From The Morgue

Friday night, I stayed at the auld family hoose, and in my old bed, the bed I slept in throughout the Todman St years.
Man…
…it was way less comfortable than I remember.
—
Speaking of sleeping on furniture in Todman St, and it isn’t very often one gets to make that segue, old-skool Todman St visitors may be bemused to see my wonderful long couch appearing in an ad for alcohol moderation.
Which is sort of appropriate.
Looks like the end of the Pigphone party to me, 271KB pdf.
The couch is currently making a living in wee sister’s flat, performing much the same function there as it did in Todman St.
—
I was in the Hutt for the jubilee for my old school, St Bernard’s College. Was good fun, actually, though it would have been nice if the SBC first XV had managed to beat arch-rivals St Pats in the banner rugby match Saturday afternoon.
Highlight was chatting with old teacher Elsabie Prasad and her husband, about all sorts of stuff. Was good, that.

Today, 29 July, is the traditional date on which members of the Church of Daffyd celebrate the birth of Daffyd.
This year I have chosen to mark the celebration with a fierce dance along the Terrace, howling Daffyd’s praises into the night sky. Also, alcohol.
I have sat at the right hand of Daffyd for over ten years now, and man, it kicks all kinds of ass at those inter-religious quiz nights to say that my deity can pwn the lot of them.
Happy birthday, my lord.
———
[David is the originator and host of the additiverich blog collective as well as being a deity]

(1)
The first novel I wrote was called in move. It followed four guys through their last year at school. I came up with the personalities of these main characters when I was still in school, scribbling them down in the margins of my schoolwork – I still have all those notes, and the final versions who turned up on the page many years later are essentially the same characters.
(The creative process I actually used was to lift key character traits from friends and acquaintancs, and mix them up. I wanted the characters to remind me of people I knew, but to be different enough that the stolen personalities wouldn’t be obvious. What happened was, as soon as the writing started the characters became entirely themselves. Still, I can point to any defining personality feature on each of the main characters and tell you who in my school was the model for it.)
(2)
I came back to in move relatively recently, and figured out some deeper parts of the structure (my ignorance of which had been hampering the story in previous arrangements). I plotted the four characters on a diagram. They were differentiated in two ways. They had either trait A or trait B, and also either trait X or trait Y, so the characters were AX, AY, BX and BY. I can’t remember what names I used for the traits right now. (I think confidence vs insecurity was one pair, and control vs no control was the other, at least at one stage of thinking about it.)
(3)
Now. A few nights ago I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars again. I’d previously got two-thirds through it, and was enjoying it rather a lot, but decided against taking it on the plane when I left NZ in 2002. I figured I’d finish it in three hours and then have a big chunk of paperback taking up space in my bag. So now in 2006 I picked it up again. I decided to re-read Part 4 and see how my memory jogged. I chose Part 4 because it’s really short.
Part 4 is about the first psychologist on Mars, coming apart at the seams as he provides support to the first Mars colonists. He tracks the colonists on two axes, introvert-extrovert and labile-stabile (basically, labile means moody and changeable, whereas stabile means of a constant mood). He cross-references these two axes and discovers he’s recreated the Greek model of four temparaments – sanguine is extravert/stabile, phlegmatic is introvert/stabile, melancholic is introvert/labile, and choleric is extravert/labile.
The text has a diagram. When I saw it, I reacted with shock, because I recognised it. It matched my in move diagram.
Which is when I realised my four characters fit the model pretty much exactly. When I was scribbling notes at age 16 I had, unwittingly, created archetypal examples of the four temperaments. (Scott – choleric. Richard – sanguine. Adam – melancholic. Dennis – phlegmatic.)
(4)
Then it gets a little freaky.
Way back when I wrote the second draft of the book I wanted to play with the symbolism a bit. Following instinct, I related each character to one of the four alchemical elements, earth, air, fire and water. Pure instinct. I just knew which one fitted which element.
Well, turns out I got them right. Choleric goes with fire, sanguine with air, melancholic with earth, and phlegmatic with water.
That kinda blew me away. Typing this now, it’s still blowing me away. Me, now: away, blown. It’s incredible how deep these symbols go inside our heads.
Think on it for a second: these patterns and structures used to conceive of the world in operation thousands of years ago in a very different culture, they come bubbling up out of the subconscious of a pretty ordinary Kiwi kid in the now. There’s no real mystery to it, but there is amazement in what it says about us, about our minds and our cultures and how they all work. There is wonder. I think it’s wonderful.

Today, July 23, was supposed to be Burn The Beehive Day.
Today was intended to be a new national holiday when all New Zealanders could put aside their differences and gather together, metaphorically and literally, to enjoy the burnination of an iconic loved/hated NZ building, and thereafter commemorate it annually with a long weekend.
But this promising new celebration isn’t going to be held this year. No, too many New Zealanders feel strongly about the buildings being destroyed in the Middle East to smile at the destruction of a building here. And how, in this atmosphere of international tension, will it be possible to emphasise that BTBD is an apolitical expression of mutual respect as well as the sheer joy of burnin’ stuff? The possibility that BTBD would be co-opted by one political pressure group or another is too great.
And so, with sadness, but with confidence that this is the right decision, it has been decided that the first BTBD will wait for next year.
Then, crowds will gather together in the courtyard of New Zealand’s parliament, and holding their little waxen Beehive candles they will watch as fires are lit in the Beehive. Children will clap and parents will smile and teenagers will look up from their cellphones for a moment. MPs will stand with labour unionists and business roundtable members, all united. All of New Zealand will join hands and, together, sing for our unity, our communal goodwill, and our mutual appreciation for burnin’ stuff up real damn good.
Next year.

Fragment One:

(one of many pamphlets scattered today in the quad area at Auckland University of Technology)
Fragment Two:

Photo caption: Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border, Monday, July 17, 2006.(AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)
(Via This Modern World )
Fragment Three:
Israeli deaths: 29
Lebanese deaths: 300
(Via today’s BBC news article)

I don’t get irritated too often. However, some things do rub me entirely the wrong way. My pet peeve, as anyone who has seen me negotiate the sidewalks of Edinburgh during Festival season will know, is bad walking. I dislike it even more than bad driving, maybe because it’s so much less potentially fatal. (That makes sense in my brain.)
Here, then, is a rare Proclamation of Religious Truth from the Holy Church of Leon (God and true-King-of-France).
Venal walking sins:
Scenic walking
The sinner is more interested in looking around himself than in looking where he’s going, and he isn’t trying to minimise his impact on other pedestrians. Scenic walkers stop unexpectedly and generally move slowly, which can cause minor traffic disturbances on a low-usage pavement and severe clotting on a busy pavement.
Text veering
The sinner is so busy texting that she doesn’t realise she’s moving in a diagonal, until she does, when she overcompensates and starts moving in the other diagonal. Repeat at unpredictable intervals.
Jittering
The sinner is weak of spirit and freaks out every time he realises there are other human beings also walking in the same area. Can be counted on to move the wrong way when approaching someone, to pause an inordinately long time when turning a corner into someone’s way, and generally to make everything hard for everyone by trying not to bother anyone.
Mortal walking sins:
Slow-downing
The sinner is walking along at a reasonable pace, and then she slows down a bit. Then she slows down a bit more. Then she slows down a bit more. Then she finally comes to a complete halt. Throughout this entire exercise, she never once looks behind to see if she is inconveniencing anyone. On a busy pavement, where overtaking can be difficult, being stuck behind a slow-downer is very frustrating indeed.
Erraticising
The sinner is all over the place. Changing speed, changing direction, turning unexpectedly and without checking for other people. This sin combines unpredictability with a complete disregard for other pedestrians. Erraticisers are the leading cause of pedestrian collisions, which you’d think would teach them to stop their erraticising, but somehow this doesn’t happen.
Wide Pavementing
Taking up the entire width of a pavement without being aware of people moving faster than you is walking’s greatest sin. Usually this takes a group of people, but narrow pavements can be occupied by one person with a bag.
This sin is most often committed by the slow. A particularly frequent sinner formation is the husband-and-wife wide-bottom no-awareness pair, but also common are the three-blind-old-ladies, the seven-clueless-teenagers, and the two-arrogant-bastards.
If anyone ever has to step into the road to get past you, then you have committed this terrible sin, and you WILL go to hell.

[x-posted from morgueatlarge email list and LJ]
Hey folks,
the NZers in the audience may be interested to hear that in today’s
Dominion Post is an article about experiencing Mexico’s Day of the
Dead, written by me.
The non-NZers can just feel all proud of me or whatever.
(I am kinda pleased. Although I haven’t seen it yet, so it’s probably
been subedited to death. But anyway.)
🙂
Hope all is well in the world,
~`morgue

I confess to not being entirely informed about what’s happening re: Israel/Lebanon at the moment. The short version seems to be, faced with some provocation (exactly what this was – the missile strike? the kidnapping? – is unclear to me), Israel has gone full-bore on the offensive, and Beirut is under fire.
It’s hard to see this flareup of violence as anything other than a continuation of an international relations strategy begun after the election of Hamas. Back in late January I was optimistic about what that election would mean for the region. I didn’t expect then that the democratically elected government of Palestine would be so thoroughly disenfranchised and vilified by the international community; all of my hopes for a moderate future for Hamas fall apart if the rest of the international community condemns them out of hand.
Israel’s recent invasion of Gaza was a development of the response to Hamas, and this massive response on Lebanon is a further development. In six short months, there has been a shift in the way things are done such that violence and warfare is back on the table in a way it hasn’t been in years.
I can’t see a way for this to get better any time soon. It’s clear from what media coverage I’ve seen that Israel’s actions are being tacitly condoned even by liberal voices. Expect more belligerence from Israel’s big guns in response to more provocation from furious Arab groups.
I only hope the Iran nuclear situation stays bubbling under for a while. This recontextualising of middle-east relations is, I suspect, also about Israel being positioned by the US to where it can launch bombing raids on Iran’s nuclear capacity with relative impunity (and the US gets to keep its hands fairly clean). If this is ever realised, then there really will be hell to pay.
EDIT: Having done a bit more reading about what’s happened, I’m now aware of the huge inadequacy of my short version, above. Oh well. The rest still fits, though.