Posts by Megan Clayton
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The anecdotes that I continue to hear of children and older folk who remain paralysed with anxiety and unable to return to any simulacrum of life as usual - even in undamaged homes - gives me pause. There seems to be a significant number of Christchurch people who are stuck in those initial moments of fear.
I continue to feel angry in this regard at the rumour-mongering, during that first week of aftershocks, by people who should have known better. The number of variants I heard on the bullshit story that relief workers had been "sent home to be with their families" in anticipation of a massive aftershock, and the terror this instilled in people whose nerves were already frayed, was frustrating to say the least.
This was for me the downside of social media (particularly Facebook) through all this. On some afternoons it became the equivalent of students gossiping before school assembly. Not everyone has the resources to sift useful news from nonsense, and many people seemed to regulate their own fear by passing it on to others.
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Paul, I see we are saying the same thing at the same time with regard to Robin Hyde. I can only be pleased at the confluence of opinion.
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The rolling out of the canon was indeed a feature in the teaching and criticism of New Zealand Literature for many years and in various settings. One thing that is perhaps curious about this was that, in tertiary institutions at least, it was often simultaneous with a struggle to get local literature recognised as a legitimate subject for study. I wonder at the extent to which this contributed to the post-war attempts to set in stone the Greats (in poetry at least) and the way in which Curnow in particular seemed to get so frustrated in the 50s and early 60s whenever younger writers didn't write according to plan.
It's also worth remembering that the fixed-canon overview of literature was at its height in the English academy at the time it was being fixed here. F.R. Leavis influenced E.H. McCormick's first survey of New Zealand Literature at Cambridge in the 1920s, and the argument can be made that McCormick brought back here a (kinder, gentler) version of Leavis's "Great Tradition", just in time for the centenary in 1940.
In terms of generic classification, I tend to group reflective blogging and forum discussions with other forms of epistolary writing: private and published diaries and letters in particular. Reading the letters of Robin Hyde (a frenetic correspondent whose correspondence ran to multiple microfilms in the Turnbull) is anachronistically comparable to reading a frequently-update blog on the usual humanist suspects: literature, politics, philosophy, religion, newspaper reporting and even film.
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As one who will only occasionally use a single word when a noun phrase would be more fun, I'd take seismological epistolarity.
Thank you Jolisa for the link (and for pointing out I was the "Christchurch writer" cited in Philip Matthews' account).
One of the curious features of this life online in the last week has been waiting to see what others would write about what we've experienced of late. It has been both flattering and comforting to have the same expectation extended to me.
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There's nothing quite so strange as being surrounded by the magical thinking of atheists, and there's been a lot of it among my family (apart from the ones who are Christians, whose humour is the blackest of all) since Saturday morning.
My father described the fault as one "pissed off at 16 000 years worth of shingle piling up and deciding to turn over" and my own thought in the first moments of the earthquake was that I had been so worried about climate change in the weeks after my 11-week-old daughter was born that I forgot to worry about earthquakes.
I also reflected that this continuous jaw-grinding, nerve-wearing stress is likely how people with anxiety disorders feel all the time. It feels as if the whole city and outlying districts is experiencing a mental health lockdown.
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Warm congratulations on your grandfather's publication, and sad condolences on the death of your grandmother. Our long-lived elder relatives are often a treasure to us and I wish your memories of her an equal longevity.
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Such a taxonomy as this would have been useful, to say the least, in my many happy-but-fraught spinster years. Its absence left me with just a few hopeful projections instead, all of which were inaccurate and ineffective, except when they weren't.
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I'd like to add a word to Kowhai's remarks above about one of the ways my thinking has shifted in light of boobquake. Immediately after I wrote my initial comments up-thread about the importance of not attacking other women for their choices about what they wear, I started thinking about how I do in fact, in a number of circumstances, do this. I gripe to colleagues about undergraduate fashion and have made remarks to officemates about the costume of specific students, often under the snide disguise of concern (as in, she looks cold with that low-cut top).
So my small boobquake diatribe reminded me that I am in fact a hypocrite in this regard, and that I would like to consider more thoughtfully as a result what I really think and say about what other women wear. I'm curious too that it's something I direct almost exclusively at young Pakeha women -- the sort of girl I would have been at 18 or 19. Maori, Pasifika, Muslim, Asian and mature students get a free pass from my judgemental mind to dress as they please. That however is a better topic for a blog post than a thread comment.
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Leopold, I am assuming that if the sight of insufficiently-covered man boobs drives those around you to adultery (which causes earthquakes), then you are as culpable as any lightly-clad woman covered in the statement's original reach.
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I shall be cheerfully participating, probably in a wrap-around top, immodestly remaining in the workforce at seven months pregnant. If anyone is inspired to earthquake-causing adultery by the sight of me (at a time when my getting stuck between a desk and a door is a far more pressing matter than the depth of my cleavage), then truly my powers are even greater than those attributed to women in general by the cleric.
I'm certainly with you, Emma, on what I think of as the feminism of dress. I don't think we get anywhere by attacking the dress choices of individual women, since it's such a quick step from that to identifying adjacent events as the consequences of those choices, and thus conveniently stripping away the agency of other actors (like those who choose to commit sexual assault).
This photo essay puts the discussion in the context of women and breastfeeding, but makes a similar point with regard to modesty and individual choice. Let the woman decide her set-point herself.