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I'm pregnant. The seor and I are expecting a baby in February 2010. This revelation came as if the solving of a puzzle, a single name to give the clutch of symptoms that had been worrying me for a few weeks: low-level nausea, bursts of irrational worry, tiredness that no amount of sleep seemed to allay. I had assumed that it was depression knocking at my door, so was pleased indeed to put a positive name to it all. There's a fair amount of work to do on the house, but no major renovations, of which we are pleased. The dogs sense something's up and flank me in their best pack formation each time I get up and walk. Our friends with children of their own speak with a single message: enjoy your sleep while you can. I am taking this seriously, even as I acknowledge that I have no sense of what that great loss of rest and leisure will be like. I have an obstetrician but no midwife as yet. To work through the telephone list of names the specialist has supplied is my current challenge. I'm not used to communicating with people whose primary presence isn't online, but I accept this is good practice for the irrevocably material world that's coming our way. With respect, gentle readers, I hope not to enter into too much of a discussion of the politics of child-bearing here, except, perhaps, in my usual essaying fashion. Most of you will know that it was not until I met the seor that any plan of this kind entered my mind, but I am open now to the change in path our lives are taking. I would not do it without a partner so invested in everything about it, reading about vegetarian diets and coming to appointments with me and drawing up lists of things to do. This gives me hope that we will keep, not lose, ourselves in this experience, even as I enjoy, for now, the sense of biological fatalism, the feeling that some things, at least are decided. Least and most familiar of all, that eight-weeks-old fetus, its future starred in so many ways and yet in others unwritten, waits in limbo in the before-life dark. The tail that first it grew now shrinks; the eyelids close over the no-eyes; its webbed hands touch together below its looming head. No bigger than a bean and not to my mind yet human, it holds our hope in the balance, this new potential, this child, maybe, to be. Tags: we are family
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I've been thinking a lot this week about my immediate forebears in my mother's family, thought that's only been intensified by the ongoing project of scanning my mother's collection of family photos that includes those of both my grandmother and great-grandmother.  Here, in the centre of this trio, is my grandmother, with her mother on the left and her aunt on the right. This was taken at her aunt's house. I'm not sure of the year but guessing by my great-grandmother's appearance I think my grandmother might be about fifteen or sixteen, which would make my great-grandmother thirty-four (my current age!) or thirty-five. If this were right, the date would be 1934 or 35. This image below, I think, would be around nine or ten years later. It's my grandmother, second from left, with my uncle (who was born at the end of 1941), my grandmother's brothers, and my great-grandmother. My great-grandmother and her husband were the caretakers at Godley House, at Diamond Harbour, for at least part of the war. My great-uncle at right served in the Pacific. He would be about nineteen or twenty here, I think.   Then today I scanned this image, most curious of all, sliding as it does between family history and colonial iconography. After the war my great-uncle trained as a missionary and was based in the North Island. I don't know who these boys are--did he know them from church, or school? They would be about seventy years old now. I wonder what their lives brought them, and how their aspirations and opportunities might have differed from my great-uncle himself, who grew up in straightened circumstances not that materially different from what these boys might have experienced. Were their lives as short as his would be? Tags: at home, in aotearoa, we are family
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After six blog posts in a row last Saturday and a weekend spent in that grim halfway state of staying on the internet, waiting for something to happen, I decided to take what, for want of a better phrase, I dubbed a spiritual detox. It is no disrespect to you, gentle reader, to say that I'm feeling much better for it: I've got a lot of reading done, for one (although I've yet to finish the weighty tome I'm showing off in the Amazon link at right). This final non-teaching week also gave rise to a lively social round. The seor and I called mid-week on Governor's Bay Jay, whose lovely blog you can now find here. Today we took Evie and Fern to visit Ashburton Jay and friends, some of whom were very young puppies. You can see my too-fast panning and unsteady walking zooms of Coco, Zsa Zsa, Evie and Fern below. [flickrvideo]http://www.flickr.com/photos/86977101@N00/3646397618/[/flickrvideo] Tags: dogs, o internet, the social round
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So much of the music I've listened to this year has been novelty music, I've begun to worry a little. The seor suggested that it might be a case of the setting-in of nostalgia for the musical forms of our teens and twenties, or perhaps a reflection of the way in which, at any given moment, a high number of the visible titans of western popular culture will be people in their thirties, inviting some form, perhaps, of identification. Whatever the reason, it's been a smooth segue from the second season of Flight of the Conchords to downloading The Lonely Island's hip hop-imbued album, Incredibad. To my slight surprise, this is rewarding repeated listening. It is musically tight and lyrically profane, with a theme that can be imagined as how the world might look if twelve-and-thirteen year old boys had access to larger amounts of money and power than was wise. The lyrics reflect the personae of early adolescence, a mixture of obsessions with detail and sex, along with fantasies of a better world. MCs who may have been defamed exclaim How could a person up and call a person wack?
How could the devil turn the blue sky black?
How many babies born will ever reach their dreams?
And how could a person call another person wack? ("Who Said We're Wack") while, in "Boombox" (a shared favourite of the seor and me), Julian Casablancas sings a chorus of elegantly descending phrases in which a New York City street is transformed into a multi-cultural paradise, as might have been imagined by an intermediate school social studies class, circa 1991: The music washed away all the hate
And society started advancing
Every demographic was represented
It was a rainbow coalition of dancing
Oh; everyone was wearing fingerless gloves
Oh; I saw a Spanish guy doing the Bartman!* Another track I much like is "Dream Girl", which first appears to be a parody in which the feminine love object is revealed to be physically ugly, similar to P.D.Q. Bach's "Jane, My Jane". So far, so boringly sexist, but there's more. As the song progresses, it becomes clear that the joke is on the deluded rappers, whose insistent fixation, excluding of reality, on one or more women who are not only mentally ill but homicidal, may well endanger their life. The dreamy lover now looks like an idiot, as does the milieu out of which he dreams. Talking to your shoe like it's your friend (I like that!)
Yelling at the walls of make-pretend (I like that!)
Telling you to stop and then you don't;
You say you're gonna stab me in my sleep
But you won't! From that point it's only downhill, and the song quickly descends into an advertisement for Chex Mix (a product hitherto unknown to me). The seor's favourite track is undoubtedly "Natalie's Rap", originally performed by Natalie Portman for SNL. Apart from the obvious parody at work here, in which Portman raps an autobiography of increasing profanity and threats of violence (culminating in my favourite of several lyrical threats, "I'll kill your f*cking dog for fun, so don't push me!), the self-deluding suitor is once again mocked, in the form of the enthralled chorus, "Natalie, you are a bad-ass bitch ... my dick is scared of you", sung over beats as if a love ballad. The reversal of traditional hip hop roles only highlights their fundamental falseness, and the visual comedy of tiny Portman threatening to fight, maim or murder more or less everyone draws further attention to the ridiculous posing in hip hop's more commercial excesses. The fact the the album's writer-performers so clearly love the modes in which they perform, however, means that it's humanity and not hip hop that's the target of the satire here. This might be a big part of the pleasure of listening: the care that appears to have been lavished on arrangements and production, so even as one is singing "Space Disc! Is totally cancelled! Space Swords! Is totally cancelled" to a setting slower in tempo but close to the beats and changes of Justin Timberlake's " My Love", there's still a sense of musical cohesion, of production from the inside out. Weird Al Yankovic this isn't. *Someone has made a video of "Boombox" on YouTube using WoW characters. Gosh. Tags: commentatrix, o internet
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Regular readers know of my chronic tinkering with these pages and their ephemera. I would like to survey, briefly, those of you who come here regularly to find out what methods of access bring you to these pages. I am asking this while I consider whether to reset the RSS full-feed back to summary feed, to bring readers to the site itself and its modest amounts of interactivity. However, I don't wish to do this if it would inflame your anger (knowing, for example, that I prefer to read my feeds in full form). [poll id="3"] Since signing these pages up for Google Friend Connect (you can now become a member of this site by clicking on the icon below the archives menu at right), traffic has tripled, more or less. My site statistics show visitors coming in their dozens from links which, when clicked on, produce 404s a-plenty. They have URLs like the one below, which alone brought sixty clicks to a single entry: http://r1rk9np7bpcsfoeekl0khkd2juj27q3o.friendconnect.gmodules.com/gadgets/ifr?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2Ffriendconnect%2Fgadgets%2Fmembers.xml&container=peoplesense&parent=http%3A%2F%2Fharvestbird.com%2Fblog%2F2008%2F01%2F16%2Ftwo-poems-by-hone-tuwhare%2F&mid=0&view=profile&libs=opensocial-0.8%3Askins&v=0.352.1&lang=en&view-params=%7B%22skin%22%3A%7B%22HEIGHT%22%3A%22%22%2C%22BORDER_COLOR%22%3A%22%23B0C4DE%22%2C%22ENDCAP_BG_COLOR%22%3A%22%23FFFFFF%22%2C%22ENDCAP_TEXT_COLOR%22%3A%22%22%2C%22ENDCAP_LINK_COLOR%22%3A%22%232361a1%22%2C%22ALTERNATE_BG_COLOR%22%3A%22%22%2C%22CONTENT_BG_COLOR%22%3A%22%22%2C%22CONTENT_LINK_COLOR%22%3A%22%232361a1%22%2C%22CONTENT_TEXT_COLOR%22%3A%22%22%2C%22CONTENT_SECONDARY_LINK_COLOR%22%3A%22%22%2C%22CONTENT_SECONDARY_TEXT_COLOR%22%3A%22%22%2C%22CONTENT_HEADLINE_COLOR%22%3A%22%22%7D%7D&communityId=03010837319079103630&caller=http%3A%2F%2Fharvestbird.com%2Fblog%2F2008%2F01%2F16%2Ftwo-poems-by-hone-tuwhare%2Frpc_relay.html Are these bots, or people? I am confused. Any illumination from you, gentle reader, would be helpful. Tags: meta-diarist, o internet
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Thank you for your variety of comments on my first scanned image of my grandfather and me. As promised, the harvestmother and I spent a productive Thursday evening eating curry and scanning more images from the family archives. All of these were from my grandmother's collection, which my mother went through and rationalised when Grandma died in 2005. (The rationalisation was of necessity, given the volume of recent images taken by my uncle on his travels with my grandmother, in which the photographer's goal seemed to be to record every moment of significance from a dozen different angles. One can't fault his thoroughness.) Many of the images I am reluctant to share in this forum, for two general reasons. One is that we have perhaps only two or three photos of many of my ancestors, and only one of some. My grandfather's family in particular lived in what might be called genteel poverty, with great dignity in difficult circumstances. In keeping with their times, they were private people (see the latter half of this entry, following "Anyway", for an idea of what I mean), and there seems to me a disjunction between the way the images of them are taonga in our family and the bright, harsh light of the internet.  In the case of my grandmother's family, it is a little different. My great-great-maternal-grandparents (my mother's mother's mother's mother-and-father) were a lively, sociable couple, a wine-tasting cellarman and his wife from Peckham, South London. Three of their children emigrated to New Zealand, of whom Nanna, my great-grandmother, was the first, as a Great War Bride. Here they are, these ancestors of mine, in a photo of a photograph my grandmother took while visiting her cousins in London late last century. My great-great-grandmother's name was Clara, which was also Nanna's middle name, although this switched to Clair at some time in her life. Clair was passed on as a middle name to my grandmother, who added an "e" when she gave it to my aunt as her middle name, following which I inherited it in that spelling as mine. Look at my great-great-grandmother's lovely lace collar, and my great-great-grandfather's waxed moustache. Harvestmother and I spent much time looking at the photos of my grandmother, her cousins and her aunts and uncles, at the variations of long slim face and large round face that their parents and grandparents passed on.  This, another photo-of-a-photo, is Auntie Nelly, one of Nanna, my great-grandmother's sisters. She died young in England, in the 1930s, possibly from TB (which my great-grandmother also had as the result of a lung injury). Family photos in my great-grandmother's collection include whimsical explanations and notes from Nelly, including the hope expressed on an image of she with her friends in their nurses' uniforms, several holding babies, that she would one day have many babies of her own. I have a necklace of hers, though at present it needs mending. If anyone can advise me of a good mender of antique costume jewellery, I would be grateful. Here are my grandparents, my grandfather the same featured in my earlier post, and my grandmother the niece and granddaughter of the ancestors featured above. I am guessing this would be in the late 1940s or early 1950s, in Invercargill. The wisps in front of my grandmother's face are part of a veil attached to her hat.  Biased I may be, but I do not think it is possible to overstate the handsomeness of my grandfather. From my grandmother, I see now, I learned something like the family beauty trick, that it comes not from classically composed features or form but from kindness, and love for others, and knowing when to speak up with sincerity. If you could have heard their voices, too, which were beautiful: his medium-pitched, light and level and hers fuller and more lyrical, both convincing you of your own inherent worth.  Less secure in the world am I here at (I think) ten, photographed in my garb for the Sunday School play (in which I was, invariably, the narrator). I'm not quite sure how harvestdad, the photographer, managed to pose me for that headshot. When I saw the image at the time I noticed only the blemish on my nose and upper lip, the first days of early-onset acne that were already a source of terrific shame for me. (When I think back, adults often commented on it as well: teachers, parents, people in the community. What kind of person tells a child she's got spots?) The harder parts of my life were yet to come, but I was enjoying school, loved reading, writing and music, and had, as you see, a chain of loving people behind me who never hesitated to be my cheerleaders, this outspoken-yet-diffident girl from the suburbs. *Okay, the original verse is
Sands, sands of my father's town,
Of my father's triple sea,
(Once for the eyes and twice for dream,
Thrice for memory);
(Robin Hyde, "The Beaches" from Houses by the Sea, IV.1-4)
Tags: at home, we are family
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