Postcards from New Zealand: Day Thirty-One

Today, I learned to ride a bicycle. Or, at least, I learned to sit on a bicycle and pedal, pedal, pedal, and wrestle the handlebars, and not fall down. Our hostess lent us her bike and we took it to the park, where I turned crazy loops around a lumpy practice field. By the end of my lesson, I could stay up on my own, though I could not control more than 50% of the bicycle's direction. This is rather odd, since unlike, say, a horse, a bicycle should not have its own volition.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Thirty

Today, we went to hire boots (i.e., rent them), because I am supposedly climbing Mt. Taranaki this weekend. I've rented bowling shoes and ice skates in the past, but never imagined that anyone would want to rent hiking boots. I can't say that I much like them; they are very heavy and make me look like a construction worker. But Graham assures me that they are very nice boots and that, once on the mountain, I will be happy to have them. Hiring these boots for the weekend costs $30 NZ. Later, we found that we had a parking ticket, because we'd left the car in a four hour zone all day long. The fine was $15 NZ, half the cost of renting boots for the weekend. This is a good illustration of Kiwi priorities.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Nine

Today, we went to the drugstore, because I have been having a lot of snot. Strangely, as soon as we walked in, a man in a white lab coat asked whether he could help us. We told him that I was suffering from allergies and he suggested a number of different products. Aldo (who is studying to be a doctor) began asking him technical questions about the medicines' contents, and he responded intelligently to all of them. Can you imagine walking into a Rite-Aid in New York, and encountering a knowledgeable person who wants to help you? We were astounded. Also, about fifteen minutes after I used the nasal spray he suggested, I had no more snot.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Eight

Today, we went tramping, which is Kiwi for hiking, along the West Coast's Hillary Trail, stretching from the ridges behind Bethells/Te Henga to Muriwai. After two hours of hard climbing, two hours from sun down, longing for a dip in the Tasman, and knowing that Muriwai was another hour ahead, Graham decided that it would be best to just stop at the beach below for a swim. The drop down was steep and slippery, but climbers past had left a rope, so we lowered ourselves down, one by one. Once on the shore, Graham boiled water for tea, for what civilized tramping expedition goes sliding down ropes to the sea without stopping afterward for tea? No matter that my shins were covered with mud, or that I had to crawl back up the cliff on all fours afterward. Even quadrupeds are civilized if they stop for tea.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Seven

Today was serene and beautiful, but we were stuck indoors for most of it, so, at five o'clock, we decided to take a walk to an outdoor cafe in the neighborhood. When we got there, they'd closed at four. The cafe is next door to a winery's bar and restaurant, but they had closed at four too. This is on one summer's last Saturday afternoons, with the sun shining sweetly for another few hours. New Zealand, why do you close so early?

Music: Talib Kweli and Jean Grae at the Powerhouse

It seems that my time in New Zealand, when not spent chasing chickens out of the house, is dedicated to hearing live performances of musicians with whom I'm not all that familiar. Looking for tracks produced by the 9th Wonder, I'd come to know a few of Jean Grae's tracks well, but I don't have any of her albums, or any of headlining Kweli's.

Hip-hop in Auckland seems a little out of place (Jean, Talib, and their back-up singer are perhaps the eighth, ninth, and tenth black people I've seen in this country—no exaggeration—and I've been here a month). That said, Jean was in high spirits, literally and figuratively, drinking Gray Goose straight from the bottle, and exhorting the audience to step up their game. She was particularly hard on the front row, stopping between songs to instruct a lardy blonde in hip-hop show etiquette: "Get your titties up off the motherfucking rail."

Sugar-coated belligerence aside, the girl can rap. No matter how drunk she got, she didn't miss one word; her delivery was crisp and clean, and her flow rhythmic and playful. Kweli, contrastingly, was loud but indistinct, hard and repetitive, like a jackhammer that paused every few minutes to exhort its own utility. While Jean and her back-up singer were making math jokes, Kweli was name-checking himself every few lines; while Jean told us to tip our bartenders, Kweli told us to buy his t-shirts. Not knowing his work well, but having always considered him a thinking-man's rapper, I have to admit that I was disappointed. If I'd never heard of either of them, and didn't know that hip-hop is, for the most part, a man's world, I'd have been surprised that Jean opened for Kweli and not the other way around.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Six

Today, I learned a new sport, devised by languishing mountain climbers and called slacklining, in which you string up a flat bungee cord between two trees, about three feet off the ground, and then walk across it. Of course, I'm not actually strong enough to hop up onto the cord on my own, but I spent the afternoon trying to balance on it, first one foot, then the other. Later, in the car, I could feel the wobble underneath my ungrounded feet, the way you do when you step off a boat.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Five

Tonight we went to this dinky Malaysian restaurant for dinner, which we always drive by and which is always totally packed. There was a table for two outside, but it was cold and we wanted to sit inside. They had a group of three move from a table for four to an empty table for eight and sat us at the empty table for four. Then, a group of five people came in, and they moved us to a now empty table for two to seat the five at our table for four. I don't imagine this ever happening in New York.

Books: The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft

When reading, I always keep a list of words I don't know so that I can look them up later. At home, I keep this list in a book by my bed, and never actually look up the words, but that is for another blog entry. Here in New Zealand, I keep them on a square of paper, and actually had cause to use a dictionary for another purpose, and therefore decided to look up some of the words used by Lovecraft I didn't recognize when reading The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Stories. Interestingly, of the five words I had time to look up, three of them (naphtha, mephitic, and ichor) had similar implications, that of foul-smelling organic fluids.

This is a Lovecraftian obsession, and while I especially enjoyed The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Thing on the Doorstep, the author has a number of stylistic hang-ups that I found rather distracting. I'm not commenting here on his personal mythology (e.g. the Necronomicon, a dreaded volume of witchcraft supposedly written by the "mad Arab Abdul Alhazred," and which is a Lovecraft invention, appears in many of his stories), but his tendencies to reuse tones and phrases, so that having read one good Lovecraft tale, you've as good as read the lesser ones as well. For example, the author often describes horrors as indescribable, and leaves them at that: "I can but ill describe;" "To describe their exact nature is impossible;" "I cannot describe the incidents and sensations;" "One need not describe the kind and rate;" "I can hardly describe what I saw;" "I can scarcely describe it;" "It would have been quite futile to try to describe them;" "The exact nature of this stirring is extremely hard to describe;" "This scene I cannot describe—I should faint if I tried it;" etc. A generous critic will suggest that Lovecraft in this way implies a horror outside of language, the literary analogue of Hitchcock's refusal to show any more of the murder in Psycho than the weapon's shadow followed by blood swirling down the drain. The brutality implied is much stronger, and generates a more delicious sense of dread, than does, say, the campy butchery of Evil Dead 2. A less generous critic will say that Lovecraft is lazy or incompetent or both.

Alternately, I would suggest that, as an intellect, Lovecraft is less like his hero Poe, who was most fascinated by the senses, than a later writer like Borges, a bibliophile fascinated by the intersection of annals and lore; history and myth, less interested in traditional story-telling than describing, say, a civilization on a faraway planet, or under the sea, via its art and architecture, in encyclopedic fashion. Lovecraft, aping Poe, isn't as dry as Borges, but its clear that underneath all of the "weird" and fantastic, the ichor and mephisis and naphtha, Lovecraft is more seriously attending to building an alternate intellectual world, a personal library of mythical volumes, describing mythical places with mythical creatures who have their own detailed mythical histories.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Four

Today, I cried while trying to parallel park. This isn't unusual; I don't drive in New York and so only find myself having to parallel park a few times a year. But parallel parking on the other side of the street is even harder. The reality is that, since the driver's seat is on the opposite side of the vehicle, one is the same distance from the curb as one would be in the States. So, it should be equally easy. Unfortunately, it is not. After I finished parking, and while I was still crying, I got out of the car and Aldo re-parked it.