Posts by Kate Hannah
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Voted up the road at the Presbytarian church. Kids waited outside while we cast our votes. Tamaki a hard electorate to be a lefty in, as it's one of the safest Nat seats out. But happily double ticked Green. Sun was shining despite the high wind & we wandered round the St Heliers shops & past the beach. Home for turkey & trimmings in a thanksgiving feast & pumpkin & apple crumble to accompany our election watchings. I do like voting. It feels important. It feels real. My foremothers fought hard for me to be able to do this.
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Capture: Walk across the rooftops., in reply to JacksonP,
He won't mind. I lent them to the Faculty of Engineering earlier in the year to scan for their archives - so he won't mind sharing. Looking forward to digging them out again and posting them for all to enjoy.
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Capture: Walk across the rooftops., in reply to JacksonP,
Right. That's my mission for the weekend then, scanning my Dad's pics of Engineering capping stunts in the quad circa 1967. They are gold. He's a very respectable professor of computer science now, but imagine the effects of six o'clock swill on a bunch of meccano-loving 18 year olds who owned every copy of Popular Mechanic. I'll find, scan & post.
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Muse: Friday Fluff: Shelf Life, in reply to bronwyn,
+1 on Tales of the City. My mother gave them to me to read when I was about 16 - LOVED them.
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Muse: Friday Fluff: Shelf Life, in reply to Sacha,
depends on the teen .... mine did.
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Muse: Friday Fluff: Shelf Life, in reply to Lilith __,
Oh I like her - I just also happen to find her productively sullen - for her own purposes ......
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Outlook is having "issues" so I may as well waste my time fruitfully thinking about books:
1) What are you reading at the moment?I've just finished re-reading The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Richard Zimler. I like to re-read when I'm stressed or having trouble finding books that I love. I have just started Barbara Ewing's The Circus of Ghosts.
2) As a child, what did you read under the covers?
Eveything and nothing - I actually don't recall ever being made to stop reading. But if I was, it would have been a Narnia (probably The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) or something unsuitable (adult reading age+speed reading = Catcher in the Rye at 10) that I failed to truly understand.
3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?
Umm. Yes. Too many to list. Schwartz-Bart's The Last of the Just is perhaps the one that astounded me with its beauty the most.
4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?
Persuasion. I can re-read that until the cows come home. The Collected PG Wodehouse as I'd need a laugh. The Cazelet Chronicles, Elizabeth Jane Howard.
5) Which literary character would you most like to sleep with?Atticus Finch. I know that's probably a bit freudian, but there it is.
6) If you could write a self-help book, what would you call it?
FML
7) Which book, which play, and which poem would you make compulsory reading in high school English classes?
Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood. A welcome update from the compulsory Handmaid's Tale (of which I heartily approve) and I think Grace's creepy sulleness and ambiguity speaks to the teenage condition.
I'm a traditionalist - the kids should have a Shakespeare each year - to read him aloud and discover the beauty of his language and the hilarous comtemporary nature of his themes and characters is a revelation. It's quite good for kids to know that there's actaully nothing that new under the sun. Love, sex, death etc
Poem. Ah, this is the tricky one. My black-wearing romantic teenage self loved reading Keats and Byron, but they're not everyone's cup of tea. Umm, the pressure: yep I'm a sad emo kid but Yeats will win out. there's something there for everyone.
8) Which party from literature would you most like to have attended?I'm going to have to go with one thrown by Jay Gatsby. Or Mr Tumnus
9) What would you title your memoirs?
Misrememberings
10) If you were an actor, which literary character do you dream of playing?
Cassandra Mortmain
11) What book would you give to a lover?
Books I have given: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to a poor 18 year old who'd never read it. He didn't like it much. Hence it didn't last.
My husband was reading Wolf's Fight Fire with Fire when I met him. We give each other all kinds of books .... he is a wonderful buyer of books for me.
12) Spying Mein Kampf or Dan Brown on someone’s bookshelf can spell havoc for a friendship. What’s your literary deal breaker?
Oh I do hate to parrot - but it's all about the breadth and depth of the books. And obviously someone with NO BOOKS fails the test.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Joe Wylie,
and this is one of the issues with history - assigning our current cultural norms and assessing society in the past against them. It is a difficult space to negotiate - and, like Sacha has so articulately stated, humanity can prevail even within an inhumane system. Nomenclature matters - BUT - it matters to us now more than it did in the past. Assumed norms regarding nomenclature change over time.
As a young grad student, I worked on an oral history of Tokonui Hospital - my assumptions about how former patients and former staff would feel about a place that felt inannately creepy and sad to me (we had a tour of the grounds) were completely wrong. At times, that place was haven, community, safety. I'm sure at other times it was not - but how those who were there remember it is as important as our current interpretations of how treatment there fits or does not fit into acceptable practise.
And Joe - you should record or write your memories of growing up and, as far as you can provide them, the memories of your parents - this adds to the sum of human wisdom, allowing us to understand the past as it was lived, instead of how we see it now.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Hilary Stace,
done - thanks Hilary
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
yes! I have that somewhere in my files as a very bizarre addition to the works I've found ... that whole genre of late victorian empire poetry (God Defend New Zealand a fine example) is truly odd. But packed with imagery and connotation to be teased out .....