In the footsteps of Captain Corelli: A pilgrimage for the book that transfixed 15-year-old me

Asos Greece. I swam here. 

Originally written for The Spinoff, October 2019.

It takes 23 hours to journey from Auckland to Cephalonia, Greece, island home of the fictional Captain Corelli, Dr Iannis, and his daughter Pelagia. For those 23 hours I was filled with a deep sense of fear and claustrophobia.

Two days before I flew I had to book in to see my psychotherapist because I’d come out in a terrible rash that seemed to migrate from my neck to my hands every few seconds. It had to be addressed before it reached my face. Turns out I was triggered by an old thread of trauma.

When I was 15 years old I flew to Fiji with my heartbroken mother, who was permanently sick with two autoimmune diseases, and my generationally racist grandmother, who couldn’t stop mentioning how brown everyone was.

We were there to avoid my father. He was in Auckland trying to figure out if he wanted to stay with my mother or make a proper go of it with another woman.

Without going into details, I met his other woman, by chance, the day before we flew to Fiji. Net outcome was my body drastically shut down by the time we landed and my entire stay was fever-ridden.

All I could manage was to eat watermelon and crawl to the beach at midday. This because, during the worst of the heat, they turned off the air-conditioning to conserve power.

Feebly I would prawn my way towards the smallest onshore breeze, clasping my copy of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and climb into a hammock, reading till night fell.

The book, by Louis de Bernières, is long and poetic and stitched together by a collection of eccentric first-person accounts of the second world war. The Greek prime minister Metaxas who was maligned by his allies and stressed to death. A Greek doctor who never went to medical school. And Pelagia, his intelligent beautiful goat-loving daughter. A gay Italian soldier who only wanted to be near other men. And of course, the titular Captain Corelli.

The book contained so much romance at a time when my life was devoid of a positive relationship to romantic love. But also, it was about war and death and suffering, which too seemed appropriate. The story pulled me to its time and place, to its love story, so effectively that teenaged me became weak-kneed. I desperately wanted to be wanted, like that. I wanted someone to swoop into my war zone and become transfixed, not by the bombs falling all around me, but by the way I was dealing deftly with the resulting losses and wounds.

What is reasonable risk? This mum on why I leave my kids home alone

Has our obsession with keeping kids safe destroyed something beautiful and valuable in their lives – and in ours? Lily Richards considers some new research that suggests unattended children are often in far less danger than many parents think. Originally written for The Spinoff.co.nz 2017

Sometimes my partner and I leave our children alone at home whilst we walk down to the supermarket which is about 10 minutes from our house, they are 7 and 4 years old respectively. We live in one of the safest suburbs in Auckland, we leave a mobile phone with them so they can call if they need us and yes, part of me feels sick about it, but I also suspect I shouldn’t and here’s why.

An American study released last week No Child Left Alone discovered that the moral outrage parents incur when they leave their children unattended is, very often, disproportionate to the actual risks their children face.

I remember growing up on the side of Mt Victoria in Auckland’s North Shore – I’d come home from school at 9 years old, stuff a heated burrito in my mouth and head up the mountain. For hours I’d be totally alone, wandering the nearer side of the cone, 10 minutes from home but completely out of sight and totally not within earshot. In today’s climate, my parents would be crucified for such lax judgement, hearing about my after school freedoms they would imagine my gruesome perverted death in a hundred different guises. But are they right to do so?
Is the pervasive fear many parents feel for their children actually founded? Well consider cars for a second, children are more likely to die in car accidents than they are as the victims of abduction, yet no one crusades for cars as no-kid-zones. In New Zealand children are probably more likely to die inside their homes rather than as a result of straying from them, and yet, I feel confident in saying most parents we fraternize with would not condone us leaving our kids home alone so we can walk to the supermarket.

Why? Research points to a wonky conscience. Morality has shifted in the last decade to favour the ever watchful parent and essentially criminalise the alternative, which I can’t think of a neutral adjective for as they all seem to be pejoratives: ‘lax’ ‘irresponsible’ ‘inattentive’ ‘careless’.

The researchers behind No Child Left Alone tested this theory, that perceived risk was linked to moral judgement, by undertaking a series of experiments where participants were asked to rate the level of risk for children in various scenarios.
For example, in one scenario a 10-month-old was left alone for 15 minutes, asleep in the car in a cool, underground parking garage. In another, an 8-year-old was left for an hour at a coffee shop, one block away from her parent’s location.
To test the moral element of the experiment the reasons the child was left unattended varied, they ranged from parents having to go to work, or being injured, to volunteering, relaxing and meeting a lover.

Not surprisingly the perception of risk to the child escalated when the participants (over 1,300 of them) found the parents to be acting immorally.
The researchers summed up their findings thusly: “People don’t only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They also think it is immoral and therefore dangerous.”

So where does this leave us? In New Zealand (according to the NZ Police) young children must never be left alone in a house or vehicle – they require constant supervision – and it is illegal to leave a child under the age of 14 years without reasonable provision for their care.
What’s your definition of reasonable? Mine is locked inside a house with a mobile phone in case they need to call for help or request more rice crackers. The reason this shifting morality and the eventual reprisals it brings to bear on parents interests me is that I remember the rush of freedom I felt as a kid when I was alone and I think that’s pretty much under attack.
Not alone in my room within the norms and regulations of my overlords (read: parents), but truly alone, on my own terms, in the wild (of Mt Victoria).
Some of the stuff I did defies explanation, probably because I wasn’t being watched and didn’t have to explain myself. I rolled fresh grass into papers I’d bought from the dairy across the road when I was 10 and tried to light them. I pretended I was being interviewed by Oprah and conducted both her side of the interview and mine. I spoke to fairies and pretended I was a single parent constantly angry at my recalcitrant ex-husband for letting the kids down. Shit got real. And shit got weird. And I was able to go wherever my freaky brain took me and I honestly think I can partially credit those experiences for my ability to have ideas, to be brave and creative and think unusual things. To add to this there is the cult of noise and control and accountability that sucks life from all good things – a school of thought has risen to promote silence as a balm. Silence is the kind of space you naturally slip into when you’re alone.  

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we boot our kids out the front door and wish them the best  – but I do think there ought to be less judgement and more rational analyses when we think about the kind of risks we’re willing to expose our children to. Are they terminal risks? Or, after some level-heading non-emotional thought, are they the kinds of risks that have a 1 in 100 (or 1000) chance of going wrong but otherwise would really blow the kids hair back?

When my partner and I first started dating, we walked. That was our thing. We did it everywhere. We did it during parties. We did it early in the morning. We did it to get places and to have fun. We were walkers. Then we had kids and realised that their tiny legs and finite energy complimented by endless whinging meant that we could no longer do the thing we loved.

We accepted this, we waited, I grew fatter but that’s neither here nor there. Fitness and thinness wasn’t the reason we walked, we walked because it’s ancient and magic and it gets you talking. We walked because no one interrupts you when you’re walking, in such an unfixed way you are unavailable. And every now and then we decide the risk is worth it to feel that magic again, we give the eldest a mobile and lock them inside and we walk down to the supermarket and talk widely, uninterrupted. And what about the kids you ask? They call us about 7 times in 10 minutes to tell us what the other one is doing or if they said something funny, or to inform us that they saw a bird or ate an old biscuit they found under the couch. In other words they use that freedom to be themselves and then relish in sharing these moments with us.

Sited:
NZ Police.
Thomas, A.J., Stanford, P.K. & Sarnecka, B.W., (2016). No Child Left Alone: Moral Judgments about Parents Affect Estimates of Risk to Children. Collabra. 2(1), p.10. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.33
Original article here: https://thespinoff.co.nz/parenting/19-11-2016/what-is-reasonable-risk-one-mum-on-why-she-leaves-her-kids-home-alone/

 

That Time I Interviewed Noel Fielding

Very few men are as comfortable in a dress as Noel Fielding.

His sketch for the charitable initiative Comic Relief, where he danced “Kate Bush” to Wuthering Heights in her iconic red dress roused a giddy audience into near delirium, not to mention his fellow comedians who looked on in envy, awe and awkwardness.
Fielding has been the obsession of the British tabloids since 2004 when he and Julian Barrett converted their stand-up gig The Mighty Boosh to the small screen. A predominance of sequins, frequent cross-dressing and a tendency to slip into a psychedelic matrix instead of ordinary time projected Fielding into a vortex of fame.
“I mean I guess in England they probably think I’m some psychedelic sort of surreal character who lives in a Forest in a magic boot and rides a unicorn whilst taking drugs”.
Sadly he goes on to dispel the possibility that unicorns are real by adding “but I’m not really like the character they portray.”

On the phone he’s gracious and rambling, a rainbow of words come tumbling down the line and it’s hard to imagine he ever sleeps or eats or stops at all – a creative Niagara Falls. Though highly imaginative he’s also surprisingly succinct and the reductionist Peter Pan trope people assume of him fails to make sense of someone so in control of his own creativity. He’s bravely hewed a niche, like Monty Python before him, where absurdity is legion and yet he’s considerate of his audience’s limitations:

“I try and get the audience onside with charm and skill before I totally freak them out. I always want to bring the audience on a journey really… the analogy I make is you’re on the boat and everyone’s on the shore and you’ve got to get them onto the boat and take them on a journey and sometimes half the people get on, sometimes everyone gets on and you have a brilliant trip, and then sometimes only a few get on and everyone else sort of throws stuff at you from the beach.”

Getting on the boat requires a willingness to suspend worn patterns of thinking but what else is art for if not to press us into different shapes than we were before?

CODA- this was originally written for and then almost entirely rejected by Metro Magazine (a few tiny fragments of my original writing remained). After accepting the haphazard preference of editors (to be fair, they had made me rewrite it once and made it much better as a result) I figured I’d put the whole thing out there, including more quotes, for people to read. I love Fielding, and the chance to speak with him was a great excitement and privilege.

Cat Fisting with Donald

A book review of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance and a look at the great (poor) whites of America.

As  Trump complains about his microphone and Clinton throws facts as shade, the regular world of poor white Americans keeps turning.

It’s a strange place, once the home of the American Dream (America’s capitalisation, not mine) but when water hit the metal and everything turned to rust the people languished as much as the materials that once allowed them to prosper.

No one really likes to put themselves squarely in these people’s camp –  their stereotyping is brutal – poorly educated, they’re missing numerous teeth, they fall pregnant too young and once born they’re terrible parents to their kids. They fight loudly, swear continually and shove their fists down the throats of catfish in lieu of bait. But the Hillbillies are rising up by their miserable millions in support of a candidate who is noxious and by most measures ill suited to their needs. And the upper class liberals and relative ‘norms’ of the world are really flummoxed as to why.

Make America Great Again – Trump’s campaign slogan might offer some clues.

Since the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, author J.D. Vance has given numerous interviews, resulting in thousands of white-people-need-our-help-too lightbulb moments, in which he simply points out that their major “issue” is in having been forgotten. Once they were the backbone of industrialised America, up and down the Appalachian trail. Families moved to where the metal was and made good lives out of it – owned plenty of American made cars and their own homes. You don’t have to be a poor white American to know how unlikely similar successes are these days but in the hills and hollers of Jackson the loss of these opportunities rubs pretty bad.

In the current climate of black lives matter, poor white Americans are putting up signs proclaiming that all lives matter, a pretty equanimous turn implying there’s nothing meritorious about your skin colour. Poor is poor. Drug addled is drug addled and ignored by your government means it’s time for a change.
You might wonder why Vance is writing about such an unpopular breed who’ve rarely been given air (excluding a few notables such as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) to share their politically incorrect and inconvenient truths. Vance is not some researcher imbedded in these communities, he was born and raised and broken and nearly fell through all the cracks in Jackson and then later Middletown Ohio.

These are his people and he proudly claims them as such. This affable Yale Law graduate who, it can’t be ignored, has moved to a State with more teeth per mouth, still shares their blood and cares about their plight.
Vance tells his own story as a way of analogising the greater misfortune of the Appalachian people.

It’s a harrowing tale of his sister and he trying to survive their unstable mom, a woman who forfeit her nursing gig after imbibing huge doses of prescription pain killers and skating through ER on rollerblades high as the proverbial. A mom who eventually turned to Heroin. A mom who never shook her childhood of instability, alcoholism and rage to recover a sanctuary for herself or her kids.

There is more interest in poor whites now as they’re viewed as the bowsprit of a social change attempting to dredge from the murky waters of debt and offshore manufacturing a promise of something simple, wholesome and neat. Trimmed with a picket fence and including an Electrolux.

Trump offers hope here not because any of his election promises really deliver answers to the deeply riven issues that affect these people but because he’s loud and abrasive and he’s actually saying something. Vance’s grandmother (Mamaw – pronounced mam aw) once told him not to be like ‘all these stupid fuckers who act like the pack is stacked against them’ and regularly referred to him as a ‘shit head’ which kind of comes off as a term of endearment when you hear her quoted on other topics. Point being, this is a culture of straight talkers who, once upon a time, got shit done. Trump not only talks a big game, he’s completely comfortable declaiming the USA as the greatest country on earth, and these folks, who once upon a time were invited to be an integral part of that huge impossible appellation, feel at home with someone like him.

Maybe he won’t make things better but he’ll sure as shit shake some trees.

If you’re struggling with the possibility of a Trump presidency and wondering who exactly would want such an outcome then read this book. You’ll be less surprised by the statistics than in the empathy Vance brings to bear upon those reduced to numbers. Underneath all the bad judgements, terrible choices, disastrous relationships and fearful child raising are underfunded, hurting, forgotten people who have lost their voice and who are afraid for their future, their kids, their country and their kin.

 

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY: A Life of David Foster Wallace
By D.T. Max

I’ve been totally flawed trying to come up with a way to enter this piece, grappling to come up with even a vaguely all right introduction. I feel slightly less a complete failure as I can see the meta narrative at work: my only real criticism of D.T. Max was his beginning, basically a 4^th form essay opener, a rejoinder so simplistic and cop-outish (sic) even a 4^th form teacher would have asked for more:
 “Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s.”
 Right?
But why I’m sympathetic to this palsy start, and see it as a reoccurring issue, is that after reading (and in Max’s case researching) DFW and in doing so reading much of his actual writing; personal letters, essays, commencement speech fragments, witticisms and such, one can become totally mute as a writer in response to such an incredible talent.

Part of what’s hard with writing about DFW is the tenacity and brilliance of the subject matter, he played around with structure, language, obfuscation and translucency his entire career: “If words are all we have as world and god, we must treat them with care and rigor: we must worship.” Known originally as a postmodernist shit-kicker with his thesis-come-published-novel The Broom of the System for which he was lauded and criticized as being (too) derivative of Pynchon et al he took postmodernism to the next level. Broom includes an ode to Wittgenstein, a critique of Heidegger and a go at a semi-plotless plot that frustrates with the intention of pushing the reader to less passive heights (something he would extend in his opus Infinite Jest). On the back of Broom’s marginal success he wrote short story collections and some non-fiction essays, finessing his aptitude for brilliant titles (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Girl With the Curious Hair, Consider the Lobster) and ultimately Infinite Jest originally subtitled A Failed Entertainment which was a nod to the meta narrative of Wallace critiquing passive entertainment as dangerously gluttonous and apathetic. Through all these publications he played grammar at its own game, driving copy editors mental by reediting their cuts of his ingenuous yet correct usage.
My point is that DFW had a style so unique, so thoughtful and multifaceted that when you read about him you expect that same brilliance to infuse the biographising (sic) otherwise it’s a little like hearing a terrible covers band and having to go home and put on the originals to make yourself feel better. Max I think realized this and devised a plan: try super hard to make linear a life of chaotic ups and downs. He devises a chronology to DFW and sticks to it, unrelentingly, which can make for some boring notations but overall was probably the safest way to go.
This structured approach hits its stride about midway through when Max feels safe enough inside his design and relents a little, becoming more poetic with his own voice and less a slave to every piece of information he recovered. Max’s tone cleverly mimics the pattern of his subject: his attitude towards DFW is like a friendship unfolding, or maybe the observance of a sibling. What begins as slightly passive aggressive during DFW’s more egocentric phase (i.e in relating DFW’s correspondence with a friend where he mentions he turned down a tenured position Max writes “or so he wrote to Peterson, though the school has no record of it and it seems unlikely”) evolves into gentle concern during DFW’s break downs, admiration after the publication of Infinite Jest, and ultimately a sense of sad resignation towards the end of his days. Max never met Wallace, he’s a stranger to the writer, but he did manage to gain extraordinary cooperation from publishers, editors, girlfriends and friends – everyone from Nadell (his agent for his entire career) to novelist Jonathan Franzen and artist Karen Green, his wife and widow.
How this unfolds then is both a forgone conclusion and a lifting of the veil, much of DFW’s writing has been dissected and intellectualized but much of his private life remained private, his struggle with pot and alcohol was coded into fiction with AA support groups appearing as church groups, his depression was explored by his characters, his love life a garrulous selfish beast cowering in corners throughout his work. Max unearths all of these intimacies with a gentle and purposeful hand. What coalesces is a flourish of trouble and brilliance and, at the end, the biography of a writer trying to align himself with the moral compass of authors like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky:

“What seems most important is that Dostoevsky…changed {from} a typically vain and trendy young writer – a very talented writer, true, but one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory – into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values.”

Finishing Every Love Story… I had a similar problem as with beginning it; I found myself wanting more. Initially I wanted more from Max’s approach but this time it was the longing that comes after a blunt drop off, confronting a cul-de-sac where a highway should have been. It is the drifting sadness of a suicide, the sense that so much more was to come; in many ways a typical DFW ending, summarily it stops and you’re left to imagine what might have been.

By the end, abrupt or not, Max manages to piece together the sad and fascinating portrait of a giant, vastly courageous intellect. A disheveled philosopher, who always had the brains but who, in his last few years, really started working on the heart. There’s a small redemption here too, that although the depression resulting from a change in medication was ultimately too terrifying to survive, DFW still managed to achieve an important milestone in his life, not old age sure, but certainly the beginnings of wisdom.

 

Note: Works I have read by DFW.

Broom of the System
Selected essays from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
The first ¼ of Infinite Jest
Incarnations of Burned Children Published in Esquire

Books I own, but haven’t yet read, of DFW’s:

The last ¾’s  of Infinite Jest
The remaining essays from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
The Pale King

Image credit: Esquire Magazine & Wall Piece with 200 Letters // Mikko Kuorinki at Kiasma Museum in Helsinki.

An unbelievably distasteful betrayal that takes an awfully long time.

A faded rock star, a talented geneticist, an embittered tabloid king and a scientist all walk into a novel. Just joking. Though actually they are all a part of this sprawling tale about modern morality the story isn’t quite as comical as this setup suggests. With his newest novel Meek, the author most notably of The People’s Republic of Love has contributed to the collection of contemporary writing about how sodden and debased modern life currently is. In, if not quite the same league then easily the same category of books as Visit From the Goon Squad & Freedom, Meek’s latest offering is one of dilemma wrapped in practical romance and all tied up with notions of death, love and immortality.

Richard Sheppard, the lead singer of The Lazygods, is a married man with two children and a successful reality TV show yet the opening sequence sees him cheating on his wife with a 15 year old girl. Things spiral out from here creating agonising situations for both Richard and perversely for his scientist sister Bec who has developed a vaccine for one strand of malaria and whom Richard loves and respects but fails to protect.  Richard’s relationship with his sister is a bit like watching a python eating a goat: an unbelievably distasteful betrayal that takes an awfully long time.

Taken in turns both sharp and meandering the story progresses from Richard’s initial transgression into the lives of those around him; Meek deals with Richard brilliantly, he’s so completely self obsessed and so totally and quite often humorously unaware of any greater moral context that he’s always forgiving himself and damaging others. Richard’s actions set the ball rolling and the 500 odd page book then settles in exploring the lives of those around him who will inevitably be impacted however abstractly by his lack of moral fiber and called to question their own.

Dealing blows along the way to tabloid journalism, Meek himself a celebrated journalist for many years, has created a pointed tribute to the likes of Piers Morgan with his character Val, the head of a Daily Mail type endeavor who loses his mind and takes to the internet with his own version of god and censorship: The Moral Foundation. The initiative seeks to unearth and publicise all manner of tawdry behavour among the ruling famous and it destroys the mental health of those within its ranks. Always waiting for the call, waiting to be cast in the light of their very worst transgressions, Richard and others are slowly pushed to breaking point. It’s here, when the characters have the most to lose, that Meek really showcases what it takes to have backbone and what is looks like to be spineless.

Phillip Pullman describes the book as a ‘moral thriller’ and it’s an apt description, certainly a page turner, tightly composed and vastly cast and considered, The Heart Broke In is something of a modern fable with large scale commentary and minute beautiful observations.

The Impolitic Version of What Became the Post: Bad Parenting

I have always had a problem with performance art; a deep abiding problem that seems to come from somewhere inside my chest, like phlegm or about-to-be-coughed-up blood, it irks and bothers me and insists on making me feel uneasy. Yes. I’m aware that this is a judgmental stance that will cause me to come face to face with people wearing one heel spewing milk telling me it’s all about masculine/feminine perception. A long time ago I rewrote some of my basic encoding that was set on ‘I like this therefore it’s good – opposite also applies’ with a more humanistic approach – I trained myself to see all (static) art as something made with love, energy and intention, all worthy of praise, even if the end product wasn’t exactly the bronze plated spikey ball I wanted in my office. Each to their own. I trained myself (and this was purely at the sweet behest of my partner who’d tired of my overbearing meanness in the face of art that displeased me) to err away from language like ‘overblown’ and ‘poorly conceived’ and instead replace these terms with, well not ones of endearment, at least utterances that bespoke of the time and energy that had gone into the work – they instead became ‘unique’ ‘inspired’ and ‘particular.’ Sadly the same level of enlightenment could not be found for performance art. Where I can look at a painting and find its merit peaceably in a gallery I, for instance, found it impossible to watch a bunch of AUT students parade around on broken heels spurting bottles of broken milk on a looped track they must have walked for hours and think ‘well that’s particular, that’s unique and inspired’.

Which is silly cause if anything’s unique it was that white washed parade of strange. But here’s the kicker; static art lets me decide how I feel about it. I can be mean I can be nice, it’s my choice. Then I go home and the piece of art stays hanging on the wall. Performance art uses you in the making of itself and I find that unavoidably irritating; and although this is the ‘beauty’ of the form, the very nature of its subliminal message, that art is greater than self, always comes off to me as a lie. That the artist is actually saying that they are more important than you because they are instruments of the art and you are just the mechanism by which it proceeds. You may hate the art and scoff; that’s part of the art. You might walk out of a room whilst a film is playing; that’s the film making you leave. You might all laugh like we did at our student teacher in high school who showed a bunch of 15 year old’s a film he’d made of cutlery painfully stilted and pointlessly (apparently) dropping onto the floor of a stage. And even though his feelings were undoubtedly hurt by our taunting and ridicule I’m certain he put all those tears into a latter piece of performance art  and not instead back on himself to ask ‘is this just silly?’

Might it be that a bigger issue here is one of editing, of constraint and purpose? Where are the limits in performance art? If they aren’t immediately available to the viewer, if the point doesn’t ever have to be clearly received, then does the artist still know what it is or are they bluffing? It reminds me of a line in the Union Atlantic where a history teacher is vigorously punishing her student for limply defending his point of view by saying ‘it was just an opinion’ to which she memorably responds:

“No!…that’s precisely what it isn’t! That’s precisely what’s become so endemic. That cheap, mindless relativism. You’re all awash in it. Of course it’s a pluralist society. So we’re modest. In the big things: religion, metaphysics. We’re non-absolutists. That’s secularism. That’s maturity. That’s what the zealots can’t abide. But this business of opinions. As if the world had no discernible qualities.”

There is the possibility that my neivity is the issue and not the ‘art’, that I’m like a conservative Catholic hating on gays because I’ve never known any, they’ve never become humanised. The fear of the unknown. In the same vein maybe my lack of theoretical investigation into performance art it is what causes me to hate it so. Ignorance fostering prejudice. Whilst I cannot claim to be thoroughly schooled in the matter I have been subjected to it, shown it and asked to partake in it. In fact, for something that instinctively rubs me the wrong way, I’ve had an awful lot to do with performance art.

My first encounter was when I was 15 years old, as I’ve just mentioned, but the whole thing was more warped and misjudged than that initial description so forgive me here a further digression. I went to a massively multi-ethnic high school in Auckland’s eastern suburbs with something like 56 different ethnicities represented and many of these people hailed from the various Islands of the Pacific. One term we had a rash of student teachers; one of these was a gentleman whose name escapes me, likely because I never bothered to learn it, who sat in on and eventually taught, a solo lesson in our media studies class. This student teacher was ebullient beyond measure, so undaunted by the lackluster response his dandy teaching caused that he was actually foolish enough to suggest that, after we’d finished watching Brave Heart for something like the 12th time, we should section out the last 10 minutes of class, on his last day with us, to watch some footage of his most recent performance art installation. We were a bunch of 15 year olds. His installation consisted of a stage lit with one bright light and an audience seated watching, the light hit a circle on the center of the white stage floor and after a minute of pure illumination there fell from an obscured hole in the ceiling a fork. A minute or so later, another fork, then another, then another, then an avalanche of forks. And then, a spoon.

I do not have to tell you the response this ‘piece’ received. I cannot recall how he justified this to us or begin to recall how he explained that it was art. Later in my life I developed an overblown ability to infuse nothingness with what sounds like theory, it’s a skill a lot of us learn at university in order to make word count. If memory serves though this man did not blow smoke from his arse, he blew it from his heart. He and others I’ve since met, truly believe that a calculated and contrived performance can result in art. I’m not dismissing this, who am I to do so? No one, that’s who. But what I am is a reader and so when I stumbled on Kevin Wilson’s newest book The Family Fang – a novel about two performance artists, Camille and Caleb Fang, who get married (around 35 times and film each one then run it as an exhibition in a gallery) and have children then subsequently use these children to create art, I thought; this I have to read.

Wilson has written something pretty strange, it’s just crooked enough to be interesting and new but the narrative relies on some really basic plot ideas like the thrill of  a chase and the promise of the unknown, he involves fame and L.A and plays around with failing writers (a writers favourite topic). But more than this, Wilson explores the line between artistic endeavour and personal responsibility. The Fangs began, for Wilson, as a way of exploring parenthood. He and his wife had just had their first child and were finding life hard, lacking in sleep Wilson began to think of all the ways that a parent can screw up a child, and like casting a warding off spell he decided to create some parents who were going to do more damage to their children that the Wilson’s would ever inflict on theirs. A transference if you will. The Fangs believe that children kill art. They’re probably right. Children tend to kill most things by way of suppression, exhaustion and a fraying of previously alert minds. But for most of us parenthood refunds as much if not considerably more than it takes, for the Fangs they decide to take payment immediately by melding their children into their art. Wilson basically shapes my entire argument against performance art; namely that it is intentionally isolationist and somewhat selfish. When you come face to face with a painting, you either like it, you don’t or you’re indifferent. In any case that response is yours, given to you benevolently by the painter to do as you wish; they have their interpretation you have yours, both are entitled to keep their own. With performance art the viewer is used to create the art then eaten up by it – your response is never privately your own, it’s grist for the mill of the art and the artist.

Wilson showcases this kind of specific perverse selfinterestedness (sic) via the Fangs two children, particularly their emotionally disastrous childhood during which they’re forsaken on the alter of fanatical artistic integrity. At one point the children, both between 8 and 14 years old, are taken on holiday, a performance is planned for the journey, they are not told what it will be. They board a plane and have to pretend to be traveling alone, their parents having adopted aliases and are seated together, on the flight to their destination Caleb stands, hijacks the onboard microphone and gushily proposes to Camille, who says yes. On the return journey the same act is played out except this time Camille says no and the entire plane is subjected to an awkwardness that seeps into the rayon covered seats, gets in their clothes and follows them home. The Fangs disrupt situations in order to manipulate people into emotionally responding in order to use that to make an abstract point that has no direct bearing or use for the people involved. They believe that art, in all situations, and only art as they define it, is more important than anything else; more truthful and trustworthy, more worthy than even their own children.

This book  tackles the hard to grasp wank of performance art, that intangible nothingness that is somehow more irritating than the offhanded response of ‘my 6 year old could have painted that’ you’re sometimes tempted to utter when staring down a modernist painting. The Family Fang walks straight into the minefield of conceptual theory based artistic practice and strips it bare to reveal the human cost of using other people in the process of defining your own self-important view of the world. In many ways Wilson uses performance art as a crazy abstraction to house his commentary about parenting; parents aren’t ever this bad or this funny, I mean parents aren’t usually performance artists. But at the same time he’s cutting a knife into the fat of selfish parenting he’s also making a pretty accurate analysis of art as contrived spectacle. There’s a line in the book when Camille is trying to explain to her children why she pushed them under the bus, why they made art out of themselves instead of parents, and she says ‘I remember how much I loved the aftermath, the confusion on everyone’s faces but ours. We were the only ones in the whole world who knew what was happening.’ I get that, it’s so human, to want to be god. But it’s another thing to act on that by contriving yourself as a godhead and calling it art.

Why We Broke Up

This is why we broke up: you weren’t suited to the person I’d become. You made my stomach ache. My feelings for you came in flashes like lightening and I didn’t like the times between strikes.

Those are some of my own to add to Handler’s fine collection of descriptive musings on why two nearly typical American high school students, Min and Ed, broke up.  Break ups; the mother of all disappointments and the father of all pain and when it happens to you why (?!) is the adverb that takes over your life. Written as a letter of explanation, condemnation and sorrow to Ed, this story comes in segments, each segment is dictated by an object in some way significant to the story of their relationship. Each of these objects is pulled from a box and considered by Min (who has put them there) before she continues with her lovelorn objective of returning the entire sad array to Ed’s doorstep.

Somehow the stereotypical topic of a basketballer never being able to truly comprehend the love of an aspiring director set amongst the backdrop of pseudo hipster friends drinking coffee and shit-head basketball groupies, comes off as remarkable whilst still nostalgically tugging on the high school heart strings we all have loosely tucked somewhere.
A gallery of images accompany the miscellaneous contents of the box; the soft edged pastel quirks of Maira Kalman’s paintbrush (author and illustrator of Principles of Uncertainty and The Pursuit of Happiness) come over like you’re holding a very extensive catalogue for an artists show in your hands (watercolour on canvas…you know I want to be a director, but you could never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up $2700).

Handler’s most likely known to you as his synonym Lemony Snicket, the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, perhaps one of the funnier, darker and more eloquent children’s series yet written. So yes, this too is a book for young adults, or it will be classified as such because it deals with teen love and we all condescend to know that isn’t ‘real’ love except of course it is, when you’re going through it.  Don’t discard this title because it’s put in the ‘teen’ section – any teen who truly comprehends the scope of the confessions in this book is a special character indeed. And anyway, what do teens grow in to? Adults. This is a book for us all.

Note: If you wish to contribute to the collection of break up stories, check out this website http://whywebrokeupproject.tumblr.com/ where, if you’re lucky (unlucky?), Handler might just comment on your heartache.

BACK SOON

Hi.

Sometimes things happen in life that take you away from a blog, sometimes those things are called babies. I’m sure that sometimes they’re not babies and are called something else, like ‘life’ or ‘work’ but in this case it’s definitely babies. Mainly one baby, our new born daughter Winter Rose. So please excuse my absence perhaps in the meantime you can enjoy a review I wrote for Metro that went unpublished due to some or other fickle concern (like how old a book is at the time the review would go to print, literary magazines can be more ageist than tabloids) and please be assured of my return.

‘The harbinger of sexual fantasy after sexual fantasy; a virtual porn shop of illegitimate incestual masturbatory scenes…’

So many problems can be found in Dirt. I do not mean porous soil or ill earthworms I mean the bat shit crazy new novel by David Vann has some serious problems and quite a few of them have to do with the use of dirt as a metaphor in the first place. In fact if dirt wasn’t the title and if it wasn’t the point that Vann was always trying to make, if the word ‘dirt’ wasn’t used an awkward number of times so that you begin to take count every time you see it on the page, then maybe this disturbing family biopic would leave you with more than an aching disquiet and a handful of dust.

Set in California, in stark contrast to Vann’s usual penchant for the colder climates of Northern America, Dirt is the warped story of a once prosperous immigrant family. Their fortune was made in the soil, born from labouring in walnut fields, acres of trees and years of picking, drying, tending.
The dead grandfather, the original immigrant and patriarch, is alluded to as the font of all the remaining families ailments. He had two daughters one of which is the single mother of our protagonist, Galen, a man stalled in his young twenties still living with his mother on their faltering land in near abject poverty. Poor because none of them have bothered to make a living for themselves, slowly siphoning off what’s left of the family trust fund that the senile grandmother controls instead.
The other daughter has a daughter herself, Galen’s cousin Jennifer, the harbinger of sexual fantasy after sexual fantasy; a virtual porn shop of illegitimate incestual masturbatory scenes get played out in Galen’s mind and then with more frequency, in reality too.

What begins as a tightly wound psychological thriller from inside the mind of either a misunderstood transcendent being or a psychopath (fine line) quickly devolves into a nasty loop of self-obsession and repetition. Vann has made the scope of his book so small, the perspective so monochromatic, that we’re only ever privy to Galen and whilst there is a little brilliance in being able to craft a narrative from inside an unhealthy mind – illustrating how it justifies itself, how it denies all other perspectives – we miss out on the kind of compassionate empathy Vann achieved with Caribou Island where he showcased the hearts, good and evil, of a small collection of people. When you’re limited to one voice the potential for arch and movement can become limited too. Admittedly some of the greatest books are written from a single perspective, Lolita for one example. But Humbert Humbert was an observant deviant whereas Galen is a narcissist so we miss out on the valuable context of contributing perspectives.
What we get instead is this earnest young man, a disciple of modern hippy dogma, of Carlos Castaneda and Kahil Gibran, splitting from the inside out, slowly yet surely coming apart in incredibly unsettling ways and dragging his family down with him whilst blaming them for his own downfall.
The last third of the book is a painful devolution into inevitable madness that repeats itself, burying itself under layers of dirt based metaphors; perhaps searching for a deeper meaning but sadly failing to root it out.

David Vann has made a career out of deftly channeling broken people. Dirt certainly has some of that insight, that frightening calm exposition on madness, greed and suffering, but unfortunately Vann’s trademark claustrophobia goes limp when set in a warmer climate. All that dry dirt: I didn’t really care whether this Californian family shriveled up and withered or whether it survived.

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Quick Caveat: I reviewed Dirt by David Vann on 95Bfm with Charlotte Ryan a couple of weeks ago and at the time, having just finished it, I was more clearly able to describe some of the interesting subject matter that underscored the book, its dark fucked-up-ness, in a semi-positive light. However on closer inspection, when called to write a print review, some of those initial sensations took a back seat to the overall failings of the work as a novel. I don’t want anyone to feel as though I was duplicitous in either review; they both reflect actual revelations about the book.