Day: 4 September 2015

Imaginary Cities

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Shifting points of view is WORD Christchurch’s season of brain-tickling talks at the Christchurch Arts Festival (Peter Singer and Sarah Waters on Monday 7 September yo!).

I arrived (just) in time on a nippy Sunday for Imaginary Cities. It featured the super-intelligent powers of authors Fiona Farrell, Anna Smaill, Hamish Clayton, and Christchurch City Council designer Hugh Nicholson, and a stellar chairperson in the form of Christchurch Art Gallery Senior Curator Lara Strongman.

The topic:

Taking the Christchurch blueprint as a starting point, this panel will look at ways in which we imagine cities, either in fiction, in history, or in contemporary life; whether as utopias or dystopias, cities imagined or reimagined.

The Imaginary Cities Panel
Imaginary Cities panel Flickr 2015-08-30-IMG_8942

Blimey. I can only hint at the brilliant barrage of words and ideas we were treated to.

Cover of The ChimesMan Booker Prize nominated Anna Smaill – author of The Chimes – complained of jetlag, but was like intellectual quicksilver. She spoke of cities as places of amassed energy, and how we have only a “narrow toehold” on civilisation.  In a city, the natural world is forever leaning over our shoulder.

Hamish talked about the city as a “morbid playground”, and a place that allows us to escape into anonymity. (Especially good for these introverted writerly types).

Designer Hugh Nicholson spoke about the imposition of the imaginary on the real:

Street patterns stay in the city for a very long time.

Cover of The Villa at the end of the empireFiona read The Flyover of Hope from her new book The Villa at the Edge of the Empire: One Hundred Ways to Read a City (read that extract, and Press writer Philip Matthew’s most excellent interview):

A couple spin by on a tandem, a white boy on the front, a brown girl behind, both pedalling unsteadily through green trees, both laughing with delight at the prospect of their opportunity. Earthquakes have destroyed their beautiful city, 70 per cent of its major buildings have been or are about to be demolished. But 106,000 of the city’s residents have risen to the call! They have submitted their vision for a new city and here is the synthesis of their dreams, a “flyover of their hopes”.

Fiona loved maps since reading Milly Molly Mandy as a kid. She spoke of Hippodamian grids – “a quick way of slapping down a city on a frontier” and the motivation to citybuild as encompassing politics, power, and the impulse to profit.

The one map we never see is where we are always coming ashore, looking for something.

How do fiction and memory fit into this?  The city is a time machine. Hamish sees fiction as an engagement with an imagined remembered place. And every NZ writer is dealing with a relationship to place. Anna said that in fiction, you are inheriting the physical remains and stitching them back into a narrative. Fiction can help us understand cities better, said Hugh. Fiona spoke of the power of the novel to comfort, and proposed that the humanities are well named.

Cover of The Pale NorthThe writers spoke about the city in their books. Hamish set The Pale North in a fictional Wellington, and had to think deeply about ethical engagement after Christchurch’s quakes.

Fiction is a hell of a machine when things go wrong.

Fiona read a lot – including Seneca on earthquakes, and used that research as “a rich mass of compost” on which to build. Her next book is a novel that will sit with The Villa as its fictional counterpart.

The dystopian London in Anna’s book The Chimes was born of sensory impressions, and one of the books she mentioned was Peter Ackroyd’s psychogeography about the Thames. The other great influence in her hybrid of fantasy and mythic elements was Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (an amazing book that).  She quoted Conrad:

“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” (Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad)

Fiona spoke of the new doco The Art of Recovery and how it showed little shoots of hope and energy:

A profound session then, and it ended with Lara asking for more “public imagination” in Christchurch.

Quotable quotes

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More reading:

Jesse Bering: Science not morals

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Cover of PervAfter reading a review of Perv in The Press’ Your Weekend magazine I was very intrigued. Jesse Bering is a science communication professor at Otago University so this book is looking at perversions from a scientific perspective – not a moral one.

Many thanks to Word Christchurch for giving me the opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and sit right up the front of the fascinated crowd. The topic is an uncomfortable one for even the most open-minded of us but he gave the talk with such grace and humility even when heckled by a couple of audience members.

Jesse Bering
Jesse Bering. Flickr 2015-08-30-IMG_9023

But surely this is what it’s all about: having the conversation. Looking at our own desires and the desires of others and seeing them as just that, without judgement.

Unfortunately I’m still on the holds list for this book but I hear he writes in a humorous way. Phew! That will make the subject a little more relaxed reading!

Patricia Grace: On Belonging

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Last Sunday I shrugged on a heavy coat and ventured out into a grey and dismal Christchurch morning to hear two New Zealand fiction writers – Paula Morris and Patricia Grace.

The On Belonging session was advertised as exploring themes “themes of nostalgia, memory and belonging” however both women confessed very early in that neither of them had read that particular description before that morning, so things would likely veer off a bit. Writers, eh?

Patricia Grace and Paula Morris
Patricia Grace and Paula Morris. Flickr, 2015-08-30-IMG_0034

But, in fact, some of those themes did come through as Paula Morris encouraged Patricia Grace into remembrance and recollection over the course of the hour. The pair had an easy, relaxed rapport. Patricia Grace, whom I have never had the opportunity to hear speaking in public before, has a calm and softly spoken demeanour. She speaks slowly and thoughtfully.

To start with they spoke a bit about Grace’s background, and the degree to which she grew up in two worlds. That of her father’s family – rural and Māori, compared with the world of her mother’s family – urban and Pākehā. The divide between her life growing up in Wellington “hooning around the streets” with her cousins and crabbing at Mirimar Wharf, and the marae community of her father’s whānau, where she lives now. As a child she enjoyed the environment of sea and bush, with both in close proximity.

In fact, many of the memories she recalled over the course of the hour would factor in the sea, including the passage she read from her novel. I get the impression that Patricia Grace would not be comfortable living in a landlocked country or too far inland. As it is she seems to have a very strong sense of belonging in her seaside community with her brother, cousins and children all living in what Morris compared to a “family compound”.

Chappy

Cover of Chappy

Then they moved on to discussing Grace’s latest novel, Chappy which has several settings, including New Zealand, Japan, Europe and Hawaii. The novel is about Daniel, as he unpicks the story of his Māori grandmother and Japanese grandfather, the “Chappy” of the title.

Grace said “Chappy” grew out of a story she heard from her husband, who is from Ruatoria, about a Japanese shopkeeper who had lived there and was a much loved member of the community, but who was imprisoned on Somes Island during WWII, and then deported, leaving his New Zealand wife and family behind.

As an aside, due to various First World War centenaries this year, I’ve been looking at a lot of contemporary news reporting and this treatment of Kiwi Japanese during WWII is no different than that of New Zealand Germans in the earlier conflict. It seems we always repeat the same behaviours, demonising the enemy (and anything that reminds us of them sometimes, whether it’s justified or not).

Grace started wondering how this man had come to be living there and that formed the seed of what became the novel. The device of having Chappy’s story revealed by other characters was partly due to her belief that she couldn’t adequately convey the mindset and culture of a Japanese character though she felt she could “get into his heart as a human being”.

“Chappy” is Grace’s first novel in ten years, and Morris was at pains to point out this isn’t just laziness.

“People think when you’re a writer and you haven’t written a novel for ten years that you’re just lying around eating bon bons all day.”

In fact, life intervenes. Grace has seven children and a mother who lost her independence – family life does sometimes take precedence over writing novels.

Grace read from Chappy, a passage about sea journeys and stowaways.

Tū

Cover of TuThen Morris went on to ask Grace about her earlier novel, Tū (which in Morris’ opinion would make a great movie) and led to her sharing memories of being a child in Wellington during WWII. The American soldiers who gave the kids oranges and chewing gum, the ration books which she though were “cute”. Trams rattling up and down (accompanied by the sound of a tram, rattling past on Worcester Boulevard). The experience of waving her dad off on a military ship so immense she mistook it for a building.

She never intended to write a book about war but found her father’s notebooks and started researching. Her father had never talked about his war experiences (and she had got the impression that he’d never been at the front lines when, in fact, he had) and the stories she had heard from Māori Battalion men, who sang Italian songs, were mainly tales of mischief. Her research revealed otherwise.

Multi-culturalism and te reo Māori

Morris says that Grace is “subversive” and offers one of Grace’s quotes, from 1989, for comment.

New Zealand is a multi-cultural society but you wouldn’t know this from reading our literature.

Does she still feel that way?

Grace thinks that literature and the media have changed since then and technology has helped though she admits “I don’t do technology, really”.

She also has no issue with the novel as a “European form”. “You have to do your own thing,” she says “in the lens of the novel. Make it your own”. Morris believes that published literature is still fairly Pākehā dominated.

Cover of PotikiA comment from the audience led into an interesting discussion about whether Grace is “political”. The questioner says that “Potiki” and its use of te reo Māori really opened doors to the language for her without feeling educative. Was it intentional?

Potiki was published in 1986 and uses some Māori language components. At the time of its release, Māori was not yet an official language of New Zealand (this was achieved, after much campaigning, in 1987).

Accusations were made at the time that this use of te reo was “divisive” and intentionally political. Grace however thought she was just writing about ordinary people. Morris agreed in this saying that when she wrote Rangatira she used Māori words that lots of people would be familiar with, and any that weren’t would be clear from the context…but apparently not everyone agreed. Morris also pointed out that many writers do this and have to defend themselves, people like Junot Diaz who have to explain that “this is how my characters speak”.

Grace says that the only political part of “Potiki” was the absence of a te reo glossary. She’d had them before but felt that “a glossary is what you have for a foreign language”.

“Nobody did a glossary for me when I came across French in a book or anything”. Certainly my own reading experience with The Lord of the Rings novels and even The Chimes, is that it’s not necessarily an impediment to reading if occasional words are in an unfamiliar language (elvish) or specialised vocabulary (music).

It was a shame that the session had to stop just then because I felt that there was more that could have been discussed on that topic, but end it did.

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Celebrating Father’s Day

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Father’s day makes us pause, remember and show love and appreciation for our dads.

Dad and Daughter
Dad and Daughter

Some of us resist the  overt commercialism of it, while others of us love to buy gifts; either way most of us find it impossible to ignore. So kids everywhere, young and old, make or buy cards and plan something special. (often with a tad of help from mums and teachers.)

Do we find it as easy to make a fuss of Dad, as we do Mum? Breakfast trays adorned with a posy in a vase may not cut it for him. Though a tray with the Sunday paper might. What do dads want from their children on Father’s Day?  A quick verbal survey of some dads I know, varying in age, came up with these answers:

  • a card with genuine expressions of why they like having me as their dad.
  • real time together on the day – something we choose to do together.
  • a day trip, somewhere we don’t often get to go.
  • a meal out together.
  • letting me show them photos of when I was a kid.
  • hugs and no hassling for the whole day.
  • the latest Lee Child and whiskey would be good
    an undisturbed sleep-in then bacon and eggs.

Not many surprises there. Dads here mostly want to hang out with their offspring and /or have some rest. Unlike the traditional German Father’s Day Hike when men hightail it into the woods, pulling a wagon laden with beer and wine. Quite a different emphasis! To be fair in Germany the day is also known simply as Men’s Day.

Father's Day Outing
Father’s Day Outing

Parenting is not something we’re taught in school. It’s a strange new land for all of us who take that journey and we can often need advice and especially encouragement. There is a wealth of resources for fathering right at the library. Not to mention BabyTimes and StoryTimes held weekly in our libraries.

Dads, however you choose to spend it have a very happy Father’s day! We wouldn’t be here without you.

Cover of Don't puke on your dadCover of Fathers who dare winCover of The night of the living dadCover of Beginning fatherhood

That was then, this is now – 4 September 2010 / 4 September 2015

DonnaLeave a comment

This morning I took some photos of familiar places, of my old neighbourhood. To see what things look like now.

I used to buy bagels and fruit and vege from here. Here’s what it looked like early on 4 September 2010.

Daily Bagel and Covent Fruit Centre September 4 2010, Kete Christchurch

Here’s what it looks like now.

Victoria Street

Victoria Street, Christchurch. Friday 4 September 2015. Flickr 2015-09-04-IMG_9102

Knox Church was looking poorly on 4 September 2010.

Knox Church, 4 September 2010.

Knox Church, 4 September 2010. Kete Christchurch.

And now, all new and fresh.

Knox Church, Victoria Street

Knox Church. Christchurch. Friday 4 September 2015. Flickr 2015-09-04-IMG_9109

The Central Library on Gloucester Street, soon after the quake.

WiFi users outside the Central Library

WiFi users outside the Central Library Even though the library is closed due to the earthquake customers are still happy using the free Wi Fi, 7 September 2010. Flickr CCL-CE-2010-09-07-DSC01928

And the same spot now.

Old Central Library site, Gloucester Street

Central Library site. Christchurch. Friday 4 September 2015. Flickr 2015-09-04-IMG_9162

Here’s the 2015 photos. There are also photos of the same area from 4 September 2014. There have been plenty of changes since then too.

The Press has done some Then and Now features:

And the CEISMIC crew have revisited five key sites, five years later.

More photos and stories:

Our blog posts looking back:

Undercover in North Korea with Suki Kim

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Cover of Without you, there is no usNew York resident Suki Kim is a very clever essayist and novelist who wrote the award winning work The Interpreter. However, it was her impressions of life in North Korea as an undercover journalist which were the subject of her discussion On North Korea: Inventing the Truth at WORD Christchurch’s Shifting Points of View session at the Christchurch Arts Festival.

The Democratic Republic of North Korea (DPRK) is one of the most misleading titles for anything, ever, as they kind of forgot to add the Oppressive, Centralized, Totalitarian, Cult-like, Single Party parts to the title. Human Rights Watch refers to the DPRK as one of the most “harshly oppressive countries in the world”.

North Korea is described by Suki Kim as basically the world’s biggest cult. At the centre of this cult is the “eternal, supreme leader” Kim Jong-un, who rules with an iron fist.   The myth of the supreme leader goes on despite persecution and the millions that go hungry due to food shortages. There is no contact with the outside world as borders and lines of communication are sealed, and government agents watch everyone who might seek enlightenment.

Author and South Korean American Suki went to North Korea to teach English to the sons of the elite as part of a special international programme at a university titled “The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology” (which was quite unscientific, and devoid of technology). Without You, There Is No Us is her memoir of this experience, which beautifully infuses impressions and emotions into the issues of world politics and international relations. Political material can be achingly dry and hard to relate to; this most definitely isn’t.

Hearing her speak was timely. The entertainment industry is producing lots of young adult dystopian fiction (think The Giver, Hunger Games). Spookily, her depictions of life in the DPRK had me thinking such fictions are somehow based on these North Korean facts.

Suki Kim and Paula Morris

Suki Kim and Paula Morris, Flickr 2015-08-30-IMG_8988

Every aspect of daily life is monitored within the Institute she taught at, and everything – from the articulation to the architecture – is geared towards control. The university is intentionally designed with sterile, glazed spaces – privacy is at a premium. The idea “there is no I in team” is taken to an illogical extreme as Western notions of individualism are staunchly repressed and this was manifested in the language of her students. The words “I” or “Me” are almost never utilized by the students, who robotically state “We” and “Our” in a true spirit of collectivization and group identity. There is no place for individual ambition, it’s all servitude to the State. She did her best to teach them. And what she encountered was classes of bright, eager young men who have been lied to their whole lives, not only about the greatness of their country and its leaders, but about everything. They believe they have the internet, but it’s actually an intranet. To make it even more painful, in a show of nutty nationalism they think their “internet” is the best in the world.

Suki Kim
Suki Kim, Flickr 2015-08-30-IMG_8991

Suki developed a fondness for this innocent bunch of kids, who almost never get to see their parents (but pretend this is normal so not to incur the wrath of their overseers) and are in many ways hopelessly lost – with only the guidance of a regime which lies to them.

Over time, Suki sneakily and quietly attempted to inject the smallest of radical ideas into their naive minds. Like the idea of choice, for example, when shes is asked pointedly by the students “how many TV channels does [“wicked capitalist”] America has”!? She gingerly answers “thousands”, trying not to appear boastful in light of North Korea’s one channel which presents shows full of propaganda about the Great Leader. She endured many Q&A sessions regarding details of our lives in the West, but she could not be completely honest with her inquisitive class, as most subjects were off limits. A knowledge of the truth hurt!

I did manage to ask Suki during our own Q and A time if North Korea had any allies these days, and she said they don’t, not after the fall of the Soviet Union – “North Korea are all on their own”, much like the kids in her class whom she grieves for deeply…..

“Without you there is no us” is a beautifully written memoir detailing daily life in a closed society, and which is laced with stories of her own family history detailing the separation of loved-ones who may never meet again as they are spread across the two Koreas.

Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever read such well written personalized account of political and international relations.

Five years ago: 4 September 2010

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Five years ago today, Christchurch and Canterbury were shaken awake at 4.35am by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. My neighbours and family wandered around the corner to see this on Victoria Street.

Daily Bagel and Covent Fruit Centre September 4 2010, Kete Christchurch

Knox Church, 4 September 2010.

Knox Church, 4 September 2010. Kete Christchurch.

Our first library blog post on 4 September 2010:

Christchurch experienced a major earthquake this morning 4.35am, Saturday 4 September 2010 …

Our book chat switched into Civil Defence, community information, library info, and ideas to look after the kids. (see our September 2010 posts).

Central Library : after the quake

Central Library : after the quake. Flickr CCL-CE-2010-09-08-DSC02045

WiFi users outside the Central Library

WiFi users outside the Central Library Even though the library is closed due to the earthquake customers are still happy using the free Wi Fi, 7 September 2010. Flickr CCL-CE-2010-09-07-DSC01928

Here’s some snippets of memory from 4 September 2010:

  • A few objects fell down in the house, but the kitchen was almost untouched, except for a container of oil which left a big oil slick on the floor.
  • After the initial drama of getting out of the house we made contact with their neighbours in the other three flats. When we had calmed a bit, we began to venture around the neighbourhood. Around the corner, the Daily Bagel building had collapsed on to the street.
  • We never lost power and were without water for only a short time. Our place became a gathering point for friends who came to charge phones and use the internet.
  • Our chimney came down.
  •  Dad was in Dunedin and immediately hitched a ride back on a truck – probably the only person trying to get to Christchurch!

If you feel like telling your stories, visit Quake Stories.

More photos and stories:

Our blog posts looking back:

On the website