Monday, February 28, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Reflection.
I was reflected in two full length mirrors and couldn't tell if I was about to take a step forwards or backwards. The mirrors created infinite copies of my form, bouncing light against pools of silver glass. I imagined stepping into the image, flattening everything into the two dimensions that raced around my form. I felt like Narcissus: all my thoughts were focussed on this mirage of multiple-me. Then I noticed the face staring back was not my own.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Pseudohaiku for you.
half filled fadge my
soft bed for now
stare at pieces of sky in the roof
soft bed for now
stare at pieces of sky in the roof
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Prologue.
The great New Zealand novella undoubtedly has cancer of the eyes. Crazy cells which once lay on the surface of its plot and style, have replicated and oozed deep within the structure and form of its characters, setting and theme. Daring to look up from its navel and gaze outwards, surveying You in preference to Itself, with scant regard for its own well being, the novella's existence is defined by a sickness.
These malignant words are created vicariously from the patterns and rhythms of the broadcast noise of this young South Pacific country. Aotearoa New Zealand. A country whose history is by some measures barely cut free of its umbilical cord, and by others rich in the passage of time and the passage of navigation across the vast oceans surrounding its shores. These words are woven from the fabric of the land, from the tapestry of its people. It is they who write this. The words of the great New Zealand novella, despite its cancer, live on through your interpretation of their meaning. You save this from death. While it lies here, still and unseeing, having peered into the musty corners of the countryside and cities, under the beds and in the underpants drawers of bankers and farmers and florists and building consent officers, you are its life support. You in your recliners, on your decks and patios with their steel and glass balustrades overlooking Pauanui's canals; you on your bed, with you feet in slippers, the cat curled up next to you as you take the weight off and rest for an hour in the afternoons becuase you've earned it with a life of working for the man and paying taxes. You in your regular place on the bus, glad for an excuse not to look up and acknowledge the sad humanity that travels with you to air conditioned (if you're lucky) offices where you dutifully make money for someone else while you take home just enough to survive and sometimes less. You in your shearer's hut in the Southland high country, the southwesterly clawing at the corrugated iron, your back aching, your mind wandering to Friday night when you'll lean on the bar and engage with people for a precious few hours. This story is yours. You read it and it is shaped to fit your world. We're all in this together. The great New Zealand novella cannot survive without the input and influence of those who absorb its words and distill them into new meanings. The cancer has spread from the eyes of this novella and seeps dreadfully into the yous and wes.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Friday, February 4, 2011
Pseudohaiku for you.
Your voice makes me
feel ill; the shape
of a headache slowly expanding.
feel ill; the shape
of a headache slowly expanding.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Post.
One energy sapping, humid – in the southern hemisphere at least – February morning, the author awakes and decides to compose a post for the blog that he's created (a post which is essentially a brief story, although shorter than a traditional short story, clumsily contained within one long sentence (a sentence full of punctuation and embedded clauses that attempts to give it a flow but falls short of achieving that greatness of fluidity all good writing aspires to) in which plot, character, style, tone and theme are one and the same, leading to an unresolved tension between the author and the reader, alienating the purists – to whom the author is anyway ambivalent and therefore unconcerned by their tsk-tsking – and baffling the critics) so he sits at his keyboard and composes the words – words which combine to fulfill the brief he's given himself and which skip at uneven pace across the screen, just behind the flashing cursor, until their number seems about right; and then the post ends, somewhat unsatisfactorily it must be said, although allowing room for improvement which, if you contemplate more deeply than usual, is paradoxically a good thing, because if the unusual piece was perfection there would be no need to continue writing such tracts of text, as to emulate perfection once it has been achieved is just being greedy, for, as with time, even though perfection unto itself is infinite, there is only so much to go around each person.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
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