End of Term

Police Car at Night

It was the end of another stressful teaching semester, and we’d been drinking for most of the afternoon. It started at the staff party, with scones and fingerfood and glasses of wine. After that we all – students and staff alike – drove on to a local pub for dinner.

Dinner turned into a bar snacks and more wine, and by the time we rolled on out of there, I must have drunk at least eight glasses – albeit over a period of six hours or so. My colleague Charlotte was even worse off. She lived some distance away, and didn’t feel she could drive home.

I said that I’d give her a lift back – she said it would be easy enough to make her way to the pub carpark next day to collect her car.

Up till then I’d actually been planning to call myself a taxi. Charlotte lived in the opposite direction from me, though, and the distance was quite considerable. The rest of the group had dissipated by then. I didn’t really want to drive, but there didn’t seem any other obvious solution. Not until I was actually behind the wheel of my car, that is.

The moment I turned out of the parking area I knew I was in trouble. A police car was lurking outside, and I heard the siren start up behind me before I’d even had a chance to accelerate up the long hill leading out of town.

The cop was matter-of-fact enough. I, on the other hand, started to gabble out excuses the moment I rolled my window down. “I know that I shouldn’t be driving, but I’m just giving my friend here a lift home.”

Charlotte didn’t help matters much by leaning over and slurring out something about how I was doing her a favour because she wasn’t fit to drive home herself. So much for cool, calm and collected.

All in all, we must have looked a pretty disreputable pair. His main concern, however, was to make me blow into his device as quickly as possible, before the fumes of alcohol could clear.

I didn’t doubt for a moment that the result would be a fail. Had up for drunk driving! I could see my driver’s licence confiscated, my job flying away, shame and disgrace brought down on the family name …

“That’s a youth fail, sir,” he pronounced sepulchrally, with a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger frown.

“A youth fail? What do you mean? I’m not a youth.” I was in my mid-thirties at the time.

“No, sir. But if you had been under age, that would have been a fail. And you said yourself that you shouldn’t be driving.”

“So I’m not over the limit?” I could hardly believe it. We had been drinking all afternoon. And I still felt pretty sozzled, to tell the truth.

“No, sir.”

“So I can go?”

“Yes, sir. But I think, once you’ve driven your friend home, that you shouldn’t drive any more tonight. You did say yourself you shouldn’t be driving …”

“Oh yes. I’ll do that.” I would have agreed to anything at that point. I couldn’t believe I’d got away with it, that he was actually going to let us go. “Thank you, officer. I’ll be very careful.”

I took my time about starting up. He didn’t seem to be following us, but I drove extra slowly anyway ( I guess that’s how you can spot a drunk – the exaggerated care with which they inch their way along the road).

Charlotte was most repentant at having got me into this; I, incredulous at my narrow escape. It brought home to me both what a foolish risk I’d run, and how liberal the blood-alcohol allowance really was …

Her husband was away for the weekend, she said. I’d be welcome to stay if I didn’t feel like driving back.

It sounded like a good idea at the time, but as she showed me into the tidy guest room, cold straight bed lying lonely there, I began to wonder if there was any more to it. Was that all this long strange evening had been for? …

Next day we drove back in the pouring rain to collect her car. As soon as I saw she had it started okay, I was off out of there like a bat out of hell.

•

Never give up

Hospital at Night

when you
get home after an undisclosed
absence abroad (say seven days)
to find your life in
chaos wife in hospital note
in red ink left on
the coffee table explanations given
gratis by your father who
can’t hear the doorbell nor
is he aware of any
of the names of any
of the main protagonists it’s
a rainy night and nothing
for it but to drive
to the hospital (wherever that
might be) and fight for
parking in the truncated parking
zone – crowded out by their
new building – make your way
to the curtained alcove hone
in on the source of
disturbance see her hear her
voice breathe deeply understand the
cat’s hysterical reaction but transcend
it hug her tell her
about the presents you’ve brought
back for her leave her
behind eventually having been seen
(not moved) by the doctors
then go home
to sleep

•

Time-slips

The Philadelphia Experiment (1984)

Jenny Randles' book Time Storms: The Amazing Evidence of Time Warps, Space Rifts and Time Travel (London: Piatkus, 2001) includes, on its back cover blurb, the following set of enticements:

In this well-researched and authoritative book you will discover:

• Why scientists believe time travel will soon be possible
• How a time machine would actually work
• The truth about experiments already carried out to develop a time machine
• First-hand reports of people who were transported hours or days across time and space
• Whether UFOs may in fact be time travellers visiting us from our own future

As she remarks on p.66: "Forget the silly media hype - consider only the verifiable facts." So what are those facts?

1. Q: Do scientists believe time travel will soon be possible?
   A: No, they don't. What she's referring to is just that tired old business about travelling faster than the speed of light through wormholes in space - about as "scientific" as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ...


2. Q: Could a time machine actually work?
   A: Insofar as one can ever be sure of anything, one can feel fairly sure about this: No, it couldn't.


3. Q: What is the truth about experiments already carried out to develop a time machine?
   A: There haven't been any worthy of the name. All that stuff about the (so-called) "Philadelphia experiment" has roughly the same credibility as film footage of alien autopsies ...


4. Q: Are there first-hand reports of people who were transported hours or days across time and space?
   A: Here's where the story gets a bit interesting. There really are such stories, and some of them are indeed exceedingly strange ...


5. Q: Might UFOs in fact be time travellers visiting us from our own future?
   A: There's little reason to suppose so. By the same token, since we don't what - if anything - they are, there's no real way of ruling it out categorically.

I don't suppose the subject would really interest me all that much if it weren't for that time in Featherston - not the experience in the old curiosity shop (weird thought that undoubtedly was), but the stuff that happened after that.

It's not that I'm really sure anymore just what it was I saw that night, but it didn't seem to be of this earth. The one that I used to live in, at any rate. It's not that I don't want to write down what I saw, but it's hard to find the words - any words - for it ...

I suppose that the easiest thing is just to suppose that I'm cracked in the head: like the hero of that Nigel Cox novel Skylark Lounge, the one who sees UFOs and ends up burying himself in the side of a mountain on the volcanic plateau. If only it were that simple.

Hint, hint, hint ... Why not just come out with it and say that I saw myself. I saw myself but it wasn't me. And I didn't really like what I saw that much, either. And nor did Cathy (she was with me, too, which is the main reason that I can't just write it off as an hallucination) ...

•

Family Portrait

McClosky Family Gathering (1965)

17 people

6 in the front row
7 in the second row
4 in the back row

7 ties – 1 bowtie
corsages in 3 pockets
suits best frocks

staring out at the camera
with thick-rimmed glasses
beehive hairdos

prosperous
not comfortable
chairs grate on concrete

at the edge of the lawn

•

Mercator & Nostradamus

Michel de Nostredame (1503-1566)
[painted by his son César (c.1614)

These two men, near contemporaries, survivors of the turbulent religious and intellectual climate of the sixteenth century, have left behind very different reputations to posterity.

One has been hailed as a representative Renaissance humanist, a pioneering mathematician and geographer.

The other has been pilloried as a mountebank, a conjurer, masking his lack of meaning in incomprehensible macaronics and meaningless quatrains.

Nostradamus: Centuries (1568)

Timeline:

Nostradamus

Mercator

1503 – (14 December): Michel de Nostredame is born in St. Remy-de-Provence, in Southern France.

1512 – (5 March) Gerard Kremer is born in Rupelmonde, in the county of Flanders.

1522-25 – Nostradamus studies medicine at the university in Montpellier.

1529 – Nostradamus begins doctoral studies in medicine at Montpellier Medical School.

1530-32 – Kremer studies Arts at the university of Louvain.

1531 – Nostradamus is invited to Agen by philosopher Julius-Cesar Scaliger, and works there as a healer.

1534 – Nostradamus marries and has two children.

1536 – Kremer (now ‘Mercator’ [Latin for merchant]) collaborates with Gemma Frisius and Gaspard Van der Heyden on a terrestrial globe.

1537 – Nostradamus's wife and children die of the plague. His wife's family sues him for the return of her dowry and his friendship with Scaliger sours.

1537 – Mercator collaborates with Gemma Frisius and Gaspard Van der Heyden on a celestial globe.

1537 – Mercator’s first sole publication: a wall-map of the Holy Land.

1538 – After being charged with heresy for an inadvertent remark he made about a church statue, Nostradamus leaves the region rather than stand trial before the Inquisition at Toulouse. He reportedly travels around Italy and other parts of France for a number of years.

1538 – Mercator publishes his first, heart-shaped, world map.

1541 – Mercator publishes his important and influential Manual of italic lettering

1541 – Mercator completes his own terrestrial globe.

1544 – Nostradamus studies plague treatments with physician Louis Serre in Marseilles. Around this time, major flooding in southern France leads to another serious plague outbreak in the following years.

1544 – Mercator is imprisoned for heresy in the Castle of Rupelmonde.

1546 – Nostradamus treats plague victims in Aix, then goes to Salon to battle another outbreak.

1547 – Nostradamus marries Anne Ponsarde and settles in Salon, where the couple have six children.

1547 – (June) Mercator meets a nineteen-year-old university student from England, soon to become a close friend – John Dee.

1550 – Nostradamus publishes his first almanac, which contains a general prediction for each month of the year. The almanac is a success and new versions appear annually until Nostradamus' death.

1551 – Mercator publishes a celestial globe.

1552 – Nostradamus finishes a book about cosmetics and fruit preservatives which proves very popular when published three years later.

1554 – Mercator’s publishes a wall-map of Europe.

1555 – The first installment (centuries 1 through 3 and part of 4) of Nostradamus' most ambitious project, Les Prophéties, is published.

1556 – Nostradamus is (allegedly) called to Paris for a consultation with the French queen Catherine de Medici on her husband King Henri II’s health.

1557 – The second installment (the remainder of Century 4 along with centuries 5, 6 and 7) of the Prophéties is published.

1558 – Centuries 8, 9 and 10 of the Prophéties are (allegedly) published in an limited edition. No copies of this book are extant today, however, which leads some to doubt it ever appeared.

1559 – King Henry II killed in a jousting accident. Nostradamus' supporters believe the monarch's death was predicted in Century 1, Quatrain 35.

1564 – Mercator’s publishes a wall-map of the British Isles.

1564 – Queen Catherine de Medici (allegedly) visits Nostradamus in Salon.

1564 – Mercator suffers a severe mental and physical breakdown during his surveying journey around the Duchy of Lorraine.

1566 – (July 2) Nostradamus dies at home in Salon at age 62.

1568 – Publication of the omnibus edition of the Prophéties (omitting only the last fifty-eight quatrains of the seventh "Century"): the basis of all subsequent editions of his prophecies.

1569 – Mercator completes his Chronicle of World History

1569 – Mercator’s wall-map of the world is the first to use his new projection.

1578-84 – Mercator publishes his corrected edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, both maps and text.

1585 – Mercator publishes the first set of 51 modern maps for his projected cosmography: the Atlas.

1589 – Mercator publishes the second set of 22 modern maps for his Atlas.

1592 – Mercator completes his Harmonization of the Gospels.

1594 – (2 December) Mercator dies at Duisburg, Duchy of Cleves, in Germany.

1595 – Mercator’s third set of 29 modern maps is accompanied by the publication, by his son and grandsons, of 107 maps, with Mercator’s own Treatise on Creation, as the complete Atlas.

Consider the similarities:

• Both were inspired to start on their major works after a period of personal crisis: the death of Nostradamus’s entire family from plague in 1537-38, when he was in his early thirties; Mercator’s nervous breakdown in 1564, in his early fifties.
• Both were accused of heresy : Nostradamus in 1538 (aged 34); Mercator in 1544 (aged 32).
• Both made their principal discoveries – Nostradamus’ prophetic quatrains, Mercator’s geographical projection – around the age of 50.
• Both their masterpieces were published in three instalments (Nostradamus’ Prophecies in 1555, 1557 and 1558; Mercator’s Atlas in 1585, 1589 and 1595), and were left incomplete at their authors’ deaths.

Though one, Mercator, lived in largely Protestant Northern Europe, the other, Nostradamus, in largely Catholic Southern France, they both tried to live peaceful harmonious lives in the midst of the political and religious chaos of sixteenth-century Europe.

Mercator may be regarded by us as a scientist, Nostradamus as an occultist, but in reality both of these terms belong to a later era. Nostradamus would have seen himself as a doctor and a healer, Mercator as a cartographer of the heavens as well as the earth, of past eras as well as the present.

The mere fact that Mercator retained his close friendship with the English scholar (and Magus) John Dee throughout his life is proof of a more elastic sense of the boundaries between the seen and the unseen worlds than we may be capable of comprehending today.

Mercator: Atlas (1623)

•

Forest & Demarcation Zone

Doris Frohnapfel: "Forest and demarcation zone
in the border area of Saariselkä (FIN)" (2003)

pine-trees on a hill
shadowing further lines

of trees
snow on the ground

the branches
fence

open plan
big enough squares

to let out mice
small birds

but not let in
the larger predators

saplings grow
despite the weather

some have fallen down

•

Mercator's Projections

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594)

I’ve been reading a book about Gerard Mercator, “The Man who Mapped the Planet.” Quite a lot in it interested me, but a few things in particular.

First of all, there was the fact that he never travelled beyond a little square of territory in and around Benelux (Belgium – Netherlands – Luxembourg). That was the backdrop for all of his epoch-making attempts to map earth and the heavens.

Then there was his imprisonment for heresy in 1544, at the age of 32, in the castle of Rupelmonde.

Finally, there was the (alleged) nervous breakdown he suffered after trying to survey Lorraine some twenty years later, in 1564.

Het Gravenkasteel te Rupelmonde

Mercator had left Louvain on business in early March, trying to resolve some property matters to do with his recently deceased uncle’s estate. This was interpreted as an attempt at escape from the accusations levelled against him by the Catholic hierarchy, and thus (in its turn) became one of the principal accusations against him.

The prison he was kept in was – by sheer coincidence – the same castle that had dominated the village he grew up in. He was kept there for more than half a year, and came out with crippled health, having lost virtually all he owned in the world through legal fees and (semi-legal) bribes.

He was lucky to escape with his life, actually. Two of the women accused at the same time, Antoinia van Roesmaele and Katelijn Metsys, were buried alive to die by slow suffocation, two of the men were burned at the stake; others were beheaded or banished. Only Mercator got away with a warning.

Lorraine (France)

The second break in his life is more mysterious. His latest biographer, Nicholas Crane, can’t really explain why he chose to go so far afield, on so stressful an errand, so late in life. Nor can he offer any real information on why the map of Lorraine he compiled was never published:

At some point that summer, probably in the deep south, something terrible happened. Perhaps father and son were beaten or robbed by a band of thugs, or perhaps it was the plague that ravished some of Lorraine's border areas in 1564 ... Mercator, an unwilling traveller by nature, may have found the fears and discomforts of the road too much to bear. Whatever the cause, the curse of Guise finally struck, and Mercator cracked.

- Crane, Nicholas. Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet. 2002. A Phoenix Book (London: Orion Books Ltd., 2003): 211.

The "curse of Guise" referred to above was the fatal unpopularity of the House of Guise, Dukes of Lorraine (Mercator's employers), in those parts of their domains whose inhabitants still remembered the brutal, wholesale massacres of Anabaptists and Calvinists which had been carried out there a few decades before.

'This journey through Lorraine,' recalled [his first biographer, Walter] Ghim, 'gravely imperilled his life and so weakened him that he came very near to a serious breakdown and mental derangement as a result of his terrifying experiences.'

- Crane: 212.

Dare one venture, some kind of terrifying vastation, long before the term had even been coined? One reason his surveying work was never finished was, Crane suggests, that "such a detailed, accurate map was ... a 'map for war, useful to an enemy, who with a compass and quadrant could lead an army through the whole country'." [212]

This was, after all, the countryside of Joan of Arc:

Jeanne la bonne Lorraine
qu’Anglois brulèrent à Rouen

[Joan, the good maid of Lorraine
whom the English burnt at Rouen]

as Villon puts it in his "Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis" [Ballad of the Ladies of Past Times]:

Où sont elles, où, vierge souvraine?
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

Where are they, where, sovereign Virgin? / Where are the snows of years past?

This year marks the 500th anniversary of Mercator's birth. The event has been celebrated with conferences and celebrations all over the world, but particularly in the low countries which he called home.

All his great works date from the period after his "dark night of the soul" in Rupelmonde Castle. The overarching conception of the Atlas itself, however, can be dated to the years after his "serious breakdown and [near] mental derangement" in the forests of northern France.

Burning at the stake

•

Delphi

The Delphic Oracle


"still busy accumulating influences"
- Lawrence Durrell

Aesthetically there is nothing much to see

except itself

a place of rich transgressions, tears

& insanity

It is built on two enigmas

neither decipherable

a sort of mute challenge

•

For once the sea

seems diminished

a light wheezy creaking

like a man rowing across water

Apollo killed the Dragon

& left the corpse

of the gigantic dead beast to rot

•

The atmosphere is so pure

one hears the stroke of his great wings

all other considerations seem confused

Once again the historians

begin to stammer

Is not truth two-sided?

While one is uneasy

•

it is not with a sense of fear

so much as a sense of premonition

One has sudden moments of panic

What is here, one feels

is intact in its purity

The long winding roads leading away

coil like the sacred serpent

towards the centre of the earth


[after Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place. Ed. Alan G. Thomas (1969)]

•

Coral Burrows

Coral Burrows (1997-2003)

6-year-old Coral Burrows went missing at around 9am, Tuesday 9th September 2003. She was found ten days later in a bush area a few miles from her home. Her stepfather, Steven Williams, was arrested and charged with her murder - he'd beaten her to death in his car while driving her to school.

I didn't particularly follow this case at the time, though I remember the interviews with the distraught family, including Coral's father, before the shock arrest of her step-father for the murder.

I must have been thinking about it quite a lot, though, as it's started to appear in my dreams. Last night, for instance, I dreamed that I was watching TV when a documentary about the case came on. It was the usual sort of thing: some wiseacre psychologist "explaining" the whole thing in terms of upbringing and family influences. Talk about rushing in where angels fear to tread! Clearly for this guy there were no mysteries in heaven above or earth below.

Then came the thing that makes me sure it was a dream. They'd done some interviews with relatives, friends of the family, and so on, but then it came time to talk to the local cop. I don't know if he quite understood that he was being filmed, that all this was on the record, but he just started skiting away as if to some buddies in the pub.

From time to time, he said, someone would move into Featherston who thought that he could sell dope there, or commit petty crime, or do any of the other things he'd been used to doing where he came from. Such people usually 'took the hint' after a while and moved on of their own accord. Except for Steven Williams. He just stayed. It was almost as if he liked it.

I suddenly had this vision of how you "hint" to someone that it's time to move on: the drive-bys, the anonymous threats, the cold shoulder in the shops - a lovely vision of a community united against the stranger. It's not that I doubt that it's so, it's just that I still can't quite believe that any policeman would admit that that's how things are done, that the law's insufficient sometimes, that one needs to rely on a bit of vigilantism, a bit of mob mentality.

Maybe I'm wrong, though, maybe it wasn't a dream. Certainly the psychologist kept bleating on, unperturbed by the implications of what had been said. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I suddenly felt the chill of those grim dark fields, the distance between houses, the ease with which anything can be done, anything hidden in surroundings like those.

But you have to want to - that's the point. No matter how cruelly you've been brought up, no matter how much of a hairtrigger temper you've got, you have to be ready to go through with it - to hide the body, even take part in the search, keep on lying to everyone else in the family until it comes out.

I don't think there's any doubt that Williams did it. But then who knows? There's still something like a blip, a kind of timewarp, between heading off for school and the discovery of the body more than a week later.

What really happened during that short drive? What was said to set him off? That's if anything at all was said ... Perhaps he just cracked. But then what causes a man to break like that when others continue to stand upright, to go about their business? Drugs? No doubt that's part of it. In my dream there was something blacker there, something more like a mindstorm, a sense of horror that grew and grew and grew ...

19th September 2003 – Coral’s body recovered and stepfather charged

As police cordoned off a 30 to 40 metres square area in bush near Lake Onoke (Ferry), Coral’s family learnt of the death of the six year old and the arrest of Steven Roger Williams (Coral’s step-father).

The police waited until daylight to begin their search of the area. Coral’s body was discovered at 9.15am and recovered early in the afternoon. A preliminary post mortem was started and is expected to be complete later in the weekend. Meantime the police and forensic expects will remain at the discovery site to conduct a “thorough and meticulous examination of the scene”.

29 year old Steven Roger Williams appeared in Masterton District Court charged with the murder of his stepdaughter. Coral’s family stood quietly during the hearing but others outside hurled abuse and food as Williams left. He will be held on remand until October 17.

The family came out to make a public plea for time and space to mourn their daughter’s death. In a statement issued through the police, parents Jeanna, Ron and extended family want to thank the police, volunteers and public for the support given in the search for Coral. “Our plea to all New Zealander is to treasure your children and help keep safe”

- crime.co.nz

Steven Williams

•

Life in the Tararuas

The Tararua Ranges

The colder weather is bringing the beasts down from
the heights. I heard both wolves and the mountain lion as I
crossed to my cabin last night.

I am still here, helping in the kitchen, driving cattle, and
riding four or five times a day.

•

You would be amused if you could see our cabin just now.
There are nine men in the room and three women.

For want of
seats most of the men are lying on the floor; all are smoking,
and the blithe young French Canadian who plays so
beautifully and catches about fifty speckled trout for each
meal, is playing the harmonica with a pipe in his mouth.

•

All the hilarity of the house has returned with Evans.

He claps people on the back,
shouts at them, will do anything for them, and makes
perpetual breeze.

A little case of
suspicious appearance was smuggled into the cabin from the
wagon, and heightens the hilarity a little, I fear.

•

Evans flatters me by
saying that I am “as much use as a man;” more than one
of our party, I hope, who always avoided the “ugly” cows.


[after Isabella Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879)]

•

Trans-Tasman Relations

[Julia Gillard]

“Kye-wye, are you? Spotted you from the accent.
Yeah, we get a lot of youse fellas over here … Ya last
name’s not Thomson, I hope? No relation to that
mongrel in the Parliament? You musta heard about
heem? Nah? The one’s who’s been screwing all those
sheilas and charging it to the union? Union of ratbags
and scroungers, eef you ask me? Whatsa matter? Cat
got your tongue? I tell ya, you Kye-wyes have got a
cheek coming over here, getting elected to Canberra,
then rorting the system for all it’s worth! You’re not
one of them? I bet you’re not! But that’s what all of
youse say, isn’t it? Innocent as little lambs till you’re
caught with your hand in the till? Whassa matter?
Don’t youse have any sheilas worth screwing in New
Zealand? Not that our P.M.’s much chop in that
department – leathery old bitch she is … Perhaps
that’s how young Craig got round her in the first place
– administering some comfort in the bedroom
department, was it? Getting out here? Ya miles from
anywhere mate! If it’s a brothel ya looking for, my
cousin runs one down in the Cross. Nah? Well, fuck
ya then .. Ta very much. I’ll keep the change.”

Feb 4. Disappointment

The North Pole (1909)

For nine days they struggled
sometimes hungrysometimes fed
often they were thirsty
always thirsty

In the harshness of the winds
they sought the sun
his stars had been favourable
his ponderings jerked off into dreams

My throat was bleeding from over-smoking
amongst hummocks of ice
that looked like tombstones to me
I hope we don’t sink during the night

The uncivilised brain is confused
by the civilised
his guns and rifles were to them
a sore temptation

under a drift of snow


[after Violet Clifton, The Book of Talbot (1933)]

•

Cairo the Victorious

[Egyptian troops battle protestors]

"Going to see the pyramids was never supposed to be like this!

"I’d booked the hotel months in advance, the boat-trip on the Nile (“pretty basic,” they told me – make sure you bring your own toilet paper). Things looked a little tense when I arrived – lots of guards with guns – but then don’t you expect those things in a Middle-Eastern airport?

"It wasn’t till five minutes into my ‘stroll around the town’ that I began to realise what was really going on. It wasn’t so much that I got lost as that I got swept up – in the excitement, the crowd pressure. They all seemed to be flowing in one direction –– as I learned later, to Tahir Square, the City Centre. They were chanting. There were women in full burqa, men with long white beards. Then the bricks started to fly!

"After that came the water cannon, the tear gas and the bullets – in that order. We couldn’t even run for cover – there was such a pressure of people. “Peaceful, Peaceful!” the crowd was chanting. Fat hope of anyone hearing that! They were dropping like flies. I saw a man get his head stove in by a brick, women and children screaming!

"I got off with a soaking and some red and stingy eyes, though – surprise, surprise! – there were no flights out the next day, and no way of getting a refund on the river trip. I ended up cowering inside my hotel room for a week, watching CNN, and trying to live on peanuts and bottled water.

"The next time the fellaheen decide to march downtown to defy Pharaoh, I think I’ll plan on being on the other side of the TV screen!"

•

I can't even tell

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

what colours
these are
in the dark

everyone knows
that he’s a
patriot

you guys
go too far
sometimes

anything
can happen
any time

she’s fine
she’s
fine

let it go
can’t you see
you’re on safe

ground?

•

Featherston Tales

arson

Children terrorise Featherston
NZ Newswire January 12, 2012, 8:52 am


Child thugs, some as young as six years old, are being accused of vandalism, arson and trying to extort money from elderly residents in the Wairarapa town of Featherston.

One 86-year-old returned serviceman said he was too scared to go out at night because he would be a good target on his mobility scooter.

"I live alone and I can't even go out for a beer of a night - it's too dangerous going home. They've just got control of the place," he told APNZ.

Featherston fire chief Colin McKenna said children as young as six had been seen wandering the streets until 2am and he had seen children trying to extort money from people.

Sergeant Kevin Basher said that about six months ago a core of three or four troublemakers, with up to 15 others, began causing trouble.

They had been lighting fires, stealing, damaging property and abusing people.

Police, CYF and South Wairarapa Safer Community Council were trying to resolve the problem, but it came back to parental control, he said.

"We're taking a holistic approach, looking at the families and into such things as whether these kids are getting three meals a day, have a bed to sleep in with clean sheets."

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Featherston residents reassured after spate of crimes
Newstalk ZB January 12, 2012, 1:52 pm


Police are assuring Featherston residents they're doing all they can to control a group of youths who've been causing problems in the Wairarapa town.

A group of children is being blamed for a spate of crimes over the past six months, including vandalism, petty theft and lighting fires.

Some are as young as six-years-old.

Masterton Senior Sergeant Warwick Burr says the problems stem from a large family in Featherston, and police are working with CYF to get the children some help.

"While we acknowledge that there is a problem, it's not a case where a whole community is being terrorised by a small group of juveniles that the police and other organisations cannot do something about."

Senior Sergeant Burr says the teenage ringleaders have been attracting others to the group.

Tony Reid: Featherston (2008)


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Pity what you can't change

The Social Network (2010)


“I’m CEO, bitch”
– The Social Network

How can one defuse
such personalities?

The girl with a grating voice
in your morning language class

The Machiavel manager
whose own thwarted career

as writer & researcher
has choked & foundered here

Deception is one way
Listen to what they say

with feigned sincerity
Perhaps you’ll start to see

admire what you despise
open – or shut? – your eyes

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Research Assumptions

Storm over Eketahuna

Some twenty years ago I reached a crossroads in my life (though, like most such events, the fact seems more apparent in retrospect than it was at the time).

I’d recently moved to the lower North Island to take up a position at the college there. At the end of the first year, though, my employers felt able only to offer me halftime work for the upcoming semester.

On a trip up north to my alma mater, I mentioned this fact to one of my old professors, who promptly offered me a fulltime job at the university there instead. My immediate impulse was to make the move, shaking the dust of the less grateful of the two institutions off my feet.

The decision wasn’t solely mine to make. I was married, had responsibilities … It hadn’t been easy for my French-speaking wife to get a job in our new town, and I wasn’t sure how she’d react to the idea of resigning again so soon (even though – somewhat paradoxically – she was being employed to teach NZ studies, of all things …)

In the end we stayed. “And that has made all the difference.”

It contributed, I’m sure, to the eventual demise of our relationship, a few years later. The place was just too small, too far from metropolitan pleasures and stimuli to interest her longterm. She started to hanker for Europe, and while I shared her frustration at the geographical and social bounds surrounding us, they didn’t chafe me quite so badly.

A certain timorousness can overcome one when one enters the Academic life: a conviction that another such job will be hard to find, a reluctance to go back out into the marketplace to hawk one’s wares …

I procrastinated, temporised, bargained – and, as a result, lost her for good.

I understand how unusual an opening this may seem for this account of my Academic research over the past five years, but I don’t know how else to account for the precise nature of the investigations I’ve been conducting during this period into a virtually unquantifiable what might have been … Much of the material here falls into my field of specialisation: literature of the Early Modern era (approx. 16-17th century), but I’ve also strayed into local history, abnormal psychology and parapsychology.

Let me explain further:

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Class Discourse

Jacques-Louis David: The Death of Socrates (1787)

The unexamined life
is not worth living
said Socrates

Who was Socrates?
Does anybody know?
Not quite

Near enough
A Greek philosopher
400 BC or so

& Socrates said
that he was tapped
to search for truth

because he knew
that he knew nothing
but was interested

in everything
Does anyone
know anything?

That’s the point, I guess
What am I trying to say?
What are we here for?

To score you
a better-paying job?
hand on the art of

bullshitting?
teach you to
“think critically”?

I suppose that’s it
– not that it’s teachable –
to encourage you

to think it through
for yourselves
’coz we all know how much

that skill is in demand
in the outside world
Yeah!

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Ghost Stories

Tanks in the mist (2011)

... And so the old man came stumbling back into the bar ... ‘Engines of war!’ he muttered. ‘Engines of war! I seen ‘em – out in the mist …’

Nobody knew what he meant at the time. They just put it down to the triple whiskies and the heavy fog. You can see just about anything in one of those! But then, many years later, the army was doing manoeuvres around that area, and there they were! Engines of war. Just like the old man had seen behind the pub, all those years ago ...

– You mean tanks? Why didn’t he just say ‘tanks’, then? What’s all this stuff about ‘engines of war.’?

– Well, it’s quite an old story. My father used to tell it. It’s supposed to be set before the First World War, I think – back in my grandfather’s time. I guess that’s why the man wouldn’t have recognised a tank when he saw one.

– Oh. Okay. Fair enough. Well, anyway, my story was told me by a guy I’d never met before – or since, for that matter – one evening in Edinburgh when I was studying over there. I was having dinner with a group of friends, one of whom had invited her new boyfriend over for the first time. He was a medical student (as was she), so when the conversation got round to ghosts and ghost stories, we expected them both to be pretty sceptical.

That proved not to be the case, though. After we’d trotted out all the old chestnuts (‘Now we’re locked in for the night’ – after the old lady has checked all the doors and windows of her bedroom in the strange house), he said he’d once played a game with a group of fellow students where they’d tried to hypnotise each other.

‘What happened?’ we asked.

‘Well, one of the others had been trained in how to do it, and she put us under, one by one, and asked us questions about ourselves.’

‘You mean, questions about the future? That kind of thing?’

‘Yeah. About where we were then and what we were going to be doing in six months time.’

‘And did they come true? The things you said?’

‘Well, that’s just the thing, they did – more or less, anyway.’

‘That’s not much of a story,’ said Martin, the loudest and most vociferous of us.

‘Except for one girl,’ he continued. ‘She said she couldn’t see anything at all. Everything was blank, she said. Then she just went quiet.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, six months later, that girl was dead.’

‘You mean, she saw her own death?’

‘I don’t know what she saw. All I know is, she said she couldn’t see anything at all – whereas the rest of us saw all sorts of things ...’

I don’t know. Obviously he could have been having us on. None of us really knew him, not even Carol, the girl who’d brought him along that night (she stopped going out with him shortly afterwards. Perhaps she was a bit creeped out by what he’d said). He seemed pretty sincere – kind of a straight-up guy, actually. Afterwards we thought he’d maybe told us the story because he didn’t know any of us. It sounded to me as if it had been preying on his mind. Anyway, that was the end of that storytelling session – I’ve never forgotten what he told us that night, though.

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