Gu Cheng and the troubles of Chinese capitalism

[Like all good Poundians, Hamish Dewe is a Sinophile. He spent the first decade of this century in China, working, studying Mandarin and writing mordant poems about the anabolic growth of capitalism in cities like Shanghai and Shenyang. In the second part of the interview we did last week I asked Hamish a few questions about the situation of China today...]

SH: What have you been reading lately?

HD: I've been rereading Gu Cheng, the exiled Chinese poet who killed himself and his wife on Waiheke Island in 1993. Although Gu Cheng is quite well-known, not all of his stuff has been translated, and I'm thinking of putting some of his early poems into English.

SH: Gu Cheng is perhaps more famous for the tragic manner of his death than for his poetry. His death was a major news story in New Zealand and in China, and a movie has been made about his troubled relationship with the woman he killed. Does the terrible end of Gu Cheng's life make it harder to approach his poetry?

HD: It does. There's probably a partial parallel with Ezra Pound, another great poet who did bad things (I've been following the debate about Pound on Reading the Maps). But I think that whereas Pound committed his sins over a period of many years, making anti-semitic statements in his writing, praising Mussolini and Hitler, and making hundreds of pro-fascist radio broadcasts during World War Two, Gu Cheng suffered a psychotic breakdown, and committed one cataclysmic action. There isn't evidence that the murder of his wife was premeditated.

I didn't know Gu Cheng personally, but it is apparent, from the many accounts of his life, that he was a very unstable person. Pound was of course spared the death penalty after World War Two because friends like TS Eliot and Ernest Hemingway managed to persuade the United States government that he was insane. Whether he was ever insane, in the ordinary sense of the word, is quite debatable, but it suited his supporters to present him that way, at least for a while. I don't think that many people would doubt that Gu Cheng was insane at the end of his life.

SH: Why did Gu Cheng wear a cut-off length of trouser leg on his head, as though it were a hat?

HD: He believed that it stopped people from stealing his thoughts.

SH: Is there a political dimension to Gu Cheng's breakdown? It is very easy to brand artists who suffer from severe mental illnesses as mad geniuses, and to thereby ignore the social and historical implications of their work. Gu Cheng was a man who often found himself on the wrong side of the Chinese state. As a youngster he was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and forced to do menial work in difficult conditions, for little or no recompense. Later, after returning to urban China and becoming known as one of the group of 'Misty' poets, who produced obscure yet politically resonant texts, he came under fire from the government of Deng Xiaoping. His poetry was criticised as 'decadent', because it departed from the tenets of propagandistic socialist realism, and his own father was induced to denounce him in print.

HD: Yes, that's an extraordinary essay. It begins 'I am finding it harder and harder to understand the poetry of my son, Gu Cheng...' The father was himself a poet, but he kept close to the socialist realist line, producing propaganda. Like many other figures in the Chinese literary establishment, he was troubled by the complexity of the texts that the Misty poets produced. They rediscovered the mystery and depth of the Chinese language, and their phrases and images have an ambiguity, a multidimensionality, which is anathema to political propaganda.

SH: And yet the Misty poets were not apolitical, were they?

HD: No. If they were apolitical then they would have been easier to dismiss. The Misty poets were able to find a middle way, if you like, between boneheaded propaganda and impenetrable obscurity. The images in their poems couldn't be reduced to a simple political meaning, but they nevertheless resonated with the hopes and fears of young Chinese readers. Consider Gu Cheng's famous phrase 'I have been given dark eyes, but I use them to search for light'. There is an allusion in this phrase to the experience of the generation of urban youth which was persecuted in the Cultural Revolution, and to the attempts of the members of that generation to change China for the better after their return to the cities. But the allusion is not made explicit. There is no outright denunciation of the Chinese state. That would not have been possible in print, of course.

But I think you should be careful about jumping from that fact that Gu Cheng was persecuted by the Chinese authorities, and eventually had to leave the country, to the conclusion that he was fundamentally a political animal. I don't think politics was as important to him as his own personal phantasmagoria. He lived partly in a world of his imagination. He wasn't someone who could formulate a coherent political programme. If he had been allowed to stay in China then I think he would quite happily have done so. He had an intense attachment to the landscape of China, which he had acquired as a small child, and he never adjusted to life overseas. He refused to learn the English language, even after being given residency in New Zealand, because he was afraid of making the Chinese language 'jealous'.

And after he settled in New Zealand Gu Cheng chose, for whatever reason, to endure a 'double exile', by living on Waiheke Island, away from many of his supporters in the Chinese community of 'mainland' Auckland. He was very isolated. It was probably isolation, rather than political frustration, which contributed to his fate.

SH: The Misty poets were tremendously popular in the 1980s, selling tens of thousands of books and giving readings in stadiums. Does poetry have the same status in China today? Does it provoke the same excitement?

HD: In my experience it does not. There has been a growth in other forms of entertainment - movies, television, computer games, and so on - which has coincided with the economic boom and the growth of consumption. There are lots of writers, lots of books around in today's China, but fiction seems far more popular than poetry. Pulp fiction seems to be particularly popular. There's been quite a fad for slightly smutty novels about the urban underclass, for example -

SH: Might a new protest movement in China - a sort of Chinese version of the 'Arab Spring', or the demonstrations seen in countries like Greece and Spain - recreate an audience for poetry, or at least for serious literature?

HD: China is not without its problems, but I'm far from convinced that such a movement is in the offing. The Communist Party has managed to establish and consolidate the capitalist system in China over the past thirty years. Under the banner of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics', the pursuit of profit and conspicuous consumption have been glorified. Young Chinese are, in my experience, far more interested in the acquisition of cellphones and i pods than they are in ideas like democracy.

And there is a material basis for the consciousness of young Chinese: there really has been, along the eastern seaboard of China, a considerable increase in wealth and spending power over the past few decades. Wages and salaries have increased greatly, albeit from a very low base. I'm not aware of many popular uprisings which took place in the midst of an economic boom -

SH: But some of the increases in wages and salaries have been won through the actions of unofficial unions - through strikes, even. And recently we saw an uprising in the Guangdong city of Wukan, which resulted in the expulsion of the Communist Party and the establishment of an independent local government - HD: Yes, but it seems to me that the movements you talk about are different from the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s. They are not based on ideas, ideas about an alternative society, but on a desire to get a bigger slice of the wealth in actually existing Chinese society. They do not question the system - they only seek to reform it. The union movement may be technically illegal, and indeed may be persecuted, but it could well ultimately benefit Chinese capitalism, by increasing the spending power of Chinese workers, and thus growing the internal market for goods manufactured in China. As the global recession cuts spending power in Europe and America, China is aware that it must find buyers at home for more of its own goods.

I note, as well, that the Wukan protesters have reached an agreement with the Chinese government, and reopened their town to the outside world. I see the union movement and Wukan-style protest movements as having very little intellectual content. I therefore can't see them creating the sort of ferment of ideas we saw in parts of China in the 1980s. But I could be wrong.

SH: Do you think serious economic problems are a prerequisite for widespread dissent in China?

HD: Chinese people, especially in the populous east, have become accustomed, over the last two or three decades, to increases in wealth, in spending power. If that trend was to end suddenly, without any convincing explanation, then the legitimacy of the Communist Party might be eroded. The Communist Party might become a victim of its anti-intellectualism and opportunism. The party has essentially said, for decades now, that it deserves to be in power because it is making China wealthier. If the economy runs into a wall, then the party can hardly revive the sort of voluntarist rhetoric of Mao, who decried bourgeois consumerism and called for sacrifices in the building of socialism. I don't mean to defend Mao, or contrast him positively with the current Communist Party leadership - I'm just pointing out that he had more ideological and rhetorical resources in the face of hard times than the current leaders would have.

If there is a crisis in the Chinese economy, it might well be prompted by the property market. Real estate in China is extraordinarily expensive, especially given the fact that one cannot buy freehold there - everything is leased, albeit for a long time, from the government. Because economic opportunity is focused on the eastern seaboard, in cities like Shanghai, there has been a massive internal migration in this direction over recent decades. A shortage of apartments has seen prices soar. The increase in consumer spending power has only made the problem worse, because people are competing for apartments.

You can nowadays buy a nice house in the Auckland suburbs for the price of a lease on a rundown apartment in an unglamorous part of Shanghai. Apartments in Shanghai are priced by the square metre, and it's not unusual for a square metre to go for the equivalent of eight thousand dollars. Speculators are going wild. It is quite possible that property in many parts of China is currently overvalued, and if reality catches up with the property market we could see a crash, and people owning mortgages worth more than their apartments. In the meantime, don't buy a place in China...

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Anti-humanism, jazz, and Oceania: a briefing with Hamish Dewe

Back in 1995 a cantankerous poet and printer named Alan Loney photocopied and stapled together a few poems and stories by his friends, and gave the resulting sheaf of paper the rather grand title A Brief Description of the Whole World.

Over the past seventeen years Loney's creation has evolved into a stylish, eclectic journal called brief, which has published forty-three issues, attracted the services of a series of editors, and regularly won funding from Creative New Zealand.

I edited a couple of issues of brief back in 2005-2006, and I'm guest editing the 44th issue of the journal, which will have the theme of Oceania. Hamish Dewe edited the 43rd issue of brief, and I wanted to talk with him about his experiences, and about my plans for number 44. When I dropped into Hamish Dewe's house this morning he was stretched out in his backyard, close to the place where a great plain of mud-grey concrete gives way to plots of rising corn and spinach, and reading Wyndham Lewis' supposedly unreadable novel Roaring Queen.

As long-time readers of this blog will know, Hamish has never been afraid to talk turkey, and he took pleasure in both defending his own editorial principles and questioning my ideas for the next issue of brief. Here's a transcript of my interview with the man who was once described as 'the Ezra Pound of Auckland'...

SH: With its relatively small number of contributors and lack of obvious editorial interventions, your issue of brief might seem like a throwback to the early days of the journal in the mid-'90s...

HD: The similarity wasn't intentional. Back in the early days Alan Loney gave contributors ten or so pages each and let them do what they wanted - he was leasing space on the shop floor. I haven't done that. I've selected - I've rejected.

SH: Do you think that an editor needs to be an interventionist?

HD: Yes, unless he or she is a utopian. In the best of all worlds free expression might be possible. In practice, though, writers tend to need pressure from outside. They need to be told when they're producing shit. Loney's laissez-faire approach meant that writers felt free to fill up their allotted pages with shit.

SH: You didn't include any of your own writing in your issue of brief. Other editors, myself included, haven't been so modest...

HD: I see the editor as somebody leading a group, without dominating it. A group of musicians, say. I used to belong to an improvisational jazz band. The most difficult thing to do, in a band like that, is to know when not to play -

SH: Miles Davis used to sit out whole songs -

HD: That's right. I want to supervise things but I don't want to take over. SH: brief has been the focus for a number of controversies over the years, as it has evolved. Alan Loney handed the editorship to John Geraets, who began to solicit work from a wider circle of writers and to comment on important cultural and political issues. Jack Ross succeeded Geraets and began to publish people Loney disapproved of, and to editorialise about subjects like the Iraq war and the imprisonment of Ahmed Zaoui. Loney felt the journal had changed too much, and urged a boycott of it -

HD: Loney is a control freak.

SH: But he felt that he was making principled criticisms of the way the journal was evolving. He had wanted brief to be a sort of record of the work being done by neglected Kiwi writers - by members of what he called 'the Other Tradition' -

HD: That tradition existed mainly in Loney's head. Loney himself wasn't neglected - he got grants, residencies, published a couple of books with Auckland University Press - and neither were many of the contributors neglected.

SH: Loney seemed to derive some obscure psychological gratification from imagining himself as a victim of persecution. Admittedly, his antics annoyed so many people that he eventually really became a neglected, if not persecuted, figure. He now lives overseas and has few contacts with the New Zealand literary scene. How do you regard brief, today?

HD: I see it as a way of cohering a community. There's a group of writers who share their work in the journal. I'm wary about making too many generalisations about their work, though -

SH: There's been some discussion at Reading the Maps about the future of offline publishing in general, and offline literary publishing in particular. In this age of online living, is it possible for a literary community to cohere around a print journal? HD: I admit to belonging to various social media. Facebook, twitter. But I'm a lurker at those places, not a poster. I don't feel entirely comfortable in the online world. I love the old-fashioned print publication. I love the spine, the pages, the coarseness of paper. I write in pages, and I think in pages. The page is my horizon. I simply can't concentrate in the endlessness of cyberspace.

SH: Do you sympathise, then, with those technosceptics who wonder whether the online reading of literature is an entirely good thing?

HD: People like Nicholas Carr who argue that in twenty years kids won't be able to read Tolstoy because their brains will have been rewired by the net strike me as a little extreme. But I wonder whether the advocates of internet literature have forgotten the importance of constraints. So many great works of art, of literature, have been built around constraints. The sonnet is a constraint. The diptych is a constraint. The cartoon frame is a constraint. Grammar is a constraint. You can't think without constraints. The open-endedness of the internet, the ability of a site to grow and grow, seems to excite many people: I don't know why. I like short poems partly because I like to be able to see all of what I'm reading in one glance. I'm a synoptic reader. I annoyed Brett Cross, who was laying my issue of brief up, because I insisted on putting those poems which covered two pages on facing pages. I couldn't bear to split them.

SH: And you also have a liking for old-fashioned means of composition?

HD: I like to compose long-handed. In fact, I can't type poetry. I hate the finality of type, and I hate the neutrality of type. You strike a key, or press a keyboard button, and you get the same letter as you got the last time you hit the key or button. It feels mechanical. It is mechanical. But when you write you can vary the size and shape and darkness of your letters, of your words. You can cross out errors or unacceptable truths. You can mutilate phrases. You can write corrections and queries between the lines. I know that a poem is usually published in print, not in longhand, but there is a thread, a secret thread, that goes through the composition process, that insinuates its way into the published text, when you compose in longhand...

SH: Can I ask you about the cover of your issue of brief?

HD: It was my favourite image from Wall, an exhibition of drawings held by Ellen Portch at Elam last year. I am interested in the character it shows. I call him Sexless Man. And I like the form of the drawing. I like its extreme structuring. I like the regularity and repetition.

SH: Is the drawing a sort of visual equivalent of the poems you like?

HD: I do like poems that have a structure apart from the ego.

SH: That's quite a resonant phrase but I'm not sure exactly what it means. Can you unpack it for me?

HD: Must I? I like resonant phrases. I have a tendency to talk in aphorisms...I guess what I mean is that I don't like poems which revolve around individual selves. I don't think the self offers the best vantage point on the world

SH: You want something larger than the self?

HD: Something smaller.

SH: I was listening to an interview with Alice Oswald, the British poet and translator of The Iliad, and she was criticising the tendency of Westerners to see the countryside in Romantic terms, in the terms that Wordsworth and his friends established so long ago. She was arguing that there are many ways to see a landscape, to see the world, and she asked the question "How does a landscape look from the point of view of moss?" Is that the sort of question you're trying to answer?

HD: Not really. Isn't it very Romantic to think you can impersonate moss, instantiate yourself as moss in a cave? What fanciful bullshit! If you're talking about models for breaking down the self, breaking through the self, I'd prefer you to discuss Louis Althusser and his anti-humanist approach to the world -

SH: You like Althusser's idea that humans aren't the centre of the world, that humans don't really even control their own actions, and that human history isn't heading towards any sort of great goal?

HD: Very much so. I don't like Marxists who talk about dialectics. To me dialectics always seems to involve some idea of synthesis, or reconciling small things in terms of something bigger. I don't want reconciliation. I want fragments. I think that what makes us human is the small stuff, the forces and processes that pass through us, under the radar, so to speak, of our superegos, or even our conscious minds -

SH: Stuff like -

HD: - hunger, boredom, lust...

SH: Are you surprised that a number of people have called you a pessimistic writer?

HD: No. And I take such criticism as a compliment. A while ago I was called dour. That was meant as a criticism. I took it as a very great compliment. SH: Can I ask you to name a favourite text from brief 44?

HD: I don't want to talk about a favourite but I'd like to draw attention to the poems by Vaughan Rapatahana. They hark back to the early days of the journal -

SH: That seems to me a weird thing to say, because Vaughan's poems are short and carry readily accessible, strongly political messages. By contrast, a lot of the stuff in Alan Loney's brief seemed quite abstract and elaborate. HD: Yes, Vaughan's work is political. He sits in exile in Hong Kong passing judgment on Maori and Pakeha alike for their perceived xenophobia and philistinism. He is disgusted by the way Australia and New Zealand act as deputies for the US in the Pacific. He is worried about the threat that the English language and Western culture poses to Pacific island societies.

But can't someone write poems which are passionately political and at the same time linguistically adventurous? Just take a look at the way Vaughan, in his polemical fury, mutilates his words and lines, throwing letters and whole phrases across the pages. Just look at the way the meaning of his poems is tied up with the shape his poems makes on their pages. He reminds me of some of the wild Futurist poets of the early twentieth century - of Marinetti, for example, who tried to simulate the feeling of war on the page by going berserk with typography...

SH: I think Vaughan has brought something different to brief, and to similar spaces where he has published over the last year or so. brief has - let's face it - been a journal dominated by urban middle-class Pakeha, but Vaughan has a very different background -

HD: And his concerns are different. His focus on rural Maori society, and on the Pacific -

SH: And his work in trying to save Pacific languages. As you know, I'm editing the next issue of brief, and I've given it the theme of Oceania. I took the term Oceania from the late Tongan intellectual Epeli Hau'ofa, who disliked 'Pacific', because he thought that it suggested an ocean without people, rather than a set of peoples connected by water. I don't want to pretend to be anything but a palangi, and I don't want to pretend that brief isn't a palangi journal - I just want to bring a few more Vaughan Rapatahanas into the literary consciousness of palangi Kiwis, and make a few of us, at least, think about our society and our writing in terms of the ocean and islands which surround us -

HD: That sounds very noble, but also quite problematic. brief represents a particular set of people - most of them are used to thinking in terms of a national New Zealand literary tradition, and in terms of European and North American writers. That's where their models come from. Is there any real chance they'll embrace cultural traditions they've never heard about before? I think they'll reply to your efforts with a resounding silence -

SH: It can be argued though that a silence about Oceania - a reticence about New Zealand's real geographical context, its real neighbours - underlies the whole history of palangi literature here. The nationalists who created the official model of New Zealand literature in the '30s, people like Allen Curnow and Charles Brasch and Frank Sargeson, were seduced by a vision of this country as a handful of islands floating in a vast empty ocean. We only need to think of some of the key phrases of Curnow's famous nationalist poems - phrases like 'Not in narrow seas', 'distance looks our way' and so on - to appreciate the emphasis on isolation, on loneliness.

Curnow and the other nationalists thought that New Zealand's great problem and opportunity was its isolation. And the 'internationalists' who challenged their programme - people like Louis Johnson - accepted, consciously or unconsciously, the notion of New Zealand as a very physically isolated place. Johnson argued that modern communications and literary tradition meant that there was 'an underground tunnel' between this country and Europe. He also pointed out that, in the postwar decades, we were drawing a lot closer culturally to America. But he apparently never thought to challenge the idea that New Zealand sat in the middle of a vast and empty ocean.

The reality is that, for many hundreds of years, the Pacific was a highway for Polynesian cultures. And in the nineteenth century writers like Melville celebrated Oceania as one of the great crossroads of humanity. Victorian New Zealanders considered the seas to their north as vital to their colony's future, and worked to build an island empire. The 'isolation' about which Curnow et al talk so often was an economic and political construct. After the advent of refrigerated shipping New Zealand became Britain's farm, and the Pacific became less economically important. And as New Zealand and other foreign powers annexed most of the Pacific Islands, restrictions were placed on movement across the ocean. Trade links to cities like Sydney and Auckland were lost, and Polynesian vaka were burnt.

As a result of all this, palangi Kiwis lost their awareness of the galaxy of societies which lay in the seas to their north. And it's surprising how little things have changed, despite the recent great migrations to New Zealand from the Pacific Islands. Epeli Hau'ofa celebrated the new mobility of island peoples in the late twentieth century, because he saw it as a reopening of the Pacific highway which palangi colonists had closed for decades. In Auckland some of the most vital art is being made by Pacific immigrants, or people with a 'Pasifika' background. Painters like Andy Leileisu'ao, who calls himself a Kamoan, or Kiwi Samoan, and Glen Wolfgramm, who describes Tonga as his 'foreign homeland', are doing remarkable work, as they bring palangi and Polynesian cultures into dialogue. But where are the palangi artists and writers attempting a similar dialogue? Why isn't the great emigration from the north stimulating us, as well?

HD: That's all very well, but you can't force people to take an interest in a particular culture. And you shouldn't try to tyrannise us with geography. Many brief contributors probably feel more comfortable with American literary models than Pacific literary models. That's alright.

SH: I don't want to tell people what to read. But it does seem to me that palangi Kiwi writers could be enriched by contact with other inhabitants of Oceania. There are all sorts of fascinating intellectual currents floating across the Pacific.

Over the past year and a half I've been investigating the Tongan intellectual scene, and in particular the 'Atenisi school of thought, which has its origins in a tumbledown private university on the outskirts of Nuku'alofa but now has adherants in universities across the world. Futa Helu, the founder of 'Atenisi, wanted to fuse Polynesian and classical Greek thought. I think that was a fascinating, if quixotic, ambition. I think Helu can teach us something about biculturalism, about cultural exchange. Futa Helu was passionate about Heraclitus - so is the poet and classicist Ted Jenner, one of the most prolific and distinguished contributors to brief. Paul Janman, whose movie about 'Atenisi was recently released, is a long-time reader of brief. I think there are connections waiting to be made.

HD: I think you need to be clear about the difference between exchange and appropriation. If you want to take something from another culture - fine. Picasso stole from the Africans, Pound stole from the Chinese. But appropriation is not the same as genuine exchange. I wish you well, but I think your Oceania issue will be an aberration in the history of brief. I don't think you're going to inaugurate a new era in the history of the journal. I think it's better to have smaller ambitions - to try to keep the quality of the journal high, and to introduce the odd new voice, like Vaughan Rapatahana. Your issue sounds like a utopian enterprise, and I am not a man for utopias.

Send submissions for brief 44 to shamresearch@yahoo.co.nz

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Blogging and the curse of coolness

Only a few years ago blogging was being hailed, in the mass media and in academia, as a revolutionary medium of communication. The pundits told us, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, that blogs, with their speed of publication and low costs, would inevitably supersede newspapers. Blogs were also tipped to transform literature by complicating or even obliterating the distinctions between author and reader. And politicians were warned that blogging would change the nature of public debate, as hordes of formerly quiescent citizens began posting their opinions online.

In 2004 the Merriam-Webster dictionary pronounced 'blog' the 'word of the year', and in 2005 the media revealed that a new blog was being created every second.

Today, though, blogs are out of fashion. A survey reported by the New York Times showed that blogging is fast losing popularity amongst younger people, who are much more enamoured of newer internet platforms like facebook and twitter. A Pew Research Centre survey of thousands of American web users suggests that blogging is also losing its appeal for older folks. The proprietor of Gombeen Nation, one of Ireland's most popular blogs, recently observed that, thanks to steadily falling readerships, his competitors 'are dropping like flies'. The internet is now littered with the hulks of abandoned blogs.

Blogging is in decline because it conflicts with both the profit drive of capitalist corporations and the consciousness of contemporary internet users.

Corporations find it relatively difficult to make money out of blogging - the potential for advertising is limited, compared to that available at e mail sites, facebook, and twitter, where new internet 'pages' are opened much more often. Blogging has failed to attract many of the celebrities - actors, musicians, sportspeople - whose tweets and facebook updates are followed by huge and lucrative audiences.

If blogging is out of tune with twenty-first century capitalism, it is also at odds with the thought patterns of many of the residents of developed societies. The millions of citizens who created accounts at sites like blogger.com, LiveJournal, and Wordpress soon ran out of enthusiasm for their new hobby, as the prospect of regularly turning out posts hundreds or thousands of words long came to seem oppressive rather than liberating.

With its draconian restrictions on word length, twitter spares its users the troublesome task or advancing and defending arguments. Slogans, non-sequitirs, and in-jokes replace premises and citations. Just as the brutally abbreviated 20-20 form of cricket removes most of the distinctions between good and bad players, so twitter destroys much of the difference between good and bad thinking. Martin Guptill can make a 20-20 half-century, and Charlie Sheen can become a literary star on twitter.

It is telling that politicians, who were generally rather unenthusiastic about blogging, have become some of the most prolific and popular tweeters. Political soundbites and slogans have been growing shorter and more fatuous for decades, and twitter is the perfect medium for the shortest and most fatuous of them.

With its endless opportunities for self-indulgence, facebook offers a similar escape from the tyranny of thought.

The popular abandonment of blogs in favour of twitter, facebook and other internet platforms that prioritise brevity and insouciance is part of a wider tendency in our culture. As Nicholas Carr has observed in his famous essay 'Is Google making us stupid?' and his follow-up book The Shallows, the internet is being used to enforce a 'Taylorisation' of the modern mind.

Just as the Taylorist method of factory management seeks to get higher and higher yields from workers by dividing their time into smaller and smaller portions and making their tasks more and more specific, so companies like Google are today trying, with the help of technology, to speed up and simplify our thinking. As workers become accustomed to speed-reading and multitasking at their computer terminals, their brains are, to some extent at least, rewired, so that they find it harder to do the sort of 'deep' reading and thinking which literature and serious political discourse demand. Blogging - good blogging, anyway - becomes more onerous, and the inanities of twitter and facebook become more appealing.

Whenever I wonder whether blogging will survive the second decade of the twenty-first century, I think of Alex Wild's The Constant Losers. In Wild's novel, which was published late in 2010 and recently received some well-deserved praise from Landfall, a young man and woman conduct a strange dialogue through the fanzines they self-publish and the cassette mix tapes they create and circulate.

The protagonists of The Constant Losers are twenty-something hipsters, familiar with the topography and nightlife of the bohemian zones of Auckland. Both characters are nevertheless preoccupied with the artefacts left behind by a pre-internet, pre-digital era of youth culture. For most members of their generation, the cassette anthology and the photocopied, stapled-together fanzine seem to require pointless amounts of solitary labour, and appear mendaciously resistant to the desires of readers and listeners. Their tracks and pages cannot be skipped or rearranged, or posted to a filesharing forum. But Wild's characters are enchanted by the fustiness of their cassettes and their fanzines. The scarcities and uncertainties inherent in old-fashioned DIY publishing excite them, as they seek rare issues of fanzines in the freebie racks of inner city music shops. They enthuse over the clunky fragility of their tapes, as well as the archaic hissing and sighing sounds which the cassettes impose like overdubs on the tunes they collect.

Some of Wild's readers have considered her novel a homage to youth and coolness, but I prefer, in my uncool, curmudgeonly way, to see the text as a dig at a civilisation addicted to technological and cultural innovation. Wild's characters rebel against the twenty-first century not by stripping off their clothes and heading for the nearest forest, but by retrieving and aestheticising the obsolete innovations of their parents' generation. Like Joseph Cornell, who made surreal worlds out of old-fashioned objects arranged in boxes, or Laurence Aberhart, who uses Victorian technology to photograph contemporary New Zealand, the heroes of The Constant Losers are determined to find a future in the past. The architecture of Wild's novel complements its theme. The Constant Losers appears, on the surface, to be a chaotic work, consisting as it does of fascimile-style 'reproductions' of the protagonists' respective fanzines. With their zany fonts, smudged black and white images, and corny or esoteric headlines, the zines don't initially look very considered, let alone artful.

But a closer examination of The Constant Losers reveals the author's almost classical concern with form. As they take turns entreating each other, Wild's protagonists balance and stabilise her text. The Constant Losers can be considered a novel of letters, in the tradition of Dostoevsky's Poor Folk and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Like her characters, Alex Wild refuses to prioritise fashion over history.

Blogging may have been superseded by new and inferior innovations, but the medium need not die. Indeed, bloggers should treat the rise of alternative forms of online communication as a liberation, rather than a disaster. Freed from the curse of coolness, blogging can now develop as a literary and artistic genre, or set of genres. Blogging may have lost some of its old practitioners, but it should be able to attract writers, artists, and political thinkers dissatisfied with the short attention span of twitter and the ritualised onanism of facebook. Blogging may become an act of resistance against the dumbing down of culture and political discourse in the twenty-first century.

Here in New Zealand, Richard Taylor's exciting, perplexing Eyelight is exploring the aesthetic possibilities of the hyperlink, and testing the limits of the internet 'page'. On a series of quieter but equally strange sites, Jack is showing that the blog can become a sort of cultural memory bank. Ross' A Gentle Madness documents his bibliomania, while his edition of the late Leicester Kyle's lost works is bringing an important writer out of the shadows. With his insistence on publishing one seriously researched blog-essay at the same time every week, Giovanni Tiso is using blogging to make a stand against our culture's tendency towards brevity and superficiality. Over at the Kea and Cattle blog, the newly-minted Rhodes Scholar Andrew Dean has been showing that wild eclecticism and intellectual rigour can go together, as he publishes mini-essays about subjects as different as depressed cricketers, South Island regionalism, Rilke, and The Simpsons.

Like the characters in Alex Wild's first novel, today's bloggers are consciously rejecting fashion, and showing the possibilities inherent in a supposedly outmoded medium of communication.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Breaking into fact

Whenever I examine a newspaper I steer around articles dealing with individual tragedies and outrages - car crashes and house fires and child abductions and murders - and instead read reports on more general, abstract subjects, like political conflicts or economic crises or demographic changes.

I justify this preference to Skyler by explaining that I see the world in materialist terms, and regard history as the working out of broad forces and grand structures. I tell Skyler that individual human tragedies and triumphs are not, in the scheme of things, significant, and thus don't count as news, in the proper sense of the word.

But there's a less intellectual reason why I try to steer clear of the tragedies that are part of every day's news. I find reading about crimes like the recent violent assault on a small girl in a Turangi holiday camp both distressing and depressing. I'm hardly alone in this, of course: the atrocity in Turangi has disturbed people up and down New Zealand. Even those of us who have avoided newspaper articles and talkback radio have received details of the crime and updates on the hunt for its perpetrator, courtesy of angry family members and friends.

A crowd laid siege to the Taupo District Court yesterday, as a young man appeared there on charges relating to the attack in nearby Turangi. A lot of Kiwis will be fantasising about the punishments they'd mete out to the attacker, if only they were given the opportunity.

While this sort of aggressive response to a heinous crime is rational enough, and may even have some therapeutic value, it seems to me to be somehow inadequate to the sheer mystery of evil. From Eichmann to Harold Shipman, the perpetrators of terrible crimes always seem somehow slight, once they are captured and safely removed from the scenes of their deeds. The reporters and psychologists who observe their appearances in the dock and interview them in prison meeting rooms, seeking some clue about ideology and motive, tend to be disappointed. It seems impossible to square the evil of the crimes with the pathetic lives and unimpressive countenances of the perpetrators. If we want to understand the evil of a Shipman or a Manson we must look beyond the individual, into history and sociology and the structure of the human mind.

The annotated selection of Kendrick Smithyman's poems I published last year included a text prompted by one of the most notorious murders in modern New Zealand history. Smithyman disliked easy rhetoric and over-certainty, and his discussion of the killing of Kirsa Jensen is both complex and sensitive. I've reproduced Smithyman's poem below, along with the commentary which I gave it in last year's book.

FICTION FACT

The not well chosen motel looks over the road
to the marshalling yard. They've a current row
about reducing staff, not enough work
to warrant; conceivably this might be why the yard
worked all night but seemed to get nowhere.
A few jolts forward, some coupling, clanking,
a few jolts back, some pointless heavy breathing
from too-long stationary diesel locos.
These are of course Bulgarian motors.
One has heard about Bulgarians, Smiley might tell more

whose prose leaps in the small hours from Kipling, the Great Game,
to Greene, the enduringly painful down at heel
talent which Evil has for breaking
any gloss of fiction, into fact.
That place which we passed, rivermouth
a few kilometres south which is historically
connected with missionary endeavour,
in a day or two there
a girl child will fall
from her horse, a middleaged man - platitudinous,
nondescript - with a nondescript truck
will stop, offer help. She will not be seen
again. We shall not, as we do not, know.

18.9.83

Note

On the first day of the spring of 1983 a fourteen year-old girl named Kirsa Jensen disappeared after riding her horse to a section of coastline just south of Napier. Jensen was last seen at Awatoto Beach with a bloodied face, which she attributed to a fall from her horse, and in the company of a middle-aged man, who claimed to be waiting with her for her parents. Jensen's body has never been recovered, and her killer has never been identified.

Smithyman and his second wife Margaret Edgcumbe had spent a night in Napier in late August 1983, near the end of a journey through the middle latitudes of the North Island which took them to Taranaki, the Wairarapa, and the Ureweras as well as to Hawkes Bay. In 'Fiction Fact', which was written after the couple's return to Auckland, Smithyman remembers the uneasy night he spent in Napier, and finds in it premonitions of the tragedy about to strike the town.

In an interview with Jack Ross for the Smithymania issue of literary journal brief, Margaret Edgcumbe remembered that Kendrick often suffered from insomnia in his later years, and used to cope with this malady by reading deep into the night. In 'Fiction Fact', Smithyman's sleeplessness is reinforced by the noise from the railway workshop situated all too close to his 'not well chosen motel'.

The poet is obscurely troubled by the idea that the engines of the trains being repaired across the road were made in Bulgaria. In the early 1980s, Romania was widely regarded in the West as the most liberal of the Soviet Union's Eastern European allies, on account of its relatively independent foreign policy, and its neighbour Bulgaria was often perceived as a sinister, fiercely repressive place. Bulgaria's bad reputation derived partly from the closeness with which it followed Soviet foreign policy, but it also had something to do with the bizarre murder of Georgi Martov in London in 1978 by Bulgarian secret agents. Martov, a writer who had fled Bulgaria and become a prominent critic of its rulers, was killed by a tiny poison capsule fired out of an umbrella on a busy London street.

Smithyman wrote regularly about the Soviet bloc and the Cold War in the 1980s, thanks partly to the influence of his eldest son Christopher, a career diplomat who had begun, at the end of the 1970s, to specialise in Soviet affairs and to learn Russian. Christopher worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Wellington up until shortly before his death from a brain tumour in 1984, and on his occasional visits to that city Kendrick sometimes found himself chatting with diplomats from the Eastern bloc at parties and functions his son’s employers had organised.

In 'Fiction Fact' Bulgaria, with its Cold War connotations of espionage and repression, seems to remind Smithyman of books he has been reading to cope with his insomnia. After considering John Le Carre's novels about the Mi6 agent Smiley - a character sometimes described as the anti-Bond, on account of his dour demeanour and undramatic methods - Smithyman thinks of Rudyard Kipling, whose 1902 book Kim popularised the use of the term 'the Great Game' to describe the rivalry between the British and Russian Empires in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Kipling's novel relates the burgeoning career in espionage and the on-again, off-again spiritual quest of a young Englishman raised on the Indian subcontinent. At the book's end Kim must choose between finding enlightenment deep in the Himalayas or enjoying worldly success as a British intelligence officer.
If Kipling's novel counterposes spiritual purity to worldly corruption, then Graham Greene's fiction demolishes the dichotomy, showing that men of God can be as amoral as the most cynical spy. Greene's preoccupation with the darker side of humanity was not confined to the page: as his biographers have shown, the great writer consciously experimented, for much of his life, with acts which he knew to be evil, like spying on his friends for British intelligence. It is appropriate, then, that Greene, along with Kipling and Le Carre, suggests to Smithyman the 'talent' that 'evil has' for 'breaking/ any gloss of fiction, into fact'.

In the last dozen lines of his poem, Smithyman explains why he has been so preoccupied with dark thoughts. He and Margaret passed the site where Kirsa Jensen was last seen only a few days before her disappearance.

When Smithyman describes Awatoto Beach as a 'rivermouth...historically/ connected with missionary endeavour' he refers to the nineteenth century history of the place. In the early 1840s the Church Missionary Society established a station at Awatoto, which was then known as Awapuni, after acquiring ten acres near the mouth of the Tutaekuri River from a local hapu of the large Ngati Kahungungu iwi. The young William Colenso, who would eventually win renown as an ethnologist and a botanist as well as a clergyman, was the first occupant of the mission station, and in 1845 he and his followers managed to raise a church there.

For quarrelling Ngati Kahungungu hapu and, eventually, for members of other iwi, Awapuni became a neutral locus for negotiations and diplomatic intrigues. In the
1850s the great Tainui leader Wiremu Tamihana visited the place, during his efforts to win Ngati Kahungungu support for the King Movement he was creating. After the invasion of the King Movement's lands by the Pakeha government in Auckland in 1863, Awapuni was the site of negotiations between Ngati Kahungungu and semi-secret government agents keen to keep the iwi from joining the war on the side of King Tawhiao.

'Fiction Fact' is not a poem which constructs a logical argument, or a linear narrative: it proceeds, instead, by a series of unexpected associative leaps. Perhaps Smithyman is reminded of the intrigue-filled history of Awatoto by the spy novels he has apparently been reading, and perhaps the terrible mystery which surrounds the disappearance of Kirsa Jensen reminds him of the sinister secrets which are the stock in trade of spies and states.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Christopher Hitchens and the end of triumphalism

As the American flag was lowered at Baghdad International Airport last week, the most vociferous literary proponent of the invasion and occupation of Iraq lay dying in a Houston hospital. In the mass media and on the blogosphere there has been a curiously muted response to both the end of America's long occupation of Iraq and the passing of Christopher Hitchens.

The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was vehemently criticised and defended around the world, and controversy persisted for the next few years, as the easy overthrow of Saddam Hussein was followed by widespread resistance to American-led forces, civil war between confessional groups, and economic collapse. Chistopher Hitchens had been a journalist and political commentator since he graduated from Oxford University in the early 1970s, but it was the support he gave, in print and in endless rounds of television talk show appearances and college hall debates, for Bush's attack on Iraq which made him into a celebrity and a hate figure in both his British homeland and his adopted America.

Hitchens had been a Trotskyist of sorts at Oxford, and had later associated with both the left of the British Labour Party and the ginger group of liberal American intellectuals which publishes the journal The Nation. By calling Bush's assault on Iraq a war of liberation, and by comparing its opponents to the appeasers of Hitler, Hitchens upset many of his old comrades and readers and delighted the right. His endorsement of Bush in the 2004 presidential elections only confirmed his apostasy.

In the early years of the Iraq war Hitchens was regularly excoriated by left-wing commentators, but few of his old opponents have felt the need to renew their fury in the aftermath of his death. The blogger Louis Proyect was one of Hitchens' most ferocious and persistent critics, but his obituary for his old enemy is surprisingly measured. Alex Callinicos, whose Socialist Workers Party was often condemned as an ally of 'Islamofascism' by Hitchens, has also refrained from denunciations.

The many articles published about the end of the American occupation of Iraq have had a similarly restrained tone. Long-time critics of Bush's war have been in a reflective rather than a strident mood.

If the end of the American war on Iraq and the death of that war's most passionate advocate have received muted responses, it is perhaps because Bush's war seems to belong to a different, distant era.

A decade ago, when Afghanistan had been speedily occupied and plans were being laid for an assault on Iraq, America was widely perceived as a dynamic and unstoppable superpower. The collapse of the Soviet Union had brought Eastern Europe into the American sphere of influence, and now, confronted by Bush's post-9/11 'for or against us' rhetoric and a massive military buildup, formerly recalcitrant parts of the Middle East and Central Asia seemed set to follow. Ideologues close to Bush talked about creating an 'American century', by using military firepower and free market economics to spread the writ of Washington into even the most barbarous corners of the globe.

The transformation of Iraq into an outpost of American capitalism and a model for the benighted parts of the world seemed, in this heady atmosphere, an easy task. Bush's deputy Dick Cheney predicted that the war on Iraq would be a 'cakewalk'; Hitchens gave victory a sort of teleological inevitability when he looked forward to the 'overdue liberation' of the country.

It is now obvious that the heady early years of this century marked the zenith of American imperial power and self-confidence. The adventure in Iraq ended up demonstrating the limits of American military capabilities, and the economic crisis that began on Wall Street in 2008 has shown up the fragility of the country's economy. Today not only the bomb-scarred streets of Baghdad but the ruined industrial zones of Detroit and Cleveland and the foreclosed suburbs of Stockton and Tampa mock the imperial hubris of the Bush era. To reread Hitchens' writings of a decade ago is to enter again the febrile atmosphere of the early years of the 'War on Terror'. Hitchens admitted to feeling a sense of 'exhilaration' in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities, and his pro-war articles have a troubling excitement and confidence. After spending decades as a left-wing gadfly, with no influence in the centres of political and economic power, Hitchens felt that Bush's response to 9/11 had given him a cause with which he could identify wholeheartedly. The reformed Marxist's aggressive endorsements of Bush policies soon won him visits to the White House and meetings with neoconservative strategists like Paul Wolfowitz. Hitchens even gave Bush and his inner circle a political pep talk on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

Hitchens' excited response to the War on Terror sometimes expressed itself in a frank delight in violence. In a 2002 interview, for instance, he enthused over the effects of the cluster bombs American forces were dropping on the recalcitrant parts of Afghanistan:

If you're actually certain that you're hitting only a concentration of enemy troops...then it's pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too. So they won't be able to say, "Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through." No way, 'cause it'll go straight through that as well. They'll be dead, in other words..

Hitchens' advertisements for Bush's war were written in haste, and without great regard for either facts or logic. Reviewing The Long Short War, a collection of twenty-two pro-war articles penned in late 2002 and early 2003, Norman Finkelstein noted how often Hitchens contradicted himself, even within the confines of a single article. Finkelstein found Hitchens claiming that the war had nothing to do with oil, then stating on his very next page that 'of course it's about oil'. He saw Hitchens arguing that Saddam's regime was on the brink of 'implosion', then asserting a page later than 'only the force of American arms' could bring regime change in Iraq.

While many early supporters of the war on Iraq either revised or abandoned their arguments as the war dragged on, Hitchens persisted with the same discredited talking points. Up until the end of his life he claimed, in the face of an avalanche of countervailing evidence, that Saddam had maintained a nuclear weapons programme in the 1990s, and had tried to buy uranium from Niger. In an interview with Radio New Zealand last year he repeated the lie that the Iraqi Communist Party and labour movement had supported the invasion of their country, neglecting to mention that the American 'liberators' had not only maintained but enforced a Saddam-era law banning trade unions and strikes.

What is important in Hitchens' pro-war writings is not evidence or logic but a rhetoric of destiny and triumphalism. In text after text, Hitchens gives the impression that the war in Iraq, and the War on Terror in general, are struggles of world-historical importance between forces of reaction and progress, and suggests that these struggles might be won or lost because of the bravery or cowardice of Western intellectuals. Hitchens treats critics of the War on Terror like unforgivable enemies, and presents himself as an auxillary of the American armed forces - a 'keyboard warrior', hunkered down in his Washington office-bunker.

Hitchens' delusions of self-importance are not novel, for anyone who has studied intellectual history. In the 1920s Ezra Pound decided that Mussolini was taking his advice; a decade later Martin Heidegger was stupid enough to believe that, by circulating his writings inside the Nazi Party, he was becoming Adolf Hitler's intellectual mentor, and guiding the progress of the 'new Germany'; in the 1960s Louis Althusser convinced himself that his office at the Ecole Normale was the secret centre of world revolution.

Hitchens responded to the failure of the American mission in Iraq by broadening rather than abandoning his vision of a world-historical battle between forces of good and evil, light and darkness. As Iraq fractured along confessional lines and support for Bush collapsed in America, Hitchens turned increasingly from the War on Terror to the notion of a wider war between religion and reason. In his 2007 book God is not Great he proclaimed religion an 'urgent danger' to the survival of the human race, and demanded a concerted struggle against it.

Hitchens' book won him support from some atheist organisations, but his penchant for violent rhetoric and his particular antipathy for Islam meant that the atheists sometimes came to regret inviting him to speak at their gatherings. The biologist and atheist PZ Myers described what happened after Hitchens took the stage at the 2007 Freedom from Religion convention in Wisconsin:

[I]t was Hitchens at his most bellicose. He told us what the most serious threat to the West was (and you know this line already): it was Islam. Then he accused the audience of being soft on Islam, of being the kind of vague atheists who refuse to see the threat for what it was, a clash of civilizations, and of being too weak to do what was necessary, which was to spill blood to defeat the enemy...

The way to win the war is to kill so many Moslems that they begin to question whether they can bear the mounting casualties...Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide. Or, at least, wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world until they are sufficiently cowed and frightened and depleted that they are unable to resist us in any way, ever again...I could tell that he did not have the sympathy of most of the audience at this point. There were a scattered few who applauded wildly at every mention of bombing the Iranians, but the majority were stunned into silence. People were leaving — I heard one woman sing a few bars of "Onward, Christian soldiers" as she left to mock his strategy.

Hitchens wrote a series of books which attempted to celebrate men he regarded as his precursors in the struggle against religion and other forms of unreason. But texts like Orwell's Victory and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: a biography are so poorly researched and constructed that they can only be considered assaults on reason. Hitchens' study of Paine piggybacks shamelessly on John Keane's biography of the great man, at times lifting whole paragraphs from its source; his homage to Orwell dispenses with secondary literature altogether, preferring unsubstantiated assertion to quote and citation. Just as Jim Morrison is only considered a great poet by folks who don't read poetry, so Hitchens is only acclaimed as a scholar by the right-wing ignoramuses who know him as an advocate for war on Fox News.

Abandoned by the left, Hitchens increasingly found a home on the hard right of American politics. He began to associate with David Horowitz, the famous defector from the 1960s left who had become an advocate of the deportation of American Muslims and the exclusion of socialist teachers from high school and colleges. Hitchens reviewed one of Horowitz's books sympathetically, spoke at one of the anti-Muslim rallies Horowitz regularly holds at American universities, and began a joint speaking tour with Horowitz before falling ill.

In the eighteen months it took to kill him, cancer took some of the hubris and aggression out of Hitchens' prose. Invalided away from the television talk shows and Washington cocktail parties which were his usual frontline, the keyboard warrior found himself writing about painkillers and chemotherapy and hospital gowns. The world-historical struggle for freedom was suddenly internalised, in prose that exchanged bombast for quiet irony:

Most despond-inducing and alarming of all, so far, was the moment when my voice suddenly rose to a childish (or perhaps piglet-like) piping squeak. It then began to register all over the place, from a gruff and husky whisper to a papery, plaintive bleat...So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

Hitchens tried to immortalise his writing by making it the servant of powerful men and a world-historical struggle, but it is the very personal work he produced at the end of his life which is most likely to persist in print. Like Pound's Fascist Cantos and Heidegger's rectorial addresses, the feverish advertisements for Bush's wars will be of interest only as examples of the dangers that power, or the illusion of power, poses for intellectuals.

Footnote: an academic paper I wrote back in 2005 about Hitchens and the rest of the 'pro-war left' can be read here.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

The expedition indoors

Although the report Paul Janman recently sent south from Urupukapuka Island was full of interesting details and provocative speculations, I couldn't read it without feeling a little pained. I feel similarly uncomfortable when I read about older New Zealand adventurers, like William Colenso, the botanist and missionary whose jaunts around Te Ika a Maui are reenacted in new books by Peter Wells and my old friend the late Leicester Kyle. The likes of Colenso and Janman have been making me jealous. Skyler and I moved in the middle of this year to a suburb in the deep west of Auckland, and in recent weeks we - I use the word 'we' very loosely - have begun some renovations here, stripping layers off bedroom walls with an archaeological curiosity, and tearing up leagues of an ancient, peat-coloured carpet in the hope that there will be something solid underneath.

But the Waitakere Ranges rise on one side of our house, and whenever I think about the feats of travellers like Janman and Colenso I want to throw down my hammer or scraper and head for Waiatarua, or Ruaotuwhenua, or one of the other hills where antennae and bush grow.

As the likes of Jack Diamond and Lisa Truttman have reminded us, the Waitakeres have long been a place of refuge and adventure for Aucklanders tempted or forced to abandon city life. Bandits, deserters from imperialist war, and escaped prisoners have all made their ways to the ranges, along with visionary artists like Colin McCahon and Allen Curnow. There are a few research trails I'd like to follow through those hills.

I got a similar desire for flight back in the eighties at Drury Primary School whenever a teacher used to bang on about our area's association with Edmund Hillary. Looking through the Standard Three window past the last subdivisions of Auckland at the the dark blue Drury Hills, and hearing stories of our Ed's alpine daring, I was barely able to control the urge to rush out the classroom door and make for the south.

Skyler argues that living near the edge of the city can give us a certain mental balance, but I wonder whether it actually creates a peculiar sort of melancholy, by continually reminding us of the alternative to our quotidian suburban existences. Because I've been spending more time in hardware and furniture stores than in the countryside lately, I'm unable to respond in kind to Paul Janman's reports from pa sites and historic ruins and picturesquely isolated jetties. Instead, I thought I'd invoke the credo of Alf, and of anti-travel writing, by making the best of a bad situation, and glorifying the outwardly unedifying. In this poem, which I tried and failed to send to Paul yesterday (I suspect that he's once again drifted out of internet range, into one of Northland's serpentine harbours or estuaries), I deport William Colenso to twenty-first century suburbia.

In Defence of William Colenso's Botanical Expedition to a West Auckland branch of Target Furniture

Did you imagine him on a ridge-top,
chatting with cabbage trees,
or chin-deep in some bog
where kahikatea strain the sunlight?

Have you forgotten the forests
in this city?

Have you forgotten the rooms
full of rimu tables,
the oak cabinets varnished
with kauri gum?
Don't you remember
those spiders and dragonflies writhing
in blebs of gold?

Have you forgotten the library
archives, their piles of paper rising
like puriri trunks?

The deepest woods
the best specimens
are always indoors!

To reach the specimens
in the storeroom of this shop
Colenso climbs the staircase
like a tree.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Anti-travel in Urupukapuka: a communication from Paul Janman

[Some folks have been testing the water in rather more glamorous locations than Henderson...]

Hi Scott,

I'm sitting on an oyster-scabbed boat ramp, which is the only place we can get an internet signal here. The sun is kissing two old Pa sites standing up like a pair of green tits on the other side of Otehei Bay. Urupukapuka Island is ripe for anti-travel...the locals however are innocent of the precepts of the Committee for the Reconstruction of Space and Time on Pig Island...this island has been an archaeological goldmine, and is now infested with legions of red, yellow and white 'dolphin-watching' tour boats. A helicopter dragonflied down here yesterday, and disgorged half a dozen gawpers.

In 1772 Marion du Fresne spotted a fortification on the hill above us, stopped to talk to the locals, and built his hospital in neighbouring Moturoa. He was knocked off not long afterwards. There is also a story about the restaurant here, built by Zane Grey, writer of novels set in an idealised American West. The restaurant burned down in suspicious circumstances: I am needling recalcitrant locals about the probable arson. I found a 1972 history textbook among the crap novels here at the bach. One of the photos in the textbooks shows soldiers at work on the Great South Road in 1863. I suspect it was taken by William Temple, a man who marched south into the Waikato carrying primitive image-making equipment - collodion wet plates and all that - as well as a rifle. Temple won a Victoria Cross at Rangiriri, and took 'technically imperfect' photos which seem now to have a blurred, layered, almost proto-cinematic quality. Our Great South Road film should finish (ie, reverse) his work. The kids are rioting...pj