Real life impinging on fiction

Over the last few months I've been typing up old diaries from the 1990s - there were 700 pages of them, and I've only typed up just over 200 so far.

In the entry I copied today I was remembering an event that happened way back in 1954, when my grandfather suddenly died one Saturday. I'm guessing he had a heart attack, although I don't know this, since I was only nine at the time.

My mother and I lived with my grandparents, because she and my father had split up. He stayed behind in Australia while we came back to the family home in New Zealand.

My grandfather was a real father to me; I'd never really known my own father, as we'd left Australia when I was three, and I think he was often away playing at Chess Championships anyway.

Courtesy Pixabay

It struck me today that my three children's fantasies have some odd connections to these mothers and fathers and grandparents.

The mother and father in Grimhilda! have become remote and have little time for their one and only child, Toby. (In the original opera version of Grimhilda! the mother was much the same sort of character, but the father barely appeared at all. He made a shadowy entrance for literally a few seconds, said one brief line, and was never seen again.)

There's no sign of the mother in The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret until right at the end, though she's talked about early in the piece. Billy, the hero of the story, lives at home with his Dad.

In The Disenchanted Wizard Della also lives alone with her father. (There was to have been a mother, but she got cut out in an early draft.)

Now I don't have anything against mothers: my own mother was great, and in a kind of reversal, lived with us and our children for around 21 years, until she died. So I'm not sure why the mothers are missing for the most part in these stories.

The two very different fathers are perhaps fictional attempts to present the sort of father who might have been useful to me if he'd stuck around, though neither of them is the heroic type.

But what's more interesting is the older male character who appears in two of the three books. In the first he actually is Billy's grandfather, and though he's a nothing like my own grandfather, he does seem more outgoing than Billy's own dad, and plays a bigger part in the story.

Della, on the other hand, doesn't have any actual grandfather, but she has an older man who becomes a kind of grandfather to her. This is Mr Crinch, who when he first appears seems to have lost his marbles. This isn't entirely the case, but without him, Della and her cousin, Harold, would never make it back home again.

We all draw on real people to put into our stories, sometimes consciously, but more often unconsciously. While I don't necessarily think of members of my family when I'm writing my books (or even when I read them after they're completed), it seems that these people make their way into the stories anyway, without my noticing it. Certainly some of the emotions I experienced as a result of having known them have forced their way into the books. Hopefully they resonate with my readers.

A series of sentences on helmets of various kinds

From the (mostly) wonderful Kim Fabricius:
There are some churches that, for their παρρησία, [frankness] should have crash helmets in the pews – and others, for their bullshit, Wellington boots.

And from the equally wonderful Dave Pell:
There is no tantrum like a Put-Down-the-iPad Tantrum.
First I need to prepare. I put on my hazmat suit, helmet, and thick, dark goggles to make it less likely that I too will be pulled into the light. Any parent of an iPad-era child will be familiar with the other tools in my arsenal: Ear plugs, body padding, iron manacles, shock paddles, a straight jacket, an inflatable kayak (speaking in tongues while the head spins exorcist-like 360s can release a significant amount of saliva), WiFi jammers, tear gas, tasers; and for re-entry, candles, classical music, smelling salts, and several black and white paper printouts of familiar places and loved ones.
And even with all that, I give myself about a 50% shot of bringing my son’s attention back to the terrestrial world before the iPad battery runs out.

From my book, Grimhilda! - when I picked up on this paragraph I realised it had a typo in it! Now fixed...
The Sergeant Major marched out accompanied by two of his corporals. His uniform was a resplendent red, with gold braiding - unlike the drab combat kit of his Yankee counterparts. He wore a shiny gold helmet shaped rather like an old-fashioned policeman’s hat, except this one had a spike on top, with a white plume. Under his arm, he carried a pace-stick, which he used to prod people when necessary.

From an essay by Andre Dubus:
Because he and his father could not really talk to each other, this test of manual labour passes between them as a kind of spiritual gift from father to son. The gift is the opportunity to attain manhood, and the older Dubus reflects that "it is time to thank my father for wanting me to work and telling me I had to work and getting the job for me and buying me lunch and a pith helmet instead of taking me home to my mother and sister." If he had quit, Dubus writes, "he would have spent the summer at home, nestled in the love of two women, peering at my father's face, and yearning to be someone I respected, a varsity second baseman, a halfback . . . yearning to be a man among men, and that is where my father sent me with a helmet on my head." "Going home" to the women would have been to settle for passivity, to consign oneself to a world of yearning instead of a world of action.

And lastly, and most recently, a paragraph from an article on the Skully P-1, an upgraded motorcycle helmet that incorporates a digital head-up display, projecting a live feed from a 180-degree rear-facing camera, which eliminates the blind spots that affect other enclosing helmets.  The system can also broadcast turn-by-turn directions and pair with a smartphone to read back text messages, so the rider’s eyes can stay glued to the road.  It could get to be the driver's own cosy little world inside there.

About Time

We flew in from Auckland on Wednesday, arriving about 4.30 and after about five minutes at home and absolute craziness from the dog, found ourselves going out again, to the movies.  Our daughter had won a couple of seats, courtesy of More FM, to a preview of About Time.  Written and directed by the New Zealand-born Richard Curtis (Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral) this is a wacky romantic comedy that, for the most part, holds its peculiar time travel idea together without losing credibility (at least while you're watching the movie, which is all that's important).  Curtis is supported by a wonderful cast, with one of Brendan Gleeson's sons, Domhnall, in the main role, and Rachel McAdams as his girlfriend. Bill Nighy plays the hero's father, with that wonderful dryness and seeming vagueness that he's so good at. And a great deal of warmth, because this isn't just a romantic movie, but one about fathers and sons, and their relationships, and about what happens when death begins to knock. There are a host of other excellent actors, including Tom Hollander as a bitter and foul-mouthed playwright, and brief and uncredited performances by Richard E Grant and Richard Griffiths as two actors in Hollander's play.

The script is a little loose in structure, but this may in part be the result of its telling the story of a man as he grows from his late school years into married adulthood, where he becomes a father himself. There are times when the time travel aspect seems to be put aside while other things move on, but just when you think Curtis has forgotten about it, he drops it into the story again and reshuffles the plot. At times it seems as though Curtis has given himself too many characters to play around with, but he seems to manage to juggle most of them pretty well.  Only Harry Hadden-Paton, as one of Gleeson's slightly dopey friends, and Richard Cordery, as an uncle given to seemingly Alzheimer's laden non sequiturs, seem never quite to fit into the whole scheme of things. Nevertheless, t
here are plenty of witty lines, lots of adept comedy playing, and some unexpectedly emotional moments.

Gripping and gritty movies

Taking a punt on movie choices can mean that often you wind up seeing something that's a bit of a dud. I usually prefer to have some idea about a movie before I watch it, even if it only costs me a couple of dollars from the Public Library.  However, last week I picked up three movies (we haven't watched the third) and the first two turned out to be crackers. 

One was Nothing but the Truth, which apparently didn't get much of a theatrical distribution for reasons that are beyond my understanding, in spite of having a top-notch cast: Kate Beckingsale, Alan Alda, Matt Dillon, Noah Wylie, Angela Bassett and Vera Farmiga, an actress who plays her roles with such intensity that the television screen threatens to go on fire. The film is based on a true-life case about a political reporter who refused to reveal the source of her story, and wound up in gaol for months.  However, the scriptwriter and director, Rod Lurie, has rewritten the thing from the ground up, changing all the details and the background, so that the film is presented as a proper drama, not as a piece trying to fit around a real-life episode.  It's all the stronger for this, and allows Lurie to write excellent roles for his cast, none of whom let him down.

Beckingsale's character is given the chance to write a piece for her major newspaper that will expose a female CIA agent, but refuses to name her source. This refusal gets her into deep trouble with the Government, and she is thrown into jail by a heavy-handed judge (the actor, in real life, was an attorney in the original case). This causes havoc to the CIA agent and her family, to the reporter's own family and doesn't, in the end, let her off the hook.  It's a tough film made tougher by the insistence on principles that the reporter clings to, and which she finally brings her lawyer around to. You may guess the surprise ending - my wife did, but I didn't; it neatly rounds the film off. 

The other film was originally played over four nights on British television. It's called Father & Son, and stars Dougray Scott, Sophie Okonedo, Ian Hart and Stephen Rea. It's a gripping piece that doesn't turn out the way you might expect; it's violent and dark, but it's about integrity and the idea that eventually the choices you make in life have to be for the sake of others or else you die from the inside out.

The story concerns a career criminal, Michael O'Connor, who wants to put all his bad behaviour behind him.  Unfortunately things aren't as easy as that, and he's forced to decide whether he will amend things he's done wrong properly, or only partially.  His teenage son, Sean, (Reece Noi), the child of a mixed marriage, is accused of a gang retaliation murder, though we know from the beginning that he's innocent. O'Connor hasn't seen his son in a while after his wife was murdered about five years back and there's considerable bitterness in the boy.  But behind the bitterness, we eventually learn, there's a great deal more going on than we first suspect, and part of the story is about the reconciliation required between O'Connor and his son, a reconciliation that needs to take place before things can be healed. There are father and son connections throughout the story, none of them very satisfactory at the start, and a host of brilliantly drawn and played characters.  Part of the story is also the truth about the murder that took place some years before, and how it fits into all the other elements.

Scott plays a tough man who seems at first to have matured; but we learn that his seeming vulnerability towards his new wife and unborn child is only skin-deep.  It takes far more to bring his true self to the surface. He's surrounded by duplicitous characters - the links between different people turns out to be nastier than we expect - and it takes a good deal of sorting out.  The writer was Frank Deasy - he died about the same time the series aired.  He had written the last episode in the Prime Suspect series, and the same grittiness is apparent here.

Being random, as the blog's title implies

1. My wife and I were outside this morning in the sun chopping down the upper half of the holly hedge that separates our house from our neighbours' place.  It was a beautiful morning.  We then spent nearly an hour around 1pm talking to my son and his wife in the States, on Google's equivalent of Skype, went to go outside and found it was pouring with rain.  Since then the temperature's dropped considerably and we're now trying to get the house warm.  After all the fine weather we've had any cold day comes as a bit of a shock.

2. A friend lent me a copy of Edmund Gosse's book, Father and Son, a couple of weeks or so ago.  I'd heard of this book over the years, but never got round to reading it, even though it has some status amongst the English classics.  What an odd book!  Gosse was the sun of Philip Henry Gosse, who was a famous zoologist in the 19th century, around the time of Darwin.   He was also a Puritan Christian, as was his wife - the mother of Edmund: she died of breast cancer when Edmund was still under ten years old.  Philip married again, a few years later. 

The book is supposedly the factual memoirs of Gosse as a child, and of his relationship with his father, who, according to the book, was virtually a recluse, and a very rigid Christian.  (Gosse's mother was as puritanical as her husband, according to Gosse junior.)  The book claims to be fact, but later biographers of both father and son have found a good deal of fiction in the writing.  It's very much the view of a man who has cast his parents aside along with his religion, but in writing about it he colours the characters of his parents - his father in particular - in such a way as to make the reader recoil from them. Knowing that Gosse's writing is more biased than not is quite helpful in reading the book: you see how he shows himself as the one treated somewhat unjustly, when in fact this was apparently less than the truth.  He also, perhaps unwittingly, shows himself as rather pompous and quite class conscious.  Those who are lower than him in the social scale are written about in such a way as to show that Gosse despises them - it's not just what they do, it's how the author describes them.  For example, in describing John Brooks, a poor man who doesn't do the right thing according to Gosse's lights: John Brooks was a heavy dirty man, with a pock-marked face and two left legs...  I'm not sure how Brooks manages to have two left legs, but doesn't it immediately make you feel he's something of a monster?

I'd got to a point with the book where I thought I wouldn't finish it, but I will.  However, Gosse has lost my sympathy quite some time ago! 

3. I'm currently learning lines for the play, The Sunshine Boy, in which I'm playing Al.  He has a substantial enough part, but it's nothing like as long as that of the main character, Willie.  There's a great deal of humour in the play, and it'll go across well with an audience.  The line-learning has kind of interrupted my latest attempt to learn Psalm 119 (the longest in the Psalmody).  It's a tough psalm to learn, but I'm making slow progress on it.  I'm also singing with the Sunny Side Up group tonight, at one of the retirement villages, and I'm revising words and music for that as well.  So the brain is getting quite a work out at present!

Attending the birth

Back in the dark ages, when we were having our first child, I had to write to the hospital requesting permission to be at my own child's birth.  I was reminded of this because it was mentioned in one of the old letters I've been ploughing through in the last few days.   With the other four sprogs (as someone called them) there was no permission slip required; it had by that time become expected that the father would be at the birth(s).  (Sorry about the 'expected' pun there - didn't see it till after I'd written it.)

I don't ever remember wearing scrubs at any of these births, but I dare say I did.  Certain less than important details of my past life seem to have vanished beyond recall.  The scrubs element came to mind when reading this paragraph from Charlie Brooker's post in The Guardian earlier this year, when he attended his first child's birth.  

Labour takes ages. In the end, after hours of not-much-happening, there was a moment of drama. The entire cast of Holby City quickly filled the room and I found myself changing into a set of scrubs, in the toilet, in tears. I also held on to a sink for support. By the time I came out the crisis had passed, and my wife was smiling. We then had a further four hours of waiting, during which we both slept, after which the doctors decided to perform a caesarean.

I don't know what kind of scrubs either Charlie or I wore, but I see somewhere else on the Net that I've been recommended to find Cherokee scrubs for men.  I presume Cherokee scrubs are not intended only for Native Americans - in the advertising I see a white bloke wearing them, and an Asian.  Not a Red Indian in sight, now that I think about it.

Men's Group - Movie

Back in 2009 I wrote on one of the other blogs I was then contributing to about an Australian movie called Men's Group.  
I hadn't been able to see it at that point, although there was a brief trailer available online, but it was getting rave reviews wherever it was shown - which, unfortunately, wasn't in as many places as it should have been.

However, it's now available on DVD, and I caught up with it last night.  In spite of the group hug that they're having in the picture in the poster, this isn't a movie about men getting soft with each other or even communicating very well with each other (I don't think they actually hug at any point in the movie itself).  It's about Paul, a facilitator who offers a small group of men the chance to come together weekly and talk, in his own home.  (His wife and family always spend Tuesday nights with his wife's sister - wisely.)  Five men attend regularly, even though all of them admit at times that they don't quite know why they're there.  A sixth participant comes for one highly emotional evening in the middle of the movie.

The men are: Alex, who doesn't think there's anything wrong with him, and can't see why his son doesn't fall into line; Freddy, who's separated from his wife and little daughter and is desperate for things to be right in his marriage again; Lucas, a dour, good-looking man who barely contributes, but whose private life (which we, the audience, are party to) is aggressive and violent; Moses, a man who wears a beany and a long black beard, both of which enable him to hide to a great extent; and Cecil, the oldest member, who gives away very little and seems okay on the surface.

Of course all of them give away a great deal more than they intend. The audience knows more about them - but not much more - and sees them in a slightly different light to Paul, whose relationship with them is restricted to the Tuesday nights.

There is some resolution in the story - one man manages to make headway in his life - but the rest are still either struggling, or unable to move, or perhaps on the cusp of change when the movie ends.  However, the filmmakers wisely haven't allowed their characters to have easy ways out, and we're left wondering how some of them will fare.

The film is intensely emotional, and will leave viewers - male and female - with many thoughts and responses.  Men definitely need to see it, but women do too - and their reactions will be different.   Christian viewers may want to ask about forgiveness and change in regard to the men in the story, but these guys haven't got to that point yet; the need for some level of self-understanding has to come before they can think of turning their lives around completely.

This is a brilliant movie that deserves a very wide audience, including those who wouldn't normally go to see it.

Brave

We went to see Brave today with three of our grandchildren, one daughter and one daughter-in-law.  What a wonderful film, though not entirely for children, who might find it quite scary in places.  The five-year-old grandson assured me he was okay while at the same time telling me it was a bit scary.  And it was: the scene in which the ferocious bear appears, and especially the big battle between the male and female bear at the end, are very frightening.  If you're five.

But frightening bits apart, this is a delight.  The characters have originality about them, the story isn't as straightforward as it might first appear, and the detail in every scene insists that we come back for a second or third look at the movie.

The wonderful thing about animated movies in particular is the artwork that's involved. It's in a league of its own, but more importantly it invariably celebrates the beauty of the world.  Brave is no exception (and the short Pixar movie that accompanied it, in which three generations of starkeepers deal with the latest influx of stars, is just a wonder from beginning to end).   The Scottish wilds are wonderfully portrayed, and the animals in the film (in particular the heroine's horse, and her father's dogs) have their own personalities, but are also animated wonderfully as animals.

Brave's big plus, in terms of animated movies, is that it concerns a young girl who knows her own mind, and who's finally allowed to follow it.  While females have often been the subject of cartoons, from Snow White onwards, they've seldom been as adventurous or forthright as Merida, the heroine of this movie.  Merida has to battle with her mother at all points, but she manages to win through at the end still on the same side.  Both characters have matured by the time we're finished.

The vocal work is delightful too - the script includes a number of less commonly used words that fit well with the Scottish accents.  Kelly MacDonald plays Merida, Emma Thompson her mother, and Billy Connelly her father.  I wasn't sure that Connelly was going to work at first, even though he seems an obvious choice for the role: he's larger than life and the character he plays is larger than life both personality-wise and physically.  But Connelly has a way of reading his lines in movies that doesn't always ring true.  Fortunately for Brave this style is soon left behind, partly because he gets fewer and fewer lines to say as the movie goes on.

Julie Walters appears as the wood-carving witch, and is quite unrecognisable.  There are a number of other reasonably well-known actors in the smaller roles including an actor named Patrick Doyle. This is the same Patrick Doyle who composed the score, and his score is a delight from beginning to end; even the bagpipes come across effectively.   Doyle the actor has appeared in other movies he's composed the score for, including two of the Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare adaptations.

At the opposite end of movie-making, as it were, we watched the second in the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo trilogy; The Girl Who Played with Fire.  Like its predecessor, it's violent in the extreme, though there are thankfully no sexually abusive scenes.  (There is one what-seemed-to-me-to-be unnecessary lesbian sex scene, however.)  Unlike its predecessor, it relies on a lot of coincidence, and there's much less actual mystery to it. The heroine manages to find out things fairly easily, and Blomqvist finds her even more easily at the end, by which time she's been beaten, shot and buried alive.  She's one tough cookie.  The story is left hanging (unlike the first film) and it's presumably necessary to see the last movie to get some of the unfinished business dealt with.  The revelation about her father in this one seems a bit far-fetched, especially as the first time we saw him he was drastically on fire to the extent that you wouldn't have thought he'd have survived.  Seemingly he's as tough as his daughter.  (And let's not mention his even tougher son, who's very unpleasant.)

2nd round of Auditions for Grimhilda!

Grimhilda! is a new musical for all the family to enjoy.   It will be directed by Bert Nisbet, who is well-known in Dunedin theatrical circles as both an actor and director.  The Musical Director is Jonathan Drummond, who has assisted on some of the recent Gilbert and Sullivan shows and has had experience as a conductor in a variety of areas.   The show will run from the 27th April to the 6th May this year (there isn't a performance every night).  

We have a nearly complete cast, but still have two outstanding roles to fill:

The Father - baritone.  Requires an experienced actor/singer in the 25 to 35-age range.   This part doesn't have a large amount of singing but the actor is on stage for a substantial part of the show. 

The Parrot - a character part with no singing.  A male actor of small to medium height is required. 

We are also looking for one or two male chorus members.   Age is not important. 

The auditions will be held at 127 Glenpark Ave, Maryhill, Dunedin on Sat 4th Feb, 2012.  Starting at 10.  

Please contact me by leaving a comment here, or sending me an email (see my profile)

This is scary...

I think we first had some sort of Internet access in 1989. And for a good deal of the time since then I've been playing various games on the Net: chess, Scrabble and some few others. These aren't 'real time' games; the chess, for instance, was more like the old system of correspondence chess that my father used to play back in the 30s and 40s. It could take days then for each move while they waited for a letter to come by return post. It was similar with the online chess: occasionally someone would respond to your move straight away; most of the time it was at least a day before you'd see a response.

I used to play chess regularly, and occasionally won, but for some reason gave it up. But I've played Scrabble on various sites over the years pretty much continually ever since I first discovered you could play it online.

And this was the case up until a couple of months ago. At that point I must have had some complete mental blank in regard to Scrabble, or else got so tied up with something else that lesser things went out of my head. Anyway, last week, out of the blue, it suddenly struck me that I hadn't played Scrabble for a little while. It turned out that I hadn't actually played it since May. When I went back into the games (there were three unfinished ones) one of the players thought something must have happened to me - we tend to let each other know if we're going to be away for a few days. Another player who has shared quite a bit of 'conversation' with me in the course of the games, has obviously thought something similar, as she hasn't started up the game again since I wrote to apologise the other day.

The scary part is that I didn't miss the playing. Not that I'm some Scrabble addict, but it's been one of the things I do regularly online.

How can part of your brain just ignore something you've done for so long?

On another tack completely. I'm not a person who needs to be in the start-up stage of any innovation, especially in the technological area (although we were amongst the first people to get email in Dunedin when it was available). Consequently, when I ran the shop it was quite some time before we went over to a Point of Sale system. By the time we'd got the Board to agree to the idea, and had got the money together, POS systems had been around for years.

I'd been thinking about the possibility for some time before that, of course, and saw the advantages. Mostly it was the lack of finance (a perennial problem in that shop) that left us way behind. And even when we did get into it, we went for a system which proved to be somewhat limited as the years rolled on. It worked in terms of recording stock and keeping track of sales and all the usual stuff; it just wasn't very sophisticated, and it was built for a different kind of retail system to bookselling.

Some years later one of the other Christian bookshops in the country (they're few enough for us all to have known each other, pretty much) did get innovative, and they brought someone in to build a POS system from scratch. When we shifted over to it, it turned out to be pretty amazing - certainly as compared to the system we'd been on. But the curious thing about it, I found, was that the people who'd built it never used it to its full capacity. In fact, we used it far more extensively than they did.

I don't know what point I'm trying to make here. It's just a bit of anecdotal history, I guess! I've always been intrigued by cataloguing things - used to try and do it with pen and paper when I was a child (all my books had 'codes' inside their covers) and in a way, I think humans have this kind of inbuilt desire to bring a sort of order to what seems to be a rather chaotic world. Some of us are more prone to cataloguing than others, perhaps. I know the rest of my family doesn't seem interested in the idea very much.

I have a feeling I'm trying to add some focus here, but it's eluding me. Maybe it connects up with my seeming mental block in regard to Scrabble. If we don't order things, we lose them. Not sure if this is the point I'm trying to make. Maybe I'll come back to it later!

Boy

Waititi [Taika Waititi, director of the movie, Boy] has been described as “worryingly” multi-talented. “Ha! I’m going to burn out? I think my friends are worried that I’m going to have a meltdown.” He has worried about this himself. “I used to be freaked out about being interested in so many things. I always thought, when I was in my youth, that I’d have to choose one thing and just stick with it and try and be good at that,” he says. “But there are so many creative ideas that come into your head that don’t necessarily suit a painting. They could be a story or a film. They could just be a cake. If you have lots of different mediums at your disposal, ways of expressing yourself – the more the merrier, I think.”

The quote above comes from an article in the NZ Listener, written by Diana Wichtel. The article is entitled 'Our Boy in Hollywood.'

Which reminds me that I haven't mentioned the movie, Boy, in this blog as yet. My wife and I went to see this a few weeks back, and I was pleasantly surprised. Not sure what I was expecting, but I had a note in the back of my mind that some reviewer hadn't been too impressed with it. Foolish reviewer. This is a marvellous movie that manages to be both funny and serious at the same time - often within the same shot.

Futhermore it's wonderfully cast: James Rolleston (he of the completely Pakeha name) plays the Maori boy of the title, a bit of a runt at that awful age (he's around eleven) where girls have suddenly become interesting. Unfortunately he has not a clue as to what to say to the one he's smitten with, and comes out with some adult rubbish that naturally puts her right off. But if Boy is clueless in this area, he's smart in other ways: he runs the household while his grandmother is away at a funeral - apart from his six-year-old brother, there's a girl cousin and a couple of little kids who don't seem to belong to anyone in particular. And when his father turns up after a jail term, Boy, initially under the delusion that his father is as special as he claims, soon discovers that he's no more than a boy himself - a man who's never really grown up in any way apart from physically. Boy tackles this problem with gumption and mana. And manages to get his father to begin to face some of what's wrong with him.

That makes it sound like a serious movie; underneath, it is. On the surface, it's full of delights, has subtle humour (and outrageous humour), and not a few quirky surprises in the storytelling. Equally it has spiritual depth (different to that of The Whale Rider but equally valid, and a moral viewpoint.

Apart from Rolleston, the other joy in this movie is Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu, who plays Boy's younger brother. He gives a performance as honest and alive as any you'll see on the screen this year. No doubt, like many child actors, in part he was just living the role. Nevertheless, not every child actor manages to convey their inner self so readily. Waititi plays the father himself, and is exuberant, foolish, extravagant, outrageous, endearing, violent and pathetic by turns. As annoying as the character is, Waititi still allows us to empathise with some of his difficulties.

The movie is shot through with a wonderful New Zealand feel - it could be nowhere else in the world.

In relation to that, I watched a video of Bridge to Terabithia recently. Who in their right mind thought that a New Zealand school could possibly look like an American one? Yet that's just one of the many peculiarities of this odd movie. The houses the characters live in are American in style, but the countryside around is decidedly New Zealand. The cars drive on the American side of the road, but it's a New Zealand road. The school bus is a cousin to the school bus in Forrest Gump, but it's full of New Zealand children, as is the classroom. A strange movie.

More Mum than Dad?

A bit too late for Mother's Day here in NZ, but never mind - this song has a somewhat timeless quality.



Cleverly put together and full of words: so keep your wits about you and your ears wide open. I think the singer's name is Adam Cole.

You can download the song as an mp3 from the site in the link above....if you want. The words are written out on the You Tube site.

Two extracts from Finding Sanctuary

Finding Sanctuary is by Abbot Christopher Jamison.

In February 2004 BBC Television broadcast a programme entitled 'What the World Thinks of God.' As part of their research they commissioned Bradford University's Peace Studies Department to carry out an audit of wars over the last hundred years, with specific reference to the role of religion in causing those wars. Looking back at history, they analysed the actual mechanisms by which religion might case war and found several possible ways in which this occurs. These mechanisms might be the promise of salvation to those who fought the infidel, or the intention of religious leaders to seize holy places - both key factors in the medieval crusades. Or they might be the desire ot convert the enemy, as in the wars of the Reformation.

The researchers then analysed the thirty-two wars of the twentieth century. Their conclusions were that only three had a significant religious element. They considered the Israeli-Arab wars, for example, to be wars of nationalism and liberation of territory (and I would ad that the same is true of the Irish wars and conflicts). They noted that the current campaign being waged by Arab terror groups is largely about political order in the Arab countries, especially the presence of foreigners there. These groups use the language of religion, but the use of religious language to justify terrorism is disowned by mainstream religious leaders.

Political leaders use differences in confessional faith as a way of mobilising support for political wars, and it is mainly in this way that religion becomes a factor in war. Furthermore, the main wars of the century (the two world wars, the Russian civil war leading to Stalin's regime, the Chinese civil war leading to Mao's regime) claimed seventy-five percent of all casualties of war in the twentieth century: they killed 150 million people. None of them is attributable to religion. The recent conflicts in which religion has played a significant role have killed only one per cent of the number of victims of secular wars.

This study provides evidence that religion is not a major reason for war in modern times. But the two great moments of violent religious conflict in Europe, the Crusades and the Reformation, have cast a long shadow over the popular mind, so that even though there have been no truly religious wars for many centuries, even intelligent commentators still insists that religion causes wars. The reality, however, is that in the modern world it is governments, and not religions, that cause wars. (pp 165-6 Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition 2006)

And on another tack entirely:

I offer a final story from the desert fathers and mothers. A young monk once went to see his superior: 'Father, ' he said, 'I must leave the monastery because I clearly do not have a vocation to be a monk.' When the older monk asked why, the younger monk replied: 'In spite of daily resolutions to be good-tempered, chaste and sober, I keep on sinning. So I feel I am not suited to the monastic life.' The older monk looked at him with love and said: 'Brother, the monastic life is this: I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down.' The young monk stayed and persevered. (pg 172 ibid)

And in spite of the title of this post, one more:

You may be wondering whether such an approach to scripture is only for monks, so I offer you this thought from St John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople. "'I am not,' you will say, 'one of the monks, but I have both a wife and children, and the care of a household.' This is what has ruined everything, your thinking that the reading of scripture is for monks only, when you need it more than they do. Those who are placed in the world, and who received wounds every day, have the most need of medicine." (pg 66 ibid)

Number eight - and not wire either

John O'Keeffe writes: The poor fathers of Ireland were dealt another terrible blow last week. Well, at least one section of us. Apparently fatherhood may be out of reach for men in their mid-30s, a "new" study suggests. Infertility specialists found that miscarriage rates increased significantly when the prospective father was older than 35, while pregnancy rates dropped after the age of 40.

You could have fooled me, mate. There's me at 44 years of age, minding my own business and -- hey presto -- seven weeks ago, a fourth child, a brand new PPS number arrives on the payroll. That's right, all the fours -- number four at 44 -- yet according to this "new" survey it's a wonder I can dress myself in the morning, let alone father a child.

All this discussion of children and pregnancies is pertinent to us in our household today, as I've just become a grandfather again - the eighth grandchild arrived at lunchtime today, so keen to get into the world that he's a month early. He might have come a week ago, in fact, but he obviously decided it was a bit too cold to get on with the actual process after his mother's waters broke.

Admittedly becoming a grandfather is even easier than becoming a father (as far as the blokes are concerned) but it still brings its own peculiar joys and woes. I'm sure there are grandfathers out there who don't give a stuff about their offspring's offspring, but I'm not in that category. I take as much interest in my grandchildren's lives and activities as I took with my own children's - though admittedly I don't have anywhere near as much responsibility this time round. Which is cool.

Anyway, O'Keeffe's article is lots of fun, and he makes a good case for Dads being older rather than younger...

Gilead - again

I'm reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead again. I keep wanting to mark something on virtually every page; the book just seems full of quotable material. And it's not the clever laying out of words so much as wisdom. This is one of the few novels I've ever read that is wise.
Don't ask me how she does it; probably Robinson is no wiser a writer than many other great writers. But something in this book has brought out the wisdom in her, and it shows time and time again.
Probably quoting from it wouldn't work that well, because you need to have read what's gone before and to have felt the tone of the thing. The apparent meandering, conversational tone of the writing (an old man writing to his very young son) seems almost as if Robinson had sat down, from day to day, and just let the thing pour out. But I suspect it's far better constructed, and structured, than that. And the writing is frequently vivid. There's nothing 'casual' about the way this book is put together, even though on the surface that may seem to be the case.
I'm about half way through it again (I first read it in 2006, I think, when it was relatively new) and it moves me as much as it did the first time; maybe even more. I've just been reading it at a cafe and kept feeling emotional about one thing or another in it.
Perhaps it's the whole father/son thing that appeals to me particularly. Because of my own history I've always been a sucker for books that deal with that subject. Perhaps it's the fact that the main character is a good man; there are very few really good characters in fiction - or in life, if it comes to that. Perhaps it's the fact that in the last couple of months or so I've had more concerns about death and ill-health than I've needed to have in a long time. The main character in the book knows he's going to die fairly soon, which is why he's trying to lay out his life and history for his son. But he doesn't dwell on the dying; he's constantly talking about life, and creation, and joy and celebration and the extraordinary things that make up the day to day. Death comes into it, of course, but it isn't the focus.
As he says in a page (126 in my edition) I've just read again today:
I have not been writing to you for a day or two. I have passed some fairly difficult nights. Discomfort, a little trouble breathing. I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earhtly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I had done, by dwelling on them.
This speaks very strongly to me at the moment, when the discomfort I'm dealing with day to day tends either to get right in the way of things or be put to one side as something I will endure without great anxiety. Trusting in the Lord is an element of it, but not necessarily the easiest path to take.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll write more about this wonderful book as I go on.

George MacDonald and another

During his sermon this morning, our chief pastor quoted from George MacDonald's David Elginbrod as follows:

“Though a mother’s love is more ready to purify itself than most other loves – yet there is a class of mothers, whose love is only an extended, scarcely an expanded, selfishness. Mrs Appleditch did not in the least love her children because they were children, and children committed to her care by the Father of all children. But she loved them dearly because they were her children”.

Our Pastor also made the statement regarding those who think Jesus taught a prosperity Gospel:

God is not an accountant; He is a Father.