The Lighthouse Keeper's cat

The first real New Zealander I ever knew was a man I met in the early 2000s in a backpacker in Istanbul; but I didn’t know that he was a Kiwi at that time. I didn’t even know that New Zealanders named themselves after a what I thought of as the name of a fruit, but actually is the name of a bird. My Boyfriend and I were on a part-business part-holiday trip filming some backdrop shots on video for a friend of us. It was November and, having packed with the German prejudice of everlasting summer in Turkey, we were freezing and I was convinced to respect the fact of Mediterranean winter by a head cold and a sore throat.

One evening, I just came up the stairs dragging myself back to bed after running around town in icy rain, a grey-haired gentleman answered my noncommittal-German-nodded greeting with the question ‘How are you?’ Now, I am really bad with faces. So taken aback by such a personal question, I assumed I had met this person before and he was enquiring about my well being. I answered his question telling him how I felt having a cold in a freezing city where it never stopped raining.

It did not occur to me that anything was odd about this, not even when I came back to our room and told my boyfriend about the english speaking gentleman that had giving me a strange look because I answered his question with a few polite sentences.

‘Ah, the lean, grey haired fellow?’ asked my boyfriend. ’He is from New Zealand.’

Ah, and why would he know? All native english speaking people look the same to Germans – unless they are American of course.

‘I saw him googling about WW1 and war memorials.’ he said.

My boyfriend of that time is an archive of obscure historical and cultural knowledge and my fever muddled head requested to not further question his conclusions.

I had totally forgotten this incident until I moved to New Zealand, of all places, years later. Of course he was a Kiwi! And of course I was not supposed to answer a question, I had received an noncommittal greeting in return to my polite nod.

Language is not only functioning based on vocabulary and grammar, like words sorted by rules beaded on a thread and clapped together by punctuation; there is cultural, situational, educational, emotional and some-thing-or-other-al context. But beyond language and context is meaning. In creative writing we are told to avoid interpretation, to leave the revelation of meaning to the reader; in non-fiction writing we are told to lead the reader straight to the meaning; in every-day life we just perform a subtle dance around the proclaimed meaning of the moment.

… to be continued

When met a friend for coffee yesterday, she told me that her boyfriend, also a friend of mine, had commented on how happy I seem to be. Ignoring the fact that he might actually have commented on me being a miserable, whining pain-in-the-ass beforehand, there actually is no denying it: I am happy; at least as far as my personality allows the mentioning of happiness, without stating the limitations of potential happiness, which is why I rather end this sentence here.

And just to make this absolutely clear: I have not met this perfect, gorgeous, interesting and whatever-else guy. In that case I would not be happy, but totally freaked out– which is not what this post is about, anyway. Neither have I won the lottery, nor do I make near enough money to pay my bills, or replace my 18 years old car.

So why is life a shady orange rather than a pale blue?

Something Marc Nieson said in Making Words Count (WU Podcast) caught my attention, especially his advice on how to write: find out what works for you. Try different things. See how these influence the quality of your writing sessions; furthermore, take notes after a successful writing spree: where did you write, when did you write, what did you eat? Is it always the same place or the same time, et cetera, et cetera. Nieson said this, while reminding his audience that once you are in the flow – or whatever you might call it – all these things actually do not matter; however, we have to start somewhere, don’t we?

So today I was standing in the kitchen and thought, why am I so annoyingly content, full of energy and running around with this stupid smile, like a teenager in love?

I love writing; and, I am really, really bad at it.

Everybody who read any of my posts, can see it. I can see it. I can see it better day-by-day. That is the whole magic: whatever you do, you will be really bad at the beginning. But it does not matter if  or how bad it is, because you can make it better. This is not just true for your first drafts in writing; it is the same for every design, every painting, every illustration*.

If you love it, stick with it and make it better.

So what is this post about? I am not sure, and I have to go and do some really bad writing on my book, which makes me happy(ish…)

^_^…

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*Unless you are a creative genius, or are incredible talented and have been doing it for a long, a very long time. I rather not meet the first kind, but I’d love to talk to the second.

This is the last page of Tove Jansson’s Tales from the Moomin Valley as found in the Wellington City Central Library. The first stamp is 3 SEP 1977, the last one 28 APR 1983.

I issued it on 4 JAN 2012, I wish had a stamp like this, I think I’d use it… ^_^…

I was wondering if this is an ‘Urban Messages’; but I think it fits: Libraries are urban life-forms, with books as heartbeats and issue desks as roadblocks.

‘On-writing with Sally Adee’ made me laugh out loud two times today: first while jogging and the second time during breakfast, when I listened to it again taking some notes. The science journalist, and technology features editor at New Scientist, talkes about her writing practise, a way to ask dumb questions, and the need to throw away 4250 words to gain the 750 good ones.

The recording is part of ‘The Writing Studio – Podcast’*, published by Vanderbilt University, where you can find another interesting talk: ‘On-writing with Cecelia Tichi’.

*) with luck this link gets you to the podcast in iTunes. Vanderbilt University, and other publishers, could – and should – make it easier to share and embed their audio or video content on blogs and social media. Apple’s iTunes won’t do it for them … @#$%^&… #rant… ^_^…

Wikipedia’s protest against the planed SOPA legislation, and the Wikipedia blackout today, are not only dark omens of a future without both free sharing and free access to shared knowledge on a free medium. There is something more sinister hiding in its shadow.

I am not a fan of online piracy; however, living in a country that most copyright lawyers* proprietors don’t know exists, I share the pain caused by an industry that lost the ability to price, or distribute, their products to meet their customers expectations and needs. The SOPA and other world-wide anti-piracy legislation are not only ill-aimed, they are the last struggles of an era that is already gone. Kapitalism can feel the end, but it won’t give up without a fight.

We all know where this might lead: to an authoritarian administration of a – still – free medium, an administration that is centralized, unrestricted and requires complete obedience. If we choose to let this happen, the transition into the post-kapitalism era, even though it might not be stopped, might be slowed down; or turned into something nasty. It’s much harder to get rid of a totalitarian system, than to come up with new ideas for a different future, while we still live in an ‘open’ society; whatever the state of its ‘democracy’.

It is happening. Now. It’s our choice. Support Wikipedia**.

*) Sorry, the lawyers actually found us. In this country the media industry, in from of the US government, forces our government to persecute their citizens, before the said industry tries to make it legal for said citizens to buy their content.

**) Clay Shirky tells you 2 things you can do in his TED talk and explains all of it way better than me!

Crisis is all too familiar to me; there is this exhibition, this deadline, there are sleepless nights, oh-shit-oh-shit-I-just-can-not-do-this-f***-F*** etc… Getting older, you ask yourself, why does this happen every time? It’s just stupid. A waste of time. Could I, PLEASE,  just get on with it! In the end all-is-well-that-ends-well. Some stuff goes on the wall; other stuff find its place in the bin.

So it is not surprising, that this quote caught my attention, even hidden in a footnote, during my research on story telling and creative writing.

“This explains why hardly any productive work gets through without morbid crises of a neurotic nature.” 

I am reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell*; I often find myself more interested in the comprehensive footnotes and quotes, than in the actual text. You’ll find this footnote in Part 1, Chapter 1, under the title ’2. Refusal of the Call’, where Campbell quotes Otto Rank** (1884 – 1939) from Art and the Artist, published in New York 1943.

To distinguish the ‘neurotic’ from the ‘productive’ artist Rank writes: ”…both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their violation in reshaping themselves.” He states the neurotic type does “…not get beyond the destructive preliminary work and is therefore unable to detach the whole creative process from his own person and [unable to] transfer it to an ideological abstraction. The productive artist also begins… with that re-creation of himself … [but] is in a position to shift the creative will-power from his own person to an ideological representations of that person and thus render it objective.”Rank emphasises that even the productive artistic process is “in a measure limited … to within the individual himself… in its constructive, but also in its destructive aspects.” He ends with the quoto above, “This explains why hardly any productive work gets through without morbid crises of a neurotic nature.”

In short: The ‘artist’ is captured in the need to re-invent himself, or his surroundings. In a productive phase, he is able to shift this creative power from himself to his artwork. So the artistic process, if it does not begin in crisis, will go through crisis, or even end in a crisis (failure).

This might explain a lot ^_^…

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* and desperately trying to ignore hero-worshipping references to Freudian psychoanalytic simplifications that make me very, very angry…

** again you have to see them in their historic context. That we have outgrown some (most?) of their ideas, does not mean they do not have something to say.

One of the good things about moving to the other end of the world is that you have to let go of a lot of objects you once thought of as important. Even better is to find theses little lost treasures of your past scattered between your families’ and friends’ living rooms on one of your rare ‘homecomings’.

When I found Peter Høeg’s ‘Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow’ between my mother mystery books I had to smile, remembering Smilla’s untameable, rash character and the million ways to look at snow. Re-reading it, I enjoyed it as much as the first time, maybe even more, because the second time around you are able to appreciate the well crafted, poetry-like quality of Peter Høeg’s writing, rather than following the captivating, and often fantastical, plot.

So I though I get ‘The Quiet Girl’, Peter Høeg’s 5th novel, for some light holiday reading; I wonder if this book will make more sense the second time around, but I am not worried, it does not have too. There are many reviews online, the Guardian review by Caroline Miller, The Independent book review by James Urquhart , and  New York Times review by Liesl Schillinger*. I am not in any position to add another one. However, if you grew up with Gabriel García Márquez, get captivated by Paul Auster, devour everything by Haruki Murakami, or – in general – do not have to scientifically understand what the words mean, but are able to savour in the poetic – and in this case acoustic - imagery that is created in your head**… go get it.

*) who on earth is this woman and who gave her that book to review @#$%
**) Ms Schillinger isn’t one of these people