Cross-pollination

I have non-teaching time, at this, the sweetest time of year.  Most of Concrete University, and much of Sockburn too, is heavy with blossom.  Individual petals blow in drifts across lawns, adhering to my clothes and hair, the north face of the house and in the ears and up the noses of unsuspecting puppies.  A few days of rain at the end of last week made the gutters run with lemon-coloured pollen water.  The return of the sunshine is such that, though eyes stream and grow puffy on people and animals alike, the whole of the western suburbs seems to be strolling about, amiably, in short sleeves, asking itself how nice it is to see the sunshine.

These four weeks there is much to be done, on the periphery of my normal daily round where things grow interesting.  Next week I shall be in Auckland, finally, for the launch of this, and then to Rotorua for this in the following week.  I have seized both these chances to travel not only for the work and friendly reunions they offer, but also for the change of scene.  My regular flights into the hinterland have reduced in number since the señor moved in, he for whom there is no place like home, but this fact makes the opportunity to go somewhere slightly different that much sweeter, not to mention the built-in dog care that the señor’s presence now provides.

I have been thinking a lot about the utility of being a two-person household, which state you know I took up only after long consideration.  More mess is created but there is more labour to clean it up.  The señor makes much of having been raised feminist, and if I were to infer causality it would be to say that the chores that need doing around the house are no less visible to him than to me.  I, too, am wary of the trope of expected telepathy, the one whereby one persons sits and stews, sometimes for days, waiting for the other to apprehend whatever task needs to be done, not least because I have been the unintentional causer of such fury in others, during long-distant flatting arrangements.  So the end result is often the señor laughing at me–sometimes a little testily, I think–as I itemise aloud what I have done, what he has done and what needs to be done.

I do not think there is an easy solution to any of this, other than constant negotiation, to make conscious what is unconscious, itemising not only one’s labour but also one’s thinking about labour.  I feel fortunate that I wasn’t raised to tie too closely the condition of the house with my own gendered value.  The greatest causes of untidiness in my childhood home were stacks of papers–mail, sheet music, correspondence, homework–books, cassette tapes and later CDs, all, to my mind, good kinds of mess.  Now to this we add DVDs, computer and gaming paraphernalia, dog toys, dog leads, dog bowls, dog crates.  It is the clutter, I think, of a well-lived life.

If I write with confidence it is because I am back at work on my manuscript, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.  I am still learning as I go, and reading as I go, too.  The literary critic that sits on my shoulder as I read has these days a lot more to say about the technique of others, the better to understand what they do so that I can refine what I do.  For a long time I felt as if my creative work proceeding by a mixture of luck and magic.  Now I swing the other way: aesthetics, for sure, but leavened, always, by a heavy dose of utility.

The trick is to write down as well as along.  In the past I have when dealing with fictional narrative worked too hard to move the characters from one plot point to another, mimicking in prose the way in which I used to play with dolls as a child.  Now my aim is to record more faithfully what each character is experiencing from moment to moment, to drop the reader as fully as possible into their perceptions.  The more I do this the more I wonder at the artifice of it.  On this I will yet have, I think, more to say.

Deborah has gifted me a circulating affirmation called the Brillante Blog Award.  The memorial image, which you can see here, looks not unlike those early attempts at graphic design that were made using The Lettering Book back in the 1980s.  The award comes with the responsibility of passing it to seven others.  I am hypocritically reluctant to single out any writer in particular, even as I enjoyed the singling out that applied to my own writing by Deborah.  So let me sidestep the responsibility by directing you to some posts of note which illustrate the range of writing to which I choose to link from here.

It’s not just what you see, but from where, and who you are when you look.
From this we can look westward, and there, look back in time, which is to say, look homeward.

There are things to consider in heated brevity, and others best told at cooler length.

Words are a pun, or a portal.  Words are a history of looking.

What do you want to cast?  Ley lines to the imagined past?
And what do you want to find?  The aesthete, the re-state, intelligent design?

You can read the child in time, the parent on the wane, the papa on the continent.

Enrolments will close.  Classes will begin.  There are sons for the return home.

If the essay needs defending, we can do this.  We can read, we can think, we can write.