A FRANK DISCUSSION WITH THE CHILDREN OF NEW ZEALAND

Kids know nothing, right? Otherwise why would they need to go to school? I recently had a frank and furious discussion with the children of New Zealand (not all of them) about the environment, the recession, and the Nanna Economy. Here is a partial transcript. Their "ideas"—if you could call them that—included greater social responsibility, an innovation-led response to environmental issues, an end to the physical discipline of children, less consumerism, and a rehabilitative prison system. I know, ridiculous.

ON MY LOGO

Many people (some) have asked about the logo, above. Where did it come from, and what exactly does it symbolise? Well, it’s an old family crest. The dragon symbolises awesomeness, obviously, though it’s an awesomeness that comes with a hefty price, for a dragon’s life is a lonely one. (We all fear that moment on a date where we go to kiss her goodnight and accidentally sneeze on her face. But what if sneezing on her meant she was instantly consumed in a roaring red plume of hellfire? That would be embarrassing. And what stops fire shooting out during coitus? How would that be explained to the elderly couple who live above? I digress.) The wings symbolise our power to take our awesomeness to other locations where it might be appreciated, while the guitars represent the awesomeness that can be unleashed like a dragon’s-fire from our soul.

So I hope that explains that. Oh, and the shield. The Celts called it “Aberffewk”, which roughly means, “Sneeze-guard”.

RICKY GERVAIS

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of considerable fame must be a total dick-wizard. But the sumptuously famed Ricky Gervais could not have been lovelier or more accommodating.

Here's the profile I wrote on him which ran in Sunday Magazine.

ON CREATING TENSION IN YOUR WRITING

Tension. Without it, your writing is boring. With it, your writing is awesome. Tension forces the reader to love your words, but also to fear them. Many writers are afraid to use too much tension in their plots. They think kids can't handle it. Think again. Tension is what hooks readers of any age and keeps them turning the pages. Authors employ many methods to increase the pressure on their characters. Here are a few you can try:

1. Cliffhangers. End every chapter on a cliffhanger, like this: “‘We’d better go,’ said Lucy, ‘the pirates will be back soon.’ Now read the next chapter, or I’ll kill Mummy.”

2. Illustrations: Make a crude drawing of a scary clown cutting someone’s head off and write ‘You’ underneath it. Slip the picture inside the pages.

3. Have a friend dress up as a scary pirate. Then have him sneak into the child’s room and stand in the corner. Make sure he is holding the book. Then, when the child comes in, have your friend turn a flashlight on under his face and say, “Would ye be looking for this?”

This creates tension.

Now here’s some writing advice that doesn’t suck. In fact, it could be all you ever need.

ON THE SUPERSTITIOUS WRITER

“I suppose my superstitiousness could be termed a quirk. I have to add up all numbers: there are some people I never telephone because their number adds up to an unlucky figure. Or I won’t accept a hotel room for the same reason. I will not tolerate the presence of yellow roses — which is sad, because they’re my favourite flower.

I can’t allow three cigarette butts in the same ashtray. Won’t travel on a plane with two nuns. Won’t begin or end anything on a Friday. It’s endless, the things I can’t and won’t. But I derive some curious comfort from obeying these primitive concepts.”—Truman Capote, The Paris Review Interviews vol. 1.

There’s a prize for anyone who writes a joke that begins: “Truman Capote was on a plane with two nuns …”

The Paris Review interview website is here, for your gorging.

ROBBIE COOPER

If you the have time you might want to look at the photographic work of Robbie Cooper. His series on people matched with their online avatars is stunning.

HAIKU: PRINCE

Being back in the country gives me the opportunity to undertake simple pursuits, such as brewing my own hooch, or exploring forms of pastoral poetry. While browsing the collected lyrics of Prince the other day, I had a thought that if he had not become an international recording artist and sexologist, he could easily have been a master of the Haiku.

[Extracts from ‘Hallucination Rain’, the collected haiku of Prince.]



Moon

If I don't find my destiny soon
I'll die in your arms
Under the cherry moon



Cherry Wine

I give 'em some cherry wine
Then we play some pool
And they watch me bank the six and the nine.



Love

Because something near your leg
Is haunting u, such a disgrace
U're rock hard in a funky place, ow!



17 Days

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha
17 days



Dawn

All I'm sayin' is that
I wanna smack it all night long
On and on until the early morn'



Clams

What about the clams on the shore?
Souls in progress, here come the fisherman
Soul no more



Sister

Hey, I saw your sister skatin'
On the lake this afternoon
Good heaven, how she's grown



The Pier

U'd make me leave the lights on
I'd pay money just 2 C
Your happy dancin’ silhouette upon the pier



Soup

Is this the same soup as usual?
It feels strange
Hallucination rain



Snowman II

The ocean swallows the shore
I could still see him smiling
When my snowman is no more, no more



Doves

How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in the world
So cold



June

In September my cousin tried reefer 4 the very first time
Now he's doing horse
It's June

ON THE LANGUAGE OF THE FRONTIER

As a frontiersman—because that’s what I’m calling myself now—I have to adopt the habits and language of the frontier. In accordance with country law, every item I have must be exchanged for something rugged—my trainers for a pair of boots, my wool hat for a sturdy helmet designed to repel falling logs or teams of angry hawks—and every standard measure I know must be exchanged for something mysterious. Thus, my supplies for this week: a kinch of heating oil, a fatt of bacon, 9 hands of wood, 8 market fusts of berry wine, 4 &9/8ths swods of molasses, a shid of rye meal, 9 barlycorns of stewing apples, a crack of whittling tobacco, and a host of other things I just made up.

A word is a beautiful bird: appreciated greatly when it’s flitting around our heads; but mourned only by the last hunter to hold it’s limp body to the fading light and admire its elegant plumage; or, more accurately, by the last lexicographer to pause above its entry in his dictionary proof and give a heavy sigh before he strikes it through.

Here's a nice Deutsche Welle story about one man's efforts to keep fine old German words alive (via Languagehat.) Who would ever think that "Spielautomat" (slot machine) is a finer word than "Groschengrab"? (Literally, "Penny grave.")

And here's a Times story about the Collins dictionary people's efforts to enlist celebs to save 24 endangered English words.

A DISSIMULATION OF OMENS (OR, WHY AM I SEEING KITTENS?)

The fantail is, by both definitions, a curious bird. When you leave the house they flit gaily around your head and feet, and when you walk somewhere they follow. You can understand why people think they’re an omen—though of what is not exactly clear. I have an Aunt who says fantails are harbingers of death, while my Nanna says they herald an impending birth. Could it be both? A zombie baby? Someone on Facebook said a fantail was only bad luck if it came inside. I have one who comes in each day at 4ish and flies around the house for 30 minutes. No good? Someone else said they were the spirits of dead relatives, which might explain why the bird leaves when I undress. Whether any of these theories are true, or whether fantails (Rhipidura fulginosa, Piwakawaka,) are seeking not your soul, but just the sweet taste of the tiny bugs you disturb as you walk, is irrelevant. The pure fact of the matter is that strolling through a quiet glade with several birds flitting around your head makes you feel like a sage of the woods.

Eerie things happen when you're alone in the country. The other day I took a can of diesel and set several huge piles of logs alight. In the evening I went back to check I hadn't set fire to anything important, like a forest. I sat and watched for a while, and as the sun dipped behind the blaze I felt like a Pagan hermit must have felt when he maintained his property. On the way home I rounded a bend to find my way blocked by a tiny, black kitten. He sat in the middle of the track, considering everything and nothing. How he got there and what his mission was I’ll never know. The kitten inclined its head and looked at me, wide-eyed, and I stared back from my stationary vehicle. Then he hopped brightly off into the bushes, leaving me to ponder. Eventually I shrugged and drove off. How the kitten got so far from anywhere is not for me to know. Luckily, in rural lore, a black kitten in your path means just a teensy bit of bad luck.

ON BECOMING DUMBER

'“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.'

I'm sorry, what was that? I wasn't listening.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

On Rural Social Networking

I am writing from the wilderness. I am connected to you by a 28000bps thread of hope. There is no cellular coverage here, in the place I am, wherever that is. The place I am is a yawning chasm in Google Maps. Is it even possible for you to imagine what that’s like to be surfing at a top speed of 28000bps? For a start, it mocks the word “Surfing.” What you’re doing is floating, miles out at sea, hoping that the tide will slop you inch by inch towards an island in the distance. 13000 to 28000bps is like waiting for a glacier to download, and then, just as the glacier is almost done, an elderly Inuit gentleman steps out of a cave and goes, “You have been disconnected. Sorry.” The glacier resets, the man goes back inside.

Being back in the country is nothing like I imagined. I thought teams of rustic locals would arrive at my door bearing whole pigs and casks of home-stewed cognac, or to invite me to a pagan barn orgy. But no. I’m back in the place I grew up and rediscovering a complex network that through the years has continued to evolve without me, and without regard for what I might have done or become in the time since I left. Though I might imagine it occasionally pausing over its cup of gumboot tea to say, “I wonder whatever happened to that Matthew,” it in fact has no real curiosity about the things outside its daily motions. In much the same way as we run back to our social networking services after an absence, eager to see if anyone has queried our lack of tweets or status updates, I longed to see some evidence of my having been missed here. But delightfully, there wasn’t any. A social networking system is not designed to register the missing. And yet the reason that the phenomenon is so addictive is precisely because we believe it knows our absence.

This post took 12 minutes to write and 14 to upload.

On Ruby, and Her Tendency to Take Her Love to Town

As a child, my Mum’s music confused and beguiled me. It contained strong themes and adult situations. There were jiltings, adulteries, crippled narrators whose wives, despite all pleading, still liked to take their love to town, hotels that you could check in to, but, for some reason, could not leave, and other scenarios that were beyond my understanding. We learn arguably as much about the world from our mother’s music as we do from her stern directives and gentle admonitions. Mum’s music was with us, always. We took it to town, to sporting fixtures, and on long journeys. The cassettes would warp and wrinkle in the heat of the car so that it sounded as if the band Air Supply was performing I’m All Out of Love while wearing space helmets full of jelly. What joy.

At home our Mum liked to turn her music up loud enough that she could listen to it while vacuuming. Sometimes it seemed to us as if we lived inside a giant stereogram. Her music would make the walls of my bedroom pulse. I remember, particularly, standing in a paddock, miles from home, on a beautiful summer day, watching the breeze shift the grass and toss the seed-heads, and hearing Born To Run wafting faintly over the hills to see me. There was no escape from Mum’s music.

My Pulitzer-winning analysis of the song Hotel California was so well received that I’ve decided to continue the series ‘Know Your Popular Country-Themed Music.’ This time I’ve chosen the Kenny Rogers classic: Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town, the aching, lovelorn lyric about a crippled war veteran and his wayward pet chimpanzee, Ruby. Please enjoy.

Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town

Link Love: Heidi & Rose

These two young comedians are the self described Anne Franks of comedy. I met Heidi at the comedy club recently and she charmed the whiskers off me. You might consider visiting their site, or even attending their brand new show, if you're in the area. It's called 'A Guide to the Uncool'.

http://heidiandrose.wordpress.com/

On Our National Flag

Some people have been in touch wondering whether I would ever get around to uploading my ideas for the redesign of the New Zealand flag. Not many, but some. It's a very graphics-heavy story, so difficult to place on my primitive website, but if you would like to see it, then please send an email and I will send you a sumptuous PDF file, in lurid technicolor, free of charge. It is my gift to you.

On the Term: 'Mind Fuck'

Definition from Wiktionary, a free dictionary:

English

Noun

mind fuck (plural mind fucks)

1. (psychology) a situation which calls into question the way your mind currently sees a certain idea or the world in general

1973, Kathryn Watterson, Women in Prison, University of Michigan/Doubleday, page 322,

"One day there was a big cockroach on the wall and a woman hit it with her shoe and it screamed. I swear it screamed. That was about it for me. It was really a mind fuck."

Or, an audio-visual example: