I’m in Mosgiel, just outside Dunedin. I didn’t know this before I came but apparently it has the highest retired population per capita in New Zealand; it’s known as ‘God’s waiting room’ (as in ‘God will see you now Mr Partridge’). My first story was on the fuss over the disabled car park outside the post office being moved ten metres down the road. It should be good though, there’s enough to keep me busy at work to not get bored and it’s all about learning the craft. Today I had to interview an 11 year-old who’d won a short story competition, reminds me that it’s been a long time since I’ve had contact with kids outside my family so probably good practice. I think I might have hit my own creative peak at 10, and I seem to remember being pretty happy then (there was one school bully who plagued me but I hit back at him that year and made him cry).
Even with the relatively tranquil pace my mediocre shorthand is somewhat of an obstacle. I’ll start using the Dictaphone as backup and I should have a bit of chance to practice shorthand, maybe I can get up to speed by the start of next year’s diploma course and do the test then. Toni, the Taieri Herald’s only fulltime reporter, made an observation that now seems blindingly obvious – to pass an 80wpm test easily you should be practicing the passages at 90 or 100wpm, just to get used to moving at inhuman speeds and so the test itself seems easy by comparison. Whereas I’d been practicing at 60 or 70, trying to get comfortable with that, which is the wrong approach. Hopefully catching up on shorthand late will be easier than trying to juggle it with a hundred other things while doing the rest of the diploma.
I went to the chemist and they gave me some vitamin B ‘executive stress’ pills – I ‘look too young’ for natural male hair loss (though old enough to take that as a compliment – and I have a friend my age, also a journalist named Dave, who lost his hair two or three years ago) so they said it was probably stress causing it, which I can believe. I’ve been like a learner driver on a hill-start at a red light, frantically revving and stalling and not moving forward. They said stress could also be behind my bleeding gums. Either that or gingivitis, but anyway I got some kind of mouth-rinse medication for it. Hopefully all this medication plus a gentler pace and change of scene will have me back in shape by the end of the three weeks. I feel a lot calmer - I’m not in a state of total burnout like autumn last year, I just made an error of judgement with the course and only gave it 75-80% of the effort required and got thrown a bit.
I had a minor creative leap the other day when it occurred to me that as the short stories I’ve written since last year have a thematic continuity (ie my personal preoccupations with bitching about the film industry, sexual frustration, lack of money and writer’s block) I could put them together as a book and self-publish. I made a book called Anterior Pathways in 2002 to keep myself occupied (& sane) while unemployed. I think I did 50 copies at the photocopiers and it’s now ‘out of print’. It was a good experiment, and I found that several people who weren’t interested in hearing my music were happy to read my prose. If I do a ‘sequel’ it’s already in somewhat darker territory so I’ll have to write another story or two and work it towards some kind of ending. Then I’ll be ready to leave the country I guess.
I also had my first go at playing Dunedin-style improvised music on Tuesday night, with the band Wolfskull. The music scene was my main motivation for coming here; the town has a strong musical history and there’s still good stuff happening though not on the same level. The music's quite different from Wellington’s free scene, still improvised chaos but evolved more out of guitar rock than free jazz. Unlike a lot of Wellington players, these guys don’t have degrees in music - which made it easy for me to fit in. I like how they've got all kinds of cool instruments (Hammond organ, analogue synthesizer, plus guitars, drums etc) but they're half broken - and no one seems to know how to tune a guitar. I also saw the Dead C earlier this year in Auckland; the whole ‘Dunedin sound’ thing is quite a different aesthetic approach, but one that feels oddly familiar. It’s slower than Wellington maybe – which is good as I really felt like a change of pace.
Likewise I’m boarding in Mosgiel with a Christian family (solo mother and teenage daughter) – Christianity was something that’s part of my upbringing in a very loose sense (I went to Sunday school briefly) but which never really took hold. I'm getting hints of what my life might have held if my family were southerners (they’re all in the North Island except for a cousin in Christchurch). It’s all some kind of North/South divide metaphor thing maybe. Yeah whatever.
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Posted by fiffdimension at October 21, 2004 08:19 PM | TrackBack