48 Hours: More Mud Than Mordavia

So, its the end of the first full day. We cut off filming at 5 because the light was going and all of our shooting is outside. We're in the process of filming a Monster Movie that's set in Fraser's Dad's backyard. Given the weather, I'm hoping that we get style points for having an entirely outdoor shoot on a rainy weekend.

Oddly, despite the fact that I've been eating all day, I've been hungry all day, too. Still, right now I'm clean, dry, demudded, my feet are dry, and I've just had a hot dinner. Bliss.

Am having a wonderful time.

(I exaggerated a little bit - there isn't more mud than in a winter Mordavia game. Just.)

Commonplace Book

The myth of colonial isolation and inferiority seems to be connected broadly to the theological concept of the Fall of Man - the immigration of our ancestors was, as it were, a second Fall, a departure from a Garden of Eden situated somewhere in Victorian England. Like other myths of inferiority (as in the reaction of a Jew to anti-Semitism, for example) the loss of self-confidence is insidious: no labour of intellect or will can ever really bridge the predetermined gap. Many New Zealanders who go to Britain (to go 'back Home' is the code word for it) may be unconsciously making a trip to a land that does not exist: the land of their great-grandmother's exiled fantasy, with the Old Lady sill drinking tea and whisky at Windsor, the village cricket team still playing in the twilight, and Oscar Wilde riding off to jail in a hansom cab. But not all of us are bound by the myth. Personally I prefer the dark country I was born in, with its man-eating pigs and politicians imported from Australia, where, if you break wind at the Bluff, you can be heard in Auckland.
- James K. Baxter, Aspects of Poetry in New Zealand, (The Caxton Press: Christchurch), 1967. (Originally presented as a lecture at Victoria University of Wellington.)

More poetry

Yet Another Boring Poem About A Bird
So, there was I,
a stranger in the Auckland Zoo,
facing down an angry tui
who staunchly perched beneath
a green netted sky.

It's an over used cliche I know,
as hackneyed as a kowhai tree
blooming in its first flush of gold
or the soft purpled grey cat's down
of a magnolia bud, just sneaking out
for a quick smoke in the chilly
end of winter -
just casually saying Hi, as one does,
it's not that we knew each other that well,
but yet I merited a quick Gidday.

But back to that cliched tui
its white bib and flounce of black,
shone through with bluey purple
(purple again!) and back to me,
in the green and damp smell,
talking to the tui, and
that bird, on that day,
swearing.

--Stephanie Pegg, May 2006

(All this seems to be a natural outcome of reading a lot of poetry in class right now. If there's anyone out there who doesn't like reading poetry, well, I guess you can just stop reading my posts. ;->)

On Breakfalls...

So this evening at our frisbee game, I made an involuntary but extremely exciting horizontal flying dive. To the good people at Sword and Shield who taught me how to breakfall, I didn't do the slap-hand-on-ground thing, but did (by reflex or accident) manage the land-on-side-and-cushion-head-with-shoulder thing. So I have a slightly stiff neck and a grazed elbow, and hopefully things won't get any more exciting than that. Thanks for teaching me how to breakfall, guys!
(Would someone please give Steve Hodgson a hug for me and explain why?)

(And once again, I muse on the paradox that a non-contact sport like frisbee is, practically speaking, more dangerous than sword fighting.)

Hooray! My birthday is only one hour and four minutes away.

So I Just Had My 48 Hour Writing Audition.

We ended up with a silent film, with a giraffe, and the line "I can't remember anything before two weeks ago" in which Fraser gets tied up, beaten up, and then nearly slaughtered like a dog. By Debbie. With Sam as smiling yet sinister sidekick. Oh, and I forgot the bit where Debbie reaches into Fraser's throat and pulls out the other giraffe. We were going for a gloomy, claustrophobic, sinister feel, as you can tell.

Twas a lot of fun.

Yet Another Infliction Of Poetry...

Catullus No.13
O, come with old Catullus, that we may dine:
a loaf of bread, a flask of wine, you, a girl,
it will be Paradise!
So long as you bring some wine,
  and maybe a bit of bread,
  and definitely a girl,
  and you.
For your well-salted wit
you shall have all my love,
(though my pockets are home for spiders)
and a little something more elegant,
  or smelly, I should say -
for my latest girlfriend left a bottle of the
most stinkiferous, redolent, exotic attar
of roses that you ever did smell.
(You will beg the gods of love to make you
  All Nose.)

Heaven.
-- Stephanie Pegg, May 2006.

(Our class assignment for today was to rewrite one of Catullus' poems in the style of a poet that we liked. I started off with whatsisname Fitzgerald and the Rubaiyat and then got a tad distracted.)

((Today I've had a signing test worth 20% and handed in a 2000 word essay worth 33% and a language assignment worth 20%. So I'm feeling tired but accomplished. Yay!))

Poems R Us Ride Again

To Mr. John Wyndham,
This is the outer edge of space, you know.
Since first Maui paddled out here in his
brothers' best waka (that's canoe to you)
this has been the edge.

What do you think of us in our secure
isolation? A golden land, to which
your chrysalids may limp from Labrador?
Labrador! (Where the heck is that?)

Oh, sir, you stand at the still dead centre.
Time fleets us, also, and the spinning world
throws us ever outward to an unkenned
undiscovered shore.

When next you write a refuge, remember:
this is the outer edge of space.
-- Stephanie Pegg, May 2006

(This is the first draft. Critical comments are welcome.)

tristissimam mortem Q. H. Flacci lugebimus

Yesterday in Latin we reached the chapter in which Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the daring hero of the epic tale of life, love, battles, and the pursuit of poetry which has been informing our Latin class for the last year and a bit, finally pops his clogs. So we wore black armbands in his honour. (Also, it's the last chapter of the book, and now we shall be reading Catullus. It looks hard.)

And in other news, one of our frisbee teams won the game last night, and the other drew. It was a very good turnout actually.

And in other news...

I've been accepted into the Classics Department's Greek Field Trip for this summer. Much Joy.