Craig Cliff's Blog, page 21

All that lofty stuff: a chat with Lawrence Patchett

Lawrence Patchett’s debut short story collection, I Got His Blood on Me, was launched earlier this month. I first came across Lawrence’s writing when he won the ‘over 10,000 words’ category of The Long and the Short of It competition in 2011. His winning story, ‘The Road to Tokomairiro’, is in this collection, along with eleven other stories that feature ghosts, shipwrecks, big game fishing and kicking a ball around at the park. Laurence Fearnley sums it up pretty well on the back cover when she calls it, “a rugged and haunting collection”.
Over the past few days I’ve been firing questions to Lawrence via email and he has graciously responded.
The following conversation is the sixth in my occasional series of chats with newish Kiwi short story writers (see also: Tina Makereti, Pip Adam, Sue Orr, Anna Taylor and Breton Dukes).
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CC: A lot of your stories begin – on the page at least – with plot. In the title story, which opens the collection, the narrator finds an injured man on the side of the road with a musket and other items that suggest he might be from another time. In the following story, ‘The Pathway’, we learn in the first paragraph that a missionary has drowned while trying to cross a river on horseback. When you start a new story, do you start with these events in mind, or is the starting point somewhere else?
LP: I like your distinction between the story on the page, and the real beginning of the project, way back at draft zero. There’s a big distance between those two points! At the real beginning, when I’m first working on a story, it always starts with character, someone who’s been suggested to me by a real person in a historical book or photograph or whatever, or someone completely invented. Often it’s a mixture of the two. That character lives with me for a bit before I can find an incident—a bloody crisis, most likely!—that will push them into some pretty extreme stress.
When it comes to putting the story on the page, I like to get straight into it, without any throat-clearing. I want to grip the reader right from the start, so often I go straight to that crisis or central conflict—not all the time, but often it seems to work out that way.

I admire other writers who can do it all sorts of different ways, like opening with that more subtle and symphonic sort of sound, but still hooking the reader in. You know what I mean? Maybe that’s what Alice Munro does. Or like some of those Owen Marshall stories in The Divided World, or the start of a Richard Ford novel, maybe. I’d love to be able to do that at the start of a story, without losing the reader. Maybe with a bit more practice, eh?

CC: Tell me about it. The path to a finished story is littered with the scrunched balls of failed symphonic openings.

That’s not to say your openings are plain. There are some great, loaded first sentences: “The man bled on the motorway.” “We carried no guns.” “Hazel ran into the bunkhouse with her gun drawn.” Were you conscious of the need to hook your readers in because of the longer-than-normal length of many of these stories? What are some of the differences between a 3,000 word story and a 10,000 word one?

LP: Thanks—yeah, I was definitely aware of that. You have to hook them immediately into a big story, something that will be a good reward for the bigger chunk of reading time and attention. Around this time I remember reading some bedtime stories to my nephew, and I noticed how the best stories took you right into the story’s central problem in the first sentence—and actively, as well. No messing.

One of the big differences with a longer story is that you can push your character so much further—and, in fact, you’re obligated to. There’s no hiding. This means that in a longer story you can’t opt for that reticence you can sometimes get away with in shorter stories—you know, where the character begins to see the massive problem in their lives or themselves, and just backs away from it. That’s what my stories used to do, anyway. In a long story you’ve got to force them to confront it and articulate it and own it, and all that difficult stuff.

CC: It seems as if the New Zealand novel has become obsessed with the past in recent years. As The Earth Turns Silver, The Larnachs, Wulf, Rangatira, The Open World, The Parihaka Woman — they’ve all had their own successes. In terms of historical short stories, however, it’s been slimmer pickings. Apart from a cluster of stories in Fiona Kidman’s The Trouble With Fire, I can’t think of any other recent collections that tackle New Zealand history. What are some of the joys and frustrations of writing historical short stories?
LP: I think I can answer this question by saying that I don’t really think of them as historical short stories, because that’s a direct route to a whole lot of frustrations! I try to think of them more as stories that interact with the past, or ask questions about it, or something. Otherwise I get all tangled up in the historical stuff—what are my rights here, what would this real person think about their portrayal, etc. I try to break those reader expectations about the ‘historical’ element right away. That’s why there are all those ghosts and out-of-time experiences and holograms and stuff—they’re partly about disrupting that idea of a transparent window on to the past. Sorry to get all stuffy about a categorisation thing, but I think it’s a way of answering the question, because if you set out to write a historical short story I reckon you’re going to run into trouble, whereas if you just try to write a story to explore something that interests you, it will go better. That’s the way it works for me anyway!
Apart from that, I think the joys and frustrations are the same—i.e., it’s bloody hard until you get to about Draft No. 9, and then it gets clearer and easier! Short stories are so cool because you can do all sorts of structures and voices, from a one-page vignette type thing up to a really long adventure yarn, so it can accommodate the rich, big world you sometimes need for historical settings, or a really spare and minimal number. But I do love that idea of pushing a huge story or problem through a small narrative frame, and somehow stories drawn from history lend themselves to that well.

That was one of the joys of it, for me, trying out those different structures and techniques and noises. I remember you saying one time that you like it when short story writers go for diversity and variety, and I’m starting to see what you mean now. I hope I’m not misquoting you there. Certainly that’s one of the things I was struck by in A Man Melting—that versatility and variety.

CC: That certainly sounds like something I would say. I reckon you tick the diversity and variety boxes in your collection. There’s the internal variety — different voices, different times — but I also felt like it was a different kind of New Zealand book. It seems you are interested in a different slice of New Zealand history than the novelists mentioned above. A woman in a flowing dress — the cover image du jour — just wouldn’t work on the front of I Got His Blood on Me. Did you select the particular historical moments or characters in your stories because they weren’t being written about?

LP: Ha! Yes, it’s hard to imagine that on the cover of this book. In terms of the subject matter, I think I just went to what interested me. I was really keen on adventure stories and frontier stories when I was young, so I was trying to capture some of the feel of that gripping adventure yarn, but making it go a bit deeper in terms of character. I’ve always been right into New Zealand history, and around the time of the stories I was thinking about the way we use it—and misuse it!—and I think that comes through in the book. But all your preoccupations get in there, eh—what I mean is, all these characters have to think about my ideas on sport, and heroism, and families, as well as all that lofty stuff.
What you said earlier about the growth in historical fiction is really interesting. I’ve read two of the novels you mention, Wulf and Rangatira, and I absolutely loved them. Obviously the techniques and scope are different, but I think that in one way those books are doing something similar. Wulf especially seemed to raise heaps of questions about our fascination with the stories and people of the past, and how we make them up and reshape them and use them. Great books.
CC: I want to ask you now about your story ‘My Brother’s Blood’, which is about a religious order that, among other things, tries to thwart the activities of sealers. I’d never heard of such an order, but it feels utterly convincing within the confines of the story. Is the order your own invention? How different was the approach you took to writing ‘My Brother’s Blood’ to, say, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, which features future Prime Minister Richard Seddon among the gold miners on the West Coast?

LP: Awesome! I love hearing about people’s reactions to that story. Yes, the Order was entirely invented and in fact that story incorporates several big and deliberate anachronisms, setting a religious group that never existed in a town that wasn’t established yet (Bluff). I was trying to see if I could write against the established historical story that we all know of that time—you know, the sealers arrived early and finished off the seals really quickly—and persuade readers that instead a better reality might have existed. It was fun!

In that sense ‘My Brother’s Blood’ was considerably different from the Seddon story, which looked at the early life of Dick Seddon as I imagined someone like him might have been. But in a funny way it was the same approach in both stories, because in both cases you have to just use the authority of story-telling to convince people of the plausibility of those characters and events.

CC: There’s a lot of the present in this collection, of course, though it often rubs shoulders with the past. We have a council clerk confronted by the ghost of Maud Pember Reeves, a retrenched civil servant dealing with a time traveller, and a ‘family historian’ confronting a possible relation. All of these characters seem to lionise the past, to look upon it as a time of greater dignity or higher adventure. An easy sentiment for any desk-bound employee to share. But there’s an interesting scene towards the end of one of the purely historical set-totally-in-the-past stories, ‘A Hesitant Man’, where the narrator, a man who has survived the 1909 wreck of the Penguin talks with one of the men from Terawhiti Station who helped in the rescue efforts. The narrator says he’s an under-clerk in a large office. ‘I thought it would be obvious, out there at the rescue.’ ‘No,’ the other man replies, ‘nothing like that’. I wonder if you could talk a bit about this story and how it relates to the other desk-bound men in your collection?

LP: Wow, that’s a great insight into those characters. I was waffling on earlier about heroism, and this is one of the stories that obsesses over that question of how we can be heroic. It was the anniversary of the Wahine disaster and I was trying to imagine that experience, and how you would react appropriately. I mean, how could you react appropriately? It’s impossible. I wanted a really ordinary, humble guy to have to confront that experience and those questions, and argue them out with himself and someone else.

In terms of the other desk-bound men, I think you put your finger right on it—it’s looking again at how we devour the stories and people of the past and get all possessive about them, and make them mean what we want them to, according to the demands of our lives now. I was just trying to play around with that a bit, and with other ideas of appropriation, plus I wanted to think about the recession and the nastiness that enabled to happen in people’s lives. Of course, redundancy is another kind of a crisis that characters have to react and adapt to, and that brings in the aspect of heroism and endurance again, I guess, or maybe just rage and confusion—I don’t know!

CC: At your book launch, Fergus Barrowman claimed the credit for introducing you to the American short story writer Jim Shepard. I’ve only read his 2011 collection, You Think That’s Bad, (which you’ve written about on your blog), but I can see some connections. Even in a story like ‘Minotaur’, which is about a man who works on top secret military technologies — so it’s very contemporary, a long way from muskets and six-shooters — there are those elements of masculinity, danger and murkiness (his friend has gone even deeper underground and can’t be reached). Do you have a favourite Shepard collection? Any other writers that you reckon people interested in short stories should read?
LP: Yeah, I owe Fergus for that one! I think I’d go for Love and Hydrogen, for the sheer variety and chutzpah, with Like You’d Understand Anyway a close second. Shepard is so great because he can write a deeply entertaining story about anything at all: Cuban baseball, mountaineering, female gun maniacs, and (especially) male despair. Plus he’s got a great moustache.

Otherwise, my reading veers all over the place at the moment, from kids’ adventure stories right through to speculative stuff, but around this time I do remember that I was reading Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower and Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace. Both writers were recommended to me by Pip Adam, who has the best reading tips. And they range all over the place, too, in terms of their subject matter, with Viking raids and LBJ and crazy rural types. It’s like someone has said to those guys ‘I bet you couldn’t write a story about XYZ’ and they’ve gone ‘Screw you—watch this!’ I love that.
CC: What can readers expect from you next?

LP: Well, for quite a while I’ve been working on this post-apocalyptic sort of short story about aliens and feral cats and a journey. It’s not finished yet but obviously when it’s done it’ll be a sweeping epic that will capture all of human experience and endeavour, etc etc, and will put an end to all my other stories, etc, etc. So, as you can see, that story’s broken and can’t be fixed, and it will probably end up as compost.

Apart from that, I’d love to work on something bigger but I don’t want to rush it, you know? I think it will be better to wait for the right story to come along.

CC: Well, whatever happens, I hope I get to read your aliens + feral cats + journey story some day. Thanks for taking to time to chat.

A YouTube playlist for THE NOVEL

I’m not gonna give anything away plot-wise, just post YouTube clips about some things that feature in my novel-set-in-the-past (publication date: some time in 2013).

Mannequins

I think we can agree mannequins can be scary. There are a lot of images of scary mannequins on the internet. I prefer to stand on the other side of the uncanny valley and consider what happens when mannequins achieve their aim of being alluring and seductive, rather than when they fall short.

But there’re interesting in other ways too. Like this robotic mannequin from Estonia.


(I also love/hate the way the Aussie anchorperson says the ‘qu’ in mannequin, and says Fits Me, with which is how Australians say TradeMe).

Albatross

Plenty of David Attenborough-y clips to chose from, but why go past Monty Python?

(Besides, you've probably seen my albatross photos already.)


Strongmen
I’m not going leftfield this time. Here’s Eugen Sandow, the dude who figured out how build a commercial empire from a decent set of pecs and, some say, invented body-building in the process. Here he is in an 1894 Souvenir Strip for the Edison Kinetoscope (he was pals with Thomas Edison – don’t hate him for it).


Clipper ships and figurehead carvers
This clip wasn’t around when I first started researching, but it shows a lot of different figureheads which were housed inside the Cutty Sark, the most famous tea clipper, prior to the fire in 2007. The Cutty Sark re-opened after extensive renonvations on 25 April this year. Anyone been? Would love to take a keek nice time I’m in that hemisphere.
NB: You’re liable to be lulled to sleep by the music (and I’m guessing your less-than-obsessive interest in figureheads.


... and the inevitable shipwreck
Because no playlist would be complete without the Tragically Hip, here’s them performing ‘Nautical Disaster’ on Saturday Night Live in 1995:

(Bonus points for the young Gord Downie looking a lot like Sheldon Cooper, if he stood up from the keyboard and sang CanRock)

Bloody good / Holy morality Batman / Despondency

There will be blood



Tonight is the launch of Lawrence Patchett's short story collection, I got his blood on me. (6pm at Unity Books, Wellington, if you wanted to pop along.)

I've just finished the book: it's bloody, ballsy, smart, experimental, reassured. I will post an interview with Lawrence (like these ones: Tina Makereti, Pip Adam, Sue Orr, Anna Taylor, Breton Dukes) in due course.

Until then, here's a listening suggestion for when you read the book:


Morality Play
I don't like to use flash photography on wildlife. I don't know if there's any evidence that it does them any harm (probably depends on the creature), but it seems wrong.
Sometimes, however, I have my camera on the wrong setting and I'll flash an unsuspecting bird. This happened the other day at Karori sanctuary. My camera was set to 'macro' (which is next to 'action', my default bird-snapping setting since they move so frequently and so swiftly) and it flashed, though I didn't notice the first time, so I took another.


When I looked at the second photo, I noticed how great the colours were and how crisp the robin looked, then I twigged.
Sadly the non-flash photos didn't turn out at all. To further muddy my moral waters, the robin didn't seem blinded, offended or put-off by the flashes, even coming closer to me. I know it was just after the grubs my footsteps were rustling up, but it seemed more than willing to put up with the paparazzi treatment to get a feed.

I like taking photos of birds because a) I like being in the bush (even when it's a gated sanctuary) a) I like observing birds c) I like the challenge of capturing birds on film jpeg, which is a mostly down to good luck rather than technique. But I don't want the drive to take better photos to crowd out the birds and the bush.

Even if the bird doesn't care about the flash, I do. I think.


Out there / Oh dear


My coterie of trusted readers currently have 70,000 words of THE NOVEL to gnash, pooh-pooh and dismantle as they please. All comments and criticism will be received with open ears on 24 June.

I still have several chapters to write to finish the beast off. (As you might surmise, I'm a bit distracted today, blogging about nothing-much and all). But it's getting there, despite this latest wade through the slough of despond. Sample thoughts: It just feels like a pile of words. People will think it's for children. I can't write for tuppence. Why is Part Three so fricken loooong? Two years for this? Etc.

But, as we sang at end of year assemblies in high school: Nihil bone sine labore.

Some thoughts on The Marriage Plot

Billboard via Village VoicePlots Familiar

I recently consumed the audiobook version of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. I found myself popping my iPod on while doing the dishes or watering the garden, not just during my workday commute, which is always a good sign for my level of engagement with a book.

For the first time in a while, the American Contemporary Social Realist Novel felt like a genre, and I don’t mean that disparagingly: it felt snug and comforting. Here was the entire spectrum of middle class white college kids in the early eighties (so not much of a spectrum, really) talking about Victorian novelists and literary theory and religion (at other times, the narrator quotes long passages from books on these topics).

The Marriage Plot is also a campus novel and, funnily enough, a marriage plot novel – but despite all the familiarity, it is compelling and absorbing and somehow fresh.

Will this be the Eugenides book  people will be talking about in twenty-five years? Hmm, probably not. Unless Sofia Coppola turns into a film (I don’t think it’d work to well in that medium, so even that mightn't work).


The Possibility That Dare Not Speaks Its Name

Via Guardian, photo: Mel Evans/APAt the end of the audiobook there’s a brief interview with Eugenides, which I think is a great idea and should happen more often. The interviewer asks Eugenides if he could ever see himself returning to these characters as Updike did with his Rabbit books.

Until this point (I’d only just finished the novel, so it’s not like I’d had much time to mull it over) I hadn’t considered the fact the ending was a good set up for a sequel (however icky sequels might be). The ending felt complete and satisfying in its way (partly because it wasn’t satisfying in a predicable, romantic sense – without wanting to give too much away) but it could totally be the first book in a series.

Thankfully, The Marriage Plot doesn’t feel like the start of a franchise – it’s too myopic, too whole, to entertain such thoughts. But, yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if Eugenides returns to these characters in thirty years (at which point the story would be set in 2012, so the characters will probably spend all their time reading blogs and tweeting…)


The Arbitrary Reader



Because I was listening to The Marriage Plot over the same stretch of days that I was reading Emily Perkins’ The Forrests (as a paper book), it’s only natural that I began to draw comparisons between the two books. Add to this the fact that Perkins and Eugenides appeared together at the Auckland Writers Festival for a session on ‘The Future of the Novel’, and it seems irresistible to compare and contrast.

In a few key ways, you’d be hard pressed to find two more different takes on the contemporary novel. The Forrests covers the Dorothy Forrest’s life from childhood to very old age, ranging from the 1970s to some time in the near future. The Marriage Plot mostly takes place in 1982, moving back and forward a little to tell the main characters' back stories, but it’s range is hyper-limited compared to Perkins’ novel. Also, while time marches relentlessly on in The Forrests, single events are returned to in different The Marriage Plot's chapters to show things from a different character’s perspective. This might be less like how we experience our own lives, but it's something we're used to in books and can't help but make a reader feel a tad empowered.

Romance and depression (specifically manic depression) are brought to the fore in Eugenides’ novel, not just through the action presented and the characters’ dialogue, but also via excerpts from other works. The Forrests features more marriages and just as many unrequited loves as The Marriage Plot, but that all takes place off stage, just as the depression that characters descend in and out of is hinted at through their actions rather than a discussion of their brain chemistry.

And while reviewers have harkened back to Virginia Woolf with reference to The Forrests, The Marriage Plot is just as retro, though its forebears are, unsurprisingly, the marriage novels of Austen, Tolstoy and Henry James. It is no surprise, then, that the novels are so different, and why the question of THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL is a kinda strange thing for these writers to talk about.


But which did you prefer?

Okay, pushy interlocutor, I’ll bite. I liked The Marriage Plot more, though I think it is the less ambitious book. This is very strange for me, as I tend to be very forgiving of ambitious books. (In my lighter moods I forgive my own terrible prose and cardboard characters because of the ambition that led me down that particular rabbit hole.)

I think it comes down to a couple of basic things: structure and voice.

The Marriage Plot deploys the classic love triange plot and matches it with a tertiary structure where each character gets serious page-time as the perspective character. It’s not perfect structurally. There are a few slips in perspective, when are not looking over the shoulder of any of our three protagonists, eg the phone call between Leonard and Madeleine’s mothers. And the triangle construction fails to achieve true balance: there’s a lot of Maddy and Leonard in the same scene (from either M or L’s perspective, and some events from both), while Mitchell spends a lot of time alone, and therefore gets less screen time, even if he gets the same amount of pages from his perspective… (actually, we probably get more from his than from Leonard’s).

And then there’s voice. Eugenides’ narrator was just more engaging that Perkins’. He (I think of the narrator as a he, probably because a dude wrote the book and a dude read the audiobook) has done the hard work of figuring out what's important and is there to drag you along through the maze. Perkins' narrator is much more hands off. You have to figure why things are important, where we are, sometimes who we're even following at the time -- clearly this is a more ambitious decision, and it has it's own rewards. But for pure reading pleasure, gimme the Eugenides.

(I was pretty convinced about my position before I tried to put it into words. Now, I suspect my views will get blurrier with time. I might even disown what I've said above. So be it.)

Spotify: I'm sold (on the free version)

Days of the New

Back in November 2010 I wrote a column about the theory that most people stop buying music by new artists by the age of 26 (at the time I was 27; cue chin-on-hand, watery-eyed reminiscence about fleeting youth). It certainly rang true for me:

When I was 25 I was still seeking out new-to-me artists and buying their music. That year I got into bands like Beirut, The National, Shearwater, Elbow and Wintersleep. I know because I tracked my listening habits on the website Last.fm. When I went back to Last.fm today I discovered I hadn't logged in since October 2009, which says something in itself about my waning status as a music aficionado.

I vowed to try a bit harder and got lots of recommendations from readers about what to listen to. I wrote a follow-up a few months later about my discoveries (not online unfortunately), but it took time and energy to figure out what I should be listening to and get a hold of it in ways that balanced my conscience and my finances.
About twelve months ago I got back in the habit of borrowing CDs from the Wellington City Library. For $1 you can listen to an album for a week – enough time to know if it’s worth investing more in the artist in question. And searching through the racks for new discoveries / re-discoveries will always feel like the ‘right way’ to discover music after all those hours spent in CD stores in my youth.
And then, eight days ago, Spotify launched in New Zealand. I signed up as soon as I heard the news and I haven’t looked back.
What is Spotify?
It’s a music streaming service that offers over 16 million tracks for free, if you’re willing to put up with a bit of advertising (one or two audio spots every few songs and some banner ads). You can chose to pay $7.49/month to go without the ads, or $12.99/month for the Premium service which offers a higher bitrate for audiophiles and the ability to listen on a variety of portable devices (more on this later). 
You automatically get 48 hours as Premium user when you sign up, then get 14 days to sign up for a further 30 days of free Premium, which is nice. I've put off using my free 30 days of Premium so I can get a sense of what the free version is like. At this stage the ads aren’t too annoying. They’re mostly about different features of Spotify and related apps, so it’s a bit like a drop-fed user manual.
The glory that is Spotify in anecdote form
Earlier this month, in the dark ages P.S. (Pre-Spotify), I was possessed with the desire to get the Collector’s Edition of Warren Zevon’s 1976 self-titled album, which featured the original album remastered with a second disc of alternate takes and demos. There was no chance of me finding a physical CD of this album in Wellington, and my desire was so strong I couldn’t wait for a copy to be shipped to me. So I scanned the internet for an illegal torrent to download an illegal pirated version of the Collector’s Edition illegally. Such was my craving.
But I could not find anywhere to illegally download this album for free. It looked like I could subscribe to some illegal file sharing sites and illegally download this one album and presumably get hooked on such illegality while they bought Auckland mansions with my filthy lucre... but if I was going to spend $$, it might as well go to the rightful copyright holder.
In short: I spent my allotted Aimless Internet Trawling hours that day trying to listen to the 1974 demo version of ‘Carmelita’ without success.
Then Spotify came along. The first thing I typed in was ‘Warren Zevon’ and within six seconds I was listening to versions of some of the best Songs Noir ever written. 
No buffering. No blips or glitches. 
I was home.

The goods
Spotify generates income for copyright holders through advertising revenue and subscription fees. The rate per play is miniscule, but these things add up. It is a workable business model and a legitimate way for people with an internet connection to listen to music and reward the artists.
How is this different from internet radio? How is it this same?!? It’s more like your iTunes library just underwent the big bang. Those 10,000 tracks you had? Now you have 1,600% more. You call the shots. It’s as easy to manage as iTunes and it’s simple to share playlists with friends (or go incognito if you don’t want people to know about your penchant for Bette Milder).
The urge to pirate, or support piracy, is now zero. (Okay, so not every track every recorded is available, but dude, do you have to be that guy?).
Listening at 90kbps provides decent quality for my purposes (listening while I write about a time before the gramophone was invented) and has very little impact on data usage that I can see (as opposed to watching NBA TV – I’ve gotten a bit spoilt and can’t handle the 400kbps feeds anymore... ).
I’ve spent the last week filling in some gaps in my music listening: artists where I’ve heard one or two of their albums and always meant to delve deeper (Los Lobos, Alejandro Escovedo), new albums from bands I quite liked at one stage but sort of stopped paying attention to (Nada Surf, Willy Mason, Harvey Danger), newish artists I’ve 'heard of' but not really 'heard' (Kimbra, Boy & Bear) and artists I’ve never listened to but were recommended for me by an app (The Long Winters, Fancey).
The outcome: it’s the most pumped I’ve felt above music since I was 25.
The bad
Okay, so the ads on the free version can get a bit repetitive if you’re listening solidly for the whole day (as I do on my ‘writing days’), but it’s not as bad as the radio.
And it’s a bit difficult to share playlists with friends when hardly anyone I know has signed up yet (I’m talking to you, Dan!).
No, the only thing so far that’s wrong with Spotifyis that listening on an iPad is counted as listening on a mobile device and therefore requires Premium membership at $12.99 a month. Yes, a tablet is a mobile device, but I’m a home body. I like to play music on my iPad when I’m doing the dishes or reading a book in the lounge. I don’t have a lot of songs on my iPad because of its limited memory, so I hardly ever have the album I want to listen to at that exact moment. Spotify would solve that (if I was a Premium member).
I can listen to ‘French Inhaler [Solo Piano Version]’ on my desktop in my office. But if I want to listen to the same song while I fold the washing ten metres away I need to drag my PC down the hall. That seems stoopid. Surely there’s some way to set up a local Spotify network and, so long as I’m in my own home, I can get the adsy, free version of Spotify on my iPad? Pretty please? I do listen to your ads, honest. I promise I’ll buy a coke tomorrow and I can’t wait for the London Olympics.
The Future
More playlist posts. Possibly with Spotify links. Let's just see how the one above works...

Things Left Unsaid - A post about The Forrests by Emily Perkins

On Monday the NZ Listener posted a book club’s discussion of Emily Perkins’ new novel The Forrests . To the surprise of many, a number of negative responses to the book were expressed, running counter to the hype and the lion’s share of reviewers to date.

What follows is a rather long post about the book and responses to it, including my own.

1. She said / she said

The only vaguely negative review I’d read before Monday’s post* was Nicky Pellegrino’s lukewarm response in the NZ Herald, which was doubly odd as it came ten days after Paula Green gave the novel a glowing review in the same paper.
It’s interesting to read these reviews side by side as they seem to talk about similar things, but the reviewer's differing tastes lead to quite different verdicts. 
Both reviews invoked the ghost of Virginia Woolf:

Green: “Emily Perkins' sumptuous new book, The Forrests, is a novel to savour slowly: line by line, character by character, revelation by revelation. Within a few pages I felt I was in the company of a contemporary Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf.”

Pellegrino: “…I found this a curiously old-fashioned book in some ways, very strongly reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouseand, while strikingly well written, sometimes quite frustrating to read.”

Both also found the structure interesting:

Green: “The structure is daring. It is like a photograph album made up of miniature scenes. Each luminous section exists in its own right (like a short-story tasting), but each adds to the next and the one before. You could almost dip into the novel like a photo album, but the pleasure in reading from start to end gives you the moving contours of life.”

Pellegrino: “While effective in some ways, the gaps in the story left me experiencing Dorothy as series of vignettes rather than a whole person. Meeting her as the agoraphobic mother of young children I didn’t recognise the spirited teenager I’d got to know a few chapters earlier. And I never went beyond feeling like an observer of her life rather than involved or affected by it.
Perkins is undoubtedly one of the most talented contemporary New Zealand writers but, in its structure and style, The Forrests often felt to me like a writing exercise - albeit one that she has executed brilliantly.”

Framing the two Herald reviews in this way is a bit misleading. Pellegrino’s is more of a ‘Is this book really worth the Booker hype?’ response (why you would fan the ludicrous pre-longlist speculation by mentioning it again is beyond me). 

And as mentioned, it’s not as if critics have been split 50/50 on the book; all the other coverage, both in NZ and the UK, that I’ve seen has been of the ‘bow down before a writer at the height of her powers’ variety (notwithstanding the odd quibble).

Until the book club got their hands on The Forrests, of course.


2. The Reviewer’s Credo
Lev Grossman, book reviewer for TIME, recently wrote:

The critics I love these days do something slightly different from what they used to: they don’t just judge, they open up that weird, intense, private dyad that forms between book and reader and let other people inside. They tell the story, the meta-story, of what happened when they opened the book and began to read the story.  

Having recently finished The Forrests myself, I hadn't found any reviews which challenged me to think differently about the book. They all seemed to tow the party- publisher’s line, or at least riff on the suggested themes.
Here’s the jacket copy:

Emily Perkins (photo credit: Deborah Smith)Dorothy Forrest is immersed in the sensory world around her; she lives in the flickering moment. From the age of seven, when her odd, disenfranchised family moves from New York City to the wide skies of Auckland, to the very end of her life, this is her great gift and possible misfortune. Through the wilderness of a commune, to falling in love, to early marriage and motherhood, from the glorious anguish of parenting to the loss of everything worked for and the unexpected return of love, Dorothy is swept along by time. Her family looms and recedes; revelations come to light; death changes everything, but somehow life remains as potent as it ever was, and the joy in just being won't let her go. In a narrative that shifts and moves, growing as wild as the characters, The Forrests is an extraordinary literary achievement. A novel that sings with colour and memory, it speaks of family and time, dysfunction, ageing and loneliness, about heat, youth, and how life can change if 'you're lucky enough to be around for it'.

So, if you only read the back of the book, you might believe The Forrests is Dorothy’s story, that it’s closely observed, setting is important, it ranges over decades and stages of life, and the structure is a little different.
Now read any of the reviews to date and tell me it doesn’t focus on these same things.
The problem I had when I dove into The Forrests, which I will discuss in more detail shortly, was that the book didn’t fit so neatly into its packaging.
This is why I found it refreshing to read the Listener’s book clubbers talking openly and bluntly about the book, and mentioning things which hadn't been said elsewhere.
Permit me to cherry pick their criticisms now, but do read the whole article:

Alicia:“Generally, the characters weren’t developed very well, if at all, so I didn’t really connect with any of them because of that. If I had to describe Dorothy, I’d describe her as bland, depressed, detached and unfulfilled. There were too many children/siblings.”

Cathy: “I agree with you both [Catherine and Alicia, about the book have no emotional impact]. I just did not feel at all involved with the protagonists in this book. None of the characters seemed sufficiently interesting or sympathetic to have any empathy with. I felt rather depressed and disappointed with the book, which was how I felt the characters all felt about life.”

Catherine: “I was interested in the media response to this novel (potential Man Booker winner, etc) so much that I thought maybe I had misjudged it.

Alicia:“I found the minute attention to detail and the physical world around the characters intensely boring, mundane and irritating. If the style of writing had been interesting or innovative or at least vaguely literary or poetical, then perhaps wading through endless description would not have been so bad, but it was none of these things.

Alison:“That’s so harsh...” [Of the six participants, Alison was the book’s lone defender.]

Cathy: “I don’t think Alicia was being harsh. I would have preferred less description of trivia and more character and plot development. I just don’t get what all the hype is about.”

Gabrielle (asked if there were any particular passages of writing that stood out for her): Yes – the annoying first chapter: too many words. I wanted to like the book – to support a New Zealand author – but basically it’s not my cup of tea. It was difficult book for me to like, enjoy or finish. I’m a practical kind of gal and it was too esoteric for my liking.”

Mary:“I haven’t finished the book [either]. I’m not enraptured by it. In my view, it’s overly verbose, clever but emotionally disconnected.”

Perhaps, given the smallness of the NZ book world, perhaps it is no surprise that the harshest criticism has come from book club members who, presumably have no vested interest in keeping on E-Perk’s good side.
Almost as soon as the Book Club’s views were posted on-line the Twitterverse responded with its usual mix of dismay and snark:

Jolisa Gracewood ‏@nzdodoNext up, the @nzlbookclub does To The Lighthouse. "Depressing... too esoteric... too many words... not enough about the actual lighthouse."

Fergus Barrowman ‏@FergusVUP"my worst criticism is that this story is depressing" Now THAT is depressing.

While it’s nice to see reviewers, publishers and writers uniting to support a book, it’s a shame when they waste their energies ganging up on readers.

Well, I’m going to stick up for the book clubbers here. Not because I agree wholesale with their negative pronouncements, but I think a fuller discussion of any decent book should be encouraged rather than dismissed with snark.


3. You’re not in Kansas any more Dorothy
*spoiler alert* From here on in I will discuss elements of plot with scant regard for those who haven’t read the book, intend to, and do not wish to know what happens (though I’m not sure this is the kind of book one reads to find out what happens next). *spoiler alert*
After the jacket copy, the interviews with the author that I’ve read/heard, and several reviews, I had the impression The Forrests would take place entirely inside Dorothy Forrest’s head.
But as Alison from the book club, says:

“I did find myself questioning at times whose story it was, partly because the one-sentence book review that has been in the papers is, ‘This is the story of one woman’s life from age seven to the end’. But, of course, it’s much more than that – and there are places where the story feels it’s much more like Eve’s: visiting their father in chapter three, being with Daniel in Canada in chapter five, being a housewife and looking for work in chapter eight…”

I also struggled early on to reconcile the expectation that this was Dorothy’s story with the fact that several chapters in the first third of the novel feature extended sections from the perspective of Eve (Dorothy’s sister) and Daniel (a friend of Michael, Dot’s brother, who is informally adopted by the Forrests due to problems at home).
Most troubling for me was the section set in a commune in the 1970s, where we also inhabit Michael’s perspective, the only time this happens in the novel. The reason why were see things through Michael’s eyes here is clear: we need to know the back story between him and Rena to explain why she reappears back in his life decades later; it also speaks in some way to him going of the rails as a teen.
But elsewhere the novel does not operate in this way.
As mentioned above, the novel is structured in a series of vignettes, but rather than showing the signal moments in Dorothy’s (or Eve’s or Daniel’s) life, it prefers to focus on a period before or after a conflagration. Chapter 10 begins after Eve has been in an accident (we only learn what happened in dribs and drabs through the chapter). Chapter 11 begins with Dorothy as a shut-in an unspecified time after Eve's death.
Most of the big things — Dorothy, and later Eve, hooking up with Daniel, the marriages, divorces, the birth of children — are omitted. In their place we get closely observed moments: Evelyn visiting her father who seems to have separated from their mother; a visit from Dot's younger sister Ruth and a man who may or may not be her midlife crisis boyfriend.
The Forrests tells its story by giving us the gaps between the events that might have made up a more conventional novel. The book is like the stencil formed when you cut out a string of paper dolls. Both the dolls and their outlines are doing roughly the same thing, they seek to evoke the human form, but they are constructed differently and they require you use a different part of your brain, to look differently.
It’s no wonder, then, that some readers might respond negatively, or apathetically, to the book because it does not pull at your emotions in the same way as a traditional boom-bash novel (not that there needs to be explosions; I might soon post a comparison with Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, which I'm reading now). A lot of shit actually goes down in the course of Dorothy’s life, but the book is mostly foreboding or post-mortems. It’s a muddle because, the novel argues, Dorothy’s life is a muddle, because all lives are experienced as muddles. Or in the words of Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
So, to round back to the point about Michael and Rena at the commune: We see Rena’s first attempt at seducing the much younger Michael, and we also get to see him being led off to her room. The novel does not show us the subsequent sex scene, or tell us how long the liaison lasted, but I think the use of Michael's perspective just this once is unnecessary and confusing: enough information could have been supplied to the reader in other ways.
 With the Michael-Rena relationship, the reader has knowledge Dorothy does not have when Rena reappears, looking for Michael because she has received a terminal diagnosis and wants to give him her house at the commune.  In contrast, Dorothy only learns about her father’s homosexuality toward the end of the book. There are a few clues, but the reader, like Dorothy has been oblivious to the true nature of her parents' marriage until this point.
So it was difficult for me to ever feel this was Dorothy’s story, or to empathise fully with her, because, yes, I was asked to spread my attention among a number of characters early on, but more crucially I was privileged with more information than her for a large portion of the novel. I think this might be why some of the book clubbers failed to “connect” with the characters.
I will say that, though I felt off-balance a lot of the time, I actually found the first third of the book the richest and most enjoyable, in part because of the variety of characters. And it seems true that life up until the age of about twenty is crammed with other people, especially parents and siblings, who are eventually sloughed off to reappear at birthdays, funerals and weddings – something The Forrests, through its narrowing focus, does a good job of mirroring.

4. Hot-noticing / Not-noticing
The second aspect of the party-line I think needs closer inspection is the quality of the writing and level of observed detail. In a couple of places (eg at the AucklandWriters Fest last week) Emily Perkins has used the term “hot noticing” to describe how the focus of a scene keys in on Dorothy, her primary sensations and emotions.
As the reviewer in the Sunday Times (UK) put it: “Where other novels approximate, Perkins renders her action with pin-sharp accuracy.”
But this is not the preciseness of, say, Nicholson Baker, who will turn an object over in his hands for page upon page. These are the fleeting observations of a person up from their arm chair and going about their business, however domestic it might be.

Some examples:

“... Dot placed egges one by one in the recycled ice-cream contained, minute pore-like squirkles in the beige shells, some of them streaked with droppings or dried gunge.” (301)

“Dot dug her thumbnail into a mandarin, the bubble-like pores popping, limonene spritzing invisibly over her hand.” (155)

This second example comes from Chapter 11 - ‘Loose’, when Dorothy is going through a bout of agoraphobia. The chapter is the apotheosis of hot noticing. It would work perfectly as a stand alone short story. But even here the keen, minute observations are only sprinkled one or two to a page. The book is never bogged down in figurative language in the way that one might imagine from a 'modern Virginia Woolf'.
More interesting for me was the voice of the narrator, especially when honed in on Dot’s perspective. The register often expands from the default contemporary-lit loose-formality to include more informal words or constructions:

“Flat pods of melted chewing gum blemished the footpath. Sunlight badoinged off storefronts’ plated glass.” (p293) [I think this is actually the second time light ‘badoings’ in the book]

“Dot lay listening to the show in the bathroom down the hall, wishing the shimmery sound of the failing water would go on forever.” (248)

“The edges of the silence filled with a tinselly buzz of cicadas.” (266)

“The spiky irises had gone; daphne smelled thickly, spriggily sweet.” (336)

“The evening fuzzed, as though molecules of air had thickened to hold the last of the light over to the west, laky streaks lined the sky, and the hills in the distance were the colour of morello cherries.” (319)

You will have noted the preponderance of adjectives ending in ‘–y’ above. Elsewhere in The Forrests grass is “slushy”, smells are “smoky”, flowers are “lemony white”... 


Perkins is asking language to achieve a lot here. Without resorting to simile, without even seeming to employ metaphor, Perkins is describing everyday things in surprising ways, often taking something related to one sense (eg touch and/or sight, “tinsel”) and using it to describe something related to a different sense (eg sound). Dropping the register also pulls the narrator closer to Dot’s own internal monologue. These strange collisions, these almost awkward phrases: this is how Dorothy sees the world.

I found this the most exciting part of the reading experience. However, I also felt my attention being pulled from the story to deconstruct many of these phrases and ask: Does this work? 

Again, it's this tension between the quality of the writing and the quality of the connection with the story/characters.


5. Silent Disco
My biggest gripe with The Forrests is that, for all the “hot-noticing”, there’s a lot of vagueness. Some of the vagueness can be warranted, especially when Dorothy’s in a fugue-like state after the death of Eve or batty in her old age. And I respect the attempt to depict the various time periods with a light touch (a reference to the new Sky Tower or “Newsnight” or tablet computers), but there’s a point where lightness becomes blankness.
Take the references to music in the novel. Music, the novel tells us, is dangerous because of its transportative powers. You are liable to forget yourself (like in the scene where Dorothy and Daniel are at a club early on, and which is referred back to in the last line of the novel) or be reminded of earlier times.
The closing sentence from the chapter in which Eve dies:

"The music from the stereo inside flared across the garden; one of the kids must have gotten hold of the remote control." (p150)

When Dorothy is at her high school reunion:

“The song came on and it made her heart beat faster. There was music that for years had been out of bounds because of its time-machine properties, its ability to land her in a place from before...” (p179)

And a bit later:

“He shut the door. At that moment the band started playing a song from when she was fifteen, a song her body heard before her brain did. The music was like lying on the runaway as a jumbo took off just above you, scraping the air.” (190)

But what sort of music? Kajagoogoo or Joy Division? Abba or Billy Idol? Beats me.
And later:

“... they waited in the Honda for the rain to ease up before making a dash for the indoor pools. Another song from years ago came on the radio. Dorothy turned it up and listened, the red digital minutes ticking closer to the swimming lesson’s start time. Through the aching shone a shaft of pleasure: Hannah was a quick learner; by the third chorus she was singing alone.”

Okay, so we know the colour of the clock’s display, but what about the song. All we know is it’s old…
Then this, from a scene where Dorothy is sitting in the car with her adult daughter, Amy:

“ Dorothy turned on the radio... [five lines of dialogue later:] ‘Jesus, Mum.’ Amy leaned forward and turned off the radio.” (p239)

Again, we never get told anything about the music: its genre, its volume, anything. We are told of its existence and that is seemingly enough. It's like saying: 'There was weather outside.' 

I’m starting to feel nostalgic about that jumbo jet simile.

And one more:

“...Dot drove the rental car around the corner, parked it outside a university building, held onto the steering wheel and sobbed for Hannah’s small room there at the hostel, a room that to her hers still looked empty without shelves of books, though there was a band poster she’d brought from home, the big plastic eyes on the stuffed toy puppy Hannah had had since she was a baby and her brave smile as she sat perched on the edge of the single bed, back straight and knees together as though good posture was the key to independence.” (274)

Compare the image you have of the cuddly toy to the one of the band poster. Now consider what either image tells you about the year this scene might occur in. I’m pretty sure this is from some time in the near future, so maybe it’s a bit difficult to cite a specific band. But I found the novel so devoid of specifics once it past the present day, the age of the iPhone, that time didn’t seem to pass, except to age Dorothy and Daniel.

All colour leeched out of the novel as it progressed. Perhaps this is deliberate. Perhaps it's coyness on the part of the writer. Either way, I can see how other's might feel disconnected from the novel and find it a struggle to finish.

6. The Politics of Aging
The only sphere of life “in the future” I felt informed about was the political world. It’s a pessimistic vision, with powerful gangs, an addled government and an apathetic public. But more importantly, these political snippets are also comments upon Dorothy’s relationship with her family or her own life. Again, a small number of words are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Some examples:

“‘So I hear there’s another nuke ship out there,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the invisible harbour. A bird purred from the bushes by the roadside.  ‘Yeah, apparently junk. It’s circling while they find a place to process it. Debt cancellation.’ She was repeating what stood in for news, what presented itself as news these days although nobody trusted the source...” (279)

“All [the double-length buses] did here was jam the traffic, but the council before the current council had ordered them and everyone was stuck with the decision, it would have been ‘bad management’ to reverse it, buy their way out, and this was all any ruling body seemed to do these days, live under sufferance with the choices of the previous administrations, or at least make it sound that way.” (309)

7. Washing up
So those are some of my thoughts on The Forrests after a single reading (and paying a little too much attention to what others are saying).

In the great wash up, I can see why five out of six book clubbers struggled to, or didn’t finish the novel. I think their criticisms are valid, insofar as a lot of their objections are questions of taste, and there are some stylistic things (the switching perspectives early on, the combination of attention to minutiae and a lack of specificity) that could explain these reactions.

Of course, it's difficult to say this much in 140 characters. 
_______* I also remember reading something from Graeme Beattie on his blog to the effect that he found the novel well-written but too bleak / lacking in joy… but I can no longer find this comment. Either a) I’m doing a ‘boy look’ b) Bookman Beattie has removed this aside, for whatever reason or c) I hallucinated the whole thing.

(Inter)National Flash Fiction Day - May 16

Apparently May 16 is National Flash Fiction Day in the UK. (This link has some tips for how to write flash fiction, but all you need to know is: edit ruthlessly.)

I haven't written any flash fiction for a while, but here are thirty 100 word stories I wrote in 2008.

And here is a single story made up of thirty 100 word sub-stories. (An amended version of this may appear in the endpapers of THE NOVEL...)

This concludes today's flash post.

Recent reading / taste / neglected reading

Read to me truly

I recently listened to two non-fiction audiobooks, both of which were read by their authors: The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher by Julian Baggini and A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams by Michael Pollan.

Of the two, I enjoyed Pollan’s the most by far. It’s about his experience building his own ‘writing house’ – perhaps it’s no wonder it appealed since I’m perpetually struggling to claim space to write (and once secured, perfect that space), and have started waking up to architecture in the last six months or so.

Baggini’s book is literally 100 thought experiments, like, if that pig really wanted to be eaten, would you renounce your vegetarianism? Some are a bit meatier than that (excuse the pun), but I found the discussion that followed each scenario to be too light to be worthwhile.

'Giraffe Park' by Beth Hoeckel
A question of taste

Both Pollan and Baggini’s book got me thinking a lot about taste. In one of Baggini’s thought experiments, a dude decides to only make rational decisions but when it comes time to go to the diary, he finds himself equidistant from two stores stocking identical goods. The only way he can think to choose between the two stores is to toss a coin, but then he thinks that’d be irrational, so he ends up starving to death (or something… I’m paraphrasing heavily). Baggini comments that there world doesn’t separate evenly into logical and illogical, that there’s a raft of things that are outside of logic, and this is where taste comes in.

Personal example: I love feijoas, like apples, like oranges, dislike persimmon. If offered the choice of two fruit, the choice will be easy for me unless I'm offered apples and oranges, in which case it'll come down to how I'm feeling at the time (and if I can be bothered peeling the orange). Logic doesn’t really come into it (expect the question of peeling the orange, perhaps). My tastes are just a set of coin tosses that took place behind the scenes which predetermine my behaviour when allowed to act outside of logic.

The question of taste, of course, is big in architecture. My next column in the Dominion Post (it'll appear Sat 19 May) is about two blocks of council flats here in Wellington and their architectural flourishes: Do these spaces have a designed purpose? What are they used for now? How important are they in the scheme of things? When discussing the porthole windows of the Pukehinau Flats, or the periscopey lift tower of the Arlington Apartments, it’s really a question of taste: Do they appeal to your eye? Do you value character in public housing? And if so, at what cost?

When it comes to fiction, the temptation is to focus in on the ‘big mistakes’; these both shape the plot and go some way to shaping the characters. But it’s dangerous to think about ‘big mistakes’ in terms of logic. With hindsight, and within the confines of a narrative structure, it often seems like the character made an error of judgment which led to the ‘wah-wawm’ moment, that they acted illogically and therefore deserve their comeuppance. On the contrary, I think most lives are shaped by tastes and preferences, these little apple-beats-persimmon, feijoa-beats-apple binaries that are constantly shifting (today orange beats apple because I feel like some vitamin C), and logic doesn’t come into it. Think about how you wound up with your current (or most recent) partner. If there was a ‘Do I or don’t I?’ moment, it likely came after you already did at least once.

The best short fiction knows this. It doesn’t deal in logic or blame, but looks at where we wind up when our tastes are given the wheel. Which is why so much feels intractable within a short story.

And novels? I’m not sure. I know there’s a ‘big mistake’ in THE NOVEL… perhaps it’s my big mistake, a failure of my logic, the flaw at the heart of my latest attempt at the longer form?

Or perhaps it’s all a question of taste.


'In the end, a playlist exists beyond logic'

'Pablo Picasso' - Modern Lovers
'Outside Chance' - The Turtles
'I've got that feeling' - The Kinks
'Growin' Up' - Bruce Springsteen
'Imagination (is a powerful deceiver)' - Elvis (Costello)
'Everyday is like Sunday' - Morissey
'Silver Future' - Monster Magnet
'Kingdom Come' - Tom Verlaine
'My Country - tUnE-yArDs
'Pascal's Submarine' - Gord Downie



And now…


My current audiobook is Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, read by Hope Davis. Sadly, Ms Davis struggles  with the Australian accent and the first third of the novel features two Australian characters. This small quibble aside, I’m enjoying the book. I am reminded of something Patchett said at the Melbourne Writers Festival last year about the part before Marina Singh gets into the Amazon being much longer until a friend/editor convinced her to Cut Cut Cut. I’ve notice parts where it feels as if a chunk has been excised, but I’m not complaining. I might even advocate for further streamlining (once I’ve finished the whole thing and know what’s really important).

I’m also reading a paper book at the moment that isn’t research related. It’s Emily Perkin’s The Forrests. I’m about 150 pages in, and looking forward to the coverage the book receives as this month's selection for the Listener’s Book Club.



A check against targets

In my 2011 end of year reading summary, I noted the following goals for my reading in 2012:

"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!!" (Running total: zero… Ay carumba. BUT Geoff Cochrane has a new collection of poetry coming out in July. It will be called (cracks knuckles and furrows brow in concentration) The Bengal Engine’s Mango Afterglow… Can’t wait.)"Listen to 12 audiobooks, including at least four non-fiction books." (Running total: 12 already if I count State of Wonder; non-fiction: 4... TICK! Makes me feel a bit better about my poetry fail.)"Read at least twenty New Zealand books." (Running total: 7, includes four non-fiction books that are research for THE NOVEL)"Read at least six Australian books of fiction." (Running total: Two - Forecast: Turbulence by Janet Turner Hospital and Inheritance by Amanda Curtin... I didn't blog about them at the time as I was about to appear in a panel with JTH and AC in Perth... not that I didn't enjoy both collections, just throught it'd be weird)"Read at least six books I already own" (Running total: zero)
Conclusion: A third of the way through 2012 and I've already achieved one goal (and its sub-goal), am on target for two more, but I'm yet to get outta the gate for the remaining two. 

Edwin Fox Maritime Museum, a rave.

This past weekend M. and I attended a wedding in Blenheim, which involved my first trip south on the ferry since 2000. Both the crossing to Picton on Friday and the return voyage on Sunday were incredibly smooth, but both took place under the cover of darkness, which was a great shame. I’m sure the sounds looked amazing.

The highlight of our weekend in Marlborough was a visit to the Edwin Fox Maritime Museum in Picton.

As regular visitors to This Fluid Thrill will know, my current work in progress, aka THE NOVEL, has nautical and historical elements, so the chance to see the world’s ninth oldest ship seemed like a good way to kill some time before catching a ride to Blenheim.

But the Edwin Fox, built 1853 in Calcutta, is more than just the world’s ninth oldest ship as this placard from the outside of the museum announces:

The Edwin Fox: the oldest merchant ship in the world, the last surviving East Indiaman, the oldest ship that brought immigrants to NZ or convicts to Australia and the best $10 you can spend in Picton.The museum has a decent display upstairs that covers the ship’s construction and various working lives as a transporter of cargo/convicts/immigrants, as a hulk used by a freezing works, its near ruin and its subsequent preservation.

But the real star of the show is the Edwin Fox herself. You can walk on a section of the ‘tween decks (which is a bit misleading as there’s little of the main deck left, so it feels like you’re above decks), inside the cargo hold (the inside of the hull from bow to stern) and around the entire ship. As it is in dry dock, you get to see the ship in a way that is impossible if it is in water.
The 'tween decks, looking aft Some ship geek inspecting the cargo hold. From the keel of the Edwin FoxWalking on and around the Edwin Fox brought home the scale of such ships – both their massive size and weight, the amount of teak, pig iron and muntz, and how small it must have seemed when making a hundred day passage from Europe to New Zealand as an immigrant.
Even M., who has very little interest in this sort of thing, enjoyed the experience immensely.

On a personal note, my one disappointment was that the Edwin Fox, despite being the most expensive ship built in Calcutta at that point (or so one of the displays claimed), only had a billet head rather than a full-on figurehead. But that’s just coz I have a thing for figureheads. To the credit of the museum and the Preservation Society, the original carved billet head is on display in the museum.

Edwin Fox Billet HeadI should also say I am a great fan of the fact little has been done to restore the ship. This is not to say a great amount of time, money and effort has gone into its preservation, and that a great deal more will be required to continue to preserve her, but the experience is so much the greater to observe how time and the elements have treated this vessel.

To refurbish her would surely be the end for the original ship and beginning of a full-scale replica (you can see where I might fall on the question of the ship of Theseus, can’t you?). Give me relics or give me death!

Stanchion eroded by the tides while the Edwin Fox was grounded. A side of the Edwin Fox showing remnants of copper plating and the ship's teak construction with both metal and wooden trenails.The Edwin Fox Maritime Museum is well worth the $10 entry fee and a great way to spend a couple of hours at the beginning or end of your South Island getaway. It is a pearler of a regional museum offering something of regional and international importance, without any unnecessary buff and bluster.

The Covers of David Bowie, OR: Taste and how to recognise it

I thought I could do a post that would prove David Bowie had good taste (after my musings about taste last week) by listing a bunch of his best covers. My thinking was: it's tricky to look at taste based on an artists own work because they are so often reacting against what they've done previously.

The difference between Madonna and Cyndi Lauper is that Madonna had the kind of hyper-selfconsciousness you need to become a pop icon across four decades. She made the right choices, for the most part, about what to chameleon into next. She showed good taste in which movements and which artists she aligned and re-aligned herself with (for the most part).

But her covers? According to The Covers Project, Madonna has only released six cover songs in her long career. You can probably discount 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina' as that was part of the Evita package (a discussion of her film career would also put pay to the idea she has good taste), and 'Santa Baby' (Christmas songs don't count - ninety-seven of UK artists breath a sigh of relief). And what do you have left? Little Willie Johnson's 'Fever' (which owes more to Peggy Lee's feminised cover in 1958), Rose Royce's 'Love Don't Live Here Any More', Marvin Gaye's 'I Want You' and her turrible cover of Don McLean's fiercely over-rated 'American Pie'.

Verdict: forgettable, or worse, covers of okay songs (you'll notice I've done you the courtesy of not linking to any of the songs... you're welcome). It makes me wonder what's on Madonna's iPod.

But David Bowie... he's done some fantastic covers. Again, you can refer to The Covers Project's Bowie page for all his covers (and covers of all his songs).

Here are my top five:


Let's Spend The Night Together (Rolling Stones)



I was tempted to say Rebel Rebel here. While technically not a cover, it is Bowie playing Jagger over a Keith Richards Riff For The Ages. But 'Let's Spend The Night Together' shows both good song selection and the chutzpah to mix it up a little: those Hawkwind spacerock squeals in the intro, the upped funk quotient, the clunky piano, that disintegration outro and slight return... yeah, that's the stuff.


Sorrow (The McCoys)


The best cover in Bowie's 1973 cover album Pin Ups (notable mentions: the Easybeat's 'Friday on my Mind', the Pretty Things' 'Don't Bring Me Down') is the perfect middle ground between the McCoy's sleepy original and the Mersey's too poppy 1966 version. It's like some artists don't actually know what they're singing about. Bowie sure does (here) and his became the definitive version.


Knock on Wood (Eddie Floyd)


Eddie Floyd's version is cool. Bowie wants to ride on the coattails of Floyd's swag, but goes one better by putting the pedal down and racing though one of the best fusions of funk and rock on record. The sax is still there, but it's not the star. There's too much else going on: the guitar that comes and goes, the tinkly piano during the second verse. (If there is a star, it's the MC5-style shout-don't-sing backing vocals.)

China Girl (Iggy Pop)


Any mention of Bowie and Iggy Pop should include the words Berlin and drugs, but let's not. Bowie was one of the first to recognise Iggy's talents beyond the Stooges sludgey power punk, and went on to cover six songs first recorded by Pop. I chose 'China Girl' (co-written by Pop and Bowie), because I think it is more of an Iggy song, that dirty back alley milieu, and Bowie cleaning up Iggy's version and turning it into a more coherent pop song shouldn't work. But it does. After his years as the Thin White Duke, he knew that his voice alone was creepy enough to unsettle a diligent listener.


Helden (German version of Bowie's 'Heroes')


Technically not a cover version, but it shows a couple of things. One, Bowie and Eno were influenced by Neu's 1975 track 'Hero', and recording a German version of their homage nicely completes the circle. Two, good timing to talk about heroism with the whole East German - West German thing going on. Three, I defy anyone not to sign along to this version, no knowledge of German required.



The Inevitable But

Okay, so Bowie has done some great covers, reviving decent songs that might have slipped from the great Western songbook without him, repping cool artists, and putting his own spin on things.

But not every Bowie cover is a gem. In fact, when I really started to dig, the hit rate seemed to be entirely random.

One thing big name artists should avoid where possible is covering other big name artists. Does David Bowie really need to cover the Beatles? No. And yet we have a forgettable version of 'Across the Universe'. Does the world need another cover of 'Waterloo Sunset'? No, at least not David Bowie's poor excuse for a cover. But these are nothing compared to the crime against the aural world that is his version of the Beach Boy's 'God Only Knows'. Ack! Those hokey Tim Curry-esque vocals and broke-baroque Jimmy Webb-esque string arrangement! Double ack!

Then there are cool, lesser known songs/artists that are due a little extra exposure, but the cover never comes close to the original. For example, Bowie's cover of Tom Verlaine's 'Kingdom Come', where he unnecessarily clutters the chorus and generally comes across as whiny and hammed up.

So Bowie is not the God of Covers. Perhaps just the Patron Saint. He's not ashamed of showing people what's on his record player / iPod through the medium of the cover version. The problem is he isn't always able to incorporate his outsized Bowieness without obliterating what was cool about the song in the first place.

Without referring to his own songs and just looking at his covers, I think you'd conclude that David Bowie has good, but not impeccable, taste.