Delta Blues

19 June, 2011

in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,we are family

Just as the eye of the New Zealander finds the printed “Z” all over the world, so my local eye travels always to the west-south-west in maps of my city, that corridor of suburbs west of Hagley Park that goes Riccarton, Upper Riccarton, Sockburn, and then the exit-town cluster of Hornby, Hei Hei and Yaldhurst. Within that cartography I can pinpoint my family as though markers on a board and, for the last nine months, much of the culture and commerce of our lives.

These neighbourhoods are also one of the long strips of unliquefacted land at present, meaning that our present experience is not like that of so many of our other friends and family around the city. Our daily habits are chiefly to shake, fortify and worry, without the heartbreaking insinuation of silt into land, home and hearth.

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A poem at Bat, Bean, Beam

1 June, 2011

in meta-diarist,poems

I am full of the worst kinds of impulses creatively at present, from sulking with maudlin froideur in front of a blank screen to comparing myself unfavourably with those whose work suggests they are fitter and more productive, if not happier. It is time to mix myself a bowl of hot metaphors, get back on the internet horse and refuse to let my earthquake malaise separate me from my aphoristic lyric glands. Even fragments that don’t yield up their tenor are better than nothing at all.

Thank you to Giovanni for keeping the vehicle open.

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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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On not grumbling

15 May, 2011

in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,teaching & learning,we are family

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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Pause

31 March, 2011

in at home,commentatrix,dogs,in Aotearoa,O internet,we are family

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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