Indecision

First published in Column Eight on the 31^st March 1993

Otago: wild coasts, arid inlands, lush pasturelands. A province of marvellous contradictions. That last word sums up not only the piece of Earth we inhabit but also this province’s prevailing attitude to its Anniversary Day.

Do other provinces take such an ad hoc approach to their holiday? Would we so arbitrarily toss around Labour Weekend, Good Friday or Boxing Day? (We have better reason to do so with Queen’s Birthday, since the Queen celebrates it twice each year.)

This year confusion was added to confusion as banks and offices took one stance, retailers another, and some schools a third, in order to fit in with a much more important event – the cricket.

With some shops believing that they have to trade every day, or die, shoppers had no idea what would be open in town.

What are we celebrating? Not much it seems. The newspaper presented some historical articles on the earliest settlers, and reported on the high school’s Anniversary Day speech. I didn’t see anything else.

Quite honestly, while we fluff around year after year, the whole point of the holiday ceases to be. What will take to make us unite? An Act of Parliament?

Indecision continues in another area: the Andy Bay roundabout. I had high hopes for improvement when I saw Citiworks back there digging and delving. Yes, the plot in the middle is bigger, with a nice kerb for cars to ride up on to. It still, however, looks like a base for some civic dignitary’s bronze statute which hasn’t arrived from the foundry.

Let’s face it, a roundabout doesn’t work in this location. Abandon it and put in some plain old-fashioned traffic lights before an enormous semi-trailer demolishes a Mini trying simultaneously to negotiate that pitiful zig-zag of a double lane.

Yet more indecision: the buses. The free day must have shown that Dunedinites don’t have any inherent problem about riding on buses. (Although I have some inherent problems about that seamy ‘You can do it on a bus’ piece of advertising. It’s about as clever as most toilet graffiti. 

Where Dunedinites do have problems is the basic fact that it costs more to travel daily on a bus than to take the car – in terms of petrol, at least. If every member of our family used a bus instead of being taxied everywhere (that’s assuming with the present timetable they could find a bus), our budget would skyrocket. Either that, or we’d just stop going lots of places.

The chicken or the egg. As long as prices stay up, and as long as there are no buses when they’re needed, who’s going to bother going on them?

More indecision: parking meters back in the main shopping area. Just when we’d got the city beginning to look halfway decent, someone want to clutter it up again. (Why not bring back overhead electricity wiring as well?)

The problem isn’t the fact of parking in the main street, it’s the fact of cars in the main street. Rather than plant rows of meters again, let’s think about making the Octagon through to Frederick St a pedestrian-only zone. The idea’s been around for years – let’s move with the times and get on with it.

And finally, a possible decision – 16-year-olds in night clubs.

I’d like to be optimistic about human nature, so I’ll try. Of course they won’t drink, of course no one will  buy drinks for them, of course the bar staff will have time to supervise, of course there won’t be trouble, of course the drinking problem in New Zealand won’t be encouraged.

Of course, pigs will become a problem to air traffic controllers.

 

Trooping the Colour 

The Queen herself didn’t actually celebrate her birthday twice a year; but we in New Zealand celebrated it on a day different to the actual day she was born. Apparently the first Monday in June is the day – in England – when the Trooping the Colour takes place. In England, of course, it’s also the start of Summer, and the ‘official’ birthday of whichever monarch is in power. New Zealand, without consideration, celebrates it at the beginning of winter, which makes no sense at all.

Otago Anniversary Day is supposed to be observed on the closest Monday to the 23^rd of March. However, most schools celebrate it on Easter Tuesday, even when the school holidays occur at the same time. Offices tend to close on the official day, but shops often stay open and also tack it onto Easter. Even though many of them now stay open as well!

I don’t know which Andersons (Andy) Bay roundabout I’m talking about here. Partly this is my ongoing dislike of roundabouts that aren’t really big enough, or are too big – or like the newest one in Oamaru, where I now live, are so big that they barely fit the intersection, and cars struggle to rotate around them. Ambulances and fire engines avoid it completely.images 

I’m intrigued that way back in 1993 I was advocating for a pedestrian only main street. I've long since changed my mind about this. In the last couple of years, part of George St (the main street), was turned into a semi-pedestrian street. Except that cars can drive along it single file, and in one direction, as well. It has not exactly proved popular, and worse, it’s removed even more parking spaces from the central city, something that a peculiarly ideological City Council (the one before the current one) decided was a good idea. Now traffic flow in the city is worse than it was, and finding a park is more of a nightmare than ever. Pro-bikies, who have gained sections of the roads where car used to park and where bikies seldom appear, say this is a great thing, carefully forgetting that the elderly don’t tend to ride bikes, that it’s very difficult to take home your weekly grocery shopping on a bike, that getting children to school is impossible on one bike and so on. And that Dunedin has many hills…

Glorious?

First published in Column Eight on the 7^th April, 1993

I see some protester has scrawled obscenities on the Cenotaph. Downwards at an angle above the inscription, The Glorious Dead, is a word both objectionable and objecting.

I may be wrong in thinking that the protester disagrees with the message engraved on this monument. Maybe he or she had nothing else to do. The obvious intent, however, was to cry out that the implications of the phrase, The Glorious Dead, are hard to justify. Our view of war, in general, has changed since the days when monuments were raised in memory of soldiers slain in battle.

While some of those who gave their lives for their countries may live on in glory, their deaths were anything but glorious.

Death on the battlefield is a horrifying alternative: a long slow lingering torture or a sudden extinguishing of the light. There isn’t much in between. Although the death arises in an attempt to halt the onslaught of the enemy, at the moment of truth, those slaughtered must find their self-sacrificing motives mixed with, or even overwhelmed by, the desire for life.

Yes, I know giving one’s life for one’s country is a noble thing. so we used to think; it’s an extension of the noble philosophy of giving one’s life for a friend. But what battle was ever noble? Most are outlandish horror.

An article in the news this week detailed the after-battle life of a Vietnam veteran, from Palmerston North. This man has been so affected he can no longer stand the stress of living amongst other people. A television documentary some months back showed US veterans living out their lives in isolation, far away from families and friends.

I’ve been considering this whole matter of glory in war, or the lack of it – and its morality – after reading the draft of a book on pacifism by a near-neighbour of mine, Walter Lawry.

In the days of World War II, patriotism was at one of its  heights, and the majority thought war had to be fought, come what may.

The pacificist minority were viewed as traitors, wimps, and cowards, people who  had no consideration even for the safety of their own wives and families.

Their heroism was viewed very bleakly by almost all who had dealings with them. Yet it takes as much courage to stand up to the majority who believe they are right, as it does to stand up to an enemy who threatens to overwhelm you, and take your life.

Ironically, it seems easier to die for your country than to live on in the ignominy of going against the common grain.

The story outlined in this book is the sort that blows away all the dusty geniality of our history, as we thought we knew it. It exposes the antagonism shown to the conscientious objectors, an antagonism equal in ferocity to that shown to the enemy.

As Lawry says, New Zealand had to prove itself more loyal to the Empire than the very country that made the Empire. In Britain, some ‘conchies’ were given a short prison sentence – perhaps a month. Generally they were put to useful work.

In NZ, they were separated from their wives and families, imprisoned for the duration of the war – up to five years – and wasted in terms of productivity.

More than forty years down the track we’re finally beginning to appreciate the price men paid for refusing to go off and kill.

Standing up to the current world view will always get you knocked down. And as Easter approaches, I’m reminded of that all-time great conscientious objector, Jesus of Nazareth. He had the same problem when He stood up for the truth. His enemies buried Him and tried to put Him out of sight.

When it comes to truth, things haven’t changed a lot. The only difference now is that the majority bury Easter, and Jesus, and the glorious truth He spoke about, either under an avalanche of pop-eyed bunnies and chocolate eggs, or indifference.

Walter Lawry lived a couple of blocks away from me, and I was given the privilege of reading his book, We Said No To War, before it was published, in 1994. I think I did a bit of proofreading on it.

Continuing on with Spanish!

 I haven't been keeping up with the groups of ten Spanish sentences that I was working on because I decided to finish memorising Psalm 139 in Spanish. (Salmos ciento treinta y nueve.) I'm just about there; I have about four verses to go. But it's hard work! 

I usually try and learn them when I wake up earlier than I intend, say about 4 am. I lie in bed with my phone under the covers so as not to disturb my wife, and go over and over them. By breakfast time, of course, the words have wandered off into the brain's systems somewhere, as they should, but they don't want to come back until later. Maybe they have to get endorsed somehow, as being bona fide members of the long-term memory club. 

Anyway, I haven't thrown away the idea of fluency through the Spanish sentences. There are currently three sets of ten; the third set is mostly struggling to get off the ground because of the clash with Salmos ciento treinta y nueve.

I considered earlier on today that it's perhaps it’s not essential to remember those sentences forever, as it were. None of them are important in their own right, and they don't connect with each other in terms of subject matter. They're random sentences from my collection of Anki cards. 

On the other hand, being able to remember them individually and correctly is good for me, so I'm better to aim for long-term retention. 

Initially with the first group of ten sentences I took one strong word out of each sentence as the key word and then matched it up with another strong word out of the next sentence. Once I had all ten key words I used to them to form a kind of 'story.' 

This worked pretty well on the first set, less so on the second, and not really at all on the third. Which indicates a flaw somewhere. That may have been that I realised I now had to do the work of connecting these key words up to each other in some way in order to remember them!

Having to remember the ‘key words’ in order to find the sentence in my head was just another thing to have to remember on top of the sentences themselves. Perhaps the brain bureaucracy thought that remembering two lots things at once was a bit unnecessary, and they've demanded I simplify. 

I'm part of a choir where the conductor started the year off aiming to teach us the Kodály sol fa method along with the new music we were doing. I was enthusiastic at first, and the choir tried hard to fit to this, but for all the method's values it meant we were having to learn two things at once, one of which was not readily connected with the music. And then we still had to learn the words of the songs separately. The method has its merits and is highly regarded in its home country, among other places. But somehow it just didn't gel for many of us. Possibly the brain bureaucracy was trying to ease its workload.

Back to the sentences. I needed a better way. 

For a long time I've used an alphabetical system to keep track of which piece of poetry or Scripture is next in my long list of memorised items. This consisted of attaching the name of a person I knew well to each item I learned. 

It was very satisfactory when I only had a smallish list, but once it got to the cumbersome stage - my list is now about two thirds of the way through the alphabet for the fifth time - it became hard to remember whether it was Harry or Harold who was H in the set I was working on, or Arnold or Arthur, and so on.

The trouble is that names, even though they may remind me of particular people I know well, have no intrinsic meaning. (Yes, of course they have meanings as words that have become names.) I've known quite a few people called Harry or Harold or Arnold or Arthur, or variations on those. Their names are important but the names themselves are essentially just 'tags' to identify them. They don't in themselves say anything memorable about the particular person. 

So as a memory system they're not ideal. But the alphabet is well and truly embedded in my head. If I combine that with using strong, vigorous, even violent nouns to invoke a picture in my imagination, I'm making better connections and should keep them more readily. If I give each Spanish sentences an alphabetical noun that immediately put something strongly visual in my head, then I'm a step closer to tacking them successfully onto the sentences. 

The nouns have to be very definite, easily visualised and very memorable. Definite and very memorable is more usable than just any old noun that comes along, such as A is for Apple. Better to have A is for Atomic Bomb, B for Battle (of Waterloo?), C for Car Crash (preferably not of my car, but perhaps it should be). Gabriel Wyman talks about strong violent associations in part of his book, though in a slightly different context; the idea has a long history of usage in memorization. 

I'm not sure of the logistics of putting this together as yet, but it's more encouraging than the feeling I have at the moment of losing the ground I've gained.

UPDATE 5.8.26: Salmos 138 now complete - just have to keep revising it until it's permanently stuck in the memory banks!

This is close to the version I'm learning, but still not the same. 
I'm amazed at how many Spanish translations there are of this Psalm. 

Encouragement

First published in Column 8, on the 24^th March, 1993

A few days ago I spent a pleasant half-hour writing a letter to an author, someone I know only through a book discovered by chance in the library. I’ve never come in contact with the man before, and I’m not even sure if his other books will appeal to me.

However, the book I read (which was about the craft of writing), struck a chord on most of its 255 pages. The nearer I came to the end, the more I was sure I wanted to drop the writer a note.

Writing to authors isn’t something I do every time I read a book – if it was, I’d be writing letters all the year round. But when someone has written a book that really pleases me, and I wish it would never come to an end, then a few words of appreciation are always worth the effort.

Probably the first author I had the nerve to write to had been the victim of an unpleasant American review (the victim was a Brit).

Initially I wrote a rather stroppy letter to the magazine in which the review had appeared, telling them while everyone else had to put with and understand the American sense of humour, they didn’t seem to reciprocate by understanding anyone else’s. I believed that was the main reason why the reviewer hadn’t seen the point of the British book.

(A reviewer in the same magazine on another occasion claimed that the spellings on the British edition would be off-putting for American readers – perhaps the Americans really are becoming a different people.)

Surprisingly my pugnacious letter was published in the magazine. I photocopied it and the original review, and sent them to the author, along with a sympathetic letter which I hoped would ‘console’ him a little for the way in which his work had been attacked.

Naturally he was hardly grateful to the extent of sending me five free autographed copies of his book, but he did appreciate the fact that a reader had gone to the trouble of writing.

Writing to authors is a way of expressing appreciation for their work, and I’ve done it a few times since. Moreover, it establishes human contact that’s otherwise missing for most authors. Each of those I’ve written to have replied: in doing so they come across as ordinary people doing a job that most of us regard as something out of the ordinary.

Sure, authors get paid, and one or two out of a hundred are able to make a decent living. But apart from the payment, the mere sale of a book doesn’t mean as much to a writer as the fact that some other mind has taken hold of it, grasped its point and enjoyed it – or been stirred by it.

All writers like to be told how much their hard work has meant to their readers (incidentally, this isn’t a personal request to be inundated with fan-mail!)

Writers must work for the most part on their own; they have to cut themselves off from families and friends to get the work done; a tremendous number of brain cells are used up over a job that may barely make a ripple on the sea of books published each year.

For writers of books which aren’t bestsellers the encouragement of some readers must go a long way towards telling them what they’d done wasn’t wasted.

A short letter lets them know, months and perhaps years down the track from when they first conceived their ideas and shaped them into sensible sentences, that someone understands what they’re saying, and has responded.

Rob Lloyd Jones [see below]
from his web page

The author was John Jerome, and the book was The Writing Trade, the first book of his that I’d read. I really enjoyed Jerome’s work, the apparently effortless style, the quiet humour, and the ability to make something fairly ordinary seem extraordinary. Even the weather.

I also wrote at one time to an author of commentaries on Old Testament books. Dale Ralph Davis had by that time written several books covering the period of Biblical history from Judges to Second Kings. I received a very gracious letter from him, and still have it. I’ve read almost all of his books now, and re-read the history commentaries two or three each.

I don’t remember the incident about the British book I got ‘pugnacious’ about – so I haven’t a clue as to who the author was or what the book was called.

The most recent author I’ve written to is Rob Lloyd Jones, who among some thirty titles wrote a series of four kids’ adventure books. I found all four of these in the give-away section of the Waitaki library, where I do some volunteer work once a week. Sadly it didn’t look as though they’d been read much. However they turned out to be funny and imaginative and very readable. The main character, Jake Atlas, usually manages to unintentionally destroy quite a number of famous ancient treasures and famous places in the course of each of book; the Aswan dam in Egypt, for instance, or a well-known museum of antiquities, or some long-standing place of ancient worship, or the Terracotta Army, which goes down like vast rows of skittles. But he’s not out to destroy, but to save. He grows as a character through the series, and the last one has an ending that is surprising in light of the style of the books up to that point.