cold discipline for solo travellers
From the category archives:
Life is busy and heavy with both utility and novelty, but in a manner that borrows all the time and energy that was used, before February, for what seems now to have been easy leisure and creativity. The pleasures of the old life have been marginalised by the duller demands of getting through each day in a city that is itself all margins, no centre.
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Unlike most of the rest of the time, when it comes to earthquakes and being in them I have left little desire to make windows into [wo]men’s souls. We were neither killed nor injured, nor was our home destroyed or damaged, nor did our animals run away, nor did our amenities fail. The massive ground accelerations of which you have heard in the city and the eastern suburbs were no more than a tenth of that size at Ilam, where I was at work at the university. A colleague and I clung to two facing doorways, and I thought as our eyes locked of that zoom shot at the end of Bonnie and Clyde, when the gaze of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty similarly meets, in their case, for the last time.
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A modest wrecker of this reader
Somewhere around six months into my thesis (which took me four-and-a-half years to complete and submit), my aesthetic broke and I retreated, so far as literature and much of film was concerned, to live amongst subtexts and metanarratives. I can’t tell you why this occurred with any clarity, but I can tell you when: as I read the death of Stephanie in A.S. Byatt’s Still Life, which I was anxious to finish before heading out to a job I had helping a high-school student with English language. That, too, would end badly, but not for a few more weeks. In the meantime, however, my willingness to immerse myself in realist simulacra of human suffering as a form of recreation atrophied, in a manner that seems to have become permanent.
There was still plenty to read: poetry, criticism, archival fragments, all the arcana and ephemera through which I travelled in search of an argument. Within a few years there were extensive online newspapers and journals, and later blogs in all shades of serious- and light-mindedness. There was more reading than ever before. The fact remained however that I was unable to immerse myself in the modern literary novel to any other than a minimal extent, a poor and sure handicap for someone who had continuing aspirations of writing literary fiction herself. Others posted lists of the fifty or one hundred books they had read in a year; I counted myself lucky to make a dozen read start-to-finish, outside of my professional obligations.
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Posterous
Little Boxes
20 May, 2011
in commentatrix,in Aotearoa,teaching & learning
There are nine boxes stacked in the garage, their contents the sum total of my ten-year work archive. They took perhaps ninety minutes to pack up, under the instruction that all our goods were to be packed for storage then shifting, then another ninety minutes across two different days to shift into my car, when the instruction changed to culling all but an under-desk set of drawers and two further drawers in the communal filing cabinets. In a large institution, inside which we are all in varying degrees of displacement, the instructions change frequently and sufficiently that the same task gets done over and over again, minor variations on the same theme. Even with the majority of buildings cleared for occupancy, there is not enough viable space, and a hierarchy of needs sees many of us moving or ready to move.
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