Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

As I write, the windchill outside is minus fourteen degrees Celsius. I'm all for braving the elements, but when you've got a monstrous head-cold yourself, it's hard to muster up the oomph to get out in subzero weather, even to go and watch chunks of ice floating down the Hudson River in the hope of seeing a polar bear perched on top of one. This cold snap has kept me and the kiddo under virtual house arrest for over a week, and forced me to rely on old-fashioned diversions like home-made playdough and guitars made out of cardboard boxes.

Like the agoraphobic subterranean citizens in E.M. Forster's neglected sci-fi masterpiece "The Machine Stops", I get my news from the outside world via a screen. For some reason, all the news this week seemed bad, almost bad enough to take the shine off all those Little House on the Prairie vibes I'd accrued, baking scones, crocheting dolly hats, and feeding playdough cupcakes to teddy bears...

Canberra was burning, houses and lives lost, and a world-class observatory (where my partner once spent a summer as an undergraduate, doing all-night observation runs and amusing himself by rolling pencils at huntsman spiders rendered slow-motion by the cold) burned to the ground. Not that you'd have known about the fires from the newspaper of record, though - barely a paragraph in the New York Times. Thank goodness for Uncle Lionel, who e-mailed breaking news from the front lines, as he and family battled the fires with garden hoses:

Houses all around gone just brick foundations and twisted metal and burning gas and exploding gas bottles and mains and burning fences about 15 metres high - with at least 85 km winds and dark as midnight with burning ash and cinders in eyes ... no fire trucks around - police saying evacuate but if you do - you can't go back ....

The fire came over Narranundah hill, which is or was covered with Radiata pine, with a violet red shimmer and roared ... whole fences across the road went up. Power lines blew down and transformers on poles exploded. ... I did not see a fire truck till 9 pm when 10 of them came slowly up the Hindmarsh drive and stopped outside the burnt out houses.

Meanwhile, in the capital of the US, two burning issues that never really went away came back around again. Reproductive rights, in the form of the 30th anniversary of the landmark case of Roe v Wade, and racism, in the form of George W. Bush's decision to weigh in on a suit against the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action procedures. I don't know which is richer. Conservative lawmakers wanting to tighten restrictions even further on access to contraception (including the morning after pill) and abortion, when currently 86% of counties in the US do not even have abortion providers, and even for those that do, freedom on paper is not the same thing as choice? Or the nation's highest-ranking recipient of affirmative action -- George Jr., a mediocre student who got into Yale as a "legacy admission" because his dad had gone there - telling everyone else they can get by without it? (There's a concise and stroppy overview of some of the issues here, and much more if you search for it).

But that's life in what some days passes pretty well for a theocratic patriarchy. Even as I say that, I hear a chorus of "pshaw, typical liberal exaggeration," and "if you don't like it, why are you staying there?" You know what? Lately that feels less and less like a rhetorical question, by which I mean less like a question I can control the answer to. By sheer luck the passport I hold isn't on the list of countries requiring special registration with the Immigration and Naturalization Services. But the detention of people from the expanding list of "Arab countries" continues. Some have indeed committed immigration violations, like not being able to afford to fly home when their visa expired. Others have committed no violations at all, and didn't even need to register, but have still been locked up indefinitely on no charge at all, as detailed in this sobering article in Salon.

[Note in passing: you can now read all the "premium" articles on Salon.com for free if you watch -- which is to say click your way swiftly through -- an ad for a luxury car or a personals service or somesuch. Poor old Salon is having a hard time making a go of it on subscriptions alone. Naturally I'm deeply sympathetic; also I'm deeply human and am more than happy to be able to read their quality features for free with a few clicks of the mouse. I can't help myself, but I feel a twinge of guilt that my something-for-nothing freeloading might help lead to the demise of the site. Sic transit gloria online publishing...]

I'm not the first to note that it is all alarmingly reminiscent of the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, when families were broken up and whole communities intimidated, dispossessed, and locked up. Just across the river in New Jersey, six of the thousands of people detained under John Ashcroft's frightening new blend of "justice" and "security" have just finished a hunger strike. They've been in jail for up to 13 months, charged with no crimes, and given no indication of what's going to happen to them. They want answers, they want better food, they want to be moved to a jail where they can see their families without a glass wall between them. One of the men has a daughter he hasn't met yet -- she was born after his arrest, and he just wants to see her. Look, I don't care if the guy overstayed his visa, forgot to put his middle name on a form, or failed to pay a parking ticket, for god's sake let him hold his baby.

What keeps me chipper these days, when all the news seems bad and the winter virus from hell has left me with a voice like Dame Edna when I was hoping for Marlene Dietrich? For one, reading top-class fiction, like "Jon", a deliriously dystopian tour-de-force by upstate New York writer George Saunders, in which an overly plugged-in and turned-on youth conjures up a few divine revelations despite himself. If, like me, you're a conflicted technophiliac Luddite, read it when you've got a spare uninterrupted twenty minutes or so, and then disconnect from your computer for a week on the strength of it. Totally apocalyptic. I loved it.

And my other pastime these days is watching a person become a person. The little lad is one and a quarter (already!), and his favourite word this week is "Wow," which he applies to everything that catches his eye. On our one long outing this week, to the organic butcher at 99th and Broadway, he bellied up to the glass-fronted display case and expressed delight at the variety of things on display. Chops, sausages, free range chickens -- it was all amazing. "Wow!" and "WAAaaaaooow!" and "WOW!" he hollered, melting many a chilly city-dweller's heart with the sheer force of his enthusiasm. It seems somehow very yogic, to be that deeply impressed by random organs, a basket of lemons, a man in a striped apron. I don't know if it's one of the Six Buddhist Perfections or not, but maybe it should be. That disarmingly genuine cosmic wow can get you a long way through a bad day... I'm doing my best to get the hang of it myself.

Speaking of which, thanks to the kind correspondent who reminded me about the bucket fountain in Cuba Mall. As a Wellington baby, that clanking hypnotic beast was my original cosmic wow, and every time I'm back in the city I spend at least an hour doing transcendental bucketation in front of the thing. Now guess what -- it's got its own bucket fountain website, with a wicked real-time screensaver version of the real thing. You can even buy T-shirts! I sure hope they plan to make them in teeny weeny sizes too, so I can get my daily cosmic wow in the one neat little package...

It's good to be back in the city. I missed it. The brass-monkey wind off the Hudson River, the extra dollar you pay for every pallid veggie at the cramped little supermarket on the corner, the car alarms, regular as cuckoos. Increasingly, I feel like a local here - it may be a city in America, but it's a world city, and one that's easy to feel at home in. Then I read an article in the Village Voice, about what can happen to legal immigrants and long-term residents under the new terrorist-unfriendly regime if they merely obey the law and turn up to register their status. Or this one, about university students in Colorado jailed for taking slightly less than a full courseload.

It takes a lot to stand up to that sort of treatment, and sometimes all you can do is go a little native. Take an encounter I witnessed in the week after September 11, 2001. There was shouting down on the street that went on a little too long to be just another parking dispute. I looked out the window to see a turban-wearing Sikh taxi driver being berated by a short, grumpy white man in jeans, who was shouting something about "you people" and "our buildings" and "go home," interspersed with some of the choicer epithets available to the speaker of American English. (The sort of words, in fact, that I once saw characterized in a tabloid newspaper article about a fallen fireman as "good-natured insults," as in "I saw the poor fellow only yesterday, and I hailed him with a good-natured insult").

It was a tense moment, but fortunately the volatile guy was hedged about by large university students telling him to calm down; the taxi driver turned his back, waved his arms dismissively and carried on loading suitcases into the cab. But the angry white man didn't let up, and eventually the taxi driver had had enough. He turned around and yelled, with syllable-perfect subcontinental diction, "Don't you be telling me to go home, mister! I have lived in this city for twenty years! This is my motherfucking country too!"

I hope that anonymous gentleman has all his papers in order as the registrations and the arbitrary detentions continue. I'm not male, nor Muslim, nor from any of the targeted countries, and I'm starting to feel nervous (not without reason -- a friend was turned away at the border about a month ago, on a passport technicality; like me, she's just trying to finish a Ph.D. at one of the country's top academic institutions). For the moment, though, this is my host country, with or without that streetwise adjective. In fact, I'm pleased to know that I am - according to the NZ Listener, where my name was tucked away in the list of contributors to a year-end roundup of good books -- a "New York mother."

A New York mother. It's true, of course. Yes officer, I cannot deny that I am domiciled in New York, and the state of the floor this morning reminds me that I do indeed have an offspring (one who is, at the moment, deeply fond of trains, Tupperware, and the totemic flour-sifter spirited away from the kitchen and into the toybox). It may also be germane, perhaps, that one of the books I reviewed in that issue of the Listener is a incisive and witty account of 21st century mothering in New York.

Indeed, over the last dozen or so years that I've been traveling and grubbing round in libraries and teaching and writing and learning all over the world, "New York" and "mother" were the two invisible items at the top of my wish-list, desires so strong and so potentially jinxable that I hardly dared say them out loud. To suddenly have both in the same year - especially a year so grievously marked by death at home and downtown -- felt like winning some cosmic lottery. "I'm living in New York," I'd remind myself on days when the garbage trucks shrieked and the streets reeked and the windowsills were black with the dust of god knows what. "And I birthed a baby in the West Village at lunchtime and caught a cab home that same evening!" Truly, this is my motherfucking city too, as long as my visa status holds - oh yeah, and that's my mothersucking baby, the one with the American passport (although much good that'll do me if they ever decide to throw me out).

So on my stroppier days, I feel like wearing both words on my chest like medals (I know, I know -- in this column, I often do). But it's different, choosing to emblazon "New York mother" on your own tank-top in silver thread (note to the style-conscious: London mother Madonna wore a similar item on her latest tour), and being made to wear one of those embarrassing stickers that bleats "Hi, my name is... New York mother." It's a question of context, that's all; as a writer among writers I would have liked to be counted as a writer too. The one with the baby on my hip, sure, but you'll notice that's a pen in my other hand, and a laptop weighing down the nappy bag. (Was it Norman Mailer who said that a real writer "writes with his balls"? I prefer to use my hands, it's just so much tidier, and besides, my boobs are busy).

The parental is political, we all know that. And despite the unimaginably seismic shifts of the last few decades that have made full-time fathering an almost respectable choice, and full-on fathering practically a requirement, it is still a profoundly gendered issue. As someone much smarter than me said, when it comes down to it there really are only two kinds of people in this world: mothers, and their children. Most of those mothers (and most of those children) do other things too, so it seems only fair to recognize that teensy fact in strictly parallel terms.

Everyone who's ever had the temerity to birth and raise children and do something else as well has wrestled with the knotty problem of why it is that the "working" in "working mother" refers to something other than mothering, whereas a "working carpenter" bangs things together and a "working actor" isn't waiting on tables that week (there's a nice article on precisely this topic in the latest Brain,Child magazine). Not to mention why it is that a woman who performs the jobs of teacher, manager, chef, chauffeur and more for her family doesn't even merit the adjective "working" - she's just a mother.

And every single one of those women with access to writing implements has chronicled the identity crisis the whole thing provokes ... in other people, mainly, but in ourselves too. It's all been done, more cleverly and concisely than I can manage here; check out The Price of Motherhood by Ann Crittenden, for starters, and London mother Allison Pearson nails the dilemma of the middle-class working mother perfectly in her poignantly tragicomic new novel I Don't Know How She Does It (read it with a large glass of mother's ruin and a box each of tissues and chocolates). And Tillie Olsen got there years ago, with Tell me a Riddle and Silences.

It didn't really bother me in the end, to be tagged a "New York mother" amongst all the "Wellington writers" and "Eketahuna editors" and "Christchurch critics." It gave me good fodder for this blog, for one (see, now I'm the taxi driver and you're my captive audience while I go on about it for the next couple of miles - better pray that light turns green soon!). And, to be fair, on the same list of contributors there were an "orchid-grower" and a "hairy poet," so I wasn't the only one to be characterized as something other than a wordsmith. But yo -- next time someone wants to call me a Noo Yawk muthah, gimme some respect and spell it right!

It's New Year's Day in upstate New York, and there's the sleety beginnings of an ice-storm outside, washing away the remains of the foot of snow that made for a genuine White Christmas a week ago. Sure, the song says "just like the ones I used to know," but actual snow on the day itself is rarer than you'd think, and waking up to a snow-cloaked world is an incomparably magical way to celebrate the day -- especially if you have a fourteen-month-old on the premises who's never gone sledding before. What with the snow and the two bouncy dogs (whom he refers to as "dodgies," entirely appropriate in light of the Axis of Extreme Mischief the three of them formed within minutes of meeting each other), this house-sitting gig has been a dream holiday for a certain small boy.

In between the dreaded lergies mentioned last time, we managed to have several kinds of seasonal fun. Sledding, of course. And then there was the Christmas party that featured the very best of over-the-top American decorating skills: strings of fairylights and illuminated candy canes led us up the garden path, and inside it was even more spectacular: twenty-eight Santas arrayed about the house, seasonally appropriate cushions on the couch and Yule-themed pictures on the wall, no fewer than three separate nativity scenes, a small model village arranged neatly on a wodge of fake snow, and at the centre of it all, a ten foot tall revolving tree lit up like…well, like a Christmas tree, really. It was pretty special, and I think we can all safely continue buying stock in the alarming style guru Martha Stewart for years to come.

Then there was the much-anticipated second instalment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. My friend Gil affectionately (and accurately) described the first film as "three hours of bad '70s hair." Frodo Comes Alive, sort of thing. I can tell you that The Two Towers, by contrast, is all about the whiskers. Maybe it was just that we were sitting eye-crossingly close to the screen, but ooh, those bristly chinny-chin-chins! I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that each individual hair on Karl Urban's phiz (under the ill-advised Kariotahi surfer bleach job) was computer-generated to prickle with personality by the same wizards who turned Andy Serkis into the extraordinarily life-like and sympathetic Gollum/Smeagol. (Incidentally, for this new mum's money, Serkis turned in as good a rendition of the wild and unpredictable weather of toddler mood-swings as has ever been seen on the big screen).

Will the roughly-trimmed hairy chin be this season's facial fashion statement? With knee-length beards for the older gent (and something with birds in it, perhaps, for the older Ent)? I don't know -- by about the fiftieth extreme close-up on Aragorn's bewhiskered mouche I was feeling a little itchy, and not in a nice way. But lo, what magical elf-powers are these, that make for a miraculous absence of beard-rash on Arwen's alabaster chin? (And for that matter, readers alert to homoerotic subplots might wish to check out the equally unsullied cheek of nimble Legolas, he of the exceptionally well-stocked quiver…)

Pursuit of the hirsute aside, The Two Towers is an extraordinarily elemental film and I found it affecting in the extreme. This time last year we watched the first film in the company of three other New Zealanders and an eight-week-old baby. The former laughed at all the in-jokes and the latter slept through the noisy bits and woke up in order to nurse with piglet-like gusto during the quiet hobbity scenes. I'm glad I didn't sneak a child into this film, though. The preparations for the defense of Helm's Deep, with beardless youths and old men thrust into armour while mothers and babies are bundled off to shelter reminded me of the grim cut-and-thrust of the Iliad. And Frodo's haunted pallor brought to mind the woeful underfed child-heroes of Dickens, with a nice touch of rock'n'roll heroics -- a Jim Morrison or a Jeff Buckley burning the candle at both ends for our salvation. It's really no contest: I'll take the soulful saucer-eyed hobbit with the hollow cheeks over that spotty bespectacled try-hard boy wizard any day.

New Zealand was looking bloody good, too. Thanks to Peter Jackson, I'm thinking Tourism New Zealand can pretty much pack up shop and retire (although they might want to send a clue-telegram to the woman next to us, who, while the credits rolled, insisted loudly that large chunks of the movie were actually filmed in Peru, because she'd been there and she knew what it looked like). The travel section of the Sunday New York Times a couple of weeks ago had several articles by brave writers who'd traveled all the way across the world to Aotearoa to see if it was worth it. Their conclusion: it is. But you know that, or you wouldn't be reading this. (I had to take issue with one headline, though: "If New Zealand is Colorado thirty years ago, Queenstown is Aspen" … bollocks! I happen to have been to Aspen, just this summer – lovely tiny little mountain town, with a confusingly large number of Gucci and Prada outlets – and it rather reminded me of Queenstown fifteen years ago).

Meanwhile, on the stereo: a swag of lovely sounds from home thanks to my siblings. Bic Runga's newest, Beautiful Collision is one of those albums that really grows on you. It sounded smooth almost to the point of blandness at first, but now I'm all over it, especially the sleeper song about tripping round New York: "Impeccably dressed in your secondhand best, we were waiting for the taxi to come…" As the chorus goes, "I do believe I might be having fun." Word, Bic! And True from Trinity Roots has to be one of the most gorgeous CDs I've seen in a long time. The music's delicious, ambient and evocative, but kudos to the packaging designers for imagery that conjures up fingerprints, moko, maps, and navigational instruments. I can't stop looking at it. Another album that delivers equal treats for eyes and ears is Pine's more-Britpop-than-Dunedin-sound LongPlayer, which comes in a delicately inked transparent liner. I'd love to tell you who designed it, but I can't find a credit anywhere.

Then there's Marshmallow which consists of tunes by Alan Gregg, played by Gregg, fellow Muttonbird Dave Long and quite a few guests. In the Muttonbirds, Gregg was George Harrison to Don McGlashan’s Lennon&McCartney, penning musically inoffensive three-chord tunes with lyrics that rhyme tidily, in contrast to McGlashan's ominous, disjunctive and uncanny anthems of Pakeha paranoia. Gregg’s song-writing approach works for sing-along classics like "I Wish I Was in Wellington," but I’m not as keen on the bad-girlfriend songs – "Esther," for example, which might as well be called "Esther, ya troll!" In any case, Marshmallow lives up to its name, with a couple of tunes so cloyingly sweet that they made my teeth ache (take "Scooter Girl, scooter girl, did you ever see a cuter girl" – take it, please), in amongst other songs as deliciously fluffy and nostalgic as the home-made marshmallow Mum used to make, best eaten still damp and freshly rolled in coconut.

How to describe the Folk the World Tour album from artlessly brilliant folk-comedy duo The Flight of the Conchords (Jermaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, possibly the best-known extra in The Fellowship of the Ring)? These guys take me back to the first time I saw the Front Lawn, in the Auckland Town Hall in nineteen eighty something (thanks Dad, for buying the tickets and driving us all the way in from Papatoetoe!). The bus driver's song is sublime; I can't stop thinking about David Bowie's nipples; and my friend Alice nearly drove off the road listening to the one about the racist dragon; but the throwaway track about watching the hotties on Cuba Mall… damn, that one broke my heart and I can't explain why. And because I listened to this album before going to see The Two Towers, I had the Conchords' inspired alternative theme-tune –"Frodo, don't wear the ring!" -- running through my head the whole time. Those of you who've heard the album will know exactly what I mean; everyone else will just have to rush out and buy it now.

Like Russell, I'm blogging from the road for the next couple of weeks, but in response to popular demand, here's a bit more Manhattan-porn for you all (with some bonus upstate New York pastoralism further down the page). This time of year, the tip-top of the Empire State Building is lit up red and green to broadcast Christmas cheer across the city. To my eternal envy, friends who live one street up from us and a couple of floors higher can actually see the top of the building from the corner of their bedroom window -- you have to squeeze in beside the bedside table and twist your head a bit, but sure enough, there it is, blinking away like a sentinel. This time of year, the first night of Hanukkah also gets a look-in, with blue and white lighting, but Kwanzaa, the African-American end-of-year celebration devised in the 1960s, hasn't made it onto the lighting schedule yet, although later in January, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday gets the treatment in red, black and green.

That reminds me, it did feel a bit like an early Christmas present when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott -- who not so very long ago voted against making MLK Day a national holiday -- finally resigned his position after spending a week trying to explain away his words of praise for arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. As my mate Alice pointed out, to his temporary credit, Lott groveled on over to the cable network BET (that stands for Black Entertainment TV, although the entertainment value of his apology was debatable) to apologise directly to the people he'd actually hurt, rather than simply take his "Ah'm jest so, so, so surry" dog-and-pony-show to the mainstream media in order to soothe the ruffled feathers of aggrieved liberal white folks. Yep, of course I'm a deeply aggrieved liberal white folk who agrees with Colin Powell's take on it -– no right-thinking American agreed with Thurmond's hateful policies in 1948, let alone today. But I'd say that to hear those policies implicitly endorsed by the leader of the highest parliamentary body of the entire goddamn nation must break an African-American heart harder than it could ever break mine, which is why fronting up to a largely black audience was a big move. Mind you, whatever credit Lott got for that gesture was wiped out for me today by his insistence that, in this whole affair, he had "walked into a trap" set by his political enemies who took advantage of a "poor choice of words" on his part. Actually, Trent, that should read "opened my big trap" and made a "totally inflammatory and unreconstructedly racist choice of words." And despite his resignation as Senate Majority Leader, he's still Senator for Mississippi, and you can bet your well-thumbed copies of Up From Slavery and The Autobiography

of Malcolm X that there are plenty more like him in charge of the country.

Anyway, back to the promised urban portrait of the season: everywhere is decorated with fairy lights (only you get looked at funny if you call them that here) and the city's Christmas tree vendors are out in force in every neighbourhood. Competing tree-sellers occupy diagonally opposite corners of 110th and Broadway, so each trip to the supermarket promises a stroll through a small, twinkling temporary pine-scented grove, hung with coloured lights and superintended by an inflatable Santa Claus. As the toddler and I walk past the trees, little hand in big hand like Piglet and Pooh, I tell him to take a deep sniff of the prickly branches. I want him to lay down some olfactory memories of the season, so his distant future self will be able to summon up a vision of December in New York. Inhale, kiddo -- pine-trees and cheap pizza and dog piss (not to mention the odd whiff of regular old people piss, depending which corner we're on). Look at all the colours: dirty snow, yellow taxis, the glowing green orbs that mark the subway station… And remember how it feels to have a cold, cold nose.

I'm actually writing this week from Ithaca in upstate New York, where we're house-sitting for a couple of weeks, so our noses are even colder than usual. I miss the holiday buzz of the city but, if the weather forecast holds, we're due for an actual white Christmas up here. And the peace and quiet is really something -- the city-born-and-bred toddler has learned to sing the tunes of fire sirens and car alarms with alarming proficiency, but the first morning we wake up in Ithaca is always vaguely reminiscent of The Quiet Earth (sans Bruno Lawrence in a peculiarly flattering nightie). Then there are the cheap groceries, and veges that actually taste of something, and a vista of trees instead of rooftops. Small-town life certainly has its attractions, and coming back here tends to awaken my farmhouse-in-Waiuku variety fantasies of a return to the green heart of the motherland.

But Ithaca is a funny old place: it's dominated by Cornell University, not just visually, with the Gothic bulk of the hilltop campus looming over the town below, but also economically – it's like a mining town, only they're mining the pockets of parents who can afford an Ivy League education, and there's plenty of ore left in that particular seam. The town also -- I don't know if "boasts" is the right word -- a large and well-established lefty-hippie contingent. It's home to the legendary Moosewood Restaurant (whose vegetarian cookbooks grace many a student flat in New Zealand), a Tibetan monastery (where half of Kurt Cobain was baked into a final stupa), there's a wonderful organic farmers' market that runs most of the year, and a delightfully cheesy annual festival with excruciatingly earnest themes (my favourite: “Hello, Old Friend!”). Not only did the city council recently vote against the war in Iraq, but Ithaca managed to keep big box retailers and corporate octopi at bay until well into the 21st century: the very first St*rb*cks outlet has only just arrived, under cover of the Barnes and Noble that just landed down on Route 13. And a couple of years ago Ithaca hit the earthy-crunchy jackpot when it was voted Most Enlightened Small Town in America by the impeccably alternative Utne Reader.

It's been a very fine place to go to graduate school in, but even if Cornell feels like the academic centre of the universe it's still a four hour drive from anywhere you might want to actually visit, or indeed, live. After five years here it began to feel a little like a high-tech, high-security ashram, and I was itching to move on from the long-term snowed-in summer camp that is grad school in a small, upstate New York college town. The disenchantment with academic nirvana arrived in ridiculously quotidian guises. It set in properly at about the time that, thrilled to be moving into the basement flat in which Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita, I discovered that he moved at least eight times while he was writing it, and that everyone I knew has already lived in at least one of his apartments. There's also something ineffably sad about living in a college-town oasis in the middle of what is, if you take New York City out of the equation, one of the poorer states in the country. Drive twenty miles in any direction and you come across an example of one of the fastest growing industries in the country -- a "correctional institution."

It's easy to forget that little feature of the upstate economy, but I was reminded this afternoon while sitting for three hours in the waiting room of an ER with the slightly dodgy-sounding name "Convenient Care Center" (I mean, Convenient? Talk about faint praise... I'd settle for Excellent Care, or even Properly Qualified Care). In this country, perhaps the next worst thing to not having any medical insurance at all is getting caught "out of network" -- in our case, out of the city, with an inconsolable child showing signs of a painful ear infection. No doctor we called would take walk-in appointments (not very Hippocratic, eh?). A call to the insurance company revealed that we were faced with a choice between two equally unappealing options: a half hour drive out to the hospital ER, with a god-knows-how-long wait and a $50 "co-pay", or a trek to the Convenient Care Center and full responsibility for the bill, the size of which no-one would commit to until I asked if it would be more than a thousand dollars, at which point they said "Oh no, no, no, more like a couple of hundred," as if that was a good thing. The third option was apparently treating it ourselves with herbal poultices and a few incantations to the ear-goddess.

So we made some more (increasingly grumpy) calls, invoking every privilege and pulling every string and dropping every name we could think of. Finally, after being bounced off a dozen switchboards, we gleaned the very useful knowledge that we could call the insurance company, describe the symptoms over the phone to a nurse, and thus receive a referral for "urgent care" that would be covered by our insurance. Needless to say, this little nugget hadn't been mentioned in that very first conversation with the insurance company. Goodness, no. Wouldn't want people thinking they could just swan off and make frivolous holiday visits to emergency rooms in exotic destinations on a whim.

In other words, it took us most of an hour and all the ballsiness we could muster to find out that we could indeed avail ourselves of the health insurance we pay bloody good money for; in other other words, if we asked the right questions in the right order at the right time, we wouldn't have to pay an arm and a leg to fix a small pair of ears two days before Christmas. Damn, it makes my stomach hurt to think of the people who don't even make it past that first wall of defense to get the coverage they're entitled to, not to mention those who are living without any health insurance at all.

End of a long story: child seen to (after three hour wait), prescription obtained, and all well. The waiting room crowd featured a grizzled older man wearing a hat that the child mistook for a bear, and a family of four kitted out in identical sweatshirts, jeans, and sneakers, and munching blankly from identical bags of vending-machine Doritos. And one morose young black man on crutches with a broken foot, accompanied by two uniformed people I at first took to be bus-drivers. It was only when he got up and hobbled past me that I noticed the handcuffs attaching him to the crutches, and remembered the number of "correctional facilities" in the area. No wonder he'd stared so hungrily and unhappily at the spindly Christmas tree in the corner of the waiting room and the inane television chattering away in the background.

Well, enjoy your unincarcerated Christmases, and I hope they're a little warmer than mine will be, although I can't wait for all the snow-related photo-ops the weatherman has promised. I'm going to hunker down with some library books (just devoured Revenge, the latest beautifully written and utterly implausibly plotted novel by Stephen Fry -- God, it's such a shame that man's "not in the vagina business," cos I'd lerve to have his love-children) and on Christmas Day we will roast some sort of beast, perhaps even a bit of lamb, and share a meal with Alice and any other lonely New Zealanders we can round up. Tune in next time for post-Christmas thoughts on the second Lord of the Rings instalment and related appearances by New Zealand in the US media, and a thorough accounting of the contents of an expatriate Christmas stocking (I can feel a couple of promising CDs in there, along with the jar of Vegemite and the copy of A Pukeko in a Punga Tree that we naughtily opened already...). Save me a pohutukawa blossom, and I'll give Rudolph and Frosty a kiss for ya.

As a very small cog in the vast, grinding literary-industrial complex, I’m always happy when literature makes the front page. The big prizes, and the juicy backstories (like the hints of plagiarism that surround Yann Martel, the winner of this year’s Booker prize), the public dustup between Oprah and would-be literary heavyweight Jonathan Franzen … it all helps minor lit-crit types like me feel like we’re part of a cool, socially relevant endeavour.

Now, literature has really made the big time: it's been enlisted in the War on Terror. The U.S. State Department has assembled a crack literary unit and commissioned a book of essays on What It Means to be an American Writer, to be distributed around the world. I’m guessing that the President didn’t have anything to do with the selection himself, given that he’s famously not much of a reader (reportedly, asked what his favourite book was as a child, he picked The Very Hungry Caterpillar – even though it wasn’t published until 1969. It’s now officially listed on the White House children’s pages as his "favourite book for children" – nice save, George!).

In any case, the sixty-page anthology is an intriguing collection, with some surprisingly good writing. And in case you're wondering, it's not propaganda at all, says contributor Bharati Mukherjee in an interview on National Public Radio. On the contrary, it's just an effort towards "transforming the hearts and minds of people who either don't know us, or without cause, are disproportionately angry." (What would they be disproportionately angry about, do you think? This toy, for example, a miniature rendition of a military command post in a bombed-out house, manned by a heavily armed plastic soldier? Barbie meets Rambo under the Christmas tree…).

Anthologies always invite a spot of bean-counting, of course. The fifteen contributors (who were paid the slightly odd sum of $2499 each) include nine well-known white men along with five women -- two Arab-American women writers (Elmaz Abinader and Naomi Shihab Nye); Julia Alvarez, a Dominican novelist; Native American (Chickasaw) writer Linda Hogan, and the Calcutta-born author Bharati Mukherjee who asserts her identity as an un-hyphenated plain old American – and, in the Colin Powell/Condi Rice corner, distinguished African-American author Charles Johnson.

If you're interested in having your heart and mind transformed, you can pick up a copy at your local American Embassy (and they're translating it into thirty or so languages other than English), or read the whole thing online. The online version is especially useful for US-based readers: thanks to a law that prohibits the domestic distribution of propaganda aimed at foreigners, the anthology itself is banned here. Wouldn't want the government telling people what to think, now, would you…

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What else I’m reading at the moment: The Book of Iris, Derek Challis’s monumental biography of his mother, Iris Wilkinson, better know as Robin Hyde. Begun in the late 1960s by Gloria Rawlinson, then abandoned for almost three decades, this is a hugely detailed account of the extraordinary and difficult life of an extraordinary and difficult writer. Like Virginia Woolf or Colette or any number of modernistas, Hyde’s persona was larger than life: she treated the world as a stage and wore her art like a costume. I’m only a couple of chapters into the biography, but enjoying it immensely. Maybe I’ll follow it up with Roger Horrocks’ biography of Len Lye, another world-class artist from the homeland.

And I just finished a marvelous book called Babycatcher, by Peggy Vincent, a California based homebirth midwife, who caught some two and a half thousand babies during her long career. We all know where babies come from, of course, but it’s easy to forget (even if you’ve recently been on one end or the other of a delivery). This book recounts dozens of births, in hospitals, hippie houses, and, in one memorable case, on a fishing boat in the middle of a huge storm. It’s bloody fascinating reading (pun sort of intended), and seems pretty damn seasonal to me: what is the Christmas story, after all, if not an account of a blessedly uncomplicated homebirth-on-the-road? Talk about your spiritual midwifery…