I'm listening to an audio book of "Drawing Lessons", by Tracy Mack. Some time in the long distant past I'm sure I read the book - I don't remember when, but a lot of the story rings bells for me.

But right now, the odd part isn't that I only half remember the story, from a long time ago. The odd part is that the main character is Rory, and her friend is dating a guy called Dean.

It also reminds me more than a little of Donna Jo Napoli's "Changing Tunes".

Gilmore Girls, anyone?

One of my colleagues just came back from a month's holiday - in Canada. She brought back cookies for all of us.

So ... WHY did none of my canadian friends tell me about these absolutely wonderful Maple Leaf cookies with real maple syrup in the icing, I ask you?

Were you trying to save me from myself?

on Saturday I went to Variety's Monster Book Fair, and found myself trawling through the children's section (as is my usual at bookstores and libraries). What struck me about this one was the books it contained - and what I collected as I trawled through it.

Oh, it contained the bright white pages and colourful spines that denote a book published in the last decade or so. Scholastic with it's bright red icon, page edges crisp and glowing in white. But also it contained volumes I've never seen or read, or only seen when I was younger and not thought of since. Spines faded from years in the sun, pages browned with age and reading. Copyright dates in the 40s, reprinted in the 60s, covers of dark green and simple drawings. Books akin to those I last saw on my school library shelves in the 80s and early 90s.

Simple stories, where all comes right inn the end, however badly they go in the beginning. Bullies getting their comeuppance, though not through revenge. And I pulled title after title from the rows of books on the table, and since then I've dived straight into some of these stories, as if I've always read them. Some are comfort books for me, memories of lazy hazy days of summer, when my world seemed to be brighter than it is now. School days when I borrowed a book every day at lunch time, and returned it the next lunchtime. Refreshing as sunshine and birdsong and spring blossom at the tail end of winter.

So, on Sunday night, I read a book until midnight. It wasn't the latest thriller, or gilt covered bestseller, or the latest instalment in a favourite author's repetoire. It wasn't a mystery I needed to solve, or a space battle needing winning, or full of the thrill of the chase. No, I couldn't put it down becausse it was a book of childhood - one that tugs at sweeter heartstrings than those of sorrow or loss, than those that bring me to tears. A tale of friends and dreams and childhood and gifts with no repayment sought, and luck and a thrift our world doesn't seem to like to remember.

I don't think the particular title or author matters here.

Suffice to say, I'm glad I went to the book fair, and sad I hadn't before. And next year, if at all possible, I'll be there. Trawlling through the volumes that marked my childhood.

You know how, some days, everything just compounds and piles on you? Until you get to the stage where you're frustrated and feeling hemmed in and have used up your entire store of patience for the day? It always gets like that for me during the last few shopping days before christmas.

It doesn't often get like that for me by 8am. But, today....

At the bus stop I'm currently catching the bus there is meant to be a bus at 20 past, 25 past, and half past. This morning there was one at 7.19 (I missed it), another at 7.20 (which I also missed) ... and THREE at 7.32. It's been doing this for a week or longer. You'd think by now I'd manage to get myself out of the house and to the bus stop in time for the 20 past bus, but ... No. It doesn't seem to be happening. And today it frustrated me.

Then, on the bus I did get on, the stop before mine it pulled in at an angle in front of another bus, and the driver beeped at the one in front to let him further in or out or something. Okay, fair enough. EXCEPT that at the stop I get off at, another bus pulled in front of mine at an angle, and after all the passengers had gotten off he beeped and beeped and beeped for the bus in front of him to let him out. Completely forgetting that two minutes ago he'd been doing exactly the same thing.

*parp!* *parp!* *parp!*

And the sound was so blaring and noisy and so NOT a morning sound that it just closed me in on myself some more.

It's not going to be a good day if I've lost my patience stock before 8am...

Happy Birthday Canada!!

Happy Citizenship Day caragana_leaves's mom!

:)

Generally speaking, one should not remember at 8.30pm that one is meant to make brownies for morning tea for work tomorrow, or that one has not yet eaten dinner.

Oops.

Brownies are now in the oven, dinner is in the microwave. And I'll probably end up watching the first half of Bones on the "+1" channel, after finishing the second half. I have been listening to the first half, just not watching it. And it's a little freaky - not surprising for a season final, I suppose.

Today has been productive, at any rate.

wenzel will probably be amused at this.

This week purple is obviously the "in" colour in our office spaces. One day this week there were I think five of us wearing at least some purple - plus several others around the building, including one of the presenters. Today there are two or three, plus one of the presenters.

Yesterday it was red - half the office had at least some red, and three were wearing solid red tops. But definitely, this week, Purple is the color to be.

In preparation for going to see the "Monet and the Impressionists" Exhibition in a week and a half, I borrowed the Exhibition catalogue from my library and read it.

Yes, I'm a geek.

From Andre Masson's "Monet the founder" Verve, vol 7, nos 27-28, 1952:

"Monet's work is one of the great turning points of painting, a commotion, the primacy of light (or, if you prefer, of colour-light). He spoke of the flash, the flare, the flame of Bordighera: 'Here everything is pigeon-breat and brandy-flame'. These few words sufficed to commend the place. Sun-loving, he saw luminosity everywhere, even in shadow, and there was nothing black in the festival he brought along with him, not even coal. His logic required it thus, his poetic also - and, though his luminist impulse affected all his companions, none followed him absolutely in this respect.

He was a painter of appearances (not a theologian), in tune with his vision of reality, of which he gave a lyrical, enthusiastic account. He accpeted the flight of time, the ephemeral. hee had a new way of seeing, feeling, loving nature. Perhaps he went too far in letting others say that he was satisfied with recording colour-sensatins, 'letting the eye take its coourse'. the truth is that he knew better than anyone how to 'organise his sensations', how to choose a representative colour from the flood of infinite iridescence.

It must be emphasised: this atmospheric envoelopment was recreated at the artist's initiative. He didn't abandon himself to a passivity of sight. Nature offered him a profusion of rapports which he simplified into a set of principal accords: here imaginiation exercised its rights.

There was no a priori form: based on the power of light, the exaltation of colour caused a negation of contours (or limits). The completed work found its balance through the fusion of elements.

Absense of formal limitation led to a fantastic inventiveness where touch was concerned. Touch distinguished the various aspects of the painting (the main body of it being atmosphere) - a touch of many accents: crisscrossed, ruffled, speckled. you have to see it in close-up - what a frenzy!"

---

From Lilla Cabot Perry "Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909. The American Magazine of Art, vol 18, no 3, March 1927, pp119-25

"I remember him once saying to me:
'When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.'

He said he wished he had been born blind and then had suddenlyy gained his sight so that he could have begun to paint in this way without knnowing what the objects were that he saw before him. He held that the first real look at the motif was likely to be the truest and most unprejudiced one, and said that the first painting should cover as much of the canvas as possible, no matter how roughly, so as to determine at the outset the tonality of the whole. As an illustration of this, he brought out a canvas which he had painted only once; it was covered with strokes about an inch apart and a quarter of an inch thick, out to the very edge of the canvas. Then he took out another on which he had painted twice, the strokes were nearer together and the subject began to emerge more clearly.

Monet's philosophy of painting was to paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of heaven reflected in the shadows."

I went to The Bridge Project's production of Tom Stoppard's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard today. It was one of those productions that just get you thinking ... and keep you thinking.

I was glad I'd read the play yesterday, even though it didn't make it all perfectly clear to me. I read the NY Times' review last night, which gave me a few ideas about what the production I was about to see. But such things will never take the place of actually attending.

Some moments I wasn't entirely sure what made them funny, only they were.

I sat next to three older women, who had been to My Fair Lady yesterday. During the interval we discussed what we thought of the show thus far, and varying ways of interpreting some of the comments earlier. Including the misquoted Hamlet.

One of the things that struck me was the austerity of colour. It's the second production in a month that I've seen with the same sort of colour scheme in costume and scenery. I suppose this is hardly surprising given that both productions were set in the same sort of era - though one was set in an era of this world and the other in an era of a world none of us know.

Even during the party scenes, when some of guests and family are decked out in jewel colours and jewels themselves, with glittering chandelier and ornate parlour furniture. Flickering candlelight in elaborate arrangements, the magic of illusion, the music and laughter and gaiety echoing back from the room off stage... a dream attempting to banish the impending result of the auction - which no one but Varya wishes to accept the response.

I loved Varya, the adopted daughter (or so the programme says) who appears to be appreciated by no one - and the only one who truly seems to appreciate the idiocy of spending money like it was a commodity, when their lives are about to descend into ruin around them. She moves with a purpose, always, giant ring of keys jingling at her belt. And yet, with Anya, she is soft and gentle and loving. And when the news comes of who now owns their ancestral home, she removes the keys from her belt, holds them in her hands. I wondered, then, would she pass them to Lopakhin, whom everyone believes she will one day marry. Instead, after a few moments of indecision, she throws them to the floor at his feet, and marches out. The inability of so many to understand was just ... unbelievable. Makes me wonder how much this sort of story will parallel other, less fictional, stories in this global climate.

Everyone believes, and speaks incessantly of, the upcoming nuptials of Varya and Lopakhin. She hates the talk of it, as he has never asked her, never spoken to her in such a way. Does not even know she exists. At the very end, when her mother suggests he propose, he begins, but ... he cannot continue. He stumbles over it, and speaks of nothings - something so many of us can understand.

When the lights go down, after a final sad scene with Firs, the audience erupts into applause, that doesn't diminish until after the lights come up and we have to admit that it is all over. I could not help but reflect on such applause, contrasting it against the applause for The Arrival a few weeks ago. This play got such applause and earned it. That show, it didn't get the audience that it deserved, and consequently (though it earned as much as this one did) not the applause. I hope that one day it comes back, that one day The Arrival gets such acclaim and applause. But for now, The Cherry Orchard was as magnificent as I could have hoped it to be.

I think I learned something today. I'm glad I went. And now, I think, I shall re-read the play I read only yesterday. Somehow I think my reading of it will be different this time around.

"Dear, honored bookcase, I salute thy existence, which for over one hundred years has served the glorious ideals of goodness and justice; thy silent appeal to fruitful endeavor, unflagging in the course of a hundred years, tearfully sustaining through generations of our family, courage and faith in a better future, annd fostering in us ideals of goodneess and social consciousness..."

"All Russia is our orchard. .It is a great and beautiful land, and there are many wonderful places in it.
Just think, Anya: your grandfather, your great-grandfather, and all your ancestors were serf-owners, possessors of living souls. Don't you see that from every cherry tree, from every leaf and trunk, human beings are peering out at you? Don't you hear their voices? To possess living souls--that has corrupted all of you, those who lived before and you who are living now, so that your mother, you, your uncle, no longer perceive that you are living in debt, at someone else's expense, at the expense of those whom you wouldn't allow to cross your threshold ... We are at least two hundred years behind the times, we have as yet absolutely nothing, we have no definite attitude toward the past, we only philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. Yet it's quite clear that to begin to live we must first atone for the past, be done with it, and we can atone for it only by suffering, only by extraordinary, unceasing labor. Understand this, Anya."

From "The Cherry Orchard", by Anton Chekhov

I have a very odd request...

Do you know where to find the websites that let you cheat at writing an essay - preferably one that gives you one with mistakes in it and then the polished version as well?

Or, really, any other cheating websites?

What about a website that helps catch cheating?

(My mother works at a high school, and they suspect someone of cheating.)

Thanks.

(Comments screened to protect the innocent.)

I went to a show this afternoon. A show that, on Thursday, I wouldn't even have thought about it, contemplated it. Such a lot of difference 3 days make!!

A picture book by Shaun Tan was Australian Picture Book of the Year in 2007. No words, stunning illustrations. What would you expect?
Kate Parker didn't know about the award when she spoke to Shaun Tan about turning said picture book into a stage show. He gave his permission - partly due to the intended construction of most of the set and props using cardboard and paper.

The book, I should say, is "The Arrival", conceived of and illustrated by Shaun Tan.

The stage show is incredible - hugely due to its being faithful to the book - though they added some of their own inspiration (with the permission of Shaun Tan) - a made up language which allows for dialogue, but still without the understanding of what is going on. And a shadow puppet scene which shows the terror and size of the invasion. But other than that, the play is entirely faithful to the book (something I checked after the performance by visiting Borders, not wanting to take myself out of the mood the show created).
ALL the creatures are represented, gorgeously and full of language and activity. It is as faithful to the books as I often wish movies are.

I wish I could find the words to explain how much I love it!

I hope this show travels. I hope it survives. It wasn't a sell out show this afternoon, and I doubt it'll sell out tonight or tomorrow - or that it sold out before that. And it's sad. This show deserves so much more than only one level of seating, deserves far more than five shows - six if you count the schools only performance yesterday.

If you think I'm biased, check out the reviews:
Auckland Festival information
NZ Herald preview
NZ Herald review
Theatreview review

For those not familiar with the book, check out this page on Shaun Tan's Website.

One of the things I love about Madeleine L'Engle's writing is her way of describing classical music, in such a way that you want to go out and listen to what she's writing about. Other subjects have the same sort of treatment, but this is one of the key ones, in my opinion. That woman can tell stories!

Yesterday I reread "Camilla", and discovered some of this kind of magic.

"I wanted to go in with her and look at the picture of the two old ladies picking coal off the railroad tracks and the picture that is called White on White..."


"I said, 'Yesterday I passed an apartment house of yours, Father. Is it going well? Is it going to be a beautiful apartment house?'
My father shook his head. 'No, it's not. There was to be sunlight in every room, and space to breathe, and a feeling of the beauty of the city as you looked out the window; but my plans have been taken and distorted and cramped, and now it is just going to be expensive. Very very expensive.'
'Are you working on anything that is beautiful now?' I asked him.
'Yes,' my father said. 'I am designing a small private museum that is very beautiful, and it is that that is keeping me alive.'."


"He picked out an album and we went into the last of the small listening booths. Frank had me sit down in the chair. 'Do you know Holst's The Planets?' he asked.
I shook my head. 'No. What is it?'
'It's kind of queer,' Frank told me, 'but it's kind of wonderful. I thought maybe it might be interesting to you. Of course it isn't scientific or anything, but I think it's sort of interesting to listen to a musician's conception of stars. There's one place that sounds to me like the noise the planets must make grinding against space.'
He put the record on and it was different from anything I knew. I knew Bach and Beethove and Brahms and Chopin and I loved them, especially Bach; but this music - it was like stars before you understand them, when you think an astronomer is an astrologer, when they are wild, distant, mysterious things. And as I listened I realised that the music had a plan to it, that none of the conflicting notes came by accident."


"'Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto. Particularly the andantino. You probably won't think it sounds like you.' His voice was suddenly gruff and embarrassed.
I listened and it didn't sound to me like me, but it was as exciting and different as The Planets had been, and as I listened I was filled with a great tremendous excitement. Oh, I love I love I love! I cried inside myself. So many people, so many things! Music and stars and snow and weather! Oh, if one could always feel this warm love, this excitement, this glory of the infinite possibilities of life!
And as I listened to the music I knew that everything was possible."


"'Too many of us let our suns go out,' Mona took off her glasses, looked at me without them, and put them on again. 'The main thing is to care. As long as you care, your sun hasn't gone out. Though sometimes you can care so much, you can desire so much more than you can ever reach, that your burning sun can consume you utterly. However, that seems to me to be the better fate, because I still happen to think that man is a noble animal.'"


"I remembered then what Frank and I had talked about in the park, how to be alive is to be happy. I remembered it because right at this moment I felt more alive than I had ever felt before, and I felt terribly happy.
I wonder why it is so much easier to describe sorrow than it is to describe happiness, even happiness so great that it can make you forget sorrow."

Okay, I have a dilemma, and I figure that the more theatrically minded of my friends might be able to help out.

An international group are doing Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" on the 4th and 5th of April. A Tom Stoppard version of the play. link.

Another group who toured Australia are doing "My Fair Lady" from the 25th of March to the 12th of April. link.

I'm out of town - In Christchurch - from the 7th of April and the 13th of April.

Which one should I go and see? Should I go to both? Should I save my money and go to neither?

Added to the 'Save my money' comment, a collection of impressionist paintings billed as "Monet and the Impressionists" (including Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Pissarro) from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts is in Wellington for three months (until the middle of May), and I think I need to go down and see it. Of course, it's always possible I could go see it sometime when I go to Boston, but this is practically in my backyard.

Why does everything have to happen at once? I want to do them all and I'm not sure if it's possible!

I made the decision to go up the hill yesterday afternoon ... for no real reason other than that my internet is broken at home and exercise is good. As I neared the peak – where the wind is strongest, I heard song and music. Classical music, soaring above the trees and carried on the wind. I don't know what it is, though I have a reasonable idea of where – from the side of the crater that looks out over the Newmarket viaduct, through a gap in the trees, you can see a mass of people, smaller than jellybeans. The wind is coming from that direction, which only makes it all the better.

Nothing can beat a free unexpected concert on a gorgeous summer's day. Surely nothing can.

I thought, at first, perhaps it's the rehearsal for starlight symphony next saturday, but it seems unlikely. It's not at the domain, after all, but just below the slopes of this volcano.

Clearly, heading up the mountain was a good idea.

I took my computer up the hill at the same time. There are wireless networks available from there, though the signal is weak - not strong enough to actually surf the net yesterday. By the time I got home I had a reasonable idea of what it was, and a flier I'd stashed inside a program confirmed it. The Auckland Philharmonic performing in the grounds of Government House. And oh, it was great! And beat paying $65 for a ticket!

Once upon a time, Alan of Trebond, who would later become Alanna the Lioness, gained a pet. Sharing her shelter under an old willow tree, with her fire, was a cat. A black cat, with purple eyes.

Pets need names.
"'Pounce,'" Jon suggested.
"'Blackie,'" was Raoul's choice.
"How about 'Raoul'?" Gary wanted to know.

Alanna, however, rather liked 'Faithful', and Faithful was the name from then on out.

Many years earlier, Beka Cooper has a cat too - a black cat, with purple eyes. Name of Pounce.

Many years later, Daine explores a castle at Lake Dunlath, in the form of a cat called Scrap, she overhears a conversation between two of her enemies. Lady Yolane of Dunlath, and Tristan Staghorn.
"Tristan! ... Tristan, Alamid showed us the warriors at the southern pass in his crystal. That's the King's Champion out there, and the Knight Commander of the King's Own!"
"Alamid shouldn't worry you with minutiae."
"Minutiae? ... The Lioness and Raoul of Goldenlake are minutiae?"


I had a conversation with joshwriting yesterday, in which he offered up names of computers in sci fi writings. Hal, P-1, Colossus. Somehow, Colossus didn't fit a netbook very well... but, rather than something large, what about something small? Minutiae, perhaps?

So, for one cat, there were four potential names. Faithful, as Alanna knew him. Pounce, as Beka knew him. Blackie, and Raoul.
And somehow, Blackie doesn't fit a black laptop/netbook very well. But Raoul? The idea of calling a little netbook after a big man, called Giant Killler, amused me. Especially given that Raoul once was referred to as minutiae - a drastic mistake! And, for a little netbook Minutiae fits. More than fits.

Meet Minutiae!

On Monday night, in Auckland, it hit 100% humidity. 23ºC felt like 32ºC.
TVNZ Article
nzherald article

On Thursday, in Auckland, it hit 32.4ºC. The hottest day in 100 years. And it was humid, so how hot did it feel?
nzherald article
2nd nzherald article

Last night it rained. And, when I say rained, I mean rained properly. Not this silly invasive drizzle that sends humidity soaring and leaves temperatures untouched. I mean real rain, sending temperatures downwards. Unlike the night before, where it got hotter at 1am/2am during the daily temperature change, last night it got colder.

Friday was Waitangi Day. The comemoration of 169 years since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi - at Waitangi, of course. Following that day, 169 years ago, copies of the treaty circulated among the chiefs of New Zealand, in search of more signatures, more moko patterns.

Even before Close Up began their story about nationalism, patriotism, I had been thinking about the subject. This is Waitangi Day, perhaps the most New Zealand of holidays - certainly more so than ANZAC Day (and not just because we share it with the Aussies) and the regional anniversaries that spread throughout the calendar. But what does it mean to us? How do we celebrate it?

19 years ago, I was at Waitangi for the 150 year celebrations - I was part of the choir, I sang before the queen. I still remember the heat, the red and white "uniform," the visors, the place I stood in that stylised kotuku formation that day. I still remember the lyrics to the songs - not all of them, but most - and I have the tape of songs. I recall hearing that the queen did not stay for all our items, the heat sending her to seek refuge in the Treaty House.

But 19 years seems like a very long time. Waitangi since then has had its show downs, its politician headlines, its struggle to determine how to keep protocol and yet honor female leaders of government and opposition. Mud has been thrown, tears shed, words spoken in anger and demand, high profile people jostled and shaken and roughed up. Headlines, for all the wrong reasons. The nine year old I was, way back then, knew nothing of such a world.

When they talk of renaming the day, the holiday "New Zealand Day" - I disagree. If they want a New Zealand Day, it should be Dominion Day, as some suggest. Don't take away this one - even if we don't quite know what to make of it.

They ran ads on TV including presenters giving a message for the holiday. We've begun wishing "Happy Waitangi Day", yet we talk more of summer drawing to a close, of school starting for the year, of barbeques and family time and other quintessential kiwi summer things - but not of nationhood. Should we?

Or is it not yet the time to celebrate, with all these grievances yet unheard, unresolved?

I think that, when you don't experience something for a while, there can be a tendency to forget. Some things more than others, of course, but there you have it.
In this day and age, so much music seems to be electronic. Radio, MP3 players, CDs, DVDs, online music stores, file sharing, television, downloadable songs. You can hold a piece of music in the palm of your hand (or even several hours of music in the palm of your hand), or put it in a jacket pocket. You can forget what it was that made that sound, how magical such a process can be.

Until you sit up and pay attention.

And somehow, as well as forgetting, you can underestimate the effect. Dangerous, that - who knows how much you are missing out on by shutting it out? Music can ... it can fill you to bursting, body and soul, until you think those six little repeated notes can never be forgotten. And then the next powerful note or song drives it out, replaces it, filling you once more. How could I ever have underestimated that?

Last night was the "Nothing But Dreams" Concert in the ASB Theatre in the Aotea Centre. New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Carl Doy, Tina Cross, Grant Sullivan, Bella Kalolo. Everything arranged by the ubiquitous Carl Doy. I loved it, though there were parts that I didn't like as much. I loved remembering what a full orchestra can sound like - and wondering why I'd underestimated it before. At some point I think I need to find "Night on Bald Mountain", and I also wouldn't mind finding "Tarakihi".