landingtree

I keep tweaking this in the hopes that it will cohere into an essay, and one that is not based on experiences as un-generalisable as dreams, but I have a large proofreading job to do and also accidentally deleted part of a previous draft because of how Dreamwidth post-saving works, so to hell with it.


"I wonder whether it costs you a lot of thought or trouble, or springs ready-armed like Athene from the brow of Zeus?” wrote Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Woolf made her famous reply:

"Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year."

Did she think differently next year? I don't know. Here's a related quote, this time from one of those Delany essays I was reading last year called Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student.

"The first side [of literary talent] is the absorption of a series of complex models—models for the sentence, models for narrative scenes, and models for various larger literary structures. This is entirely a matter of reading and criticism... Nothing else effects it... Generally speaking... the sign that the writer has internalized a model deeply enough to use it in writing is when he or she has encountered it enough times so that she or he no longer remembers it in terms of a specific example or a particular text, but experiences it, rather, as a force in the body, a pull on the back of the tongue, an urge in the fingers to shape language in one particular way and avoid another. To effect this one must encounter that model or structure again and again in other texts and experience it. . . well, through the body. Clumsy, inadequate, and not quite accurate, that's the only way I can say it."

Though Delany is talking about learning writing always and only from other writing, while Woolf is talking about learning style from whatever you perceive, they agree that writing is a matter of setting working in yourself, or submitting to, a pattern you've already absorbed. In this view, is writing beyond the bounds of what can be learned consciously? That was my initial disheartening impression of Delany's essay, and what a creative writing teacher friend of mine thought of it too; even if that were true, it wouldn't be much use. But I no longer think that's the implication. In any class that's about learning to reproduce a method, I find that I'm searching for the experiences a teacher’s language corresponds to. I only really notice this when it's difficult. At aikido, when I was a child, we used to be told ‘find your centre;’ more than a year after we stopped going to aikido classes, I was doing the stretches in the back garden and went, “Oh, that’s what they meant.” And then for two days I walked different. Although it consists of using words, I don't know that the act of writing is necessarily more describable in words than physical movement is – and I don't think it's less describable, either. The bottom-up and the top-down are interlaced like fingers.

( Cut for length and for wandering around through my psychology of writing in a way that doesn't come to a conclusion )

I'm very much enjoying working in a bookshop. My first customer service job. It's relaxed, which is partly because my employer is lovely and partly because we don't have enough customers. My employer has been working the shop for years, and also without much in the way of days off for the month before I was hired. Understandably, she seems pretty sick of trying to run a bookshop that makes no money, and intends to sell up. In the meantime, it feels good to get to come in as the person who isn't yet sick of it. Besides having fucks to give, and a fresh eye to turn on things which had cemented into annoying problems, I can advise on boardgames and S.F. Today I merged Science Fiction and Fantasy, because I never like browsing them as two sections; also this way if the Steerswoman books come in I don't have to choose where to put them. And I moved book two of The Mallorean, book three of a late Orson Scott Card trilogy, and our duplicate copy of part one of book four of A Song Of Ice And Fire to the cheap sale bins, along with several massive dog-eared tomes I'd never heard of and two or three comic fantasies whose protagonists get uplifted from pleasant lives in the hamlet of Hubble-on-Wimble by the Wizard Grabfart in order to be illustrated by Josh Kirby. If any of these are gems then someone will be very pleased to pick them up for five dollars.

Those customers we do get we get frequently compliment the shop. It's a light, pleasant space to be in. There were renovations earlier in the year, and every day I work there, someone says, "Oh, it's all changed! It looks better!" The only customer so far who could be called a problem was the man who told us that one of the Newtown bookshops, either us or the anarchist bookshop up the street, had sent someone to his house to purchase some books and had not been heard from since. There had been a deckle-edged Shakespeare worth a pretty penny, he said. When we told him we never collect books from houses, he said hmm, well, that's very strange, and repeated the story to us two more times. Then he came back the next week and said it all again with greater intensity. Clearly he thought that somebody was lying to him. I don't know if he's mixing up suburbs (he is sure he's not) or if someone's running a book-buying scam, or what. I have heard only good things of the anarchist bookshop. If my employer is a book thief and I get gradually inducted into Wellington's underworld, I shall let you all know.

The problem with my novel is that it's too many things.

I once decided to write a book whose first half would be the mirror-image of its second. Everything the protagonist was told in the first half would be false, everything he was told in the second half would be true, and all the locations of the scenes would repeat in mirrored order. I think this structure would be cool, and I began failing to write it almost at once, theoretical scaffold turned practical cage. This taught me that I am better at describing things than doing them, and that, having set six months aside to work on a single book, I couldn't.

So this year is, "What if I did that again, only now with institutional support in a class of ten?" It is going somewhat better. But I'm learning that what I write with is enthusiastic vision. I sit down and go "Ooh! I just realised what could happen next! Neat! I'll write the next bit!" This is why I always used to wheel from project to project, repeatedly re-acquiring my own surprise. Whether this lead to anything being finished depended on ambient enthusiasm levels, and in any event, it lead to my finishing only about ten percent of the things I started.

This also explains why, when I focus on a single project, I find myself always elaborating, complexifying. I spend weeks and months having forgotten why I started the project, until I find an old note from myself which makes the spirit of it come alive in my mind again. I write gleefully odd worldbuilding sentences, because I like gleefully odd worldbuilding, but also because those are the sentences that re-excite me, rather than sentences which just, you know, advance established events. The course I'm doing is full of good writing-craft discussions and details, but if it teaches me only one thing so that it sticks, it may be, 'continue to write the thing you decided to write, even if you are not currently gleeful about it,' a piece of advice I've already met approximately everywhere, but which seems to need to be drummed into me practically.

( In the meantime, I shall now explain why there were psychic pigs: )

I came to study in Wellington with no intention of taking any creative writing courses there - though various relatives assumed I'd chosen Victoria University specifically for its Institute of Modern Letters - because writing was the thing I did spontaneously, and the thing I was most motivated to improve at. Then Elizabeth Knox did a course called Worldbuilding and I said oh, alright then, my degree has room for one of my favourite New Zealand writers on Worldbuilding, and that was a great experience - though not particularly useful, I don't think, or at any rate of unconscious use. Elizabeth said a bunch of insightful things during the course, but the central thing it taught me seems to have been how to write a novel in collaboration with eleven other people, and also that one probably shouldn't. (We were the guinea pig year; I think in every year since she's run it with two groups of six to eliminate some of the problems of overstuffedness we ran into). Then I finished study and there was pandemic and the tap on my intrinsic tendency to write closed almost all the way. Early last year I said 'Clearly I need an over-arching structure, and if I haven't got a full-time job by October I will apply for the Masters program at the Institute of Modern Letters.' I did not get a full-time job - or a narration mentorship - and I did get into the course.

I arrived in week one feeling no enthusiasm despite assuming I was going to have a lot of fun soon, much the same attitude I bring to multi-day hikes. 'You have no novel to write,' muttered my depression, 'you will have used this year frivolously and there will not even be a novel.' I told my depression that I didn't even need to work against it particularly hard, because soon I would be doing an intensive course in one of my favourite things and it would blow away. This seems to have been the case! As with the hikes, I was correct about the lots of fun. I have in fact begun writing the novel on which I shall be assessed, not that it's shaped much like one - 'just write a novel that begins, moves forward along one or two plot threads for a while, then ends' would have been a very useful goal to set myself but no, I had to make it all wibbly. I like (nearly all of) my nine classmates and also like (much of) their writing and I am very curious how that changes over the course of the year. I'm the most fantasy-ass fantasy writer in the group, but not the only one, we also have someone doing ghosts, as well as someone doing a realist novel with a strong underpinning of myths about food and sex and someone doing Victorian serial killers, both of whom seem of our party. Most of us have our convenor, Kate Duignan, as supervisors - but on account of the fantasy-assness I have Elizabeth Knox again, which is exciting.

The format is two long class sessions a week. For one of the two we attend seminars. Initially these are from visiting writers, but by next month we'll be doing the seminars ourselves for each other. The other sessions are workshops: we initially do writing exercises and give and receive feedback on them, but after seven exercises we'll switch to talking about each other's folio projects, which in most cases are novels. I expected that to be chapter-by-chapter, but no, it's pretty much two big chunks, midway through the year and then late in it, which I think I'll like as a format.

Parallel to all this we keep reading diaries, which I'll probably keep posting bits of here. Ostensibly we're reading things associated with our projects, but in my case there has been mission creep, and my to-read shelf contains some things associated with my project plus everything else I caught sight of that was interesting. I have a very small backpack currently, so I have twice got out far too many books from the library and then had to wedge more than half of them into my cubby-hole in the IML postgrad library, leaving just space at the top for my classmates to leave copies of their exercises and our convenor to leave reading packets, which is the cubby's actual purpose.

I've never done a writing workshop, as such. Elizabeth's course had a few exercises, and one long workshoppy-session, but what it mainly consisted of was shared plot discussion. (Tangent: it was quite interesting, what we did was write a viewpoint character each, and then do three rounds of chapters, so the book was thirty-six chapters in three parts. Despite minimal back-and-forth during the rounds of writing, it was always possible to put the twelve draft chapters in an order that made sense, and we got a lot of narrative energy out of some of the unexpected consequences of that, although then spilled quite a lot of it down the side of the boat. I think. I have never re-read it, should do that sometime).

It's interesting to notice what I notice in a story, given a fairly short time to think about it and nine other people to point out what they notice in it too. With me it seems to be images - I might comment on a character or on a joke or voice, but repeat a motif of objects partially obscured by other objects, or steal one thing from a church literally and then one metaphorically, and it seems you have my attention.

Back home. Before I even went inside with my bags, last night in the pleasant Wellington cool, I pulled a few clumps of kaikuia grass out of the herb bed. I've just been weeding again, and watering the petunias I planted in a toilet bowl which, for the first year I lived here, was entirely concealed in weeds. My house has two working toilets, the indoor toilet and the outdoor ghost toilet. I've started thinking of the petunia toilet as the pagan toilet, but it doesn't have a generally used name - actually 'petunia toilet' sounds better, doesn't it.*

The neighbors with whom we share our lawn, a partial fence supporting washing lines on both sides marking the boundary, have have worked their way up their half of the garden and come around the top to our strip of planters. I'm not sure if this is technically encroachment - it certainly violates our sense of custom, but since flatmate R's ex happened to move in downstairs we've mostly avoided dialogue, the breakup having been civil but not exactly amicable, so I'm not sure what their garden beliefs are. I feel a need to hurriedly weed the top planter box which they have begun to designate as a weed pile site for the sake of future hopes and dreams of planting. So far they have done one thing I found irritating: I'd decided on a place to put a chair and they put a box for sheltering seedlings there instead. (Whose glass lid slopes harshly down from right to left across the property instead of being slanted with the curve of the slope, like my garden bench would have been. I have mainly recovered from my Opinions on this topic but they are not entirely gone).

I've been working part-time as a gardener these eight (!) years, but only recently started to feel an enjoyment in the overall shape of a garden, as opposed to just doing the weeding that's in front of me. I think it comes both of reading a design book - hence my Opinions - and of seeing my employer Raewyn prune and remove trees - in some cases trees I planted. Once I accepted this, the last of my childhood sense that any tree, once threatened with removal, becomes immediately beloved (I was an annoying child to have in the garden) melted away, and I came home and enthusiastically pruned several of our bordering trees.

Speaking of which - it's lovely to see how my mother's house has become en-treed. The manuka on the hillock by the lower water tank, the manuka in the ditch by the road, the two big native plantings down by the creek, the feijoas and lemons, the plane trees which grew from an uncle's firewood to tower over anything else around them, the conifer in the paddock which we decorated as a Christmas tree as high as we could reach, which with a ladder was about halfway - all very green and good. I wish I could reassure my child self, who was sad at the removal of a line of camellias, that all would be well. (I'd probably just sulkily reply to myself that they won't be these trees, I love these trees. True, younger self, true).

And not to finish by speaking ill of our neighbors, they bought the hose we use, maintain the compost bin, and are generally pleasant people to smile hello to as we pass each other on the path or on the deck. (Also our garden remains in a homely state of shabbiness, our vegetable garden more a gesture than anything practical, so it's easy to see why one might think it could be taken into better management. But patience, patience, neighbors! We're getting there!)

...

The great-aunt I mailed a little jigsaw to, and saw twice on this holiday, reciprocated with fridge magnets, Poetry edition. The set has words like Goddess, Pearl, Eternity, Loathing, and Azure. It can mingle on our fridge with the Kiwi edition, which at the moment is producing phrases like,

'lammington fritter'
'mine the hoon'
'where when westie'
'up the skint pav creek'
and
'vegemite marmite L&P chippy toast'.

...

Getting back after travel has me making a list of long-intended home improvements: 1. bigger fridge (we swapped in the small old backup fridge when our old one gave up the ghost and never replaced it). 2. catflap (our cat currently jumps in and out the bathroom window, which is over a concerning drop - but cats are good at those; the other thing is that when the bathroom window is open I'm more bothered by the bathroom fan in the night. The fact that 'how to soundproof my room better?' yields 'Get catflap' within a few steps is one of the reasons I tend to throw up my hands and do something else). 3. Check if anyone likes the brown faded flower-vase painting in the kitchen because if not I want it gone. (It would need to be replaced, because it hangs precariously on a trio of panels glued to the wall, with a knife, fork, and spoon on them, which are kitschy and boring. Or, my mother or possibly sister suggested asking R to paint something else on those panels, which would be deeply on-brand).




*An old pasta dishing spoon, with a smiley face in the bowl, broke at my mother's house while I was staying there. I'd always seen the smiling spoon as companionable, but seen through the lens of my flat's aesthetic - flatmate R had just been posting unsettling clown doll pictures in the flat chat, and the clown's smile has become an in-joke that can be referenced by posting various other similar smiles, actually let me pause this and post an archaic smile statue now while I think of it - I realised that this could also be seen as creepy, so I have taken the spoon head home to leave in the ghost toilet. The ghost also gave the flat a marble figurine of a man seated upon a stump with an immensely large top lip and anatomically unlikely feet, which cost $4.50 at the op shop and was a steal at the price, garnering appreciative 'Oh no's.

Joining the questions meme! Happy to give five questions to any who want them.

1. Favorite character to write for Frantic Fanfic?

'A Kafka-esque bureaucrat' is reliably fun, he (always a he, so far, I think, though the accountant helping the dwarves fell into similar territory) can find interesting ways to obstruct anyone, or get into his own situations, like being saddled with looking after himself as a small child, looking up the time paradox regulations while irritably saying that no, he doesn't know where his parents are, he isn't allowed to know those things anymore goddamnit, he signed away his family history when he took the job, and now he has to look after his younger self as a human with emotional needs? Others I remember having a lot of fun writing were Alice meeting her own evil twin through the looking glass - because Wonderland's whimsy was easy to twist into whimsical cruelty - and Sophie Hatter helping Janet with her Tam Lin situation.


2. Something you should think the rest of the world should know about New Zealand?

That to the right of the Kuratau River, as you look toward the lake it flows out from, there is a hill shaped like a hat.

I really don't know, I'm only sharply aware of the differences between New Zealand and the rest of the world when I trip over them. It wasn't that when I went to New York I thought the skyscrapers were unusually tall, it was that when I came back I realised all New Zealand's were shorter. Come to think of it, the more salient hill fact is that I grew up in a city where you could see a volcano wherever you were. Hard to get lost in Auckland if you could identify the hills. (Mountains. They are very small but the title 'mountain' is due them)

We also have a rare duck, the pāteke, that spends a lot of its time away from the water acting like a nocturnal forest rodent.


3. Which books were formative to you when you were young?

Formative. Hmm. This list could grow too long, since as a child I thought I wasn't travelling with enough books if they couldn't fill a car seat. Leaflemming started me off with fantasy by reading me The Hobbit when I was two, and I remember being surprised later on to learn that it had a sequel. (A long sequel). Things I read repeatedly as a child and hope I'd like if I returned to them: the Prydain Chronicles, Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus books, Garth Nix's Abhorsen books. Things I have returned to and know I still like: DWJ, Terry Pratchett, Bujold, Margaret Mahy, Le Guin short story collections. Things I read repeatedly which I'd be surprised to find I now liked, yet whose scenes remain on tape in my mind: Faerie Wars, The Belgariad (I found the first omnibus of that under my pillow at the end of a treasure hunt, which was fun), and some NZ-specific ones, The Karazan Quartet, in which children are chosen to travel into a fantasy world grown from a genius's computer game, and the Planet Treasure Guardians, in which children are chosen to receive magical planet gemstones and fight snake aliens from the planet Tanyaska.


4. Favorite Shakespeare play?

Variable! The Tempest and Macbeth jump to mind. The one I've spent the most time watching is Hamlet (because our high school English teacher showed us the most godawful movie of it because it had been on sale at the DVD store, and so back home we embarked on a watching-better-movies-of-Hamlet project). One of my happiest live Shakespeare memories is Pericles Prince of Tyre, but that's not because it was a great play, it was because they threw everything and the kitchen sink at the wall. Only two thirds of it stuck, but I still remember being handed one of the last fragments of a starving city's bread out of a sack, and also the duelist arriving on a motorbike. There's no play I've seen often enough to have a detailed feeling about the challenges and possibilities of putting it on, Hamlet comes closest.


5. Something you've learned from reading audiobooks?

That the mouth makes more clicking sounds than I knew; that the program which automatically edits them out costs about a thousand dollars, but I could get the free trial version for ten days, enough time to do one whole book and two chapters of another, which may be a rude shock to people when they get to chapter three;* that pause lengths are the easiest things to alter after the fact, but I'm not always conscious of when I've left pauses and when I've let one word run straight on into another such that I can't split them apart; that I probably shouldn't try to separate characters by voice depth very much, certainly not when I've forgotten about a late-book scene in which two deep-voiced men shout back and forth to each other over a siege wall. (I was planning to redo one of them later, only then my microphone broke: I'm sure 'a deep-voiced man shouts at a man whose voice is not deep but who's talking in a different audio quality' would be worse. Just integrating the few necessary retakes done on a different microphone is giving my editor a bit of a headache).




*This is not Lifelode, Lifelode is being better edited than this by a professional, and is still on its way. (At this point the combined delay sequence of me and my editor goes 'depression - covid - teaching - massive storms - teaching - microphone breakage - health problems - teaching'.) But in the meantime I made an audiobook of Floornight (here) and have started on doing What Not for Librivox, for fun, and as terrain for learning stuff like the pauses and the clicking.

My flatmate F is very reserved and soft-spoken, but whenever there's a storm, heavy rain, or (in the case of the night before last) hail, they run out onto the deck and dance around in circles. I find this incredibly charming.

This was the same unusually cold night that our cat Hopper meowed to be let out the bathroom window like usual, jumped up to hook his front paws over the sill, felt the breeze, and dropped back into the room looking grumpy. "I meant let me out into the good weather, not whatever that is.

I'm covering Evelyn's* shift today at a local bookshop, Bookhound: my first real experience of retail! Writing this now because there aren't a lot of customers. So far the shop has earned slightly more than it will be paying me, but that may change: no one has bought anything since noon.

The first sale I made, I did wrong. Leaving a note to say 'The Crowded House book was paid for with cash actually.'

A customer reported a complaint: we had sold him a book that was incomprehensible gibberish. I told him I'd get in touch with the author to prevent this from happening again.

Someone wants to leave flyers here for their new skincare parlor up the road, do we do that? Stashed in kitchen pending approval.

I'm used to thinking of shopkeepers as panoptical; in reality, customers could have stolen a dozen books from the genre alcove and I wouldn't have noticed, unless they made the mistake of beginning to act sneaky.

I was advised to bring an activity to do which wasn't a book to read, so came with a jigsaw, but the owner (who we know, and is lovely) had left something else to do: art books to cut out paintings from and put up on the walls. Next to Fantasy I have stuck a washy green city with a fort, a windowpane of a flooded forest, and a brown cellist vanishing into his background. I have also made a new 'Please ring for assistance' sign out of Henry William Kirkwood's 'Mitre Peak.'

(I'll leave it to the owner's judgement whether this calm image of an empty boat in a mountain wonderland is going to be more annoying to waiting customers than plain text. I have discovered that from the kitchen I can't actually *hear* the bell that rings for assistance, so am ducking out and in rapidly when necessary).

A homeless man came here to get change for a tenner; I assume we do that?

I'm so used to being a book-buyer that whenever I sell a book my first impulse is to hold onto it. One customer did actually have to 'Frodo Baggins the ring is still in your pocket' me.

(Do we sell the new books which are in the kitchen? Someone wants the first Harry Potter; the system claims we only have book four, and the only book I can see is three. Luckily the customer wants the first, so I have time to check. Since they seemed open to substitutions (Lemony Snickett) I'd have recommended Flora Segunda as an alternative if I'd noticed it on the shelf).

A customer reports that we have every book in two different series except the ones they're up to. We agree stoically that such is life.

Edit: Oh good, we just sold Sacred Signs and Sigils, that covers my next hour's pay. That's two books sold out of the window, I have never bought a book out of a window and didn't know windows were this effective. What shall I replace it with?


Edit: 3 pm. Now I am trying to collage a mysterious spaceship into Charles Decimus Barraud's 'Hutt River'. It isn't working very well.




* When I named Evelyn in a past post I forgot I'd decided not to use whole names of flatmates; however, Evelyn okays this!

I always find holidays good for reading! I've just been up at my mother's, where some thought had gone into making sure we had a four for five hundred, and there was a new pig, and the nights were so cold I became a person who likes hot water bottles for the first time.

A Dissolving Ghost, by Margaret Mahy.

This is an essay collection which I was very pleased to happen on in a bookshop a year or so ago, I didn't know she had one. Mahy's voice – and it was her speaking voice, many of these were given as talks or interviews – is delightful, suggesting strongly that she would have been fun to have tea with. I convinced my mother to read this book by laughing out loud every few pages, and someone would ask why and I'd read out the paragraph. Mahy has read widely, is sparkling, pragmatic though not exempt from accidentally setting her car on fire, generally excited by the world; she ends a talk called 'Beginnings and Endings' with T.S. Eliot, but begins it by starting to plan the talk and immediately having to pause to clean up the house in a hurry so that when her housekeeper arrives to do the cleaning she won't seem to be living in a pigsty.

I think the tipping point for my mother asking to read the book may have been when I read out Mahy's description of Kate McCosh Clark's The Cradle Ship, in which a pair of twins ask their grandmother where babies come from, and she tells them not to ask because it's rude, but they ask their mother anyway, and so she transforms into a fairy and takes them off to board the Cradle Ship to Babyland, where the rules of nature can be safely explained under her wise guidance – her husband coming along so that he can recite poetry if they end up needing some.

That's from a survey of NZ children's fiction in the early 20th century; others of the seven essays here are about Mahy's thoughts on truth in fiction, her early life, and her writing process, how she wants to appeal to the child like herself who reveled in elaborations and adult nods and winks, without excluding the child who doesn't. (She refused to cut the bit in The Pirates' Mixed-up Voyage where a parrot talks about determinism, but restructured another book completely so as to reduce its dependence on pi).


The New Animals, by Pip Adam

I need to hurry off to boardgaming now, so don't have time to write properly about this book. It's the first thing in ages that's sunk me down all the way into it and I emerge in a peculiarly altered state and go walking barefoot in the rain. Set in Auckland. Protagonist Carla is a hairdresser for a fashion company run by a trio of entitled men who think they're disrupting the industry but are mainly just disrupting the lives of all their employees. Everything is prosaic and falling to pieces a little. Carla has a dog she's incredibly cruel to; the dog has become a problem too large to be faced square-on – the book skips around between streams of consciousness – one of the fashion company men has an interior monologue consisting so completely of positive self-talk that it becomes clear almost at once he's incredibly anxious about how everything's going – Carla's best friend is no longer her best friend and neither of them know what to do about it – nothing's been the same since Carla got back...

Where did Carla get back from? Why will no one talk directly about where Carla got back from? It doesn't seem to have been overseas. In all the friendly, entangled, vexed life they're having, as Carla, Elodie the bright makeup artist whose verve nobody else can quite understand, Sharona who does most of the work which her bosses in theory should be doing, Duey who is a better hairdresser than Carla and has kept her life stable at some personal cost, go about the business of making a stupid job work, where Carla went to is a looming question, and the title of the book is always in play: how literal is this going to end up being? What exactly has happened?

Underscore: do not read this book if you don't want to read about cruel treatment of dogs. I highly recommend it otherwise, I am going off to find her other novel soonest.

And now I am late for boardgames and must hurtle, but another good thing about being back from holidays (I'm not quite going off to get Pip Adam's other novel soonest) is that I can resume Sherwood Smith/sartorias's A Sword Named Truth, which I'm very much liking but which was too large to take on the plane, and I had to pause at a tense point close to the end, with many young monarchs in danger or poised to do unwise things.

Lovely lunch with my friend Alexander out on the Kapiti Coast today. I don't know if I've stopped in the township of Paekakariki before, it's on a very narrow bit of land between tall flaxy hills and the sea, on what's just ceased to be the main road after the (glory, halleluiah, hosanna in excelsis) completion of Transmission Gully.*

I liked Paekak (are non-locals allowed to call it that? unsure), its details seemed slightly weirder than usual. The first cafe we went into had cabinets full of delicious looking food, but their coffee and eftpos machines were both broken; I regret that we didn't go get cash out, because the pie at the cafe next door was not at all interesting. Outside the village hall, five minutes walk from the train station, signs saying 'north' and 'south' pointed almost at right angles to each other. Five minutes from there was the sea – we walked along a path over a steep slope of boulders, with the spray kicking up into distant mistiness. A set of steps whose railings were all odd curves went sharply down into the water. Two men were throwing driftwood for a terrier to chase, and as we came up behind, one of them turned around without knowing we were there, fashionable and sharp-cheekboned, and had to stop himself throwing the driftwood at one of our faces. A little road going up between the houses above us had a sign: 'Sand Path. No exit.'

At the nearby bookshop I found a lot of Margaret Mahy I'd forgotten existed – very good children's section, writers I expect to find in ones and twos were there in fives and tens – and also The Book of the Pearl: its History, Art, Science, and Industry. I know this is the kind of book I acquire in enthusiasm as a result of how oddly specific it is, and then don't read because it's actually long and boring, and I've mostly gotten better at leaving those on the shelf, but what the hell, it was cheap, and what if one day I wanted to open it up at random and learn a new technical term for 'strawberry-shaped'?**

I hadn't noticed at that point that the book had first been published in 1908. It is written by two men who have spent many years accumulating all the pearl-related information they can find, and refer to themselves in the introduction as 'the senior author' and 'the junior author'. Their acknowledgements begin with the Queen of Italy, go on for two pages citing diplomats and museum curators and the princes of states which no longer exist, and end with the collected officials of the British Colonial Service. I boggled. I'm not sure how long I'll go on boggling before I get rid of it again. Savage peoples are referenced within the first paragraph – and apparently when they want to adorn themselves with pearls it's a characteristic trait of savagery, but when English people do it the impulse, though analagous, is entirely different. That'll teach me to buy a book based on random samples from the middle.







*A road through the hills first proposed a century ago and now built at only a couple of hundred million over budget.

**Answer: I would almost immediately forget what it was, as well as the page number.