The period known as Birthday Week and International Megan Day.
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By curious coincidence, Miss Megan Wegan and I share not only the same name but also the same birthday, which a quick perusal of the archives here will reveal is soon. Readers of the other Megan will be aware that she has not been having the best time of late, but also that her zest for life incorporates a keen sense of fashion.
As one who has previously been dressed by proxy at Megan’s blog, I thought it timely that I attempt to return the favour.
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I have been enjoying Cilla McQueen’s “publication in many parts”, Serial, here at the New Zealand Poet Laureate website. I decided to try my hand at a homage to that style in response to Giovanni’s two posts on Haiti and Avatar.
I should note, too, that for someone who makes at least part of her living teaching Film Studies, my relationship to the cinema is surprisingly ambivalent. The scale of the spectacle in a movie theatre presents a physical barrier for me. Since my mid-teens I have been affected by irregular bouts of nausea and vertigo watching films of all kinds on the big screen, which, now compounded by pregnancy, makes cinema-viewing at present more or less impossible. So Avatar remains a no-go zone for me, which is why, in part, I’ve tried to come at Giovanni’s discussion from a rather more obtuse angle.
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In which I play with — and then delete — my @brightkite account, and uphold my reputation as a Crazy Dog Lady.
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As tweeted, young Fern is in pup, surprising me at yesterday’s scan with four fetal whelps in view, one of whom obliged us with a backflip under the ultrasound. The average-sized Norwich litter is two or three whelps, so this was a surprise. There are around four weeks to go, although the poppet in question is already sporting considerable saddlebags and moving a little more sedately.
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Ten years ago I wrote a novel, for which I had positive feedback both from my reader-commentator locally and from the publisher who rejected it.
Eighteen months after that I spent another eighteen months rewriting the story, to the extent that it was a different novel with mostly different characters, settings and events. This was also rejected, again in a kindly manner, by the same publisher and by the agent whom I shopped it to thereafter.
A little under six years ago I got an assessment for the manuscript, along with some excellent advice, and began rewriting, again with extensive points of difference, perhaps a year after that. The voyage to that point was accounted for in this article in New Zealand Books.
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Those who follow @munki about the tubes — in, of course, a warm and non-threatening way — will know that she shifts house and contents regularly. It was an unexpected turn of events, however, to find (via @dubh ) the tender cat-and-crochet chronicles of Not Pants transformed into something belonging to another user at Tumblr.
Most curious of all, to my language-logging mind, is the way in which what was a metaphor, whose self-effacing qualities provided an aspirational example, is now the literal title of a tumblelog of fashion faux pas, in no way connected with the former operator of the original URL. This is not to say that I don’t value the social service of pointing out the affront to aesthetics of those who sport tights as the rest of us sport tracky-dacks, but it is to say that something is lost in the change.
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In response to this post at Bat Bean Beam.
The fibreglass butterflies ascend
the front of the unit. There is aflower-shaped windmill with a
happy face, planted in the groundbelow. It rattles when it spins.
A small ceramic gardener displaysa length of butt-crack; china
flowers and toadstools inter-mingle with the pansies and
lobelia. Once I saw a golliwog.Hand-painted pins and badges stick
to the side of the letterbox likefungus, though the back flat’s
portion is completely bare.Tourists draw up in rental cars
sometimes, mostly visitors fromAsia. They take pleased photos,
stare at the proliferation. Youcan imagine the owners’ hands by
night, extending through the frontwindow, affixing objects man- and
home-made with all the happy slapand pop of a kitchen fridge-magnet,
a plastic suction-cup.
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My own land; she makes things
19 January, 2010
in O internet, at home, commentatrix, in Aotearoa, we are family
As someone who does neither gardening nor baking, it surprises me the extent to which I enjoy reading online about the gardening and baking of others, particularly since in the past I would have berated myself for my lack of competence and enthusiasm, respectively, in both areas. (I put this down to something like the general settling of life that has come out of being married, with our mown-lawn harmony and store-bought treats.)
[click to continue…]
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