I spent last week on a lovely pest free island in Fiordland as the first of several trips for my masters. This mainly involved catching buggies in pitfall traps (this random blog I found has a good explainer). There are many great things about the lack of cellphone connectivity but one is that it gave me some time to compose some poetry about this experience.
Continue reading “Pitfall Poetry”that feeling when you have a blog dedicated to books but you are not dedicated to it so you post book reviews on your non-book blog
Anne of Green Gables and nature writing
A few months ago, Shanti read me the start of Anne of Green Gables as a bedtime story. It reminded me how much I loved this childhood classic, and I sat down and read the whole thing the next afternoon. I finished Anne of Avonlea then was sidetracked by other books.
One aspect of Anne that I really noticed upon rereading was how firmly rooted it is in place. It’s set in Prince Edward Island, which is far from anywhere I have ever been, but L.M. Montgomery’s love of her home island shines through every page*. Looking at the book with the lens of an ecologist and a person who finds solace in the outside world has given me a new appreciation for the book. At the same time, some parts of Anne seem ridiculously backward in their ideology. Here’s a few quotes I highlighted from Anne of Avonlea and my analyses of them, just to exercise my English muscles. I would have written more because I was feeling really inspired until I found out that Shanti’s friend did an entire Honour’s English thesis on this very topic and realised that I couldn’t do that much of a deep dive, so went for a shallow dive instead.
Continue reading “Mini reviews-Anne, Aurora, Rental Person who Does Nothing”In the past week I have watched four movies: Past Lives (exquisite), You Hurt My Feelings (major new york saturation but also quite compassionate), Franklin (shoulda just been the archival footage), and Fallen Leaves (about the depressed Finnish proletariat; completely unequipped to talk about race and had a very unrealistic hospital sequence but still made it really easy to understand how people end up in bad situations). This is a lot of movies, although admittedly all of them were in the 1hr 45 or less range, which is one of the main ways to make me watch a movie.
In the last month I have also watched Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, half of Tree of Life (lol), How to Blow Up a Pipeline (scary) and Barbie (good….mostly). This is maybe more movies than at any other point in my live; certainly more movies than I’ve been watching for most of the past year.
I’ve been reading about movies, absorbing them by osmosis through the mostly American media with which I am obsessed even if I talk loudly about wanting alternatives. Like Weyes Blood, I like movies, which I am trying to reflect in my behaviour. At the start of this year, it occurred to me that I read a lot of books, have my mind expanded by the ideas in them — but that ideas are not confined to the written word.
I spent some of last year talking abou the ideas of things you could learn without language: how a hill is folded is a lesson in geography without words, how a paintbrush curls around a shape might say something about sorrow, but silently. Movies are an extension of this: there are things I can learn about what the world is like and how people interact that are in movies, but not in books.
Part of what helped was having the discretionary income to spend on cinema tickets — I’ve seen perhaps 10 movies in the cinema so far this year which has helped me enjoy it a lot more, because you can’t hit pause and you can’t look away. Another thing that helped — and it did feel like work, a little bit, because books are so easy, so easy to love — was deciding that I didn’t want to watch just the most easy movies (your Mamma Mias) but movies that challenged me a little bit. How to Blow Up a Pipeline was seriously scary. The Banshees of Inisherin totally grossed me out. But they were interesting and compelling. Having friends to discuss movies with was great too, as was, well, reading lots about movies from online publications (I especially love Fran Magazine) and discovering Letterboxd (follow me!)
I’ve never hated movies — and it’s not like I’ve suddenly become a buff. I don’t know how so many people have so much time to watch movies, because I think books will always be my favourite medium (as well as possibly podcasts). But I like that they make me feel a little more Up With What Is Happening.
And what about the other claim — that there are things I could learn from movies that I couldn’t learn from books? Well, I don’t think I’d know much about Nan Goldin and her incredible photography if it wasn’t for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which is definitely worth getting a free trial to DocPlay to watch. The editing of Aftersun made me think deeply about grief as something tangible; I love how films make metaphors literal, playful, spin the world into a new shape. Tár…which completely breaks the hour 45 rule … well, Tár made me think much more about classical music. It made me think of music as a deep thing, a constant and lifelong avenue for discovery – and it possibly is also helping me with something I’m writing at work at the moment about profound abuses of power. I guess that’s part of it: I don’t know exactly what fingerprints these pieces of art will leave on me, but I know they are extending me, taking me to new places – and $20 for the cinema is much cheaper than a real ticket to somewhere else.
see also: becoming a newsletter person, becoming a podcast person, Stárting to stáre hárd
possibly en route: becoming a sourdough person (4 years late), becoming a spinning person, becoming a gardening person (aspirational)
There’s a scene, I think in the final Percy Jackson book, where Percy encounters Hestia, goddess of the hearth. From what I remember having read it many years ago and with no plans to verify this memory, Hestia keeps the home fires burning and emphasises how this is as important as the other Olympians storming around making change. Percy charges away and goes and kills some titans or something.
Continue reading “Hestia, hospitality, hygge, hearth”
There are 15 photos of the back of my head, from Satuday night. I was trying to tell what my hairstyle looked like without standing up, and I don’t have a mirror in my room. My phone camera seemed like a good option.
Continue reading “what are all of those photos for?”
Recently, I have been spending a decent amount of my time looking after small children who are not my own. The work I do usually involves balancing housework jobs like cooking and folding clothes with conversations about Beyblades and princesses, being the mediator in physical altercations, and helping take ‘my’ children to after school activities. I’m fortunate to get paid to do this; it’s the kind of work that is generally done for no pay, particularly by women, across the world. It isn’t something that requires any training or expertise, yet it is in reality often challenging and requires skill and finesse.
Continue reading “On nannying, childhood nostalgia, and complexity”
This month I have done a lot of fruit picking and preserving, largely as a result of having more time than money. I’ve been reflecting on what makes it such a great thing to do.
I start at the plant. This February I’ve harvested fruit from apple trees, pears, apricots, plums, and blackberries. Fruit has got to be the most evident demonstration of the miraculous transformation of sunlight into sugar.
The funniest part of the movie Tár, which I watched on Saturday, is the part where Lydia Tár, the woman herself, goes into her assistant’s room to find her book manuscript scattered all over the floor. The title of the book – Tár on Tár – has been crossed out, replaced with the words ‘Rat on Rat’.
For a psychological drama – a genre I watch very little of – there are a surprising amount of completely hilarious moments in Tár. It’s been out for a few months (although it only just started showing in Aotearoa), and the whole internet (at least the whole internet that I consume) seems to be talking about it. I got quite freaked out reading this interpretation of the ending on Saturday (spoilers, obviously). For once, all the Discourse I consumed about something culminated in me seeing the thing, rather than having just enough information about it to ask people intelligent seeming questions at social events.
But I’m trying to refresh my blogging muscles! And it turns out I don’t have much to say about Tár, at least not things that are original: I liked the musical structure of it, the reptition of Berlin and New York and orchestra rehearsals, how unapologetic it was about its pretension (that long New Yorker interview at the start!), the very beautiful apartment, the intense compulsion in different directions. It was weirdly car centric for a movie based in Berlin – lots of running but no cycling! I don’t know that it really came to any conclusions about “cancel culture” but it certainly gestured at the complexity and the futility of making decisions about people. The people I watched it with and I discussed it afterwards, and we couldn’t figure out if the movie believed in redemption or not. It was definitely intense. It was definitely absurd. And it definitely made me feel smart.
That’s what I really wanted to write about; the desire to consume cultural products that make me feel smart. I have this quite incedible intellectual vanity – I like knowing about things, and I like other people knowing that I know about things. Is this because I used to place a lot of value in grades and now I don’t get grades anymore and something has to replace them? probably. I think this can make it hard to separate the experience of wanting to watch Tár, which is certainly a rich text, meaty to discuss and digest, from the experience of wanting to have watched Tár.
None of this prevents me from spending far too much time watching lifestyle YouTube videos – or, worse, YouTube shorts – at an accelerated speed while playing Tetris, feeling the little ‘I’m being stimulated’ neurons in my brain buzz happily, until one day the only thing that will satisfy me might be something like this. I find it much easier to read books in their fragments than digest whole things: I pause episodes of TV shows in the middle to look things up on Wikipedia, and almost never watch movies by myself at all.
Cinemas help, I think. Not just because you get to support the film industry, although, as my friend Tim has told me many times, there is something to that. Tere are a whole lot of psychological tricks that the cinema plays on you to make you pay attention. The big screen is bastly nicer to watch that my small laptop, or my screenburned phone. The dark provieds a sense of immersion. My phone is silent. And I’ve paid enough for the experience that I want to pay attention. I’m choosier about films I want to watch in a cinema; I don’t think I’ve ever been to a film at a cinema that I didn’t enjoy, or at least take something whole away from, although I’ve consumed a lot of brainless content on streaming services which passed through me like wind, leaving nothing behind. It feels good to pay attention to the entirety of something, with most of your attention, rather than reply to messages while human voices bubble in the background. It makes you look harder. And at the end of that attention, if you’re like me, you’re rewarded with having more moments that stick to you, which you can pull smart things to say out of.
I’m dreadfully pretentious, as the archives of this here blog probably demonstrate. But I’m trying to go to more cinemas, to see and listen to the things people talk about, instead of just read about them. New possibilities open up. And it might even help people to think I’m smart.
This random essay was written a few months ago during a run through crunchy autumn leaves in Munich. I was inspired by an episode of Hair Now I had watched and composed the whole thing in my head as my breath fogged up and my feet pounded along the grey streets.
PS: This is not even the first post on body hair! Clearly this is a matter of the utmost import to me and the sole way I express my feminism. But anyway the other one from my 18 year old self is quite cute and can be perused here.
Dear eyebrows,
It’s not that I want to hate you.
Continue reading “A letter to my eyebrows”Rapid Antigen Tests have put the science of medical testing into the hand of the consumer, giving us the power to detect our own disease, and respond accordingly (in line with government isolation requirements).
In the last few weeks my Messenger and Whatsapp feeds have been veritably inundated by pictures of positive RATs in the midst of New Zealand’s second wave. All the photos are essentially the same, and could be anyone’s; poor lighting, usually a table backdrop or some disembodied fingers holding it up, and two pink lines.
Here’s the thing: I don’t want to see them.
Continue reading “On rats (of the high-tech test variety)”
Daylight Differentials 