Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

Busytot is undergoing a bit of a language explosion at the moment. No longer content with a noun-based approach to the world -- simply naming things or asking for them -- he is delving into the exciting and versatile world of sentences. Verbs, adjectives, that sort of thing. I've turned into something of an amateur psycholinguist on the strength of it, spending my days marveling at what's going on inside that little head and taking copious notes on what comes out of his mouth. I'm filled with fellow-feeling for those patient souls who teach sign language to gorillas and chimpanzees and get to have wonderfully loopy conversations with them -- although, if Will Self's fine novel Great Apes is to be believed, what the animals are really trying to say is "Fuuuuuuuuck ooooooooooofffff!".

So what is going through Busytot's head these days? Well, yes, there is the occasional "Fuuuuuuuuck ooooooooooofffff" although it's more likely to be phrased as either a truculent adolescent "Nope!" or simply the slap slap slap of his feet as he runs away, flat-footed but surprisingly fleet. (By the way, whoever coined the phrase "pitter-patter of tiny feet" must have been on only the most nodding acquaintance with children. They certainly didn't live downstairs from us. I suspect they only knew very svelte toddlers or were thinking of cats).

But it's not all negativity in our little monkey house, thank goodness. The cosmic "wow" is still there, although these days it comes out as "Oh-KAY!" or "All RIGHT!" or "YAY!" accompanied by a burst of applause; the pitter-patter of little hands. He's also starting sentences with "want a" (moon, dog, sausage, yoghurt, paint a picture, etc). Sometimes I think of toddlers as pocket zen masters, posing unanswerable koans and boggling the adult mind with their wacky tangents. Among this week's surreal utterances, for example, my favourite was "noisy ice-cream, noisy ice-cream" -- sheer poetry, that; it scans in a thudding Kipling sort of way, and I like that sibilant internal rhyme. Other times, the rising two-year-old seems like an emissary from central marketing: bugger Buddhism, none of this nothingness nonsense -- embrace desire! Love longing! Want until you can't want no more... and then want some more.

On the way out of the city on a drive up to Providence last weekend, we passed an extraordinary sight: a vast parking lot filled with row after row of iconic yellow American schoolbuses. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. Phalanxes of the things. Busytot loves schoolbuses only slightly less than garbage trucks, which is to say he would like to be one if at all possible, or, failing that, marry one and live happily ever after. "Wow! Look at all the schoolbuses!" I hollered helpfully, thinking that if one bus constitutes bliss, ten thousand schoolbuses would surely short-circuit his brain and leave him slumped post-coitally in his carseat for the remaining three hours of the trip. He noted the gleaming yellow vehicles stretching to the horizon, nodded politely, and instantly demanded "More coolbus?"

I secretly thrill to this unbridled appetite. I think Avaricious (rhymes with Aloysius) would be a lovely name for a child. It's not just a hunger for things, but a lust for life. The friends we stayed with in Providence live right on the water, and on the first day, Busytot strode down the boat-ramp to throw rocks into the water, and then commenced stripping off his clothes, with commentary – "top off, trousers off, nappy off!" Nude and goose-pimpled, he waded into the chilly sea like a mini Reginald Perrin, saying that he was off to "blow bubbles." Out of respect for his (literally) naked enthusiasm, I resisted saying that it would have been prudent to smear oneself with whale-fat and, oh yes, learn to swim first. The back-to-nature vibe wore off pretty quickly though: on the second morning, I pointed out the window and said "See Gerry's boat?" Our thoroughly urban child glanced skeptically at this unfamiliar treat, then countered with an inquiry of his own: "See Daddy's garbage truck?"

Ah, the ubiquitous urban garbage truck. What would we do without it? If a two-year-old is having a bad day, there's always a thrilling garbage truck somewhere on the block ready to provide distraction. And conversely, if a sanitation worker is having a bad day, there's always a two-year-old on the next corner rolling out the red carpet and waving an autograph book. There is a fine picture book about a garbage truck (although not about the people who drive it, alas): it's called, uncompromisingly, I Stink, and I bet it sells like hotcakes in this city. It's on my wish-list, but in the meantime we make do with Richard Scarry's epic Cars and Trucks and Things that Go, with its tankers and taxis and tricycles interspersed with bananamobiles and pickle cars.

I don't know whether Busytot has figured out the connection between the marks on the page and the remarkably consistent stories we tell about the same pictures – and for the record, let me note that after approximately twelve consecutive renditions in the car on the way to Providence, I do not like Green Eggs and Ham. But he knows what to do with books, even the kind with no pictures. The other day he swiped my current recreational reading from the bedside table (Nobody's Perfect, a big fat book of deviously witty film reviews and essays by New Yorker writer Anthony Lane), opened it to a random page, and, stabbing his finger at the words, recited "Ubba dubba dubba dubba dubba" before snapping the book shut with a happy "Eee End!"

Which reminds me -- one correspondent asked what literatures I compare, seeing as how I'm doing a degree in Comparative Literature. Good question, although the thing is, we don't really compare the literature as such. That innocent little adjective makes it sound like we're running a weekly pool ("Portuguese poetry odds-on to win the non-prose division this week") or indulging in elaborate measurements and computations, like literary phrenology ("Definitively, Russians are the biggest, but the French have an impressive bump of immorality"). Think of it instead as literature without borders: much of the field would happily do away with the adjective and just study "Literature," except that we're just as likely to be writing about film, or drama, or historical documents, as fiction. That said, I have ended up doing a classically comparative project, looking at the Pacific War as described by New Zealand, American, Papua New Guinean, and Japanese writers, among others. I've just finished a chapter on the first Papua New Guinean novel, Vincent Eri's The Crocodile, and am launching back into a half-done chapter on good old James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. Then I just have to tidy up the introduction and do all the ghastly footnoting, proofreading, and compiling the bibliography. It's a big, big project and the closer I get to the end the slower it seems to go. Believe me, there will be a loud chorus of "YAY!" in this house the day I type "Eee End."

So The Whale Rider came back to New York on Monday night. I say "came back" because although it was the premiere of the film, the children's book on which the film is based was written in New York in 1985, when Witi Ihimaera was working here. One of the odder visitors to the city that year was a very large, very lost whale, which swam up the Hudson River. Crowds of people turned out to see the creature (my friend Dohra, who grew up here, remembers going to see the whale) but as far as I know, Witi was the only one who dashed home and wrote a book on the strength of it -- in only three weeks, too.

In what might just have been Public Address's first international media junket, I trotted along to the premiere courtesy of the nice people at Investment New Zealand who put me on the list. I'm very glad they did. It's a stunning film, and was stunningly and elegantly presented. Quite an entourage has been brought over to launch the movie here and in Los Angeles: several of the stars of the film, along with Hone Taumaunu, a kaumatua of Ngati Konohi, were karanga-ed into the theatre to introduce the evening. Rawiri Paratene and Keisha Castle-Hughes read a letter from Niki Caro, who couldn't make it because she is about to premiere a little Caro of her own. The letter mentioned that when Ihimaera went to see the whale, he heard (or thought he heard) a Maori woman in the crowd karanga-ing to the whale. It's a spine-tingling image, and New Yorkers got to share something of what that might have felt like thanks to Hone Taumaunu's karakia, the U.S-based Kahurangi kapa haka troupe who performed in the foyer of the theatre as we entered, and the rousing version of the song "Paikea" performed by the cast and performers to kick off the film.

If audience reaction was anything to go by -- a standing ovation at the end -- The Whale Rider will do very nicely here. I'd been warned to bring a hankie, but didn't really start bawling until the credits rolled… it's a slow burn of a film, a straightforward story whose ending you see coming a fair way off, but which rolls towards and over you like a huge, crashing wave. Lisa Gerrard's gorgeous soundtrack certainly helps. I heard quite a few snuffles around me at the more emotional moments, but it was the scene of Pai and Koro trying to restart the outboard motor in a bucket of water that drew a stricken moan of pure and visceral nostalgia from my companion. What reviewers here see as the "bracing otherness of the coastal New Zealand landscape" is, for us lot, the vividly recalled backdrop of a dozen summers.

Loved the chain-smoking aunties, the cars, the school hall... I must admit to also swooning over the untouched 70s décor of Koro and Nanny's house, right down to the switchplates and the carpet. It was an interesting visual echo of that other filmic paean to the beach, Christine Jeffs' Rain, which made a bit of a splash here last year, but confused some viewers. I was actually asked, by well-meaning Americans, why the family in Rain had such a poor and scruffy beach house if the father was really a lawyer. I found myself trying to explain the bach aesthetic, and why it is (or used to be) the thing to retire to a tackily decorated groovy little minimalist shack for the holidays. The some-time summertime 70s bach of Rain is a phenomenon that is steadily disappearing; will the lived-in and well-loved houses of The Whale Rider be next on the shopping list for cash-rich homing expats and escapist others? "It is our whale, and our place," Taumaunu reminded the New York audience, inviting them kindly to come and visit – but not, perhaps, to stay. I'd nail a few things down, if I were him.

What audiences here will make of the film's depiction of Maori culture is anyone's guess. The Whale Rider's community is an extraordinarily isolated one: nobody in the film, as far as I could tell, had a TV or even a radio, or ever bought a Lotto ticket. This all adds to the mythic timelessness of the story, but might give overseas viewers who haven't seen Once Were Warriors the impression that all Maori -- barring the few who escape to work as well-regarded sculptors in Germany -- live in tiny seaside villages where they enjoy card-playing, fishing, performance patriarchy, and recreational smoking (a universal pastime, even in this puritan land: lots of knowing laughs greeted the appearance of a weed-pipe). People are sometimes allergic to immersion in a culture too uncomfortably different from their own: the reviewer for the Village Voice, for example, got all sniffy about what he calls the "aboriginal hoopla" of the plot. Jeez. Still, that's the sort of bracing spade-calling you expect from a hard-bitten New York reviewer. At the Q & A session after the screening, however, no-one had a word to say for themselves. It was astonishing: the guy from Newmarket Films (the distributor) stood up the front saying " Any questions?…Anyone?…Anyone?" while the cast stood there smiling and ready. I was tempted to stand up and say "Ah, yeah, just the one question: how bloody great does it feel to have totally silenced this audience?"

The after-party was held at a place called Gustavino's, which occupies a rather astounding space under the Queensboro Bridge, just next to the Roosevelt Island cable car. (You might know it from the climactic finale to the Spiderman movie). After a walk across a couple of avenues of night-time Manhattan, it was like stepping back into the film: the place was lit with shimmering blue light that made it seem as though we were underwater, and the herringbone bricking on the spectacular vaulted ceiling looked like tekoteko to me. A couple of hundred people happily quaffed New Zealand wines, exchanged opinions about the film and the fingerfood (mussels, but too few, and unidentified cheeseballs were the only things I spotted), and gawped at the stars.

Well, I did. Rawiri Paratene was beaming fit to burst. I had to restrain myself from rushing up and telling him that I used to love him on Playschool. Cliff Curtis was striding round projecting star power like the Hollywood hit that he is (Pablo Escobar, anyone?). He's a handsome fellow and made me feel homesick in an unexpected way; I gazed at his lovely curly hair and thought, gosh, it's a long time since I've patted a lamb. Mana Taumaunu, who played heart-breaking Hemi, seemed a little overwhelmed but was polite enough to smile when I told him I had a little Hemi at home so I was gunning for his character all through the movie. And Keisha Castle-Hughes looked serenely gorgeous in a shocking pink halter and skirt number (by, I think she said, Janine Clarken?) that was wrapped up in an iridescent tulle belted overcoat, like a huge ribbon on a birthday present.

Speaking of birthdays, Grant Roa (who plays the crowd-pleasing Uncle Rawiri – watch out for this man) was lucky enough to celebrate a particularly auspicious one that very day. He looked bloody excellent in an outfit that was a sort of stylized korowai – I suppose you could call it an off-the-shoulder number, except he was wearing it over a shirt and pants. I managed to squeeze myself between him and a rather officious minder so I could ask who'd made it. "Actually… I did!" he grinned happily, "I designed it and cut it out, and my mate sewed it up." What a rock star! Kiwi ingenuity, ya gotta love it.

We finally dragged ourselves home to relieve our babysitting friend, and scooped up a goody-bag on the way out. They call this stuff "chum," as in the buckets of blood-and-guts bait that you throw out the back of a boat to attract the fish, which seemed singularly appropriate to the occasion. And it was good chum, too. Last time I attended a do like this (the 2001 New York premiere of Harry Sinclair's visually delectable but narratively confused The Price of Milk), the pickings were mixed: a bag of milk-bottle lollies (yay!), a Lord of the Rings bookmark, and some dubious literature, including a pamphlet that I saved because I couldn't quite believe it. Called The Film Makers [sic] Guide to New Zealand, it begins "Welcome to the Land of the Long White Cloud, Aoteroa [sic], New Zealand" and details the many features that make New Zealand a marvelous filming location, not least "a light that makes Cinematographers gasp" and the fact that "New Zealander's [sic] work together as a team." (Also, anti-union and anti-drug types will be happy to know, in New Zealand there are "No Teamsters," and "Resources don't get wasted.")

Anyway, I think the publicists have learned their lesson: this time round, all the copy in the advertising brochures had been strictly proofread; more excitingly, each bag contained a bottle of wine (from Tohu Wines, which is billed as the "first indigenous wine company to export high quality wine from New Zealand" – if they were responsible for the excellent Pinot Noir at the party, more power to them), along with a Gala apple, a modest pounamu pendant, and a copy of the book that started it all. Nice touch, that last one; after all, children's literature is one of New Zealand's biggest unsung exports, and unlike feature films, doesn't require a pot of German co-production money to make it big. On that note, nice to see that The Whale Rider is the inaugural beneficiary of the New Zealand Film Production Fund, whose purpose is to make films not just get finished, but look finished. This one certainly does: it's crisp and beautiful and deeply alluring. Watch out for mass strandings of awestruck tourists on a beach near you this summer...

So, the bomb at Yale is looking less like the first stage of an Al Qaeda campaign against Bush's alma mater and more like something local. Just your regular small-scale disgruntled employee/grad student event folks, nothing to see, move along, unless you are trying to finish your exams at Yale... they'll have plenty more disgruntled students on their hands if they don't let them in to retrieve their hastily abandoned notes, bags, and laptops pretty soon.

All the instant national security hoo-ha was partly due to the proximity of the President, who was giving a Commencement address at the Coast Guard academy just along the coast at New London (home of the nuclear submarine fleet and quite an impressive bridge), and the fact that one of the party-hearty Bush twins is currently a Yale undergrad. According to Jay Leno last night, the President was unconcerned, saying "Oh, heck, when I was at Yale I used to get bombed all the time."

Speaking of Curious George the Party Monkey, check out this article by Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein about the Presidential Package. This is definitely one from the things you'd rather not have been persuaded to contemplate department (it certainly seems to have gotten up Andrew Sullivan's nose, as it were...). Thank your lucky stars that the electronic version of Goldstein's piece doesn't have the extreme close-up that the print version prominently featured. That full-frontal ECU quite put me off my breakfast. Not that I'm opposed to a well-placed pair of handsomely proportioned and inviting pants on the right person. Alas, most of the rockstar-quality bulging crotches I see these days are due to the spectacular holding power of modern nappy technology, rather than tickets to the latest Ewan McGregor rolled-up-sock-fest or a front row vantage point at the Bowery Ballroom...

Stop press. Oh dear. Just as I was posting the instalment below comes breaking news of an explosion on the Yale University campus. It's not clear yet whether it's terrorism (international or Unabomber copycat), a disgruntled grad student, or a gas main, but it's not good. With the country officially back up to orange alert, suddenly it doesn't feel so great to live close to a big-name university, nor to be moving to one that has just had an explosion at it...

In a perfect metaphor for the worst job market that university graduates have faced in years, it's drizzling on Graduation Day – or, as they confusingly call it here, Commencement. Ten thousand graduates of Columbia are, as I type, ritually commencing their post-academic lives on a rainy campus four blocks north (that photo was taken yesterday, I suspect, or photoshopped to produce a blue sky). They're decked out in mortarboards (or fancy octagonal hats for the PhDs) and academic gowns of a deeply unflattering blue-grey, a colour that is either meant to approximate the grimy cerulean of a New York sky, or was picked out by some colour-blind accidental sadist. Since most of them are young and perky and bright-eyed, they'll look good in the photos, as everyone does on ceremonial days like this.

It will be nice to have had that moment in the, er, sun before they plunge into the grim job-hunt. I swear I saw a McDonald's booth outside the imposing campus gates (the motto of the arts faculty has ever been "Illocum Tuberas Visne?" which is as close as my decaying schoolgirl Latin can get to "Would you like fries with that?") although maybe they're not hiring either, in the light of the latest mad cow news. Gone are the golden days of youth power in the boardroom, all-day access to the office bong, and bringing your dog to work whether you had one or not. The papers have been full of stories about graduating seniors (which is to say twenty-two year olds; senior year is your fourth and final year, not your age category) being forced to accept jobs that don't actually pay all that much, or moving back in with Mum and Dad, or, worst horror of all, applying to grad school in record numbers.

As a well-seasoned grad school connoisseur (or graddict, as I think of myself on days when it feels nothing short of depraved to still be in school), I marvel at the optimism and categorical blindness that makes five or more years of your life living on little more than the dole look like a good economic choice. It's not. But it's a plausible lifestyle choice, albeit one much much closer to the desperate wanna-be actor scenario than I'd ever considered before reading this discouraging take on the perennial problem of jobs for newly minted PhDs. Actually, that article cheered me up a little – eight percent of grad students end up with a job like their favourite professor's! Compared to the odds of making it through to the final of American Idol, that's pretty much a dead cert. I'm going to shelve my singing career and stick with finishing the dissertation.

Which is hard work, actually. Really hard work. But I've been in good company. Over the last six months, while I've been grinding out a chapter and a half and gazing out for inspiration at the rooftops and water-towers, the building over the road has been undergoing a spot of renovation. Like many early 20th C apartment buildings (and many a botoxed Manhattanite), it has a tautly symmetrical ornate face that it presents to the street, and a fairly plain and serviceable behind. If you take a close look at the tops and sides of the buildings, you can see that they've almost all been rebricked, many of them several times. You can tell from the brighter colour where the old brick leaves off and the new bricking starts – it's a little like toupee-spotting.

The rebricking is a complex job, which involves first setting up scaffolding along the street to catch any falling bricks (and there is never a block without a scaffold on it – no sooner does one come down than another goes up), and then installing what Busytot calls, with the authority of an engineering graduate, the "up-down." The up-down is, of course, what the men go up and down on to get to the workzone, and there are smaller auxiliary up-downs to carry buckets of bricks up and down. The up-down over the road is about to come down, I suspect, as over the last several months the men have stripped back the old red bricks, replaced the breeze blocks inside, and then lovingly reinstalled and repointed the brick facing. There was something very soothing about watching them click the blocks into place, and about the lovely finitude of the job. On good days, my writing felt like that: mortar, brick, mortar, brick, next row, new page. And on bad days, it's like rescuing the knitting basket you accidentally left alone in a room for several hours with a clutch of feral kittens.

Days like that I console myself with the thought that I'm a two-career woman: academic wool-disentangling is just my day job, but my vocation is toddler-wrangling. I haven't written much here lately about the joys of childrearing, but every time I do I get floods of mail, which I love -- especially the ones from those who have snatched thirty seconds of respite from their own front-line job in the toddler trenches. These are the understanding correspondents who know that if I don't write back, it's just because I have had to dash off to attend to the small matter of Busytot standing on the fifth floor windowsill, the better to admire the up-down... or innovatively serving himself refreshments from the convenient knee-height ever-flushing water-fountain in the bathroom. Yes, that one.

Today being a rainy day, this morning's playgroup didn't happen in the park as planned, but in the apartment, with six toddlers, three babies, and half a dozen adults dispersed throughout the various rooms. It was sort of like one of those cocktail parties I imagined I'd throw on a weekly basis when I moved to New York, only at ten in the morning, with nothing but pineapple juice in the pineapple juice. Based on my morning of youth-market trend-spotting, I'd say that hot activities for the under-twos this season include: stuffing oneself full of cranberry scones; faux-cooking with incredibly realistic and well-drawn (if I say so myself) cardboard vegetables; industriously peeling the paper wrappers off twenty-four crayons; and stuffing assorted dolls and soft animals into suitcases and hauling them round the apartment like so many pint-sized serial killers. Musically, we started off the morning with David Kilgour and Superette, and as things wound down, Graham Wardrop's Rest Time: Whakata was just the ticket with its mellow guitar versions of lullabies interspersed with peaceful New Zealand birdsong. I pictured myself drifting off to sleep in a tramping hut, far, far, far away from the aftereffects of rampaging urban toddlers in a small apartment on a rainy day.

Busytot was pretty tuckered out too, and is currently napping like someone who's getting a PhD in napping. He is a delight these days, now that the pesky molars are largely out of the way (hint to anyone who's never understood why children sometimes cry pitifully for hours on end when teething – get a torch and have a lookie into the maw of a compliant toddler, if you can find one -- those things are fearsomely sharp, nothing like the blunt ground-down specimens in grown-up mouths). Climbing is the latest fad, and the other day he clambered up the metal spiderweb thingy in the playground with a water-bottle in one hand, for that extra degree of difficulty. He's also very concerned to fit in with the In Crowd, which is to say the gang of two-year-olds that he runs with. This has its uses. Various household items are noted for their similarity to friends' possessions, so intransigent last stands along the lines of "No Shoes!" or "No Milk!" can be parentally finessed by tempting the little fashion slave with what appear to be "Isis' shoes," or "Micah's milk cup," at which point the holy object is reverently adopted and crisis is averted. I sometimes feel like we're running a trade in religious relics (fingerbone of St Antony, skull of John the Baptist as a boy, sort of thing).

One of my correspondents asked if toddler-wrangling is really the rich experience that everyone argues that it is. Oh, it is rich, in so many ways. I don't need to spend money on an MBA or a law degree, for example. I'm all prepared for my post-child-raising comeback as a latter-day Madeline Allbright after my time in the negotiation mines with an eighteen-month-old. You try telling him why he can't drink his milk with straw. We have straws. He knows where they are. There's a precedent involved, as straws have in fact been deployed in similar situations before. And nobody else is lining up to use them. What's in it for me to deny him the straw, except some sort of fascist imperialist power trip? And incidentally, how loudly might he have to hypothetically scream before someone calls the Child Protection Squad? And so on, ad infinitum, all conveyed in winning little interrogative three-word sentences ("Straw? Milk? Bubbles?").

And then there are the moments of heart-melting surrealist intensity, products of the alchemical interaction of a child's whims and a parent's hard-wired urge to make someone happy, quickly, somehow, anyhow. Like the other morning, when the little lad suddenly realized that his father and I wear something other than fire-engine pajamas when lolling about the house in the morning. Quite reasonably, he wanted a lavalava of his own, and the request escalated quickly to urgent proportions. "Arba arba? More? Jams? Arba arba?" A spot of genius thinking on my part (before my cup of tea, even) and, shortly thereafter, a perfectly delighted small fellow sat down to breakfast with a checkered tea-towel wrapped around his ample little puku, looking like nothing so much as a stunt double for Dobby, the hapless Harry Potter house-elf, only much cuter and much much MUCH better fed.