EYELASHROAMING

It’s the end of the year. So it seems appropriate to compose this post entirely of the opening lines of some of this year’s abandoned blog posts. Yes. It is cheating. But in my defence, they’re all pretty terrible and you can see why they were abandoned. So I’m only cheating myself. Each new paragraph represents an abandoned post. This post is their grave.

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

Steve Braunias has a great piece in his column BRAUNIASLAND in this month’s Metro, called ‘Personal Best: A happy list of the very best things about Auckland life and culture and that’. His list includes Best Tearoom (Coco’s Cafe, where the coffee pot broke and it took weeks to get a new one: ‘Sourly, I waited it out, stuffing my face with doughnuts’), Best Menswear Shop (Te Atatu Menswear, where everything is smart ‘without making you look like a dick’), Best Church (Fo Guang Shan, which ‘feels like it’s made out of $2 Shop materials’), Best Book (Civilisation by Steve Braunias: ‘My book’), Best Concert (Crosby, Stills & Nash: ‘I cried’), Best Show (The Cactus and Succulent Show: ‘I bought nine plants for $120′), Best Train (The Northern Explorer, ‘as quiet as a library’), Best Railway Station (Newmarket, ‘an expression of the meaninglessness of life’), Best Mangrove Creek (Onepoto Stream, at high tide ‘full to the brim with green, sparkling water’), and Best Road (Great South Road, which Braunias set out to walk the length of in March: ‘exhilarating, strange, ugly, depressing, beautiful’).

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.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, of modern philosophers perhaps the most sainted, served time as a schoolteacher. I am not surprised. I am also not surprised that he resigned his position after hitting an eleven-year-old boy in the head. I tried to remind myself of that at least once a week throughout this past year, and not so I could fancy myself superior to Wittgenstein. Rather, I wanted to remember that what I had undertaken was by no means as safe or as simple as redirecting the course of Western thought.

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.)