Freedom!

Today, Wednesday 3 March 2010, is new beginning. Yesterday I quit my job. (obviously I have to work out notice yadda yadda yadda so I'm actually still at my desk) But today signifies the start of the next four or so years of my life: researching and writing my PhD.

At the moment the proposed topic is kind of large and shapeless and a bit like something a nun would wear on her day off (except slightly more chic, I hope) . . . . I'm interested in the trickster/klutz/minstrel persona of the (apparently) unreliable narrator; and how that might link to the buried or voiceless authors within 'historical' narratives of slavery and capture. There's a whole bunch of texts that I might look at: Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just; Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse; Twilight (yes, really); Jim Henson's The Story Teller.

But the die is cast: I have entered my wee proposal, amoeba-like as it is, into the online portal, and now await word from the English Department. I think they'll have me. After that, I have to meet with potential supervisors, and well, start actually thinking and reading and writing. I can't wait!

In case you are worried re funds for the purchase of shoes that make me happy - I am now on contract in another part of the University, doing research and research project management - something MUCH MORE like what I love doing. Not so many hours - so I will blog. And rant. And procrastinate. And try to finish the Nanowrimo novel. And spend more time with people I love. And cook. And procrastinate some more.

I'm looking forward to it.

what happened to the last two weeks?

In an amazing display of un-timeliness, those that I work for remembered that I'm good at writing, and asked me to do rather A LOT of it. In the last two weeks, I have written two fifteen page development plans for thematic research initiatives, two submissions to Government, about four fake Evidence Portfolios, and a plethora of smaller stuff . . . .

Thus, I'm a TAD behind on ye olde Nanowrimo - but I am not disheartened. I've written another 2000 words today on *the book* and will just keep on at it throughout the summer. Come February, I will be revising the first draft. That's a promise.

losing my momentum . . . and finding it again

I've been a bit quiet - perhaps because my momentum got lost in a plethora of actual work, and, I have to admit, a fabulous busy weekend with parties and friends . . . . ooops.

However, thanks to Andrea's mean words, I am now reinvigorated, and have written my first 250 words of the day - I am planning several blocks like that interspersed with writing a "roadmap" (it's a metaphor, I think). Fortunately, mine is not on nanotechnology: it is on indigenous knowledges, peoples and identities, which is actually probably harder to "map" than nanotech.

My hiatus has also been caused by the nature of what I'm writing. I got stuck in a literary bog of hopelessness and despair as I tried to write the first person account of the Armenian genocide. I've taken heart from the fact that many of you don't write sequentially and have decided to set this section aside for a while, to be returned to in short bursts rather than total immersion, as I was getting too sad, too overcome by the horror of history, and the shortness of human memory.

Here are the things that saved me from the bog:

Thank you Martin Luther King Jr, for this quote that reminds me that there is hope in Lucine's story. It bends towards justice. I love this concept, which contains within it an image of a plant seeking light.

Then there is this: Chagall's double portrait with a glass of wine, in which the artist and his beloved reinact the joyous Jewish marriage ceremony, both Paris and the shtetl in the background. My book must do this too - show the Adana and London, the past and the future, the dead and the living.

This picture, and those words, have seen me through writing 40,000 words about slavery; they've been beside me as I wrote 20,000 words about the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal; they've helped me write a conference paper on Chaim Potok's responses to the Holocaust. They'll do me right now.

further updates on THE BOOK, including an imagined conversation with Toni Morrison

Above my computer - an ugly work Dell - hangs a yellow post-it (are there really any other kind, Kate?) on which I have scrawled:

I'm trying my best, Toni, I really am. It takes quite a lot of work - I'm sure you know this, as a Nobel Laureate etc etc.

Several things have happened: my main character has a job! It turns out she's a journalist - or at least, a journalism student. You see, I didn't know that until I wrote it. This is one of the more terrifying things about writing - even the author is not really in control. The story takes on a life of its own. Also - she has a name! She is Lucine (last name to come - I have to ask my Armenian colleague if she minds me pilfering hers) - Lucine means 'moon' in Armenian.

The political as hell bit is going to form much of the next section, in the guise of papers Lucine has smuggled into Syria hidden in her shoe. There will be extracts from real eyewitness accounts etc here I think. Better not give the game away too much - suffice to say I am at the moment setting up a beautiful culture with words, only to then destroy it. Yuck.

NanNoWriMo: otherwise known as insanity

I'm hoping to update fairly regularly - but for those of you who come here thanks to Andrea's lovely linking - here's a space holder - a random paragraph from the first day's writing.

So these biscuits evoke for me a multitude of meanings: on one simple level they are the taste of Christmas to my family, a flavour that reminds us all of the warm kitchen and the large tree, my mother rolling out the dough and chilling it before shaping the pears with their clove stalks. On another – the story of Mrs Kassardjian who embraced my young parents so far from home on their first Christmas as soon-to-be parents, at that liminal moment before my family came into being. And more distant, more resonant – a cultural memory of a way of life I never witnessed, a side by side existence, of cultural pickpocketing, in a part of the world that we now all associate with extreme ethnic divisions. So they bring hope, in a way, that the biscuit can remind us of a hodge podge, a melange, a mongrel culture that drew on all around it, that is called one thing but claimed by another – that we can all be a little more like Mrs Kassardjian, an Armenian refugee making Greek biscuits in London for two New Zealanders who’d never been to Greece or Armenia – but who passed those flavours – almond, cloves – to their children.

I will actually blog about the process, and the loveliness of my husband and children as they live with me through this - maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after. You see, I still have to work; and cook; and do research! Tonight I'm off to share recipes with some of my favourite women . . . . some of theirs may be stolen for THE BOOK. They don't know about the evil thieving ways of writers, as of yet . . . .

death of a poet, yes. death of a culture? maybe.

While the infantile New Zealand print media STILL talk about the ruckus on the school boy rugby field, and the reactions of two principals who should know better; or laments the greedy people who so love not working and having children in poverty that they have enjoyed spendy benefits for years ($1000 p/w with eight children - could you do it?), other things have happened. People have been born (you'll have to scroll down, sorry); people have died. In particular, poet Alistair Te Ariki Campbell has died.

Campbell was eighty-four. He is survived by five children, and a body of work that extends over fifty years, and still haunts the reader with its relevance, power and pity. When I was sixteen, I chose this one as my lyric piece for my grade 7 Trinity College Speech and Drama exams:

Purple Chaos

'Chaos is purple,' you said.

'A painter's phrase,' I said,

disagreeing.

'Chaos is a colourless force,

tossing up stars, flowers

and children.

and has no beginning,

and no end.'

But lying in bed,

washed up,

I know you are right.

You were talking of something else,

you were talking of death.

Purple chaos has surged through me,

leaving me stranded -

a husk,

an empty shell,

on a long white swerving beach.

Something has died,

something precious has died.

It may have been a flower,

a star,

it may have been a child -

but whatever it was, my love,

it seems to have died.

Haere ra, Te Ariki. Your Meg waits for you, as do many of your old friends. In 2000, Campbell spoke at the funeral of Lauris Edmond, reading a poem he'd written in her memory. It concluded:

"It will be back,

with the songs of birds,

to light up your house,

restore laughter to your children

and grandchildren.

Love never dies.

Love never dies."

Now that's all the news that's fit to print: love never dies.

more controversy at my alma mater

Pundit's David Young - another Old Waikatoan - has drawn attention this week to an academic controversy that's been simmering away at the University of Waikato for just over a year. A Master's thesis supervised by political scientist and all round stand-up guy Dov Bing was withdrawn from the University Library and the University's online thesis repository after a complaint was made by the subject of the thesis, Neo-Nazi Kerry Bolton (who I'm actually not going to link to, because, you know, sometimes there ARE NOT two sides to the story). The thesis is now back on the shelves, but controversy remains.



Like David Young, I was at Waikato when the "Kupka Affair" exploded nine years ago, and was actually in the midst of an honours dissertation on Modern Jewish Literature at the time. I knew all the parties involved and was present at most of the protests and meetings. I was not a journalist or unbiased bystander. So you may wish to discount my memories: taking over University Council Meeting in peaceful protest, the room bought to hushed and guilty silence as a Holocaust survivor spoke of the pain caused by being interviewed about being German in New Zealand by a man who publicly denies the historical truth of the Holocaust. Watching my professors weep openly as they discovered that the University, a community they'd been part of for over twenty years, treated them as troublemakers and pariahs for daring to question the validity of the awarding of Kupka's thesis.



I cannot help but see this new controversy in the light of attitudes that emerged at that time. Dr Bing, and others were labelled radical and impartial - as if it is possible to be impartial about the Holocaust - and their opinions were marginalised. To have the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research - another good man, Doug Sutton - perpetuate the notion that there is a balanced (ie two sided) approach to Holocaust denial - makes a mockery of what Universities stand for. The deniers use the discourse of balance to undermine the historic truth of events in Europe; they use our human discomfort with a period of human history we would rather forget; they use our inability to imagine six million dead to tell us that perhaps they didn't really die.



It is the reponsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies: not to provide mealy-mouthed justification for the protection of lies and those who propagate them. To attempt to discount Bing's supervision because of his "long-standing" views against neo-Nazi groups is more than ridiculous - it is obscene. Thanks to people like Dr Dov Bing and Dr Norman Simms , the University of Waikato was a place that encouraged global perspectives, historical analysis with depth and breadth, polyglot understanding of literary contexts, and canonical texts read with twenty-first century eyes. Let's hope they are given the freedom and support to continue to do so.