Monday 16 June 2008
Exit, stage right
Time, it’s time for new things. New design and new direction on a new blog on a mostly new-ish domain name. Still settling into the new place, so wipe your feet and mind your manners. Don’t forget to change your feed.
Bookshelves of thanks to Deborah for the long and gracious stay on her server.
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Thursday 15 May 2008
Flail
So sick of silence. And sick of whinging about ministry. Well, okay, one more whinge: blogging feels a bit redundant when you’re already spending time somewhere else doing essentially the same thing: spending lots of time flailing around and using up cranial bandwidth for little discernible result.
Meanwhile, am amassing secretive side-projects by the many. Post the secret handshake for more details.
Links! I know you missed them:
A talk by Clay Shirky on the amount of time and energy people spend on things like Wikipedia. When people shake their heads and say ‘Where do these people on the internet find the time?’, they really mean, ‘Why aren’t they doing something as mindnumbing and useless as I like to do?’
Loving the blog about songwriting over at the NYT. For example, in Andrew Bird’s latest post: ‘I have this intense aversion to canned emotion, yet that’s exactly what recording is: a reconstituted, canned facsimile of a performance. I am determined to subvert this and perhaps that’s why I ascribe mystical/religious properties to microphones, tape machines record players — technology that still physically touches something else. Conversely, I regard computers as necessary but heretical and potentially corrupting collaborators.’ Brilliant. But then we knew that about Mr Bird anyway.
I think this interview with Eskil Steenburg is incredibly interesting. He’s developing an MMO by himself, and trying to use procedurally generated content to create stories. It always comes back to stories.
I recommend For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver very much. Saying it ‘only’ uses guitar and vocals is like saying Jen Stark’s art only uses paper. I recommend Portishead’s Third too, but hey, who doesn’t?
Dear Blogspot kiddie bandwagoneers with nothing intelligent or original to say, /Karen/ still does it better than the rest of us. Even if she is just a little bit of slightly insane.
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Thursday 24 April 2008
What
He asks if I have any questions.
‘This … not knowing. Does it ever go away?’ you don’t ask.
The answer is yes, he doesn’t reply. You learn what you’re doing. You grow in understanding. You discover what you did wrong and put yourself on the line to repair it. You learn the cadence of people. You learn how to equip people with and for the gospel. You learn when you need to confront and when you need to let it go and when you need to let it go but you should confront anyway. You learn that people are what it’s all about but the structures are all about the people.
The answer is no, he also doesn’t say. You keep on making mistakes. You realize that your understanding of doctrine is flawed. You discover what you did was wrong and you replace it with something worse. You are reminded that being regenerate in Christ can still go hand-in-hand with ignorance and pig-headedness because people stubbornly continue to be people. You misunderstand people and say exactly what you shouldn’t when you shouldn’t.
The answer, dissatisfying and gracious, is that we are vitally important and thoroughly redundant. Our God is director and tailor, armorer and overseer. And you learn to say ‘In God’s kindness’ because everything, everything is.
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Saturday 5 April 2008
House of customs
We disembark at Circular Quay, and saunter down to Customs House. Karen is already there, all in black, beautiful matching parasol in hand. Later this parasol will draw public adulation from Americans. But for now, Bec greets her with ‘You’re looking very Lacy Goth today’ and a great hug.
Inside we go: there’s a scale version of Sydney inset under the translucent floor and gigantic box-kite looking things wind up to the achingly high ceiling. Even the catalogue computers look cool, decked out in the (White Stripesy) colour scheme of red and white.
We find ourselves winding and wending our way up the stairs, past exhibitions and signs advertising the free wi-fi and books on books, and truly, it’s like we’ve found a home we always wanted to be.
Into the Reading Room, then, with its venerable tables and for now it’s blank except for just us. We get out the equipment for the day. For one, just a MacBook and its sleeve, for another, mints and water bottle and Moleskine and iPod and blue pen, for the last plastic water bottle and to-do notepad and source article and iPod and iPod bag and pen and pink book to write in.
We sit and grin at each other. Someone takes surreptitious snaps with the MacBook.
Amidst the richnesses of the books, and the sunlight leaning in the windows like an eavesdropper and with wonderful compatriots, then, its time to get to work: joyful, painful, the work.
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Wednesday 26 March 2008
Sigh
Last night, my dreams officially jumped the shark.
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Friday 29 February 2008
A sheer drop
Day after day, in a carousel of days.
Today is my day off, and I drink coffee in a patisserie. The girl behind the counter is beautiful but not pretty. She has eyes like she does not want to see past herself.
Starting ministry is a freedom that saps at you, like a too much. Like being in a wildnerness, a fog. You work out your way by trial and error. Mostly error.
Sometimes you think you might just be doing the right thing. Sometimes you know you are not with a fierceness that strains at the leash.
The writing is a curious thing that seems to be going … well? Maybe writing is sometimes a bit like subterfuge. When you’re working by imagination and a instinct that has been buried inside you, to speak its name out loud seems almost an act of betrayal. Like naming a co-conspirator.
Sadness twines itself around and through and through, but it is known as well. In being known, it loses power and drama. It is another sort of conspirator - the type whose name we must speak.
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Tuesday 19 February 2008
Aotearoa, part near the end
‘They’ve got the One Ring here. Well, one of the One Rings. Heh.’
‘Huh? What’s that from? Lord of the Rings or something?’
‘…’
‘What?’
‘… Sometimes I think I have accomplished nothing in this marriage.’
We do the Abel Tasman walk over a few hours. It rains on and off. It’s undeniably beautiful - the water stretches so far out to the horizon that it loops back and stretches over you as well and the seeing of so much blue is a kind of baptism, a kind of cleansing.
We stay in ‘The Castle’, but it ends up being a manor with a nickname.
Because of the rain, we throw it in and go to see the Darjeeling Limited: a likeable, diagonal film.
One of the best dinners we have is fish and chips on the third-last night. The highlight is M.’s who, because of her stomach, hasn’t eaten fast and/or fried food in years. ‘Oh man, is this why you get fried stuff all the time? This is amazing!’ etc. Somewhat predictably, later she is sick, and we walk down around the harbour of Nelson to ease her stomach.
And then we make for home.
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Wednesday 13 February 2008
Aotearoa, part something
One shop in Nelson has a sign that reads, all in the same font and in all caps: ‘POWER YOGA TAPAS’.
‘Is it stages you go through? Or is it an incentive? One more sun salutation and you get an olive …’
We meet Craglee’s two budgies, called Les and Bo. Their mating capsule has not been used.
We breakfast with an intense young couple who are intense Labor devotees - they met during the election campaign. They are, of course, thrilled.
The drive over to Nelson is Janis Joplin.
Our accommodation here is the top floor of a stately manor near the beach. Everything inside is well-preserved and slightly past its prime, including the owners who live downstairs.
Nelson itself is markets and sun-faded hippies, people who wear straw hats seriously and awkardly named Oriental restaurants and bus tours and deep bookstores and arts and crafts markets. In one cafe, M. has a mug of coffee so large that the barista gives us a verbal warning before serving.
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Monday 11 February 2008
Aotearoa, part VII
Jade is a Puerto Rican, Brooklyn-born and raised, who throws her whole body, her tiny self, into reenacting stories. She is hyperactive and paranoid. Everything is a disaster waiting to happen; everything is her overreacting to disasters that don’t. She buries her hands into her schoolboy haircut in mock anguish; her brown eyes blaze with laughter, how ridiculous she is. Words tumble out of her, like dice out of a cup. She swears with increasing volume and frequency, tripping over herself to try and convey her good-natured anguish.
We wake easily: the beds here are exuberant and comfortable.
We laze and eat and sleep our way into the mid-morning, then we take a kayak out into the pureness of the water. The water is silken and calm. Mary steers at the back. I paddle at the front.
On the return trip, we find our kayak surrounded by a fluther of jellyfish — translucent and calmly weird. They flock to our red boat like actors to praise. Their hemispheres wink at us lazily in the light. Half-invisible.
That night, we scurry out in robes to the outdoor baths they’ve prepared for us. By the candlelight, we let ourselves down into steaming hot baths. We peer into the blackness and the stars written within it; we give ourselves this luxury — we let ourselves feel small.
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Sunday 10 February 2008
Aotearoa, part VI
Out on the water taxi, the whales sing loud. Songs of sadness that coruscate through your body. They come from every direction the songs: exhausting and haunting, until they vibrate your retinas every time you close your eyes. Communion songs, they sing.
We arrive at Craglee Lodge, and welcomed at the dock by Rosie. How do I begin to describe Rosie?
She’s warm and gregarious with a sense of humour too large for her body to fill. It’s an inclusive sense of humour too, and cheeky, every third one is about how old she feels, every second one is to test out your reactions, see if you’re in on the joke. When we arrive, our jolly young ferry drive leapson the deck to tease her about the blond bangs that hang over her face, and she takes a playful swipe at him. ‘Mind the grey bits.’ she yelps, then bursts into a low guffaw.
We meet the rest of the lodgers, and M. remarks that it feels like the cast of a murder mystery: John and Anne, a middle-aged couple out from England; their son, Phil, and his pregnant bride Jess; Olivia, a Fulbright Scholarship winning lawyer from Sydney, half-Asian, who met Jade in New York, and now live in Sydney together; and then there’s us. Whoever we are.
We hear this:
“You know that it was a Russian mail order bride filling out the visa application, when in the spot for husband’s name they’d filled in, ‘Yours Sincerely’.”
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Friday 8 February 2008
Aotearoa, part V
One afternoon, halfway through our luxurious soups (me: fresh seafood chowder, M: tomato) we hear music coming from our left. We look around, but there’s only an old couple there. It takes us both a little while, and then we look around again. The old lady is half-humming, half-singing. It’s that Christmas hymn that goes ‘… and man should live forevermore, because Christ was born on Christmas day.’ She was either singing in Irish, or she’d forgotten the other words.
We stop at a lookout to see the seals. They are hilarious animals: corpulent and slothful. Occasionally they gnaw on themselves, but usually that’s too much effort, so they stretch and moan and otherwise just lie there. M. says they’re the Guan of the animal kingdom.
A short walk away there’s a sign for a waterfall. We go down the path - halfway in, we see three bikini-clad girls coming back the other way. They’re shivering like guitar strings, but they have serene, wondrous smiles.
‘Was it cold?’ M. asks.
They nod. ‘Freezing. But you should definitely go in. It’s brilliant.’ They smile once more and go.
We walk around the curve. It’s not as loud as I thought, like nature’s own feedback loop. It’s idyllic, peaceful though. The water is clear as hindsight. Pools stretch around and down, and ferns stand guard around about us like forgetful old men. It’s green and blue and green again. The sunlight is strained through the canopy.
We look at one another. I shrug. We strip down to underthings and step in. M. first. As soon as she’s in M. gasps and takes one swoop underwater and then goes to come back out but by then I’m in and cripes and criminy it is cold like a Maori has socked me in the goat and ripped the heat from my body cold enough so that your individual atoms put on scarves and gloves so I dip my head under and scamper out. My teeth go chatter chatter chatter.
We drip-dry and pray in the dappled sunshine. And once and again, life is beautiful.
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Wednesday 6 February 2008
Aotearoa, part IV
New Zealand is impossibly picturesque. Of course, of course, of course it is. At every turn, people have stopped their cars on the side of the road, and are setting up tripods or balancing digital cameras on their car doors.
The sky is as blue and deep as the sea. And the sea is as blue and deep as old songs.
The mountains are whales. They lie sleeping, and they dream of truth that darkens like ink into water. Trees burst from their skin in clambering clumps, ebullient and clumsy.
New Zealand is a vandal and a coward. Liar. Slanderer. Thief.
Spider-like, it shrinks away at every turn. Like a mythical siren, it deceives and deceives.
Like the flirty girl in high school. She turns away from every photo. At the last moment. Calculated. Flaunty and proud.
It shatters lenses and breathes dust into storage cards: the blues will not be as blue as in your memory. The calm is not as calm.
It swallows up words like picturesque and gorgeous — their repetitions would fill one of New Zealand’s many picturesque and gorgeous valleys. It plays a dark magic to your pen: no one will ever see what you see, no matter the way of your telling.
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