Instead of a dearth of relevance, suddenly there’s a ghastly surplus of it. Like a boor at a party, the quake insists on pushing in and monopolising every conversation. (Source)
Reticence came up with the dust or down with the snow, placing me at quiet odds to this rising heap of narrative to whose granular contents I cannot, in general, bear to incline my eye. It is important to gather stories as data, it is important for everyone, everywhere, to have their say, but, to be frank, I do not suffer well all the talking and I am waiting for the sifting to start and the making to follow. No doubt this will take as long as the rebuild itself.
I wonder if perhaps it’s because I’ve participated in times past in both a talking cure and group therapy for my own historical mental illnesses, that the wider feeling of a community and beyond its boundaries a nation more generally turning over the traces, circulating the images, talking, talking, talking about its feelings, is something that for cultural purposes I so resist. I’m not meaning here the coronial findings, the stories of crisis, of deficits of provision, of help wanting or help that never came, that to my mind deserve a loud reciting in public forums and plazas of all kinds, but the meta-narrative, the story about the story, the What Does All This Mean for Us that’s an inevitable consequence of the literate, numerate, articulate life lived in late modernity, in person and online.
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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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This baby in a bonnet at a wedding is but tangentially connected to the substance of this post.
The day the baby was six months old, the day on which we headed north to Nelson for a wedding, was also the day on which, seven years earlier, I started these pages. The first posts were a mix of specificity and citations from poetry and pop music. I was living a life that was physically simpler but emotionally a lot more complicated, and I spent the first six months online hashing out that curious mixture of pride, worry and regret that was my slow slide towards thirty. The narratives were peopled by my local friends and I gave them all allusive and largely arch pseudonyms, few of which referred to anything much except the associative linkings of my own whims. Poor Dangermouse particularly disliked his; a random archival tweet this week reminded me that as recently as four years ago he was still demanding I change it (in that case, to a Castilian Ignacio), but I was stubborn, and would not.
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One of last month’s posts from Over the Net and on the Table highlighted inaccuracy – and perhaps hubris – on the part of Te Papa thusly:
“The last major exhibition of European Masterpieces in New Zealand was the highly successful America & Europe: The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection shown here in 1980. Now 30 years on Te Papa….”
Catalogue introduction to the exhibition European Masters: 19th–20th century art from the Städel Museum by the Chief Executive and Kaihautū of Te Papa.
- 1985 Claude Monet: Painter of Light, Auckland Art Gallery
- 1988 Edvard Munch: Death and Desire, Auckland Art Gallery
- 1989 The Reader’s Digest Collection: Manet to Picasso, Auckland Art Gallery
- 1989 Picasso: Artist Before Nature, Auckland Art Gallery
- 1993 Rembrandt to Renoir: 300 Years of European Masterpieces from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Auckland Art Gallery
- 1996 Masterpieces of the Guggenheim, Dunedin Public Art Gallery
- 1998 Exhibition of the Century: Modern Masters from the Stedelijk Museum, City Gallery, Wellington
- 2006 Works from the Collection of Julian and Josie Robertson, Auckland Art Gallery
It was not long before this was published that I began the uncluttering project described here which, ongoing, has included sorting a variety of postcards I had bought and filed but never got round to displaying (a habit to which one commenter also speaks). Among these were two I bought after attending the Exhibition of the Century, cited above. I had forgotten buying them altogether, but seeing them and even the plain-packet-with-exhibition-sticker in which they came threw me into a memory loop.
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Cross-posted to my Twitter Archive.
I took the liberty of a series of micro-breaks from my working week to participate in #twecon, organised by the capable and innovative @HORansome (Matthew Dentith). I was quite daunted by the prospect of summarising my article-in-process, but primarily because of the other demands on my time, not the subject matter itself. More generally I was struck by the way in which the frisson of anxiety that preceded by presentation was identical to that I’d feel if I were stepping up before a non-virtual live audience and speaking for twenty minutes.
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Posterous
Pūtaringamotu Tales
7 September, 2011
in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,O internet,we are family,writing & research
Reticence came up with the dust or down with the snow, placing me at quiet odds to this rising heap of narrative to whose granular contents I cannot, in general, bear to incline my eye. It is important to gather stories as data, it is important for everyone, everywhere, to have their say, but, to be frank, I do not suffer well all the talking and I am waiting for the sifting to start and the making to follow. No doubt this will take as long as the rebuild itself.
I wonder if perhaps it’s because I’ve participated in times past in both a talking cure and group therapy for my own historical mental illnesses, that the wider feeling of a community and beyond its boundaries a nation more generally turning over the traces, circulating the images, talking, talking, talking about its feelings, is something that for cultural purposes I so resist. I’m not meaning here the coronial findings, the stories of crisis, of deficits of provision, of help wanting or help that never came, that to my mind deserve a loud reciting in public forums and plazas of all kinds, but the meta-narrative, the story about the story, the What Does All This Mean for Us that’s an inevitable consequence of the literate, numerate, articulate life lived in late modernity, in person and online.
[click to continue…]
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