wears a pink suit with a yellow trim. ('Sounds awful,' as my mother would say.) This get-up reminds me of a black pencil skirt festooned with pink, turquoise and yellow polka dots, owned and loved by me c 1980/81. I wore it (with a black leotard) to see Cheap Trick at the Auckland Town Hall.

(I can't say any of this to TMiddy, because he grows enraged at the fashion/musical taste of my formative years. In 1981 while I was skulking around West Auckland trying to look New Wave, he was living in New York, allegedly dancing with Bianca Jagger at Studio 54, dropping by Elaine's for cocktails with Woody Allen, and listening to Beethoven and the Clash.)

Mervyn Stutter, who been doing this show for 20 years, hands out 'I Saw Merv in 92' to anyone claiming to have been there back in the day. He tells us that he and his team of researchers have seen loads of shows and carefully selected acts "so you don't pay tenners for turkeys." He also tells us that today is the first time ever, in 20 years, that he's sold out this venue. (We're in Beyond in the Pleasance Courtyard, which I think seats around 400 people.) Courtesy of Mervyn, we see some numbers from the musical APPLY WITHIN ("the first time I've ever heard the word 'fart' in a musical!" snorts Merv); comedian Mark Olver selling his show OLVER: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, which promises, he says, "actual violence"; an amazing and sinister dance excerpt from PINOCCHIO: A FANTASY OF PLEASURES by Company XIV from New York; the first seven minutes of the play SOLD - seven minutes which run through the entire history of slavery; some amiable nonsense from the FITZROVIA RADIO HOUR; comedian Steve Hall with tales of man-hair from his show VERY STILL LIFE; and a crowd-pleasing, wide-smiling a capella group from South Africa, SOWETO ENTSHA.

On the way out of the theatre, all the performers are waiting, in a reception line from which there is no escape, to smile in sweaty exhaustion and hand us flyers. (This is especially impressive in the case of the APPLY WITHIN cast: they left Mervyn's stage to perform their entire show at another venue, racing back just in time for the flyer-shove.)

The other shows we see are TOM BELL BEGINS at the Tron; CHRISTMAS FOR TWO: FRIENDS WITH YOU at the Caves; NEW ART CLUB: QUIET ACT OF DESTRUCTION at the Bosco Theater @ Assembly George Square; and MATT GREEN: TOO MUCH INFORMATION back at Pleasance.

Matt Green is funny, and gets a good reception from the audience (a full-house, albeit a small venue). He is probably the most slick and conventional of the comedians we see. Christmas for Two is a double-act, Sarah Campbell and Amy Hoggart, and there isn't a whole lot of atmosphere at their show - not really their fault. Sketch comedy in the afternoon, in front of an audience of 20 or so ... No wonder the performers are clapping themselves at the end of each sketch, just to give us all the idea. The sketches are well-acted, I think, but not funny enough, and not as weird as advertised.

More rollicking fun is to be had at New Art Club's show at the Bosco Theatre. This is a Deborah Keyser recommendation, and an excellent one. There's shouting, dancing, a tug of war. Even TMiddy joins in the spirit of audience participation. It's easy when audience participation = a massive bread-throwing fight,us making animal noises (mainly owls and stags), and someone made to dress up as a wizard/badger. There's also a re-enactment of one of my favourite Morecombe and Wise sketches. We've already booked tickets for TM to go again later in the month when his brother visits from the US.

All comedy's an acquired taste, of course. Two people march out of New Art Club after ten minutes, looking grim-faced with disapproval. As we're leaving at the end, I overhear two sulky youths with Arctic Monkey haircuts.

Monkey 1: So, did you like it?

Monkey 2: No, not really.

They exchange pained looks. Maybe we Scudder Road Circus-ites enjoy the show because the Bosco Theater makes us nostalgic for a big-top tent of our own.

Nobody walks out of Tom Bell's show, but some of the c. 15 people there look very unhappy. I glance over a few times at a stony-faced older couple, for whom the act apparently is torture. On the way out, another couple apologises to the man they brought along. 'So sorry!' they groan, as though we've all just endured a nightmare.

I, however, spend much of the show crying with laughter. Tom Bell is hilarious. He looks like the weird nephew of Keats and Rick from The Young Ones. Although before the show, while arranging the chairs, he tells us "this is a friendly show," there's an anxious edge to it, the feeling that it might all implode and have to be abandoned at any minute. His humour is very, very silly, which is the highest possible accolade from the Scudder Road Circus. Highlights: kitten falling asleep on bookcase; Kegworth; other fish in the sea; cat with ruff; deodorant. (The story that involves the cat with the ruff is over-elaborate and stupid, but very funny.)

The show is a bit of a mess: there's a lot stuffed into an hour, including a couple of sort-of songs, and it isn't clear if the Neptune wardrobe malfunction is planned or not. (Tom's laptop running out of power is clearly not planned, but much funnier.) But weird, silly, edgy, surreal messiness is exactly what we're hoping to see at the Fringe. The show is at 3:40 PM every day at bar downstairs at the Tron - entrance on Blair Street. Don't get confused as we did and wander around upstairs, clutching your tickets and looking pathetic.

Tom Bell's show is also highly educational. I am now a convert to the delights of LOVE IT! magazine. Today I handed over 68 pence at W.H. Smith on Sauchiehall Street, and brought my own copy home. At the moment, when not out and about on important Scudder Road Circus business, I am working on the sequel to RUINED (referred to by TMiddy as either EVEN MORE RUINED or RUINED 2: RETURN TO NEW ORLEANS. It is called neither of those things.) But occasionally I need a break from artistic endeavour. Evidence:

And yes, that is a coyote on top of the record player.

Meanwhile, I'm sad to say, London is burning. Spending a day at the Edinburgh Festival, or escaping into the dreamworld of LOVE IT, it's easy to forget about the bad things happening down there and in other English cities. When we got back from Edinburgh last night, and caught a taxi home, the streets of Glasgow seemed eerily quiet compared with the violence going on elsewhere. I hope all our friends in London are safe from harm. We live in strange times.