Missing photos and misinterpreted ruins
As I struggle to shake off today's hangover, though, I can't lay my virtual hands on any photos from the launch. I lost Skyler's camera last September, after I got too close to the edge of the reef on 'Eua Island, and got knocked for six by a wave. I noticed various handheld devices flashing and beeping away yesterday, as I moved my thimble counter over the monopoly board version of the South Pacific that Paul and I had constructed, but I can't find any photos of yesterday's action in the blogosphere or on facebook today.
I have occasionally presented myself as a grumpy technosceptic and a foe of innovations like facebook, but I have to admit that the absence of authenticating images of yesterday's event fills me with an almost existential unease. Was it Richard Nixon or Marshall McLuhlan who said, back in the 1960s, that an event which wasn't reported on television didn't really happen? Perhaps today we could modify that quote, and say that a literary event which hasn't been preserved in the chaotic canons of facebook and the blogosphere never really happened?
Since I haven't got any authenticating photos to offer, I thought I'd post one of the shorter poems in my new book (I posted one of the longer poems here). The poem was written after I visited Muriwai Beach near the end of last year to inspect a ruined building which I suspected might have been built as a coastal observation post during World War Two, when many Aucklanders feared that Japanese forces might use their lonely West Coast as a 'back door' into New Zealand's largest city.
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Muriwai
A telescope, on a half-painted
deck - a telescope aimed over
Maori Bay, over gannets
that circle low, awaiting
permission to land
on that flat rock,
their aircraft carrier.
A telescope aimed
to blow up these details.
A taua of middle-aged Poms,
camped on an eroded
midden, between the bunker
and the beach - a taua armed
with chilly bins: with Tetley's,
Boddingtons, Victoria Bitter.
One of the Poms lies
apart from the rest,
on a bed of crushed lupins
and loose sand, and aims
an invisible rifle high
above his head.
Silently he shoots down
the monotonous flocks.
5 Comments:
Bah. Bourgeois.
Takapu are *never* monotonous!
Great launch on Sunday :-)
Maps I have some photos but haven't looked at them yet.
I'm going to New Plymouth tomorrow. want to look the art gallery (where Len Lye's work is) and other things. I've been down there before but might take a slower look.
I could send some photos sometime or put some on Face Book.
Your and Bronywn's stories/poems are great. I enjoyed the Monopoly and Michelle Leggott's poem and intro etc
Good to see Brett in good form and Cerian as well as Murray Edmonds, Farrell Cleary and Paul Janman and others such as Denys Trussell. Ted Jenner enjoyed it also.
Interesting poem here.
Briefly also I see we are in Jacket and I thank Jack for helping me (and you and the others) there. I'll expound more to Jack when I get back re that.
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