Definitions:

• IN-STORE means band members make an announced appearance at a record store.
• MEET & GREET means band members make private appearances.

Note that Pere Ubu does not always do in-store performances as a full band.

1. Please remember that all in-store appearances must be approved in advance.

2. Mr Thomas gets nervous when the record store owner / manager offers free cds or merchandise. Should the record store want to make a gift the transaction shall be handled by a third party (the Record Company rep). The third party shall approach Mr Thomas discreetly, describing what gift is offered. Mr Thomas will then okay a formal presentation at which brief, formal speeches of presentation and acceptance are made.

3. The Record Company representative must do the following:

• Immediately on arrival introduce Mr Thomas to as many people as possible, pointing out interesting facts & aiding the flow of conversation. Do not let Mr Thomas stand around like a lemon.
• IN-STORE ONLY: As soon as possible Mr Thomas must be guided to a chair from which he may play his accordion & dominate the immediate space in an absolutist manner.
• Mr Thomas should not be referred to as Dave or touched in an overly familiar way. His name is David. Shaking hands is all the physical contact that should be needed.

4. The record store MUST NOT play any Pere Ubu recordings for the duration of Mr Thomas’ visit. It is simply too embarrassing, draws undue attention to his presence & most importantly forces him to withdraw into a protective shell of weird uncommunicativeness. This is not desirable.

5. Please remember that the first 30 seconds of arrival in-store sets the tone for the entire episode. If Mr Thomas is allowed to slip into an Outcast Lemon Mode you will have an unsatisfactory experience. INTRODUCE HIM. ENCOURAGE CONVERSATION. TAKE UP ANY SLACK. If you know a fan who wants to meet him then by all means introduce them. Mr Thomas prefers civilians. He wants to be approached. He wants to talk in these circumstances since that’s what the gig is.

Mr Thomas can be the most charming & exciting personality if very simple steps are taken to avoid awkwardness. Once he gets rolling there are no problems, you can sit back, relax & observe a professional smarming his way into the hearts of all around him. The initial stages, however, are critical. Keep in mind that Mr Thomas undertakes these events as a performance.

MEET & GREETs are not a problem because of the informal nature of the event.

(With thanks to Damien Wilkins.)

by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber at Personal Message

I was looking at the cartoon Garfield Minus Garfield the other day, and I started thinking about being alone.

Jon always seemed to me a quintessentially pathetic character living in a hostile, hate-filled world. In Garfield Minus Garfield he is at last reduced to the stark reality of his situation: a miserable love life, no real friends, the companionship he built his world around an empty husk. In portraying the void at the centre of his life, these scenes feel realer, more recognisable, and finally more honest to me than the actual Garfield comics. I feel some sympathy for Jon when I see him alone like this. I imagine that this is his life now after the deaths of both Garfield and Odie; from here, he might be able to scrape back some dignity.

But why do I only feel this way about Jon when he’s alone? Why does Alone Jon seem to portray a complexity that I’m blind to when he’s with others? I’m a bit reluctant to ask myself this question because it means I’m going to have to say something about my childhood. AGAIN.

2.
As a kid, I absorbed the idea that being alone, even though it wasn’t all that fun, made me special. I don’t know where I got this idea from. For once, I’m not even sure that it was books. Well, anyway, these were the days before ‘reject’ and ‘reej’ were such fatal insults, way before having a group ‘to hang around with’ was crucial to your authentication as a human being, so in many ways I felt OK with having no friends, and on some days went out of my way to have none. I have a vivid memory of walking towards the adventure playground (a ricketty wooden tower with a prickly conifer growing through the middle), seeing my classmates and various screaming kids swarming all over it, and looking down to kick through autumn leaves with my shoes, hanging my head low, thinking, ‘I am lonely.’ I thought those words, but I remember feeling a vague boredom with having to go through with this rigmarole in order to seem special, to seem different. It probably would’ve been easier to make friends, but I didn’t know how. In high school, especially in the fifth and sixth forms, being alone was instead a source of deep shame and smallness. I would rotate my interval and lunchtime hiding places, at one point hiding in a small underground room behind the stage in the assembly hall, where my art class was stretching some canvasses. Somehow I’d managed to talk my art teacher into giving me the key to this room. There was a long narrow window just above the room where I could see people’s feet as they walked past, which always reminded me of that Quentin Blake picture book Snuff, when Snuff and Sir Thomas Magpie and the horses walk past the basement window wearing all sorts of fancy boots to scare the boot thieves inside. Even though I always felt massive relief when I got inside the room, because I could lock the door and be alone, time moved very slowly and unhappily there, and I’d feel an equal relief when the bell rang for class and I could leave – the truth was, I did like being around people, but only when there was some kind of order in place, as in a classroom. A classmate once asked me, looking slightly suspicious, ‘Who do you hang around with at lunchtime?’ I panicked and blurted, ‘Everyone!’

Everyone.

3.
One of the best things about being an adult is that no one will ever ask me again who I hang around with at lunchtime. I can wear my aloneness freely without needing to find a secret place to hide it in. It’s still not always easy for an adult to go somewhere for dinner alone or sit alone in a a busy cafe on a Sunday – see: Solo Date City – but the stench of social failure no longer hangs about you, at least not as pungently.

Still: ‘Everyone‘! In a second I can transport myself back to the mortification that led me to tell this outrageous hokum.

4.
Maybe I have a hyper-alertness to this stuff, or maybe this is something to do with the changing of the seasons etc, but – recently I’ve noticed more urgent expressions of loneliness, despair, sometimes numbness, on the internet. It feels like there’s a new energy in it, a new sharpness, even a new humour. I think if I were a highschooler again right now, I would find some kind of solace in it. (All things considered, though, I’m glad I’m not a highschooler right now.)

5.
The currency of Screenshots of Despair is the humorously bleak, and most of its bleakness stems from a sense of isolation so all-encompassing that it becomes absurd. The isolation loops back upon itself to become a kind of hysterical meta-isolation. An earlier site, Windows 95 Tips, does a similar thing, only here, the programme itself becomes the agent of the user’s doom.

Both of these sites have had surges of popularity, I guess because they speak directly to the anxiety a lot of us share about the effect of web use on us as human beings. The sites confirm but also ridicule our fears that our lives online have disconnected us from reality, melted our brains, brought us to a deeper despair than we could ever have known offline.

See also: funny tweets about loneliness and/or dying alone.

6.
I don’t mind this stuff. Laughing about it helps, kind of, to defuse our fears, even though the isolation being portrayed here borders on the surreal and is far removed from the reality of many people’s lives. What I feel violently allergic to is despair marketing (it’s the only way I can think to describe it) such as Despair.com (‘We offer the cure for hope’) and The Pessimist (‘Expecting the worst. Never disappointed). These sites invert popular self-help and motivational jargon with a result that’s just as phoney as the very thing it’s mocking. The stuff Despair.com sells – the pessimist’s wall calendar, the glass half-empty mug, demotivational posters (‘Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people’) – is no more useful or insightful than a stock image of a nondescript galloping horse emblazoned with an inspirational quote ‘to brighten your day’, as sometimes seen posted on Facebook (Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people’ – a masterful twist on ‘inspiration’ that causes the reader to feel mildly pissed off). Despair.com renders the whole notion of despair meaningless, just as the notion of calm stoicism has been emptied of heart by the plague of ‘Keep Calm and [Insert Your Text Here]’ merchandise.

7.
There’s a less direct, maybe more seductive way of portraying despair online. Two sites I used to look a lot are the Tumblrs This Isn’t Happiness (often NSFW) and Magnificent Ruin, both of which present photography, illustration, design, quotations, and other miscellanea from around the web. Often you’ll find really interesting, clever stuff taken out of context, and I’ve stumbled across things that have led me down ever deeper rabbit holes (worm holes?) of discovery. But these sites have always taken a stance of disquiet and disillusionment (as you’d expect from their titles) and I’ve finally reached saturation point with the ethos that drives their curation. Too many photographs of models alone in bare, dimly lit rooms, cigarette smoke unfurling from their mouths; too many cells of Charlie Brown at his most bleak; too many fragments of poetry by Bukowski and John Tottenham (whose work focuses pretty much solely on feelings of futility and bitter disappointment). These fragments fuel a kind of myth-making about feeling unhappy: that it’s interesting, mysterious, and, very often, beautiful. It is despair as an aesthetic, not as a human feeling in all its messiness and difficulty and struggle.

Many of the images on these Tumblrs also associate being alone with a kind of authenticity, even an emotional intelligence. A person’s character seems keenly delineated on its own. You’re apart, therefore you’re realer. I’ve fallen into this trap with the way I look at Alone Jon, whose unhinged outbursts just seem to me like honesty. And this comes straight back to that odd fantasy about being alone, that same fantasy I had as a primary schooler plodding through the wet grass on the rec, where I would cast myself as the disillusioned character in my own movie. But that’s all it is: a fantasy.

Anyway. Maybe the point of sites like This Isn’t Happiness is to reduce unhappiness to its bones, its signifiers. But suddenly, now, it makes me feel alienated, as if I were watching beautiful, blank-faced fashion models wearing city council recycling bags as they stalk down a runway, and being told that this is meaningful.

How Are You I’m Fine Thanks

8.

I’ve begun to have a similar response to some artists who I used to really love, such as Bored Rita (er, also often NSFW) and David Shrigley, who – and maybe it’s just through too much exposure to their work – now leave me cold. Bored Rita’s work now seems hardened by bleakness and misanthropy. Is it the work that’s changed, or me? I don’t know. But I look at it and I feel as though Bored Rita hates me. Writing this, I’m suddenly afraid that she’ll discover this post and tear me to shreds with the same pointy teeth as her characters. In a similar vein, I can recognise that David Shrigley’s stuff is clever and original, that it walks a tightrope between stupidity and profundity, that it messes with perceptions of what important art is – but all I can really take from it, in the end, is hostility. Maybe that, too, is the point. But where do you go from hostility, what can you take with you into your life?

Bored Rita

9.

This won’t go on for too much longer – there’s just one more thing.

10.
I read an essay recently about emotional ‘ache’, ie. what it is, what it feels like, what it’s good for. The essay tried to provide a universal description of ache, which, I would argue, is a nebulous, infinitely various feeling. When I finished reading the piece, I felt kind of grumpy and short-changed – as though I’d been offered a thin blanket to warm up when I was clearly frozen into some prehistoric peat. And I think the reason I found it hard to get anything from the piece was because the writer hadn’t really put himself on the line in confronting the feeling of ‘ache’ – instead, he’d thrown adjectives at it. I realised that there is a limit to description, to simile, to ‘the defining image’. Sometimes all that’s needed is story. The piece made me think about all the expressions of despair and loneliness online, and how interpreting them is often an exercise in navigating irony, double meanings, fashion. It’s rare to come across an expression that feels real, that feels like it’s come out of somebody’s lived experience, that touches us.

Unfinished Painting by Personal Message

The aftermath was much photographed and remarkably so: one of the pictures is of a man called Rewiri sitting in front of the whare where he sheltered, and survived, and was dug out from after the eruption. He’s wearing a hat with a dented crown and has his elbows on his knees, the right hand loosely clasping the left arm. European clothes, trousers, shirt, a jacket, feet incongruously bare. The hut, of traditional design, looks largely intact, with the low door gaping open upon the blackness within. Leaning against it are two battered sheets of corrugated iron and in the background unidentifiable debris piles. Rewiri looks strange. What is he sitting on? A box or kerosene tin? A block of stone? Is his face tattooed or not? You can’t really tell. His gaze doesn’t quite reach the camera, it falls away somewhere between eye and lens. He seems to smile, the but the smile is uneasy; it has a hint of the sad clown about it.

from ‘The Pink & White Terraces’ in The Place of Stones by Martin Edmond (Holloway Press, 2012)

Everest

(conversation overheard on bus)

It’s the Palagi
getting around
wanting to touch everything
in this world
Touching, touching everything
Look at that one with no legs–
walked right up that hill

from Other Animals by Therese Lloyd (Victoria University Press, 2013)

Value

Baked beans became a subject for a while. Gordon worked out that each bean had a certain value to the world, but he felt it curious that some beans were eager for their own preferment. On toast, some of those beans had a truly remarkable orange lustre, and it seemed the biggest beans exactly understood – in a way the pulpy and burst ones certainly did not – what their role might be in the perfect meal. At his student flat in the Grassmarket, the dishes were known to pile up in the general desolation of a Belfast sink, but Gordon was busy accommodating the facts of life to a nourishing vision of the future. He never got drunk because he feared more than anything a loss of control, and so, on Friday nights, as the squads of local boys went skidding up the Lothian Road fuelled by pints of lager, Gordon would be inside the Cameo watching old movies about blind pianists or soldiers mangled by war and self-consciousness. He often picked up a bag of chips amid the broad, late-night fraternity of the Grassmarket, and would cradle them up the tenement stairs to have with his beans.

from ‘Gordon’ by Andrew O’Hagan in The Book of Other People edited by Zadie Smith (Penguin, 2007)

– Charles Wright, Introduction to Best American Poems 2008

Petite fatigue by Nicolas de Crécy

‘What’s poetry for? What’s the point? Why would anyone read a poem? Why would anyone write one? There’s no money in it – what’s the point?’ Ah, the point. Tapping along beside us, stabbing us occasionally in the solar plexus. I’ve never really had to front up to this sort of interrogation until the past couple of weeks. These questions all grow out of that central, baleful question: ‘What’s the point of poetry?’ It’s important to ask this, but sometimes the way it’s asked just makes me want to shrug my shoulders and pull my hood up and carve my initials in a desk. And my instincts say that any answer I give will be pretty much useless: it’d be too vague, contradictory, maybe even too selfish, to be of any use to anyone.

But yesterday I thought, why don’t I know even one clear answer to this question? Am I trying to avoid it by being confused? I’ve avoided too many questions in my life in this way. So I’m going to try to pin something down – or just catch something, never mind pinning it down – within the relative safety of this blog.

The Poor Poet by Carl Spitzweg (via Bibliokept)

I should say first: I don’t think of myself as ‘a poet’ above all else. I’m just a person who writes poems sometimes. As much as I’m on poetry’s side, the word ‘poet’ makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, and lately I’ve been trying to get to the root of this discomfort, because I keep being defined as one. I think my beef with ‘poet’ is that it has a kind of assumed importance, which seems at odds with how a good poem (or, what I think is a good poem) works. The moment a poem starts posturing, lip-synching, vogueing, and telling me what I should think about things, I feel affronted and switch off. I can’t lie – I even feel slightly suspicious of anyone who considers that above all else, they are a poet. Of course I’m revealing my own insecurities here. But I do think poetry should sit among things, among identities. It has no business being held aloft and alone. (I’ll get in trouble for all this, but let’s plough on.)

Why write a poem? It feels good to make something. It feels good to work with tools you feel you’ve got a relative handle on. If I were any good at baking or boat building or composing jingles maybe I’d do that instead; turns out I like writing better. When you start out with a scraggly line or two and over time build it into a thing that, to your mind anyway, means something or is at the beginning of meaning something, that feels like a small success – regardless of whether the poem is ‘successful’ in itself, regardless of whether you’ll be the only one who ever reads it. At some point along the way your idea of a successful poem, of ‘a job well done’, will clash with someone else’s. Which is helpful, because it keeps your definition of a successful poem open-ended.

My second response is about me too: I find being social really hard work. And I find trying to articulate myself in person really hard work too. Poetry is a way for me to try to craft a response to things, an argument, in a small, slow, private way. At the same time as writing to please myself, I also imagine someone listening – so it becomes a fantasy of connection. One of my favourite moments from a tour with Kirsten McDougall and Pip Adam in March was reading to an audience at Beattie & Forbes in Napier. They were the most responsive audience we’d had so far. When I read a poem from my book called ‘Badly stuffed animals’, I could hear mutterings and exclamations in the front row. At the end of the poem I heard an elderly woman in the audience gasp, ‘Good grief!’ I thought, YES. Connection. I also thought, this is the best it’s going to get, and it’s still pretty good.

Reading poetry serves a different sort of purpose. It’s often said that poetry says the unsayable, and I do think it lends itself more readily to unknown and unacknowledged experiences than novels, short stories, essays, reportage – perhaps because poems tend to be full of ambiguity and suggestion and space, those moments when the writer ‘leaves the bone alone’. Space is absence, but when you put it around things it can reveal potency. A poem can swiftly push past what’s acknowledged and tap into different truths. And sometimes when it does that, it can feel electric. It gets inside you. I don’t want to say that poetry can make you feel less alone, because all reading does that, maybe even all forms of entertainment do it in some way. But poetry sometimes has a way of making you feel less stranded inside your own experience, less landlocked by your own life. The writer G. K. Chesterton, all pith, said, ‘Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.’ Maybe they had been when he said that, but not any more they haven’t. Where there’s a subject, there’s someone writing a poem about it (or around it, under it, beside it…). Even I’ve written a poem about cheese. It’s a bit clunky, but still.

Typewriter by Elliot Elam

A poem can change your mind. At one end of the spectrum there’s the poem that leaves you with a desire for something – such as change or justice or kindness. At the other, there’s the poem that subtly re-drafts your understanding of something. I guess, next to a political rallying cry or an in-depth report on, say, a humanitarian crisis, a poem doesn’t have an outspoken, practical aim (and if it does, it might be more propaganda than poetry). But it can go to work on how you think, on why you think the things you do. And that’s where new empathy can find purchase. (An odd example: I remember the first time I read the poem ‘White Butterflies’ by Frederick Seidel. You can read it here. It redrafted what I thought I knew about grief.)

Ah, man. I hope this isn’t getting boring. It’s easy to drift off into abstraction when talking about this stuff. Which is why, I guess, when you look for ‘definitions of poetry’ you’ll often come across startling metaphors, like:

• ‘Poetry is the fox under our shirts gnawing at our hearts.’ (Charles Wright)
• ‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’ (Emily Dickinson)
• ‘Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.’ (Carl Sandburg)
• ‘Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.’ (George Gordon Noel Byron)
• ‘Poetry is like fish: if it’s fresh, it’s good; if it’s stale, it’s bad; and if you’re not certain, try it on the cat.’ (Osbert Sitwell)

… and so on. Most definitions of poetry are sort of useful, in some way (I find Dickinson’s the most useful, because it comes back to human feeling), but there’ll always be other definitions to contradict them, which itself tells you a lot about what poetry isn’t: pin-downable.

Back to The Point (and suddenly, I think this post is going to need a Part Two): poetry reminds me what a beguiling and imperfect thing language is, and how forceful, even visceral, it can be. How a voice takes shape through language. How language can move through shades of meaning; how it can move me. How language, finally, has limits in what it can describe; how it can be totally dismantled to show its workings, to re-purpose it. I remember how bewildered I felt when reading e. e. cummings’s ‘my father moved through dooms of love’  as I came across upended verbs and nouns. It was the best kind of bewilderment.

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height
…

For the majority of readers these things are not enough. Relatively few people read poetry (it’s possible that more people write it than read it), especially here in New Zealand. If it were up to me, planes and blimps would do a weekly poetry book drop over the land. This would at least increase the odds of taking the top of someone’s head off. 

- Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27

Library (161), by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber

In the past week I’ve been on the road with two wonderful writers, Pip and Kirsten. We’ve been reading from our first books and trying to talk sense about writing. For added authenticity our vehicle even looked a little bit like a van. My book, which I’d been using as a coaster, now looks like it’s been thrown out of lots of car windows, sat on at various small-town pubs, coughed up by a manatee etc.. Before this week, I hadn’t even read it back to myself. You’d expect that having written a book, you’d have it all in your bones anyway, but it’s as if, once the thing was printed, it morphed into a piece of mismatched furniture – like a weird collapsible office chair with the plastic still on that someone had given me and I was sitting on it out of politeness. After this week, though, I feel like I’ve got it at the right height and have figured out the levers (which are surprisingly un-straightforward even though they’re only up/down). I’ve swivelled around on it, fallen off it, stuck chewing gum on the underside (I’ve come too far with this chair metaphor to turn back now) and now I don’t feel as uncomfortable having it around.

All these manoeuverings were done in public. And I’d thought that I’d get better at it. But I think what actually may have happened was that I got worse. (To anyone who came to our second-to-last event and heard me try to answer the question ‘What is the function of poetry?’, I’m sorry.) 

Library (222), by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber

The reason why it was unexpectedly hard is that I wasn’t used to seeing/hearing myself reflected back so much: my voice in a microphone, people’s faces as I read from the book, photos of myself, my voice faltering (often) when I didn’t know how to answer a question. I found that I didn’t have much control over any of those things – or, not the kind of control you have when you’ve got distance on your side; when you’re behind a screen writing a tweet, or a thing like this, or even when you take a headshot of yourself and put a filter called Nashville over it. It’s true that we try to control the things we find uncomfortable, and that when you can’t, this quickly turns to a ghost the person you think you are in your head. Now, I know that all this is also known simply as ‘being out in the world’, but I experienced being out in the world more intensely than usual because of the performance element of touring as ‘a writer’. It made me wonder whether people who have high-profile jobs get this process out of the way fairly quickly at the beginning, or whether they’re constantly cycling through it, re-shuffling their ideas of themselves. Maybe you get to a point where your reflection is innocuous: just a tool to help you do your job.

It reminds me of a conversation Kirsten and Pip had in the car, riffing on the old quip Don’t you know who I am? (which unfortunately we never got to try out): ‘Don’t you know who I am in my head?’ ‘Don’t you know who I think I used to be in the past?’ ‘Don’t you know who I look a little bit like, at certain angles?’ etc.. The incredulity is totally absurd, but I kind of feel for the asker of those questions. They’ve found out that they appear to be nobody in particular: someone with a pair of smudgy glasses on.

The tour made me more aware of old reflexes, too – embarrassing, small-minded ones. Mainly the reflex to avoid ever seeing myself reflected. If I know there’s a mirror coming up, I either hurry past it or come at it on an angle, like a crab. I avoid being in photos, particularly photos that show any bit of my body, unless they’re non-negotiable photos or carefully controlled selfies, with the crucial filter (‘Mayfair’, ‘X-Pro II’, ‘Valencia’; even ‘Normal’ starts to look like a filter), which has the pleasing distancing effect. There’s a sort of escapism in it: escapism from yourself, and from the reactions of others if they saw how you ‘really were’. Although the exposure of the last couple of weeks has sometimes made me feel like my skin and my head have gone transparent, it’s felt necessary, in the same way that properly dog-earing my book was necessary. It’s meant opening up, rather than letting myself lurk underneath like a coaster. It’s also made me start to adjust my ideas of a ‘bad representation’ – a bad photo, a bad answer to a question, a bad recording. I started to feel OK about saying ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Maybe I should just get a real job.’

Library (166) by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber

A friend of mine says she has been trying to train herself to worry less about photos of herself by letting the ‘bad’ photos stand. Rather than rushing to delete them, she’s tried just letting them be there. (I tried a similar thing in a recent Twitter Poetry Night, in which I tweet people’s recordings of poems from PoetryNightNZ, and decided – the hell with it – to let my very average first-take stand. And saved myself a whole lot of faffing about.) Photo apps like Instagram make this an unusual stance – the whole idea is that you shouldn’t have to put up with photos that look a bit average; that pictures of yourself and your surrounds can be better, more interesting, can provide an easier reflection if you just manipulate them slightly.

A few weeks ago, rifling through a chest at my parents’ place, among all the VHS cassettes and spilled Monopoly notes and hotels, I found piles of photos. Many of them were in sticky old albums, with some attempt at chronology, but most were still in their faded envelopes from the Te Kuiti chemist, with stacks of disordered negatives. A lot were great. But a lot more were just terrible – really terrible. Blurry, red-eyed, at bad angles, with badly angled faces. The dog positioned awkwardly across someone’s chest as they slept; someone making a sandwich while grinning evilly; someone running in a way that made it look like they had no arms. I was glad to see the photos; maybe at some point, it had been decided that they were at least as relevant as the good ones and that they should be kept. They seemed somehow truer than the posed ones, and their absence of self-consciousness was comforting. I felt a bit of a pang for the more recent bad photos I’ve so readily deleted, even though I’m always relieved (and slightly drunken with power) at that moment when they’re gone. 

My brother JP, his friend Raj (with guitar), me

Construction of one of the three pneumatically powered Jaws sharks, all named Bruce. © 1974 Joe Alves/Courtesy of Moonrise Media (via FlavorWire)

There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

- Ernest Hemingway

I haven’t written in here for a while. I wish I had a decent reason. The point is, this is about sharks. 

Even in a small inland town, it always seemed highly likely that I would one day be attacked by a shark. When swimming alone in a pool, I’d be gripped with fear – the drift of my legs, then the imaginary jaws latching on to one of them – and would galumph desperately to the pool’s edge. At the height of these shark fears I was probably about twelve, had read too many large-format Monsters of the Sea-type books, had had too many conversations with my brothers about shark attacks, and perhaps most crucially, had seen Jaws too many times; it would be years until behind-the scenes photographs of the construction and filming of the giant pneumatically powered, neoprene-coated sharks (there were three), which might’ve helped me get some perspective, came to surface. It’s hard to look at those photographs now – such as the one above, with art director Joe Alves standing beside one of his half-finished sharks – without seeing the simultaneous construction and reinforcement of generations of shark fear and loathing.

To me, the image of the man-eating shark – dead eyes, a mouth festooning with razor blades – was always more powerful than reason. It was the image of pure fear. Even Margaret Mahy’s picture book The Great White Man-Eating Shark, whose central character Norwin straps a homemade fin to his back so he can have the whole beach to himself, used to frighten me – simply because the image of a dorsal fin slicing through water was so viscerally terrifying. All this, when the biggest in-water threat when I was a child was being nibbled by an eel or struck by someone with a pool noodle. I’m pretty sure my fear of sharks also led to an even more unreasonable fear of any mysterious thing living in water: seaweed, jellyfish, even swirling schools of minnows, each no bigger than a paperclip.

It’s really only in the last decade that I’ve begun to think more rationally and compassionately about sharks, and in recent months I’ve been excited to come across artwork that depicts sharks very differently from those images I grew up with – depictions that break away from the old equation of sharks with soullessness and horror. (Most of these are by the collaborative artists Kozy and Dan. See their Campbell’s Shark Fin Soup sculpture, too – a grisly, important statement.)

Waiting sharks by Franco Matticchio (via Animalarium)

The Shark Charmer by Kozyndan. The painting depicts an ama – a Japanese woman diver – hypnotising a hammerhead and a tiger shark.

Hunters: Charks an’ Kittehs by Koyzndan

Detail from Hunters: Charks an’ Kittehs by Kozydan

As everyone knows, in late February 2013, a man named Adam Strange was killed by a shark when swimming at Muriwai in West Auckland; it was incredibly awful and sad, and traumatic for everyone involved. It brought up a lot of my old thinking about sharks. It’s easy to forget, amidst all the news coverage of a fatal shark attack, that these are wild animals, and that when you go into the sea you’re going into an often unpredictable place. The first thing to go, though, is perspective. These events are rare. Since 1852, there have been thirteen fatal shark attacks in New Zealand.

Growing up means finding less delight in being terrified (so, along with my slow waning of shark obsession went an obsession with UFOs and aliens, Big Foot, and Dean Koontz’s books), and once you look closely at the fear that fuels so much of our thinking about sharks, you find a lot of myths and strange contradictions. Even knowing the statistics on shark attacks, I think, puts very little dent in our fear. We know that, for example, you are more likely to die by falling off a chair than being eaten by a shark; your odds are actually 1 in 11.5 million, according to Oceana. And there’s the fact that sharks have become the prey of humans, that many of their species have been hunted to the point of critical endangerment.

I wonder if the place that sharks occupy in our language doesn’t help, where they’re always a symbol of vicious, self-centered behaviour – ‘loan shark’, ‘shark eyes’, ‘card shark’ (a hustler or cheat), ‘shark-like’. It’s been argued that, etymologically, it’s all the other way around – that, in the 16th century, the name ‘shark’ was given to the fish because ‘shark’ was at first a descriptor for a dishonest person who preyed on others; a rogue, a scoundrel. And in another odd reversal, in some mythologies sharks are wise, protective figures, such as the shark god Ukupanipo of Hawaiian mythology, who controlled the amount of fish a fisherman could catch (and occasionally adopted a human child, who he’d bestow with the power to change into a shark at any time); and the Fijian shark god Dakuwaqa, who protected fishermen from danger at sea. 

Shark by Franco Matticchio (via Animalarium)

Camouflage by Kozyndan (showing bunnyfish riding a whale shark)

Partly, too, my thinking has been turned around through talking to my brother John-Paul, who in an interview on this blog a while ago had some interesting things to say about sharks (including a very good answer to the eternal question: ‘Would you rather be attacked by a crocodile or a shark?’ The answer MAY SURPRISE YOU). His most recent album Anniversary Day was inspired by a shark attack in Wellington Harbour in 1852: John Balmer, a musician in the 65th regiment’s band, was swimming after performing with the band, when a shark fatally attacked him. (To date, Balmer is the only person to have been killed by a shark in Wellington.)

Every year on 21 January, the date of the 1852 attack, JP does a swim out to the floating raft in Oriental Bay and back to commemorate John Balmer. It’s a lovely, strangely triumphant gesture, I think.

John Balmer Memorial Swim 2013 (Photo: Bridget Giblin)

by Cary S. Leibowitz (via Visual Poetry)

for a brief minute the light from the 23rd street was part of the tracks, the tracks were full of flowing light and for a wonderful few seconds I had forgotten about the subway (almost) the always being aware of not being aware.

Spalding Gray (January 15, 1969)

I’m not going to go all resolutiony here, but in the past couple of weeks, I’ve realised something. It is good to keep busy. Sometimes even frantically busy. I start to feel unhinged if I don’t. This is the freelancer’s lot, I guess – you’ll always be held accountable for the state of your own busy-ness. You’ve got to chase it. I’m still new to this, and my chasing has been more, well, running from tree to tree wearing camouflage pants and a little tree hat.

There are a few things I’d like to do this year. To get better at talking to people. No – not even that; just to talk to people more often. To start drawing again. And of course to start writing again. In short, to stop being such a goddamn lazy bum. I’ve been looping around, groaning, like a powerline in the wind. Partly it’s that I feel a strange old guilt when I write, like I’m wasting time. (I feel guilty just writing this post here. ‘I should be working instead.’) And partly I’m reluctant to look my writing in the eye and to wrangle with its flaws. Years ago, this was the reason I gave up playing the piano, and the flute, and today I still miss both. But not quite enough, yet, to sit down at a piano or pick up my flute and face all the hours of practise I’ve lost.

There is something that happens when you leave behind that dread of facing the work. You sort of disappear from yourself, for a time. Being immersed makes you weightless. For me this is a great relief, when I feel the weight lift.

by Franco Matticchio (via Animalarium)

Over Christmas I read the journals of Spalding Gray (a gift from my good friend Elliot), edited by Nell Casey (editor of the excellent Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression). Gray was ferociously prolific; he needed to write to feel OK. (And he wrote on everything: when Nell Casey was going through all of his writings, she found notes he’d written on hotel stationery, napkins, pamphlets, receipts, even Tampax inserts). Gray’s form was the confessional monologue. He would sit behind a desk on a stage, in a plaid shirt, with a notebook and a glass of water in front of him, and would tell the audience what seemed like everything: his fraught romantic relationships, his New England childhood, his mother’s suicide in 1967, his neuroses, his bottomless self-obsession. And, as Casey writes in her foreword, he felt torn between ‘his compulsive desire to reveal himself and his fear that he may be foolishly trading his life for recognition’. There was always the question of how much truth could he tell, how many confessions he could make, while also keeping the final, secret, unspeakable truth for himself. In one of his entries he worried that he was becoming a ‘crazy, neurotic wind-up doll’. He feared that he could no longer experience something without the need to then turn it into performance – to craft it and share it with strangers. (I can’t decide whether Gray would have loved or hated Twitter.)

Shit! how forced I still am. My whole mind is a running commentary on all that I do. I can’t turn off the comments … walking through Central Park the wind … the not too cold wind and the distinct shadows remind me of early spring (early spring and late fall are two of my favourites or should I say – late winter … where the season is just ready to give itself over) I feel the wind on my face and I think I’ll cry and I do and see … am aware of the way in which the first tear of out of my left eye has caught and rainbowed the reflections of the afternoon sun.

Even happiness seemed to frighten him: ‘The worst fear is that I’ll learn to be happy at last and then get real sad when I see what I’ve missed.’ But he still kept writing and performing – apart from during episodes of serious mental or physical ill health – and you can see from this journal how working on the monologues calmed him. They gave him a sense of purpose. ‘The paradox is that when I talk about myself,’ he wrote, ‘I forget myself.’

Spalding Gray (Nancy Campbell/IFC Films, via NY Times)

This is a story of obsession.

One of my favourite parts of a new book is the table of contents. I’d like to have a table of contents on my headstone. A table of contents is like an amuse bouche - the tasty but unnecessary thing you get served at an expensive restaurant to ‘amuse the tastebuds’. (The first time I had an amuse bouche was a couple of weeks ago at a dinner with among other people the organiser of the Boring Conference, James Ward. He was wearing a badge that said ‘Boring’. Not much of a story there, but, I, uh … The amuse bouche was a cold soup of some kind.)

Contents #1 by Kent Rogowski

Let’s start with me stealing some questions from the Vanity Fair quiz. What is your most marked characteristic? What living person do you most admire? Can you describe your idea of happiness? How would you like to die?

It took Mary Gaitskill six years to write Bad Behavior. These are stories of young women disconnected, disenchanted, depressed in New York City. Dirty pigeons stumping about outside an apartment window, garbage fluttering through wire like confetti. There was something pitiless about the way Mary Gaitskill got into the inner lives of her characters. There is a New York Times review that describes her technique as more like a vivisection than a narrative – ‘slicing through her characters to expose interior lives that are more often broken and incomplete than in any way admirable’ – and I think that’s exactly right. Her writing was visceral and sometimes cruel, and the backdrop of New York City always spoke of alienation and disappointment. (When I was reading those stories as a teenager, I was trying to write stories of my own, and I decided that I would take my lead from Mary Gaitskill. I still remember the ending of one of them: ‘She dreamt that she was trapped in a cage and that children with hollow eyes were jabbing at her with sticks.’ A few years later I came across this and howled with laughter.)

My heart pounds easily. And so it was the night Morrissey played at the Town Hall.

You can make a sculpture out of anything. An avocado and four pipe cleaners.

As a newborn, He Pingping was the length of his father’s palm, so they gave him a name that translates as ‘wine bottle’. He grew to be 2 foot 5 inches tall – way below the handles on most doors, but up to the knees of a person of average height.

He Pingping. AFP photo / Mustafa Ozer (via The Australian)

You know those articles where the writer ridicules the way authors look in their book jacket photos, sorting them into categories of expression, like the ‘head weighed down by heavy thoughts’, the ‘I despise my readers’, the ‘dances with cigarettes’? Well, this isn’t going to be one of those.

I’ve been trying to write about the postal service for years, faffing about collecting statistics and observations and half-passages, and today I found out that a friend of my brother’s is writing about it too. Not only is she writing about it, but she’s organised, and she’s writing the same things about it as I am.

Today I want to talk about primal screaming and how we are sometimes taken over by something that feels like love but that can’t possibly be.

by Jason Bradshaw

Yves Rossy, a Swiss pilot and mechanic, was the first person to really fly like a bird. One afternoon in June 2004, he strapped himself into a contraption he had made from metal, fibre glass, and carbon fibre. He climbed into a small airplane with another pilot and rattled down the runway. When the airplane was 4,000 metres above Switzerland, Yves leaped out. He freefell towards the mountains at 200 kilometres per hour. Then, like Buzz Lightyear, he opened a pair of stubby wings and began to swoop and soar. ‘It was an amazingly good feeling, like in a dream!’ said Yves, who has become known as Jet Man. ‘Up there in my invention, I am free as a bird.’

I have come to expect awkwardness between myself and others, so much so that I now go out of my way to create it.

In Wellington it is easy to find places where no one else is. I can walk up the road and around the corner and suddenly it’s just me and a gravel footpath going up a hill. And a sign: ‘Is your dog a bird killer? Put your dog on a leash. We live here.’ I can look down into water and watch congregations of fish and there’ll be no one else looking. The fish like to visit the surface together but not enough to stay – just long enough to know it’s there, like us and the moon.

Cycling in Wellington is lonelier than I remember, which is why I haven’t written about it for a while. There aren’t enough of us. Do we even exist? We’re like the weird heat-resistant life forms in volcanoes. The moment of passing another cyclist lasts a very long time – these are floating, elongated seconds where you’re both staring at each other, two cows in a clearing, the distance between you closing in slow motion. Then it’s over and the clearing fills with cars again.

Melbourne’s contemporary art gallery, ACCA, calls itself a kunsthalle – a centre founded and run by local artists and visionaries. It’s a huge, angular building that looms over Sturt Street like an army barracks. Outside, there are rows of rusted barrels filled with water. When I went there a few years ago, I peered into the barrels looking for coins (none). Then I went inside, where I watched zebra finches hopping around inside an aviary. In the main exhibition space, rows of video images – a snuffling horse here, a bride there, a weeping girl, a cartwheeling man – filled a wall. I tried for a long time to put the story together, then gave up and wandered into another room where three or four people were looking at a black screen. Suddenly, the screen brightened. And on it appeared an image of a grey, withered penis. ‘Oh, no!’ one of the people cried, and left the room. The rest of us stood there, for about a minute, looking – waiting to see what would happen, I guess. ‘We’re part of a social experiment,’ someone said. ‘We’re part of somebody scraping the bottom of the barrel is what we is,’ said someone else. And then, slowly but surely, the penis began to rise, like a time-lapse video of a plant unfurling. At which point everybody left the room except me.

by Nicolas de Crécy

An extract, from Best Book:

I read that piece and I wanted to compile a list for this city, Wellington, too. My zone is small. But my loyalties are fierce.

Best Tearoom: The Library Cafe. Don’t be fooled by the name; this is a tearoom through and through. The food hasn’t changed for over ten years. I know all of it by heart. There’s a book of poems that’s titled Millionaire’s Shortbread (‘both book and cake’) after one of the popular slices in the cabinets, from when a group of poets met here weekly. When I was a first-year university student I’d come in here hefting my Riverside Chaucer and glower in a corner by the drafty doors. The staff never ask you to leave. You can stay for hours. They are kind: they won’t clear away your empty cup until you’ve left, thus maintaining the illusion that you’re legitimately there. Once I ate my own apple and drank my own bottle of water and they didn’t do a thing. Once I saw a man eating his own foil-wrapped sandwiches, for god’s sake. This place has personal history for me. It’s where I developed a crush on a lanky barista who became known to me as Nose. It was the most unpleasant, all-consuming crush I’ve ever experienced, and for about a year I visited the Library Cafe daily, trying to talk to Nose, and either failing or making a berk of myself. Of course, nothing ever happened beyond one silent, soul-crushing date, which culminated in me launching myself at Nose, who was wearing a suit, in a terrible bear hug; I can still feel his arms hanging stiffly at his sides. I was unable to return to the Library Cafe for a year or so after this. Happily, Nose eventually quit his job, so I could go back. Back to the spinach and feta muffins, back to the cheese scones shaped like bars of gold. So many hours, so many years, spent here, reading, or staring out over the heads of the library goers below, or just staring at nothing, worrying. Recently I was sitting there, staring at my laptop, when one of the baristas sidled up to me. ‘Oh, hey, so, uh, where are you from, then?’ How the tables have turned.

Best Womenswear/Menswear Shop: Ziggurat in Cuba Street. A secondhand clothing shop. A lot of the clothes here, will, in fact, make you look like a dick. I like the danger of it. Will I come out of here looking like a dick? Ziggurat stock a great number of huge, ridiculous sunglasses that provide no mercy from the sun. They stock night gowns from the 1960s, and a tangle of cheap misshapen pant-things in a basket. They stock exquisite shoes for tiny-feeted people who don’t exist anymore. All of my best cardigans have been purchased from Ziggurat, when wandering past having no thoughts of cardigans. The walls are dappled with hats. It is the only shop I’ve ever bought a non-beanie hat from. The clothes assistants are very stylish and impossibly beautiful, like vampires. I run a great gamut of emotions when I go into Ziggurat. Envy, self-loathing, joy, glee, disappointment.

Best Church: The Congregational Christian Church of Samoa, Owen Street, Newtown. (The image in the link shows it under construction; it’s now complete.) The best, but also the grimmest, weirdest church. During the week it is like an army barracks on the moon. But on weekends you will see people dressed in beautiful clothing – men in flowing lava-lavas, women in colourful puletasi, with flowers in their hair – milling around in the carpark, utterly defeating the grimness of the place.

Best Book: Magnificent Moon (VUP, $28). My book.

Best Concert: Kirin J. Callinan at the opening of Grizzly Bear. I’d never seen him before and never heard of him. He strode onto the stage, all trousers, and began writhing in front of a high-tide of guitar pedals, some of which he jabbed his finger at with what looked like disgust. In between non-songs of thundering discordance and blatt-blatt-blatt and howls of ‘THE STARS ARE ALL DIRT’, he stage-bantered in a husky Bale-as-Batman voice. ‘Come and – see me – after the show. I’ve got – peanuts.’ Halfway through his set he tore off his Christmas jumper. The timeless torso. I was still reeling at the end of Grizzly Bear’s show, which was all well and good, but it lacked the raw, fractured, primal energy of Kirin. Here he is at hipster-bar Puppies a week later, when he broke out the torso again. To be honest, this time, it was all a bit much. I was too close to the source.

Best Market: Chaffers Market (between Te Papa and Waitangi Park), Sunday mornings. I could try to describe why it’s the best. The produce, the beer, the pancakes, the tofu and noodly things, the garlic. Those things are all good. But the real reason Chaffers Market is the best market is this guy, surely one of the most persistent buskers in Wellington’s history. Here he is butchering his old favourite, ‘Tears in Heaven’.

Best Bus: The No. 2 to Miramar. When it finally arrives, you love it and hate it with all your heart. You sweep through the bus tunnel into Hataitai, seething in the darkness. Once, when the bus stopped on Pirie Street to let off passengers, a girl stepped off and a skateboarder immediately and brutally collected her. Then cruised off. The bus driver, also, cruised off, oblivious. I guess none of this is supporting my case that the No. 2 to Miramar is the best bus. In fact, this entry is a trick: get a bike, everyone.

Best Bus Stop: I may hate buses, but the best bus stop is the Hataitai Bus Stop. Once when I was here, waiting for the infernal No. 2 bus, there was a pile of 2010 and 2011 New Yorkers on the bench beside me. Someone had left them, neatly stacked and shining. Good condition. A gift. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to take them, but I didn’t feel worthy. So I left them behind. The next day, they were gone. This bus stop is a shelter, as opposed to a stop; it’s a place to hunker down away from the wind. Sometimes there are goth kids sitting on the ground outside it, in pairs, but often there’s no one else there. You can sit there alone, experiencing intense regret that you didn’t ride your bike. There is nothing to look at, really, apart from a picture that someone has spray-painted on a wall over the road: Munch’s Scream with the words ‘WHERE HAS ALL THE STREET ART GONE?’ I like the spark of happiness I get when the bus finally, finally rounds the corner and lumbers up the hill to my side, big yellow dog.

Best Bay: Balaena Bay. A small bay, a humble bay. An open palm of a bay. Penguins nest here. I have never seen any. But I live in hope of seeing one, and this hope makes the bay look even more beautiful each time I’m there. From here you look across to two other bays, Shelley and Shark. This is also the best bay because it has a toilet. If you are running past, which many people do, this toilet is perfectly timed. It also has a shower to rinse all the bugs off after you’ve been swimming. In the early morning you sometimes see wetsuited people dragging kayaks across the sand into the water to launch off from here. My fantasy is to have a boat shed here one day. You’re not allowed to live in a boat shed, apparently, but I would find a way to live in mine.

Best Road: Grafton Road. I ride along it from Hataitai village over the hill and down into Oriental Bay. It’s an undulating road that takes you up above the houses and the sea. The view is stupidly beautiful, just one endless postcard. When I arrived back from London I walked along this road every day. At first I felt I was clinging to the back of a turtle: precarious, afraid of being eaten. The steely sea way below looked like a stage backdrop. Gradually, day by day, though, Grafton Road persuaded me that I was here and that it was real. There were a lot of roadworks on Grafton Road for a while. Once I saw that a bucket of cement from the roadworks had blown away in the wind and splattered all over the roof of someone’s parked car, like a bucket of sand upended by a toddler. This was very early in the morning; the scene was yet to be discovered. I’ll admit to feeling a mean-spirited glee imagining the screaming debacle that would unfold later that morning.

from ‘Getting Schooled’ by Garret Keizer (Harper’s Magazine)

Lilli Carré, panel from “Too Hot to Sleep”, via 50 Watts

Whenever I don’t know what to do for a job, I think about going to teaching college. This impulse gets me every few years; it’s like a fever that must be starved out. My mother has taught in high schools for decades, and our house was often filled with teachers. They would park their cars in the paddock and infiltrate the house and the garden, especially at the end of the year after prize-giving. “Call me Owen!” I remember the deputy principal slurring, as he folded up into a collapsing deck chair on the lawn.

I would not be a good teacher. I am frightened of teenagers. If I have to talk to one, I revert back to a high school student myself – miserable, awkward beyond belief, head too small for my body, a human mouse. It was a lifetime ago and my memory of being a high-schooler is still like a fresh bruise on the ribs. But this doesn’t stop me, every few years, from hacking out plans to become a teacher or a tutor. Growing up with a house full of teachers made me see that they were just humans, mostly ordinary humans with voices that projected particularly well across a room, and when I’m having one of these episodes, my brain fills with hot air and I think, “I could do that.”

But I know, rationally, that I couldn’t. I remind myself that even though my teachers were just humans, they also had an inner steel, a fortitude that enabled them to bear “the relentless experience of finitude that is teaching”, as Garret Keizer writes in his essay Getting Schooled [PDF]. “There is nothing like a school to make one aware of mortality. … The angelus that rings – not three times a day, as in a monastery, but every forty-five minutes – remorselessly drives home one’s sense of limited time on the earth, of diminishing chances to do the work and get it right.” Whenever I think of my primary school teachers, and I think of them oddly often – Miss Knight, Mrs Muir, Mrs Lile, even Miss Irvine, who could be terrifying, even Trunchbullian, but was often hilarious and kind – I imagine them in a kind of heaven. I imagine them in vast sunny gardens, trailed by cats, or reclining in corduroy armchairs beside shelves of books, at rest.

At my high school, which was very small, if kids sensed weakness in a teacher – any degree of shyness, lack of confidence, a short fuse – they would eat them alive. My form room teacher, Mr Earl, not only had a gentle, earnest manner, but he wore shorts all year round, with leather sandals and long scalloped socks. And not only this, but he had a glass eye. (It’s only now, writing this, that I realise I don’t know how Mr Earl lost his eye. His glass eye was so much a part of him, so much a part of how kids responded to him, that he might as well have been born with it.) The eye was shark bait. The goal was to taunt him to breaking point, at which he would slam his hands down on his desk and bellow in jowl-wobbling fury. And the kids would laugh their heads off. My brother has a friend, the gentlest, most softly-spoken, self-effacing young man I think I’ve ever met, who has been teaching for a year in Porirua, and when I asked him about it recently I swear I saw the shine of tears in his eyes. “It’s very hard. The kids are a lot of hard work,” he said. My brother confirms that from what his friend has told him, yes, he is being eaten alive.

Friends by Laura Gee

My mother taught Japanese at my high school. Through the haze of my embarrassment, she always seemed canny and thick-skinned, but even she lost control sometimes. Once, in Japanese class, to widen our culinary experiences, she brought us all some silken tofu to try. But – my god! – the tofu, which had been in the freezer, had not defrosted properly. There were chunks of ice in it. At this discovery – as well as the inherent awfulness of uncooked silken tofu – the class disintegrated into mayhem. A group of my classmates burst out of the room and started running up and down the corridor, lobbing tofu at each other. I can still remember the shrieks of my mother in the corridor, failing to get things under control, until mercifully the bell rang and everyone just left anyway, clods of tofu underfoot.

My mother had a caravan, out in a paddock, which she’d converted into an office. She went out there most weeknights or early mornings, with the dog and a cup of tea, to do her marking on the fold-out table. The bunk beds were stuffed with filing boxes and the wardrobe with rolled-up classroom posters. Sometimes I went out to sit on the floor and read while she was marking. She’d be cringeing over the papers. “Oh, for GOD’S SAKE, Jeremy.” “OH HELL, ERIN.” “OH what have you DONE, LEEZA.” I’d always wanted to believe that teachers must love what they do – they had to; why else would they do it; were they insane? – but small things like this, as well as the many beleaguered conversations I overheard on the phone or at staff parties or on the main street while with my mother, coloured the way I saw teaching. At high school I realised that most of the teachers there disliked their work, or at least found it incredibly hard and unforgiving – the hours too long, the pay low, the students more brainless by the year. I once overheard my mother say to an old colleague, who had left teaching: “The teaching has gone from your face. It’s lifted away. You look well again.”

Edward Sorel (via Animalarium)

The word pedagogue derives from a Greek word for a type of slave who led children to school. This detail is included in the essay by Keizer, who gives an account of his decades of teaching and argues that it is unfair to assume that a teacher works out of love for their profession. While he isn’t suggesting that teachers are like slaves, he says: “I am inclined to distrust people who expect me to work for love, or who need a sentimental mythology to gloss over the impossibilities of my job and the daily injustices it lays bare.” The only teaching I’ve ever done was teaching piano to six- and seven-year-olds, one of whom farted so relentlessly throughout lessons that it put me off primary schoolers for good, so I have no real understanding of what it feels like – what it might do to your state of mind – to grapple with those impossibilities and injustices, and to field the assumptions that you do it for love.

In the last week or so, I’ve been marking a couple of MA folios, and I like it. I like it a lot. This is highly dangerous. When this happens, I have to use my special tool. It’s a children’s book. It’s the kind of book a child would only read in a classroom because they had to. There is a picture of me on the cover of the book.

At a publishing company where I was once an editor, I was photographed playing the role of a teacher for this book. I had to pretend to be standing at a whiteboard pointing out rules for classroom behaviour. (It’s a book about “being a good citizen”.) Progressively, page by page, my facial expression morphs from harmlessly friendly into gormless, Father Dougal-like bewilderment. I don’t know what I’m doing. The kids who had been hired to play the role of the students knew it, too. They sat on the mat in their diversely coloured t-shirts and wouldn’t smile, like a bunch of mini Holden Caulfields: what a phoney. But for all it grieves me to look at these pictures, I’ve found it to be a highly effective teaching dissuasion device.

(No, pictures from the book can never be published here. Sorry.)