I met David Merritt late last year when a colleague introduced us. We had a coffee and talked poetry and chickens and politics and I was very impressed by his dry, self-effacing humour and sharp-as-a-tack brain. When you talk to David it isn’t like the tennis of usual conversation: my turn, your turn, my turn, your turn, in measured thwoks….it’s more like chasing a snake through the grass – sometime he is right there, present and gleaming and you’re close – so close! and then he slips off into some elusive (but usually hilarious) tangent and you’ve lost him again.

He’s a poet – a unique one, in that he makes small books out of the waste of other books (usually Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics which he rescues by the box-load from Dump shops because they don’t sell.) He tours the country, sitting on the street, making books, talking to people and selling his books out of a little wooden drawer ‘for the price of a good cup of coffee’.

Last night he ended his latest tour of the country in Palmerston North (he lives kind of near by in Mangamahu) so I went along and it was a grand evening out.

His performance is more ‘experience’ than typical reading, because he shuffles around the room, interacting with people so there is no illusion of the line between poet and audience, taking requests, talking and poking fun, laughing at himself and generally filling the space with his gentle, delightful presence and aroha.

The night reminded me of a parlour performance I attended by the incredible actor Warwick Broadhead – there was the same invitation to people (not literally, but invoked) to engage, to be more present in their lives, to challenge what they are being offered and turn it into something better.

The local ‘support’ act was Rob Thorne who does amazing things with Nga Taonga Puoru and effects pedals. Then David was accompanied by Chris Heazlewood (formerly of King Loser) on guitar playing incidental music between and behind the poems. The guitar playing was subtle and interesting and enhanced the poetry very well.

There is no doubt from his poetry that David is a romantic – nature is beautiful and pure, jobs are for sell-outs, the disenfranchised are heroic, relationships with women are either high-romance or hate – however, I am entirely susceptible to this manner of romance, so heartily enjoyed it and found myself crying at one of David’s ‘barbaric yawp’-style poems exhorting the reader to shoot him if he finds himself in a litany of deadening situations – the kind that probably most of the audience dwell – suburban housing, day jobs etc.

I had a great night and went home fizzy with ideas and inspiration. If the David Merritt Experience passes through your town – I reckon you should definitely make the effort go. It is entertaining, involving, funny, moving and much, much better than anything on the TV.

so I went op-shopping again…

February 22, 2012

cluttering, frugal, op shopping, recycling, second hand, simple pleasures, textiles, thrifted

6 Comments

Yes, you can take the clutter away from the girl, but you can’t keep the girl out of the op-shops. To be fair, where I used to op-shop weekly (even daily when I had a small baby I needed to walk to to sleep in the pram and we lived two blocks from an excellent op-shop) – I’m now go perhaps once every two months. I enjoy it a lot more for going a lot less, too.

It had been so long since I went, I had a great time. I saw an old mattress base with this incredible 50s fabric on it, which I didn’t buy but photographed for your enjoyment:

I bought some very useful work-clothes in the op-shop’s half-price sale and I also bought these sweet, and useful Agee jars. I’ve never seen the little lidded ones before. I have a soft-spot for Agee jars – they were always what bottled peaches and plum jams came in when I was a kid and people used to preserve more. I love the old-fashioned font – it might say ‘Agee’ but it says ‘Happy’ to me.

& they make sweet vases, right?

the things you keep which are not yours

February 20, 2012

decluttering, impermanence, journaling, recycling, second hand, simple pleasures, writing

11 Comments

A little more on stuff…

…I just read THIS BOOK. In it, the author Corinne Grant explores the roots of her hoarding habits. I found this description of her intertia around organising her possessions interesting:

‘The fear of doing something I might later regret overruled any desire to throw something out. If I threw out an old placemat, I might all of a sudden find myself completely unmoored from my past. If I threw out a cardigan my mother had given me for my twenty-third birthday, I might destroy the family bond that held us to each other. We don’t call our possessions our ‘belongings’ for nothing and … it felt like my belongings were the only things holding me together.’

I understand her attachment to the thing which links you to the person it represents. I utterly understand it. I understand wanting to keep a thing out of some misguided sense of respect for the person who gave it to you. In the past, I’ve hung on to gifts for years, thinking I was honouring the friend who gave it to me, only to have, in one case, him mock the very object and when I protested that he had given it to me in the first place, he responded: ‘God, did I? For god’s sake get rid of it. It’s hideous.’

Once Corinne Grant begins to declutter and sort out her life, she catches the decluttering bug and becomes addicted to her new fixation, spending a whole winter going through her stuff:

‘I was an archaeologist excavating my own life, determined to dig myself out of the rubble.’

I found this sentence very poignant – possibly the most poignant thing I’ve read around decluttering. Doesn’t this one sentence get to the heart of what decluttering is all about? A sense of having lost oneself? A feeling the the way to find oneself again lies in dealing with belongings and trying to establish what they say about you?

As you know if you read my blog regularly, I spent the summer decluttering my house. It wasn’t that bad to start with – I’m no crazy cat-lady who can’t throw out an empty can or an old newspaper, but I was starting to feel like the cupboards and shelves were bulging and that I was hanging on to a lot of stuff for the wrong reasons – like nostalgia, ‘it might be useful one day’ and my need to be surrounded in creative materials.

I was very thorough and heaps of stuff went – to friends who would actually use it, to opshops, into our garage sale (and I still have a large pile of stuff to be listed on trademe – which I should probably be doing now instead of writing this….). I got rid of clothes I had emotional attachments to but no longer wore, I got rid of my record collection, I got rid of piles of art materials, books I knew I’d never get around to reading, unwanted gifts…I think I did really, really well. However…

there remain two stumbling blocks:

-family ‘heirlooms’ – things which have been passed down to me which used to belong to my grandparents, or great-grandparents – these items range from the useful (a gorgeous green jug that was my maternal grandmother’s, which I love and use most weeks to put flowers in) to the space-taking and useless (a musty fox fur coat, my grandmother’s debutante satin gloves – which don’t fit me, because she had tiny hands) to the precious (cameo rings, war medals) to the sublime (beautiful gilt-edged, leather-bound 140 year old family Bible) to the ridiculous (a small old cardboard box full of my grandfather’s pen nibs. He was a draughtsman and took great pride in his pens. The nibs are completely rusty and useless. The whole artefact is useless and not particularly beautiful. It is my favourite reminder of him, and I love it.) I also have my great-grandmother’s mantle clock. It is large! The key is long lost so I can’t wind it up, making it useless. I can’t throw it out. My great grandmother was not a wealthy woman. She didn’t have much. I feel, tangibly, if irrationally, that throwing out that mantle clock – the only thing of hers I have – would be like throwing HER out.

I don’t know what I think about the presence of these items in my life. Some of it makes sense (the green jug: beautiful, useful, translates to a contemporary setting) some not (the ridiculous attachment to a musty old box of rusting pen nibs, keeping old satin gloves which don’t fit me, worn to a ball by a grandmother I never met.)

The things I love the most from my ancestors are usually quirky things, rather than precious things. I hear from those who knew her that my grandmother loved to tell fortunes, read tea-leaves and cards, so for this reason, I love her tea-leaf-reading cup. It’s one of my favourite possessions. (That’s it above – I always have it on my mantlepiece.)

My grandfather went to India during World War 2 – I love the little wooden deities he bought back from India (below.) These speak to me of adventure and fear and being miles from home, and of thinking of those at home at the point of purchasing these little souvenirs – they speak to me of his war experience much more than his actual war artefacts: his medals and papers.

Ah, family heirlooms! The threads of attachment weaving down through generations…

The other area with decluttering where I have hit a wall, is with my writing papers.

I have writing papers – early drafts, submissions, correspondence, publications, course materials etc etc – dating back as far as high school. They start with my high-school poetry books and the punk ‘zine I wrote as a teenager and then they chart my progress as a writer from there….

All in all, including my journals, it comes to about five big boxes of stuff.

Is this a lot?

Why am I so very attached to it?

Is there any point in keeping it?

If I let it go, what does that mean for all those years of learning and struggle? While I am the sum of those parts – the writer who sits here today – does getting rid of the tangible evidence of my struggles, and travails and triumphs and experiments diminish them?

Does it diminish me?

I don’t know. I really don’t.

I feel very close to being able to let it all go – to be able to throw it all on our next bonfire – but should I? What should I keep, if any of it?

How much ‘rubble’ in the archeology of a life is too much?

snail mail is love in action

February 15, 2012

simple pleasures, snail mail, these are the people in my neighbourhood, writing

cape gooseberries

February 14, 2012

food, grew it myself, literature, my friends are clever, poetry, simple pleasures, yet another photograph of a plant

5 Comments

A friend gave me a spare Cape Gooseberry bush at the start of summer and it has settled in nicely to my garden. I’ve recently had the first fruits off it – the taste of the berries, which I haven’t eaten for many years, took me right back to being a kid.

I used to take the long route home from primary school in late summer, so that I could walk past the house which had a giant Cape Gooseberry bush growing near the path, in the perfect spot for naughty schoolkids, like me. I would stand there and slide them out of their husks, popping them into my mouth and eating them until my stomach hurt.

One of my favourite New Zealand poets, Lynn Davidson, has not one but two Cape Gooseberry poems in her book ‘Tender’ (Steele Roberts). I love this book very much and often return to it, although I don’t own it as I long assumed I did – I have Sarah Laing’s copy.

I discovered this in the most embarrasing way. When Lynn Davidson read at the Palmerston North City Library last year as part of her stint as Visiting Artist at Massey, I confidently toted along ‘my’ oft-read copies of ‘Tender’ and ‘How To Live By The Sea’ to her reading, thinking it would be nice to get them signed seeing as I like them both so very much.

Well, Lynn seemed pleased to see that I had both of her books and she opened ‘Tender’ to its title page – to my horror, her signature was already there, and a dedication ‘To Sarah’…it was one of those ‘World, swallow me up!’ moments. Lynn guffawed and slid it back across the table to me and opened up ‘How To Live By The Sea’ for signing. To my horror times a thousand, that book was also already signed – this time ‘To Lynn, with love from Lynn’. I remembered that Lynn Jenner had lent me her copy. CRINGE!!

Luckily for me, Lynn Davidson thought it was hilarious and teased me with something like: ‘Typical tight poet!’ or some such – but my cheeks burned on through the night with embarrassment.

(Sarah and Lynn J, if you want your copies of Lynn’s book back – well, now you know where they are.)

((When I got home, I was gratified to find on my bookshelf that I DID own my own copy of ‘How To Live By The Sea’, but had taken the wrong one along. My copy remains unsigned, at this point in time – as I don’t want to awaken the memory of that incident in Lynn D’s mind by asking her to sign it – except, of course, she may read this post, in which case, hello, Lynn and thanks for being the gracious creature you are!))

Anyway, this is all a digression from Cape gooseberries. Eating my own Cape gooseberries, reminded me of the two terrific poems by Lynn. One of them follows.

If you’ve never had a Cape gooseberry – well, they are strange and wonderful – the size and consistency of a cherry-tomato, but a lovely orangey colour and the most highly-scented, exotic flavour. Sort of like strawberries and limes and tomatoes all mixed together, except of course not really like that at all because the flavour is unique. In any case, they are delicious! You know they are ripe when the pretty husks they grow in go papery and brown.

Cape gooseberries

In a canopy

over the curves

of the hose

the Cape gooseberry plant

suspends its Chinese lanterns.

The fluted cases transparent

as peeled skin.

inside, the orange centre

glows. Beside the house

it glows, as if it were

candle light. It attends to beauty.

Inside the power bill clamours

for attention, noisier

the the t.v., noisier

than the children. If

I pay it all today we could

eat Cape gooseberries for dinner

rolling the orange orbs

on our tongues, glimpsing

their small light

between our teeth.

By Lynn Davidson, from ‘Tender’ (Steele Roberts, 2006.)

the garage sale

February 13, 2012

community, frugal, these are the people in my neighbourhood, thrifty, zen

2 Comments

All summer, as I went through the house room by room, cupboard by cupboard, this corner was full of a growing pile of stuff for a garage sale.

It grew and grew and sat there in the corner – reminding me to keep clearing out and to try not to accumulate so much in the future.

Sometimes I would put things on the pile, and then take them off again. Usually I returned them to the pile. The strings of attachment – tugging, twanging.

On Saturday we had the garage sale. The finale for the summer of decluttering.

We sold heaps and made just over $300. Given the most expensive thing was $30 and most things were priced at $1, this might give you some idea of how much stuff we got rid of.

Without wanting to sound ungrateful to the people who came along and bought our stuff, lining our pockets…some of them were very eccentric! Firstly, we had people door-knocking the night before – wanting to get a first look. We politely told them to come back in the morning.

Then in the morning, although we advertised the garage sale as starting at 8am, people starting arrive just after 7 and many of them stood, in the fairly brisk windy weather, at the gate while we set up, waiting and calling out to us to let them in. Now, that’s keen.

There were the two women who had a physical fight over a rusting enamel jug, whacking me in the chest in the process, because I got in their way.

There were the record collecting people – who were all great, actually, but quirky as anything. Especially the older guys who reminded me very much of Harvey Pekar, in his comic strips about collecting ‘sides’.

There were the hard-core hagglers, who pick up five things costing a dollar and say – ‘Would you take $2? How about $3?’

But like I say – we are grateful they came! And spent their hard-earned money on our unwanted possessions.

I sold a lot of my records. It was a big decision to sell my records and I thought I would feel quite pained to see them go, but the morning was mostly pain-free – the only pang I felt was when someone bought my Velvet Underground record. Pang! Pang! Bye, bye iconic Andy Warhol banana. Then off it went down the driveway and I was $5 richer.

Now the corner, which had started to ressemble the trash-heap from Fraggle Rock is clean and clear and empty. I mopped the floor and placed this chair in the corner and a deep sense of peace came over me.

All around the city are people pleased as punch with their bargains while here at my house, I am happy about my empty corner, my lightened load.

‘May I admire you again today?’

February 10, 2012

i am a dork

5 Comments

There was a brief window in the 1980s when people told me I looked like Molly Ringwald. I have brown eyes, full lips, thick hair. I loved Molly. I loved the way she chewed her lip, how she gave off an aura of ‘I’m quite resilient, but also tender, baby, tender like the tiniest pea. Don’t come near me, but also come over and shuck me and eat me off a spoon.’

That window when people said I looked like Molly, Molly was so very hot then, and I loved her anyway. It wasn’t like I had to start loving her just because people said I looked like her. That was my pretty time. It was a good time. It was over before I had time to bask. I’m thankful it happened at all.

I even loved Molly’s name, like ‘dolly’ but with the gravitas of an ‘M’, like a gangster’s moll. She just kept getting hotter and brighter. She took ’16 Candles’ and raised it a ‘Breakfast Club’, then slapped down a ‘Pretty In Pink’.

Aah – ‘Pretty In Pink’ – I have seen it dozens of times. Although I’m pushing 40, it remains one of my favourite films.

I can’t see how bad it is, how cheesey because I can only see it with my teenaged, adoring eyes. That movie has everything perfect: The Smiths, second hand clothes, a record store, class war, an excellent soundtrack, ….and a funny alternative boy called ‘Duckie Dale’.

Duckie! He was so perfect and fey and heartbreaking. The scene where Duckie is sitting in his ugly bedroom on a dirty mattress, because he is poor and has no proper bed and he is longing for Molly (in the film, her character is called ‘Andy’ but really Molly only ever played Molly so I will call her Molly), but he knows it is fruitless, that she only loves his wit, the wit that is a blanket he hides under, an umbrella to shield him from how ugly and cruel the world is – that she will never love his sad, yearning entrails, his melancholic viscera, that he will have to carry on cracking jokes into her benevolent indifference because she will never be able to see him ‘in that way’- in that ‘love, love, won’t you run your hand along the swell of my inner thigh. Won’t you lie down on this mattress beside me so we can just gaze at each other without saying anything’ way.

In that scene, I think Duckie thinks, ‘although – Molly Ringwald- we laugh so hard together and I love that we laugh- it is not funny how much I love you, it is as serious as a dirty mattress on a floor in a shitty house somewhere west of privilege and south of comfort and yes, on the wrong side of the tracks, and you are the sun that comes in my curtains, you are the complete perfection of The Smiths playing over this scene. Yes, that is how deeply and seriously I love you, Molly, as serious as your alcoholic Dad and my broke-down house, as serious Morrissey’s voice on a dark Sunday afternoon.’

The Smiths’ song which plays over Duckie’s scene is ‘Please, please, please let me get what I want‘, but he won’t get it, certainly he won’t get Molly, not in the way he wants her. There is a scene at the end of the film where Duckie has his arm around a girl at the prom, so that the ending isn’t in any way sad, so that we aren’t left thinking ‘sure, Molly got her rich guy, but what about Duckie?’, but we know that he isn’t really into that girl. It’s just a noble act for Molly’s sake. He loves Molly so much he doesn’t want her to feel guilty.

That is how awesome Duckie is.

I think that is why ‘Pretty In Pink’ haunts so many aging Gen Xers – because, now even more than then, it’s clear that Molly chose the wrong guy. Blane (as Duckie said: ‘Blane? That’s not even a name, it’s an appliance!) might have been rich, but he was a vapid a-hole. The film is a tragedy, because Molly should have chosen Duckie.

I sure would have.

three declarations on a thursday

February 9, 2012

chickens, food, gardening, grew it myself, life is beautiful, nature cure, simple pleasures

2 Comments

Gardening helps me get out of my head and into my body.

I love our chickens.

Rhubarb cooked with a little bit of sugar and rose-geranium smells like turkish delight.

crafternoon tea

February 3, 2012

community, craft, these are the people in my neighbourhood

3 Comments

At work (City Library) we’ve been running ‘Crafternoon Tea’ on Friday afternoon where local craft enthusiasts can bring some handiwork, we provide a bit of afternoon tea and they can meet each other, sit and knit or sew and gossip. It’s not a new idea – I stole it from similar things in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. I don’t know who turns up in the bigger cities, but one thing I’ve been surprised about here, is the mix of ages we’ve had – which I think is fantastic. The ages mix so well! At one point I was a little nervous that the older ladies might be offended by the hand-work of my punky friend Alice. She knits ‘c**t-cloths’, cloths for washing ‘downstairs’ – pink cotton cloths with the word ‘c**t’ knitted into them. However, the older ladies just laughed and laughed and one said: ‘Oh good idea, dear, after all you wouldn’t want your c**t-cloth ending up in the kitchen by mistake.’

We’ve had all ages from teenaged girls doing super-hip craft, embroidering ironic things on to tote bags and knitting giant scale cowls…to women in (I’m guessing) their late seventies, like the lady in the photo above. I’ll call her Celia, which isn’t her name – but I don’t know how she’d feel about me writing about her here so I’ll give her a psuedonym.

Celia is hilarious.

That tablecloth she is working on in the photograph above – she said: ‘Well, I’ve been working on this for nearly 20 years, but I lost it for about 10 years. I found it again just before Christmas when I was looking for some buttons in my craft room. When I started doing it, I was doing it for my mother, but of course she carked it in those ten years it was lost, so now I’m doing it for my daughter.’

When I offered the biscuits around (Chocolate digestives and wine biscuits) Celia said: ‘Oh it’s so nice to see some plain biscuits on offer. I don’t eat chocolate any more, you see. About ten years ago, I was just getting fatter and fatter because of my terrible sweet tooth so I said to chocolate – ‘I’m finishing with you, chocolate!’ and I’ve stuck to that. After all, when you finish with a boy, that’s it, you don’t look back. So why should finishing with chocolate be any different?’

Priceless.

Today is Crafternoon Tea day. I hope Celia comes!

workplaylife

February 1, 2012

life is beautiful

—helenlehndorf

'Only connect.' -E.M.Forster

The David Merritt Experience