opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

Epictetus, Discourses I 1

2011-02-02T12:10:00.002+11:00

Well, I don't know if this is a good idea at all. But this is one of my favourite passages of Ancient Greek. Rendered in GoAnimate, with pseudo-Laurence Olivier Text-To-Speech. Epictetus, Discourses I 1, in the Loeb Oldfather translation from 1925.

Vamvakaris: The flood

2011-01-24T17:53:00.002+11:00

In the previous post, I wrote about the 1933 recording A raid on the hashish den, a comedy sketch with music, featuring one of the earliest recordings of Markos Vamvakaris. In the process, I got the bug for GoAnimate, and so I created an animated music video for the song. (Now with subtitles.)

My second such attempt involves Vamvakaris' Η Πλημμύρα (The Flood), recorded in 1935:

(You'll need to watch on YouTube to get the subtitles through Captions.)

I had not heard the song before buying the box set of Vamvakaris 1933–1937; in fact, I hadn't heard many of the songs, because early Vamvakaris is not radio-friendly. The Flood stood out for me—even before recent events in Australia made it topical.

The song presents direct, chilling vignettes of hardship after an urban flood; there is some filler in the lyric ("Mother's, it's no lie"), but in all it's brutally effective. And while Markos' more usual vignettes of lowlife posturing are also brutally effective in their own way, this is a surprising change of topic for him. The musical form of the song is also distinct: it's more relentlessly strophic than is usual for Markos—all A A A A instead of his typical AB BA A′B′ B′A′. He's presenting direct vignettes, and he uses a relentlessly straightforward style to do it.

He does so with a sparing number of notes, and with a hypnotic jangling (I think it's hand cymbals) in the break between verses. The sessions Markos recorded in, early on, each had their own mix of instruments and collaborators, and there are a few more songs from the '35 session with the hand cymbals in uses. Here though, they really come to the fore as a grim punctuation.

I was wondering whether the formulaic online animation packages for the masses that have recently come forth, like GoAnimate and XtraNormal, really can be suited to artistic expression more serious than tirades against mobile phones.

I don't think my animation of The Flood proves that it can; not least because I've got a lot to learn about cinematography—and about making the most of a very restricted repertoire. (XtraNormal As Kabuki: I can see the inflexibility of the packages turning into a codified convention for gestures.) But this has captured my interest.

A raid on the hashish den

2011-01-20T02:22:00.005+11:00

Among Markos Vamvakaris' 1933 recordings—among his very earliest, that is—is Έφοδος στον τεκέ, "A raid on the hashish den". This was a musical revue number by Giannis Kamvysis and Petros Kyriakos. Kyriakos was a musical theatre actor, and the underworld that gave rise to rebetiko music was part of what he documented in song. With all the attentiveness of an anthropologist. Or of a linguist, to judge from his "Dictionary of the mangas", recorded the previous year:

(Inevitably, the song is analysed at length in slang.gr)

The transcription below of Έφοδος στον τεκέ may not be perfect, and if anyone's ears of Greek are better than mine, I'll be grateful for corrections. It's substantially improved by the fact that the first verse has already been posted online, in a collection of rebetiko songs about hashish.

—Μπούρδα μπούρδα! Μάζεψε ασβέλτα τα συμπράγκαλα και καήκαμε.
—Γιατί ρε Τσικρικόνη;
—Ρε την κορόιδα παρισταίνεις ρε ή θέλεις να πα να κοιμάσαι στον Ωρωπό στον άσφαλτο;
—Ναι γιά ρε. Μαζέψτε ρε λεχρίτες τους τζουράδες και ξηγηθήτε τους ζούλα
—Μα τι τρέχει ρε Τσικρικόνια;
—Ρε είσαι μεγάλο χάπι εσύ ρε κύριε, και μια που δεν αντιλήβεσαι δια ζώσης, άκου το πεντάγραμμο και έχεις το δικαίωμα της αναίρεσης, α δε σου γουστάρει.
—Μπράβο

Αδερφάκι κάνε μόκο
Μαύροι πλάκωσαν για μπλόκο
Τώρα στη γωνιά τους είδα
Κάνε ζούλα την καρύδα
Θα μαγκώσουν τα δερβίσα
Θα μας πάρουν τα χασίσα
Τα καλάμια θα μας βρούνε
και τις ζούλες θ' ανθιστούνε

—Μην κουνηθεί κανένας. Στον τόπο γιατί θα σας κάψω
—Μπράβο κύριε μόλισμαν μπράβο. Τέτοια αναθροφή σε μάθανε ρε στην Κέρκυρα ρε στη σχολή;
—Ρε άσε τις εξυπνάδες εσύ ρε Τσικρικόνη και ο άλλος ο Μπάτης, και να μου πείτε τώρα αμέσως που έχετε κρυμμένο το μαύρο και τους λουλάδες. Ακούτε;
—Τι λες μωρ' αδερφέ; Λοιπόν κύριε μόλισμαν, έχεις πέσει όξω εχτρά [= οικτρά]. Μα την Αγία Ανάσταση έχεις πέσει όξω. Μα τι θα πει «μαύρο», κύριε μόλισμαν;

Ένα μαύρο μόνο ξέρω
Δεν μπορώ να σας το φέρω
Η ψυχή μου τού σπαράζει
Μα εγώ τη λέω μαράζι
Τι ντουμάνι δεν γνωρίζω
Την καρδιά μου δεν ορίζω
Μ' έπιασε μεγάλη ζάλη
Έκανα βαρύ κεφάλι

—Τώρα τραβάτε κάτω στο τίμημα [= τμήμα], και κει ξηγιόσαστε με τον αστυνόμο.
—Μπράβο! Δεν πάμε πουθενά κύριε μόλισμαν.
—Έλα μέσα ρε, που δεν πας πουθενά, α;
—Δεν πάμε πουθενά είπαμε! Είμαστε έντιμοι επαγγελματίαι
—Κάτσε παραπέρα ρε κορόιδο εσύ
—Μωρέ πάψε μωρέ αδερφάκι Μάρκο! Είμαστε έντιμοι επαγγελματίαι και έχουμε τον καφενέ μας το νταραβέρι μας τουτέτιξ δηλαδή και στρίβε με το καλό που σου λέω κύριε μόλισμαν.
—Μωρέ τράβα μέσω θα βγάλω το γκλομπ ρε.
—Ποιο γκλομπ να βγάλεις;
—Ναι το γκλομπ θα βγάλω
—Ρε, μάγκες! Βουρ ρε μπλόκο! Βουρ ρε Μπάτη! Βουρ ρε Μπάτη!
—Πάει το καφενείο...

—[??] Gather up the gear quickly, 'cause we're ruined!
—How come, Tsikrokonis?
—Are you playing dumb, then, or would you rather go sleep on the ashphalt of Oropos jail?
—Yeah, scumbags, gather up the tzouras [musical instruments] and stash them away.
—What's the matter, Tsikrikonis?
—You, sir, are a major dimwit. And since you don't get my meaning viva voce, have a listen to these dulcet tones; and you have the right of refutation, if you don't dig it.
—Good work!

Brother, keep it quiet.
The blackguards are swarming for a raid
I've just seen them around the corner
Hide that bong away
They'll snatch us dervishes
They'll take our hash
They'll find our pipes
And they'll get wind of our stash

—Nobody move! Freeze, or I'll do you in!
—Good show, Mr Shmoliceman. Is that how they brought you up in the academy in Corfu, is it?
—Cut the smart talk Tsikrikonis, you and that Batis guy, and tell me immediately where you've hidden the hash and the pipes. Do you hear me?
—What are you talking about, brother? Now Mr Shmoliceman, you are egregiently mistaken. By the Holy Resurrection, you are mistaken. What do you mean, hash?

I only know one hash
And I can't bring it to you
My soul breaks because of it
But I call it the blues
What's that smoke? I can't tell
I cannot keep my heart in check
I've gone mighty dizzy,
And my head feels heavy.

—Right, you can get down to the station now, and you can explain yourselves to the sergeant.
—Oh, good show! We're not going anywhere Mr Shmoliceman.
—Get inside! "Not going anywhere", he says!
—I'm telling you, we're not going anywhere! We are honourable businessmen—
—Cool it you fool
—Oh keep quiet brother Markos! We are honourable businessmen, and we have our café, our commerce and the like, I mean; so I'm asking you nicely, Mr Shmoliceman, you'd better get lost.
—Get inside, damn it, or I'll use my baton.
—Baton? What baton?
—That's right, I'll use my baton.
—Dudes! It's a raid! Get him, Batis! Get him, Batis!
—… Well, there goes the café...

The song has been uploaded onto YouTube once already:

... And now, courtesy of GoAnimate and Yr Obt Svt, it has been uploaded a second time:

Markos Vamvakaris: Είσαι μελαχρινό και νόστιμο

2011-01-09T20:02:00.003+11:00

Rebetiko music was a fusion of styles, and the fusion can be seen in progress through the '30s. The antecedents of rebetiko are murky, but the most visible antecedent is Smyrneika, the music of Anatolian cafés, which came with the Anatolian refugees to Greece in the '20s, and was taken up as the emblem of the dispossessed in the underworld.

A tidy narrative, but there are more currents in Rebetiko than that. Markos Vamvakaris, who is deservedly termed the patriarch of rebetiko, promoted a Piraeus Sound that was at some distance from Smyrneika. He shared a musical vocabulary with them, and recorded a few tracks with Smyrneika singers; but the Piraeus Sound was more rhythmical, more upbeat, more Western. He only infrequently uses the Maqam Saba—the bluest of modes in rebetiko music, so blue it even has a blue IV note.

(That's nothing; the Arabo-Persian original even has a blue VIII note. Yes, you read right. But I digress.)

The refugees from Anatolia recorded plenty of Amanes—the slow, chromatic laments that were emblematic of Smyrneika, and which I've looked at before, in the context of Muslim Cretan music. Vamvakaris on the other hand recorded just one amanes, and made a point of binding it with Peiraeus rather than Anatolia: Πειραιώτικος Μανές, The Peiraeus Amanes.

But Markos' path took him westward rather than eastward—not without some heavy shoving by the censors of the Greek government. By 1937, his style had matured into what is recognisably the classical style of rebetiko; it had foregone much of the raw impact of early recordings, but it had gained in musicianship and smoothness.

Not that Vamvakaris in 1937 was completely consistent; some songs are too trivially cantabile, some are powerful riffs reminiscent of his earlier music. One song in particular though, Είσαι μελαχρινό και νόστιμο, "You're dark and cute", is incoherent in a way surprising for Vamvakaris, early or late.

The song starts out with the Classic Peiraeus sound. A two beats to the bar, jaunty riff on the accordion followed by the bouzouki. The riff is in the Peiraiotikos Dromos scale—a variant of the Maqam Hijaz, and Vamvakaris' favourite: it too, after all, is named for Peiraeus:

But in the introduction to the song, the exotic intervals of the Peiraiotikos are defused:

The flattened II and sharpened IV are glossed over as passing notes; the riff is solidly anchored on the major triad. The riff wears its tonality on its sleeve.

Then Markos starts singing (0:22). And what he starts singing has nothing to do with the riff:

Where the riff was straightforwardly tonic-anchored, all I and III and V, the song is lost far from the tonic: V at best, and more VII and II. That doesn't translate to a simple Dominant chord, which wouldn't be a problem in Western music: the band is still on the tonic, and these are Hijaz VII and II, not Major key. With a tonic of A, the voice gravitates to B♭ and G♯: it teases the listener, with a leading tone a semitone below the tonic, and another leading tone above, outright dodging the tonic in bar 18. So while the riff has defanged the Peiraiotikos' exotic notes, the voice has let the exotic notes take over, and has undermined the scale's tonic.

Where the riff has jaunty sixteenth notes, the voice drags in slow quarter notes—even more so in later verses. Where the riff hops up and down the triad, the voice moseys up and down the scale, a third each bar, adrift. Where the riff has a tonic triad note twice a bar, the voice holds off landing back on the tonic until the very final bar in the phrase. And that's in the first verse: with each subsequent verse (0:33), the voice adds a bar to the eight-bar phrase (bar 29):

—so where the riff was foursquare to the bar, the voice ends up on the tonic one bar too late, in a nine-bar phrase that sounds like it forgot to keep count. And the riffs and verse keep alternating through the song, establishing and dismantling and establishing once more two different kinds of musical order.

It took me a little while to work out what on earth Markos was doing, until I realised that what the voice is doing—slow-moving, metrically free, stepping by thirds, untethered from the tonic—was the antithesis of the Peiraeus sound. In Είσαι μελαχρινό και νόστιμο, Markos is singing an amanes.

It's unsurprising for an amanes to dodge the tonic like that, or to ignore metre; that's what an amanes does. What is startling about Είσαι μελαχρινό και νόστιμο is that Markos is singing an amanes with a hasapiko introduction, to a hasapiko beat, in a hasapiko tempo, with a hasapiko sensibility, and against a hasapiko tonality. He is singing an amanes in the context of the Peiraeus Sound, which utterly clashes with the amanes. I may not be excused the anachronism, but Markos is here committing a mashup.

And the incongruity of the combination makes it startling, it isolates what was commonplace within its native context. The tonic-dodging and metrical freedom become a statement, rather than a convention; a dialectic rather than a recitation. I don't know what made Markos experiment this way, and it's not a path he went further on, either. But it foregrounds, as nothing else Markos did, how hybrid rebetiko music is; how the one Peiraiotikos Dromos could have two quite different interpretations, before they were blended in the Peiraeus Sound.

I haven't mentioned the lyrics, btw, because by this stage, the lyrics aren't particularly notable—Markos is done singing in praise of getting stoned and beating girlfriends up. But, in case you're interested:

Είσαι μελαχροινό και νόστιμο

Είσαι μικρό μελαχρινό τσαχπίνικο τα δυο σου μαύρα μάτια

Όποιον θα δούνε μόρτικα μελαχρινό τον κάνουνε κομμάτια

Είσαι παραπονιάρικο μελαχροινό κανένα δεν κοιτάζεις

Κι όλοι με σένα τα’χουνε μελαχροινό γιατί δεν τους πειράζεις

—Γεια σου Μάρκο

Τα τρυφερά χειλάκια σου μελαχροινό και τ’άσπρο σου χεράκι

Όλα αυτά μικρούλα μου μελαχροινό λυώνουν κι έχω μεράκι

—Να ζήσουν τα μελαχροινά!

Περνάς και δε με χαιρετάς μελαχροινό γιατί δε με γνωρίζεις

Και ντρέπομαι να σου το ειπώ μελαχροινό γιατί έμαθα πως βρίζεις

You're dark and cute

You're petite, dark, flirty; your two brown eyes

make whoever they look on saucily—oh dark one—fall to pieces.

You're a grumbler—oh dark one—you don't look at anyone

And everyone's annoyed at you—oh dark one—because you won't tease them.

—Go Markos!

Your tender lips—oh dark one—and your white hand

All these make me melt—my little dark one—and I'm lovesick.

—Long live dark chicks!

You go by and don't say hello—oh dark one—because you don't know me

And I'm too shy to tell you—oh dark one—because I've found out that you curse.

While I was away

2010-11-14T14:00:00.002+11:00

I: May

As if I was the first
To sail beyond the west,
Fall off the end of Earth,
Sink, swim, and gasp for breath.

As if no man knew thirst,
Before I stopped to rest
Beside the spring; or birth,
Before I heard of death.

Beyond the west: each day
A year, each step a road.
Winding to the unknown.

Roads trod by mortal clay
A thousandfold. A ride
I've hitched now. By your side.

II: May

This fulsomeness, this loveliness, this care,
This playfulness, this trust and troth laid bare,
This passion, this impulsiveness, this shock,
This pressing—this inexorable lock,

These waves and curves, this storm of skin and hair,
This push and pull and pause, this fear and dare,
These shades, dim monochrome, that sway and rock,
This stillness, lulled at by the ticking clock,

All this you teach me. All of this you hold.
All this I witness with you. Watch it flow,
Like mercury, like phlogiston, like gold.

This Here-and-Now, this Hence, this Old Made New,
This secret that not even we can know,
This you and I have claimed.
It's half past two.

III: May

So, there's this girl. Unruly, quite the knave.
Will not stay put. Does what she damn well will.
Frets that she'll fall asleep if she stands still.
Makes mirth of solemn stuff. Derides the grave.

So there's this girl. Can't take her anyplace.
Won't talk on tragedy. Will not wear frills.
Talk French cuisine, she's running for the hills.
And laughs at me about it to my face.

So there's this girl, who's got me all worked out,
piercing my artifices and my doubt.
And still stays put, and won't go anywhere.

What do I do with her? What has she done,
To make my reason and my pomp go dumb?
How have I come to earn reproof so fair?

IV: August

Grace pooling from above. Grace trickling down.
Grace mingling with the common and the base,
Granted unbidden, and divulged unbound.
Grace that suffuses all, for gain or waste.

Grace filling puddles, muddying the ground,
In which the errant wretch begrudged his haste:
Splashed past his shins, only to end up drowned
In startling, blinding, and uncalled for Grace.

Thy grace, thy charm, thy steadfastness, thy blithe
And easy gait: I, far from thee and these
Behold and cannot fathom. Where these thrive,

Where thou hast joy, I hear of now and then:
Reports of floods and mud that boil and freeze
And thaw, and bring this world to grace, and mend.

V: October

Each year Adonis dies, pierced by the boar.
Each year the maidens bear him, singing dirges,
To a tomb. Adonis each new year emerges
To live again, eager to hunt once more.

Each year the black earth, bound in snow, and sore
With grief, bewails its loss in crystal churches.
Each year, Lent breaks: up from the ground life surges
Anew, to bloom, to fade, to exult, to mourn.

Each week, each day, we dance, and draw apart,
And back again; we stop, we spin, we start,
We try anew. It works, it fails, it muddles.

Each time, we don't know that the Spring will come.
Each time, we know that soon the frost will numb
Our hands. Yet still a flame glows, where we've huddled.

VI: November

The cold has come. The stony showers flood
Blurred memories of one-time warmth, as brusque
As Melbourne weather. Now a bleary dusk
Alone recalls the sun, in faded blood,

Soon to grow dark. These feet pass through the mud,
Their pace agnostic, doubting. A boar's tusk,
They'd wailed, has struck. But pilfered myths won't mask
That chill that numbs its prey, and binds it shut.

Now stories leech away. I never sailed
Beyond the west; the storm at half past two
Was merely rain, and bore no grace. I failed

To hear their music. Now they've fallen dumb,
Too drained to praise a summer that was due
to pass. And so it sets. The cold has come.

The ashes of Sukhumi

2010-07-04T13:45:00.004+10:00

This story picks through the ashes.

When I was finishing my undergrad and moving through to linguistics in 1993, the war in Abkhazia was underway. There was plenty of grubby conduct on both sides, and Abkhazia was in the end thoroughly ethnically cleansed; but outsiders with no stake in the Caucasus had sympathies for the most superficial of reasons. As a linguist, I wished the bizarre consonants of Abkhaz well. Yes, it was that superficial—though I did also know someone who knew Viacheslav Chirikba, Abkhaz specialist on Abkhaz, linguistics lecturer in Leiden (and now in Sukhumi), and representative of Abkhazia to Europe for years.

Robert Haupt was the Soviet Union/Russian correspondent at the time for the Fairfax newspaper group (The Age, Melbourne, and the Sydney Morning Herald). This was a pre-Web age, and his dispatches, which I consumed with pre-Web leisure, alternated between leisurely whimsy and urgency, from a correspondent in the midst of the disruptions shaking the Soviet Empire. When he finished his five year stint, Haupt published a memoir of his time in Russia, Last Boat to Astrakhan (see review 1, review 2).

Halfway through his time in Russia, Haupt wrote an editorial on the Abkhazian War. My sympathies were with the Abkhaz consonants; his sympathies were with a sustainably-sized polity, which meant Georgia, and he treated Abkhazian independence as "a sort of Ruritanian joke". His sympathies led him to diss Abkhaz consonants:

The amazing thing is that even in Abkhazia the Abkhazians are a minority. In fact, they constitute 17.1 per cent of the region's population, Georgians making up 43.9 per cent. The total number of Abkhazians anywhere is just over 90,000. Put together, they are a football crowd. About half the Abkhazians are Sunni Muslims, but judging from my meetings with some of them before the civil war it was a lightly-worn faith, with few mosques and veils and with the prohibition on alcohol honoured not so much in the breach as by the barrel.
The Abkhazian language is an issue. A strange tongue, apparently related to Circassian, it sounds like the noise a Chinese speaker might make on the point of being strangled. When the Soviet Union existed, mandatory Russian obscured the problem of whether the official language here was to be Abkhazian or Georgian. As Moscow's grip slackened, disputes arose, particularly over what was to be the language used at Sukhumi University. Georgians point out that their language, having a written literature going back to the 5th century BC, has some claims to precedence as a means of instruction over a tongue that achieved a fully written form only in 1928.

I've said worse a decade later about Montenegrin, but I was scandalised at the time. Given the practicalities of bureaucracy and business and scholarship, Georgian does have more of a claim as an Ausbausprache than Abkhaz—spoken by only two thirds of that "football crowd"; the current moves to make it the language of government business in Abkhazia are not meeting with success, and the business of Abkhazia is being conducted in Russian.

But what had happened at the start of the Abkhaz war was no Ruritanian joke. Abkhaz would have had more Ausbau in place, if Georgian paramilitaries had not torched the Abkhaz national library and national archives.

Abkhaz is a small language, with a small written footprint—much smaller than Georgian. Burning down the place where all books in Abkhaz were deposited made it even smaller, and was intended to. The National Library has since managed to restore a lot of the 40% of books burned—in no small part because Soviet Abkhazia had made sure a copy of every Abkhaz book also went to Moscow. The library is still damaged and scaled down, but basically functioning.

It is otherwise with the National Archives (account in Russian). Its fate is heartbreakingly documented by Thomas de Waal:

Of the 176,000 archival documents in Abkhazia, 168,000 are estimated to have been destroyed. What the Georgian paramilitary did not burn in the National Archives (despite the efforts of both Abkhaz and Georgian neighbours), was in the archives stored in the Communist Party Archives. Georgian and then Abkhaz troops did away with those archives as the war went on.

There is a Greek component to this blotting out. Abkhazia had a substantial Pontic community before the Stalinist purges and deportations, as documented by Daniel Müller: 7% of the population in 1926, 10% in 1939 (as ethnic Abkhaz started to leave the region), but just 2% in 1959. As I noted in the Other Place, the historian Vlasis Agtzidis has recently published his doctoral dissertation on the Greek press of the Soviet Union. His focus is Κόκινος Καπνας, Red Tobacco-Worker, the Greek newspaper of Sukhumi.

The entire print run of the Red Tobacco-Worker was one of the many items to go up in flames in October 1992, after Agtzidis had already been to Sukhumi—though as the introduction notes, the print run had been microfilmed in Moscow just in time. The newspaper was of course only one of thousands of testimonies of the Greek history of Abkhazia that was destroyed.

As de Waal's accounts tell, the archive's last custodian was himself half-Greek (and spared deportation in 1949 through his German mother): Nikolai Ioannidi. Ioannidi was the director (or deputy director) of the archive, and was working on a history of the Greeks of Abkhazia. He published the first volume of Греки в Абхазий in 1990, the first published account of the Stalinist purges of Greeks (see comment #15, Pontus and the Left). The manuscript of the second volume turned to ash in his office safe, before his eyes.

And Ioannidi spent his last days in an empty room in the University of Sukhumi, drinking Greek coffee and brooding over the remnants of the National Archive, uncatalogued, unrestored, unrecognisable. De Waal reports Ioannidi's death on 1 July 2007, eight months after he had interviewed him.

De Waal paints a tragic picture of Ioannidi, but I will take his epitaph instead from the Pontus and the Left blog, in the discussion about the historiography of the purges of Greeks. Ioannidi did manage a second book shortly before he died, about the exile of the Abkhazian Greeks to Central Asia in 1949; the discussion on the blog was about the opinion of some historians that the exile was connected to the defeat of the Communists in the Greek Civil War. Commenter M-P (one of the blog owners) attributes the opinion to Ioannidi in his first book (comment #20). (Agtzidis also mentions that as Ioannidi's position in an article on the purges, fn. 188). Commenter Dimitris (comment #21) retorts that Ioannidi was merely posing it as a question, and rejected it in his second book.

Yet even while disagreeing with Ioannidi, M-P paid him tribute—the kind of tribute Ioannidi would have welcomed:

Ioannidi was a Soviet historian. He wrote during the Soviet era, relied on Soviet archives, and because of his age and circumstances, he was not influenced by post-Soviet ideological trends. Until the end of his life he struggled with other comrades of all ethnicities against the nationalisms sweeping through Abkhazia.

Robert Haupt died on his way back to Australia in 1996, just before his memoirs were published. A few years later, the columnist Peter Ryan was writing a told-you-so piece about the scandal surrounding Prime Minister Keating's investment in a piggery while in office. The teaser starts with:

IT IS A STRANGE SENSATION when you feel that a dead man is trying to send you a message, but it happened to me a couple of weeks ago, shortly after Australia's Attorney-General announced that no further inquiries would be pursued into the circumstances of Paul Keating's piggery. The dead man was Robert Haupt, one of the ablest and most respected journalists in recent Australian media history.

From the teaser, it looks like Haupt had written something prescient about the scandal. Haupt's analysis about Russia is challenged in Jennifer Marohasy's blog, just as Ioannidi's analysis was challenged in Pontus and the Left's blog. But the dead do still send us messages, through what they have left behind; and they do not ask that they be right all the time, merely that they be remembered.

The fires in Sukhumi denied others their rememberance. Haupt and Ioannidi have not been so denied. Requiescant.

… "We're talking about people's lives!"

2010-05-10T21:24:00.003+10:00

I have been wanting to write, since reading of it, about the deaths in Athens. And unhealthily (because of such recursion is our society enmeshed), I have been wanting to write about the reactions to the deaths. What I would write would be reactionary, and vindictive, and uninformed. I don't particularly want to say I'm not entitled to my own opinions about what happened, or that I cannot identify with class struggle because I am, after all, the class enemy. But the dead deserve more respect than that, and better reasoning than I can come up with on the other side of the planet. It is as offensive to make them a departure point for my sloganeering, as it is for the parties that I took offence to.

Instead, I wanted to post what someone else has said: someone who has a stake in the country, and the protest march, and the struggle on the streets of Athens. Someone whose response—I admit it—I could make sense of, but would still challenge my complacent notions.

The following article by Stratis Bournazos, which I am translating with permission, appeared in the Sunday issue of Avgi [Dawn], the newspaper affiliated with the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), on May 9, and is republished in the column's blog.

"What is a diamond worth
when people's souls are coal.
Once you're in Dante's Hell,
there's no way back to Earth."

It's Wednesday night, and I'm listening to the Winter Swimmers (Χειμερινοί Κολυμβητές). They wrote that piece for another reason and another time, but I'm thinking: what are words worth, when three people have burned? So our souls don't turn to coal as well: that's what they're worth. That's why I'm writing this, with an unbearable sense of burden. For the dead. But also, and mainly, for us.

A lot happened on Wednesday, a whole lot. We could say even more. On the huge crowd that deluged Athens. On the rage. On the savage joy. On people's laughter. On the gas that choked us. On the crowd surging, shouting "burn the whorehouse, burn the Parliament" (a harbinger of an uprising? or the prelude to a dangerous backlash against representative government?) On the fluidity of things. On how we got from the sadness of the First of May to the enthusiasm of Wednesday. On that, and a lot more. Until we learned of the dead. From that moment, nothing is the same. For all of us, the three dead have haunted our day. Their names: Paraskevi Zoulia. Angeliki Papathanasopoulou. Epaminondas Tsakalis.

It is a horror that three people found such a death. Because it was no accident, it was the result of a process of blind violence, of a conscious indifference for human life. It was going to happen. It was almost predictable—just as it is predictable that we will in the future mourn deaths from the indiscriminate use of tear gas. In protest marches for the past few years, a certain party has exalted and exercised violence for violence's sake—sometimes to the protesters' reproof, sometimes with the protesters standing aside. They have done so without caring whether there are people in danger—inside, next door, upstairs, further down.

So for the first time in our entire recent history, people have died in a demonstration not because of State violence (the case of the K. Marousis store in 1991 remains controversial), but because of anti-State violence, because of the actions of people who took part in the march, who were part of it in a way—however marginal, and who acted in its name. The Molotov cocktails and fires had a pretext: they were an act of protestation, an act of anti-State, anti-capitalist, anti-government violence. We can disagree with them, but how can we deny it?

A little after the news was confirmed, various items started circulating. That the bank had no emergency exit. That there was no fire security. That the employers forced the workers not to strike. That the door was locked. Even if all that is completely true, it is politically and morally shameful to resort to it as an alibi, to claim that Vgenopoulos [the bank owner] is ultimately at fault, or to adopt the statements of Rizospastis [the Communist newspaper], enraging in their ridiculousness, that "the three employees were killed by the urban class, whatever sheepskin their instruments may have been disguised with." Let our judgement not be clouded: this time the ongoing scandal of employer irresponsibility is not what matters. It wasn't a lightning bolt or a cigarette butt that started the fire.

Thousands of stores throughout Greece lack fire security and emergency exits. It's illegal, and it's terribly wrong. But if it was the riot police that had thrown tear gas into one of them, or the Golden Dawn [neo-fascists] had thrown in an incendiary device, and we were now mourning the dead—would we be blaming the lack of emergency safeguards then? We should not trample on our common sense or our decency.

And as for the other opinion heard—that the bank should have shut down beforehand because it was a "target": public opinion can say that, but we don't get to say it. We, who have been shouting "To the street, to the street, break the terror of the State"—we don't get to say that stores should close down, barricade, become impregnable forts, or else they will turn into deathtraps. We certainly don't get to blame the owners responsible, because they failed to regard the protest march like an earthquake, a hurricane, a looming storm, a mortal peril. If we think like that, we have fully capitulated to a perversion of the meaning of protest: we have yielded to the dominion of fear and terror.

We left-wingers of all shades, anti-government, anarchist, libertarians, we are all struggling for social emancipation, for the spread of freedom, against the capitalist barbarism which crushes peoples' lives and dreams, against the exploitation of people by people. Aren't we? So what do our values have in common with the fetishisation of violence, violence which is raised to an utmost and unitary goal in itself, and—most terrifying of all—has contempt for human life? In dismissing human life, there is no emancipation: there is no service done to the struggle for freedom, justice, and a better life. We cannot but stand face to face against this, making no excuses.

We. I'm talking about us. Each of us, wherever we have staked our ground. Representatives of the government and the establishment can see the dead as an opportunity to get out an awkward spot. Investors can fear for the consequences in tourism. Scholars and scientists have to analyse the sociological, psychological, and other causes of the phenomenon. But the question is, what do we do. All of us, who have protested worker "accidents", army suicides, the attack against Kouneva, the violence of the riot police, the murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos, the deaths of immigrants, and so much else, all with the common theme of defending human life and dignity: we don't get to forget the three dead, or offload the blame anywhere we can, as quickly as we can—on Vgenopoulos, on the State, on "agents provocateurs". We don't get to speak cynically of collateral damage, and we don't get to tally them up against the other dead. And that is nothing to do with bourgeois niceties: it touches on the core of our stance, in politics and in values. After all, what were we shouting in the march on Wednesday? "You're talking about market dives, we're talking about people's lives!"

If we have a sense of how tragic what happened was, if we feel contrition, if we allow ourselves to mourn without looking to drown our sorrow in a sea of analyses and excuses—that would be a start. Even if it is belated, because many of us—and I include myself—should have thought of all this much earlier. Even now, we must convert this tragic experience into both individual and collective thought; each of us must acknowledge their responsibilities, different though they may be. We must try to understand. We must speak with honour. We must stand up where we ought to, morally and politically. Without trying to deceive the Others—or above all, ourselves.

PS: of the many texts circulating online, I'd like to refer readers to two: Kostas Svolis' (indy.gr/analysis/tria-fantasmata-planioyntai-pano-apo-to-kinima), and Radical Desire's (radicaldesire.blogspot.com/2010/05/greques-encore-un-effort-si-vous-voulez.html).

Jottings of New York

2010-04-17T13:33:00.003+10:00

I'm leaving New York. I haven't been leisurely blogging for the twenty-four hours I've been here; I've been too busy talking with my regular commenter John Cowan (6 hrs, finishing 2:30 AM—good to know I can still do that kind of thing, though jet lag helps), and my friend Genevieve (1 hr, and we had to be efficient about it—bon voyage à Angleterre!)

There have been past Jottings of New York, and I have been to New York several times before; this was a lightning visit, and I'll just quickly note the following:

My dinner was around the corner from the Polish consulate, which had an improvised shrine to the dead president. That kind of improvised shrine is now common in the West, which doesn't have the institutionalised religious channels to commemorate death that it used to. I'm assuming you won't see that kind of improvised shrine in Greece, for example, because people until recently built actual shrines by the roadside, with icons and oil lamps.
The restaurant was Asia de Cuba, and I'm impressed that it impressed Genevieve. It is fusion Chinese–Cuban. The fusion is organic and not self-consciously experimental as much fusion is (Chinese people did move to Cuba). The food was certainly worth the money: the Shanghai noodles were correct, the pork honeyed and melt-in-mouth, the kind Greeks exclaim "Turkish Delight!" over. Pity I can no longer put away the quantities I could.
New York now, and always, strikes me with its urbanity: the dressed up young things talking over drinks or noodling with their Crackberries, jostling for drinks—this was familiar, this was how the world should be. I don't know that I would last if I actually lived here, but the switch-on, fashion-savvy, over-caffeinated New Yorker is a plane of experience to aspire to.
That, and its no-prisoners, no-nonsense purposefulness, that comes of wedging a gajillion businesspeople in a couple of square km. My anecdote of choice when I used to live in California: after two years of toothy, insincerely grinned "Hey, how ya doin'" from random strangers in the street, I got to New York, where the random strangers would shove me out of the way as they went to where they had to be—and it was heaven. This time around, the contrast was the casual jaywalking, right in front of the cops, who after all have better things to do in NYC than prosecute jaywalkers. Genevieve tells me the cops get a "hey, how ya doin'" from the jaywalkers for their trouble.
- I interrupt this transmission to thank the Qantas staff in Premium Economy for resolving my power supply issues to my laptop, and for the complimentary champers on top of it. The station to which I shall have been accustomed, indeed...
There is a beauty to this subjugated, engineered, piled on landscape of towers of brick and concrete. My friend Jana, whose idea of beauty is the Central Australian desert, gets antsy when she comes here. I grin. And it's not all unrelieved gauche glass towers, like Brisbane is (or least would have been, if Joh had demolished everything he saught to). It's Art Deco sky-piecers Midtown, lots of more squat and humane brick uptown (because, as John informed me, the soil outside Midtown can only support so much weight), and plenty of trees still, welcoming and verdant and tamed. Like in DC.
Coincidentally, when I got to my hotel at 2:30 AM, the History Channel was playing a show on reconstructing the pre-urban landscape of NYC. It was overwrought like all History Channel shows are—though at least this show didn't feature Hitler, as is the channel's default. But the reconstruction isn't that amazing a feat: we do have a British map, and pristine woodland still left on the northern tip of the island: unlike Greece, America gets that parks matter, and keeps them inviolable. Still, I wasn't expecting that Times Sq was originally a beaver pond.
And a tree-strewn Manhattan with beavers and porpoises and just the occasional Amerindian wandering down what would become Broadway: that's not "a green paradise". Chill out, History Channel. It was a tree-strewn island with beavers and porpoises. I'm not saying all of North America should be terraformed and levelled and piled with buildings and packed with a gajillion businesspeople per square km; but I'm glad this bit was.
The pile of buildings looks wondrous from New Jersey, and it was an excellent suggestion of Genevieve's to take the ferry across to see it. A giant's playblocks scattered into the sea.
The gajillion people make NYC have microcultures, just like the hills it used to have would have made it have microclimates. This time I confined myself to Midtown–Upper West Side; but Upper West Side isn't Midtown, which isn't Chelsea, which isn't The Village, and you can see it. In Melbourne, none of my friends go any further south than St Kilda; so it's rare they visit Oakleigh. (Or even, by God, South Yarra—which is as New York urbane as Melbourne gets.) I take that as cowardly parochialism. Here at least, I don't begrudge the locals who never bother to venture north—or south—of 14th Street. Their Village is world enough; and so is the next one up.
Thank you btw Genevieve for translating for me "Upper West Side = Malvern". And "they still think Asian fusion is exotic here, when we in Melbourne did that 15 years ago." It's good to have Rosetta Stones.
And thank you John for a seminar I cannot summarise or reproduce, but which was as always rollicking good fun. The comparison between the clout in their homelands of the Greek and Jewish diasporas is not one that would have occurred to me; but it gave me the opportunity to lambast Greek morning TV host & pontificator Giorgos Papadakis once again, which is a good thing.
- (Israel cares what the Jewish diaspora thinks, because that's where the money comes from. Greece remembers its diaspora when it's expedient to raise it to a nationalist frenzy over a National Issue; otherwise, they ignore them, and I'll never get over Papadakis' patronising tone when Greek-Americans rang in over the Iraq war, indignant about the Greek take on events. I'm not saying I wouldn't patronise them either. I'm saying that's dissing a whole lot of your fellow Grecophones, with unearned arrogance.)
Oh, and I know about food servers saying "To have here or to go?": "To go?" is starting to displace "Have here or take away?" in Australia. (Or maybe that's just me.) But have people been saying "To go or to stay?" for a while? It was new to me, but not to Genevieve.

The green highways of Northern Virginia

2010-04-14T07:22:00.000+10:00

I'm in a hotel in Northern Virginia this time, and am negotiating its large highways on foot; ten years ago, I was visiting a residence, and not really going anywhere much. So I had not been subjected to its large highways any way other than how God intended them to be encountered—out the car window.

So I'm warming less to the place than I had on previous visits; this is a work visit, and on the perfunctory side.

Still, especially around the grounds I am at, there is an delightsome orgy of green, of trees that are not threatening and peeling, but soothing and sensible. The gaps in the concrete in Irvine make it look like the scrubland is threateningly poised to take back over. The gaps in the concrete here make it look as if the forest has already staked out its niche, and is more at ease with its urban neighbours—more humane.

View Larger Map

At least, that's what it looks like from N. Beauregard; walking down S. King, it was as much a jumble of big buildings out of place as anywhere else.

US, so far

2010-04-13T13:17:00.001+10:00

You'll have noticed even more extended radio silence than is usual for me on a trip overseas. I've spent three days in Irvine CA, and am now heading to DC, on a plane four hours delayed.

Which brings thoughts of decaying infrastructure. An unsustainably greened Orange County, with the same gargantuan buildings and brobdignanian freeways (just as I'd bemoaned here about Oracle HQ), a vista which will host tumbleweeds in my lifetime. Airline fleets with bits falling apart as I type. Western Civilisation, throwing out its books for PDFs, to leave behind neither.

Well, no, I'm not happy I'm missing my dinner out in DC, and my Monday has been killed in waiting lounges and overnarrow seats. I'm never happy to be anywhere near an American airport, and even less so an American domestic flight, whose desperate piling on of carry-on luggage is not a million miles away from the chickens and farm implements piled onto a bus in the Third World.

I had a great time of it nonetheless in Irvine, great enough to make a point of staying offline. Not because it is Irvine. I lived in Irvine for three years, and never reconciled to it, never got it or tried to. Irvine's hex on me has by now been broken, I don't have the feeling of dread and emptiness I used to (except when I contemplate its infrastructure); but I still find little in the landscape to detain me. Except the bookstore monopolies, though even those are starting to be shut down by the internets, and nudge towards eBooks.

But what detained me in Irvine was who was in it. I spent three days of chatting with old friends, and that was a glory. (Well, two and a half days chatting, and half a day photocopying references—another of my Luddite hangups.) The chatting wasn't consistently profound—I use chatting advisedly; but it wide-ranging, familiar, and lots of fun.

The kind of chat, I am not ashamed to admit, that led us to giggle for a quarter of an hour over this confluence of YouTube memes:

*Why* this confluence of memes is so knee-debilitatingly funny to my culture is a topic that deserves at least one post. (You can start here for an intelligent take on the Russian song, and some good comments taking it further—not least my own.)

The fate of a society that spends more time on Bread And Memes than infrastructure deserves another post, but I think it would get too depressing to write.

Greeks speaking the wrong language

2010-04-07T22:19:00.004+10:00

The Mariupolitans are a distinct group of ethnic Greeks living in the Ukraine, who formerly lived in Crimea. Like I explained in the Other Place, a minority of Mariupolitans speak not Greek, but a variant of Crimean Tatar they call Greek: Urum.

They are not the only people who consider themselves Greek but speak a Turkic language. As the Wikipedia article notes, the Pontians of Tsalka in Georgia who speak Turkish are also called (Tsalka) Urums; and a large number of the refugees from the 1922 population exchange were Karamanlides, who spoke Karamanli Turkish (and wrote it in Greek characters). When the refugees of Salonica waxed sentimental about their football team PAOK, they didn't just say ο ΠΑΟΚ μας in Standard Greek. They also said τεμέτερον ΠΑΟΚ in Pontic—and bizim PAOK in Turkish. Nikolaos Contossopoulos is the foremost researcher on Cretan dialect of the 20th century; but his folk were Turkish-speakers. He concluded, he told me once, that Pontic has undergone syntactic influence from Turkish (an obvious but not necessarily a popular conclusion), because Pontic syntax sounded just like his elderly relatives trying to speak Greek.

Which goes to show something blindingly obvious, but lost in the modern East European process of nation-building: language is not the same as ethnicity (and neither is the same as nationality).

Turkic languages are the languages of Muslims, as far as everyone in the region is concerned, and a Christian speaking Turkic violates the easy dichotomies of nation-building. Which means that if Turkic-speakers internalise an ideology of being ethnically Greek—or indeed, of being Rum, Christian, as an ethnicity—then they won't take nationalist pride in speaking Turkic. They will see themselves as speaking the "wrong" language. That's not untenable in an Ottoman or Russian context: after all, the Turkic-speaking Greeks did continue speaking Turkic for centuries. But if they find themselves in a majority Greek-speaking context, they will be pressured to drop Turkic for Greek, and they won't have much of a motive not to.

And indeed, that's what happened with the Karamanlides in Greece. Greece was never well-disposed to minority languages to begin with, and the Turkish that used to be spoken by the refugees is barely mentioned in scholarship: it never became an emblem like Pontic, or even a bugbear like Macedonian Slavonic. It was quietly, and efficiently, dropped.

The Turkish of the Karamanlides passed unlamented—and unrecorded. Greek linguistics had its own priorities, being practiced after all by Greeks who saw the world in a particular way. Contossopoulos spent his career on someone else's dialect—which is after all what most linguists do; but working on his own family's dialect was not an option. Nor, I venture to say, would he have been dismayed that it was not.

Karamanlides speaking Turkish was a paradox to nationally-minded Greeks; Karamanlides dropping Turkish might seem a paradox to cosmopolitan-minded non-Greeks. The mother tongue, we assume by default, is the driver of identity and its rallying point and its emotional centre: how sad it must be to hate your own mother tongue.

And I admit to being troubled at the notion of hating one's mother tongue. Yet loving one's mother tongue, chosing to value it as identity, is as much a construct as valuing religion or culture, or what Greeks nebulously call ethnic consciousness, εθνική συνείδηση. It's innate to seek out one's own, but who one's own are is something learned, and acquired.

And engineered. The Christians of the Ottoman Empire had to be taught they were Bulgarians, or Greeks, or Macedonians, or Albanians. What the people of village X thought they were 500 years ago is different to what they thought they were 100 years ago, and often what they think they are now. And the change was often enough initiated, because someone from Athens or Sofia came to town, and told them so; or because the local landlord made a choice, and his villagers followed suit.

But the question of what people "really" are, of how their language or quirks or DNA contradict their current self-identification, is pointless. If for whatever reason the villagers of X or Y now consider themselves Greek, well, they're Greek; telling them a hundred years on they've been brainwashed means nothing. (The same goes for the search for Greeks in FYROM, it should be said: the Vlachs there in particular have changed their minds too.) Telling the Karamanlides they should have held on to a Turkish-speaking identity in Greece means even less. They suffered for being Christian in Turkey, they suffered for being aliens and speaking the wrong language when they fled to Greece: if they've come to hate their mother tongue, they aren't obligated to hold on to it for my linguistic edification.

That's problematic for me to say: the Karamanlides have had to jettison their linguistic heritage, because they were told to, and they found themselves in the coercive linguistic context of a monolingual nation-state. All Other Things being equal, maybe they shouldn't have had to make that choice. But All Other Things were not equal; and it's hard to know how much of an attachment they'd formed to Turkish while in Turkey. Love Of Mother Tongue, like everything else, is taught, and they wouldn't have found many such teachers.

And that's all terribly confused, because on the one hand I don't seek to be an apologist for nationalism, let alone to presume how the Karamanlides felt at the time; but on the other what the (former) speakers themselves now think should not be dismissed either. On the one hand, I can't get over the notion that hating your mother tongue is dysfunctional; on the other, it's as dysfunctional to expect Greeks in Greece to speak Turkish. The essentialism of nationalism—or at least, of unreflective, pitchfork-yielding nationalism, is not just hateful, it's counterproductive; and not just counterproductive, but obscuring. There's a reason linguists don't want to hear about the political dimensions behind what counts as a separate language: the flags get in the way of seeing the isoglosses.

Yet flags matter too, and "Nationalism Bad" is itself an unreflective stance. People are invested in their identities. No less genuinely so, because the identity is changeable, and engineerable. I responded negatively to the commenter at Sarantakos' who was happy that the Muslim Greeks had to leave Greece, because they had a family tradition of national fickleness, having converted in the first place. There was enough fickleness in the other direction, or alternating between the two, to make such atavistic purity tests contrary to the national interest—and not merely inhumane. Patriotism is not a matter of genetics, it is cultural, acquired, and contingent. That doesn't mean it's not real; and it doesn't mean either that the descendants of the Karamanlides are somehow lesser Greeks, or that their Greekness doesn't matter to them.

I got started on this post because I'm posting at The Other Place about the Urum. The Urum, like the Karamanlides, are Greeks Speaking The Wrong Language. As I'll explore there, they seem to have sensed in the '20s that they Spoke The Wrong Language: so they didn't pursue Ausbau like every other minority in the USSR did. That may be a pity and brainwashing; or it may be redressing an historical anomaly (as Pontus And The Left put it). But it was real. Now, there are signs at least some of them are taking pride in their language after all—with the support of the Greeks Speaking The Right Language. That's real too. Both groups are now turning into Ukrainians Speaking Neither Of The Above (Russian): the Greeks there, Greek-speaking and Tatar-speaking, now have different Otherness and different threats to their identity to deal with.

Will be Stateside next week

2010-04-07T17:11:00.002+10:00

Things have continued to be odd around here, to the extent that I haven't given my tuthree readers adequate notice of this: on Friday, I'm going to the US for a week. I'm spending the weekend in Irvine; then I'm travelling to DC for the ADL Learning Content Registries and Repositories Summit (see my position paper, if you're that way inclined); then I'm spending 24 hours in New York.

Which may mean a blog post or two here, since I only seem to blog at opɯcɯlɯklɑr when I travel.

Also letting readers know that I've accepted an offer to work at the Australian National Data Service out at Monash in July, when my current contract with Link Affiliates expires. I was melancholy enough when I left the University of Melbourne for Monash the first time, in 2006. Since then, I've changed, Melbourne's changed, and Monash's changed. Or at least, I know more people at Monash, and it's a five minute drive away.

I still won't find buskers playing the Chaconne in Clayton, though.

Ioannis Kondylakis: How the village turned Christian

2010-03-26T23:08:00.004+11:00

I've had an odd week, and as revenge against the elements, I've done a slightly odd thing.

It's Greek National Day, and Greek bloggers turn their thoughts to debates on nationalism. The Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' Blog was no exception, and during the discussion that developed, I made a glancing mention of the Cretan Muslims, a topic I've already brought up on this blog. My reference was to the apparent conversion of some Cretan Muslims to Christianity in the 19th century; Nikos responded by pointing to a short story by Ioannis Kondylakis on his site, "How the village turned Christian" (although it does not refer to conversion, but to Muslims abandoning villages for the cities).

The story is cute in a way; it's not quite the multi-culti, Why Can't We All Get Along story that our century would look on with favour, but given the sentiments of its time and place, it does a nice little subversion of the old narratives. (And the figure of the wine-drinking bon vivant Muslim is familiar enough from Kazantzakis' Freedom and Death.) It turns out the village the story is set in, Modi, is the village Kondylakis was a schoolteacher in, at the end of the Ottoman Empire; but I wouldn't assume this is exactly newspaper reporting. Still, if you read it attentively, you can see the harassment payback being described.

I decided to translate it, and I decided to be slightly odd about it. The story is of its time and place, and I'm of mine, and I decided not to translate τούρκος and ρωμιός as "Turk" and "Greek". That's the dichotomy we know now, but the dichotomy in the Ottoman Empire was credal, and not ethnic as we now understand it: the Cretan Muslims spoke Greek, and translating τούρκος as "Turk" leads to the absurdity of "Turkish–Albanian" instead of "Muslim Albanian". (The insistence on calling Muslim Albanians Muslim had a simple reason: there were Christian Albanians too, and the common creed they shared with Greeks was more important than the common ethnicity they shared with the Muslims.) Kondylakis has his characters speak of "Romioi", but the narrator knows what they meant by that, and calls them "Christians". I've gone the next step, and called the Tourkoi "Muslims". (If that makes the story sound like it's set in Bosnia and not Crete, well, there's a reason for that.)

That's not the odd thing I've done. Maybe ideological, but not odd. The odd thing is, I wanted to render the occasional code switches into Turkish of the Muslims with some English equivalent: a language familiar to English-speakers, but clearly foreign.

So my Muslim Cretans lapse into French.

You don't approve, well, tant pis.

***

He had often heard from his father the story of why he had to sell up in Modi and move to the mountain village of Akaranou. The reason was "a Muslim—begging your pardon—and a pig—by your leave"; that's how he would speak to express his hatred of that Muslim in particular, and of Muslims in general. Modi back then was still a Muslim village. There were a few Christians, but they were humble lowlanders, "thirders"—that is to say, they cultivated Muslim farms against a percentage of the income. Serfs, almost. The only one who had some measure of human dignity and pride, because he had enough property not to have to work for the aghas, was his father Mikhalis Alefouzos. But precisely because he had an independent spirit, and his spine did not bend readily, he drew the dislike of Kerim Agha, the richest and most powerful Muslim in Modi, a fanatical and tyrannical man, who wanted Christians to feel that they lived only through the sufferance of the Muslims. For that reason, whenever Alefouzos passed him by and greeted him with a simple "Good evening, Kerim Agha", he'd shake his head and stare at him with a threatening glance, as he went on his way. One day, he said to another Muslim present:

"That man there, par Dieu, Alefouzos: he's a revolté; he dares look us in the eye, he's no soumis."

When the period of Egyptian rule brought some relief to the standing of Cretan Christians, Alefouzos was encouraged enough to commit an act of great daring. He bought a pig and fed him for the Christmas feast. A pig, in Modi! A pig in Kerim Agha's village, and right next to his villa! A pox on it! Qu'on foute sa mère, the infidèle!

The first squealing of the pig spread horror in the Muslim village, and the hair of many a Muslim stood on end. There was a council of the aghas at Kerim Agha's, and they decided the rebel Alefouzos should be expelled from the village or murdered. But before everything else, the pig had to be killed. This was intolerable. The past day, while Kerim Agha was smoking on his pipe in his courtyard, he saw its filthy snout poke through his half-closed courtyard door. A pox on it! Nique ton grand-père!

"One day, par Dieu, it'll come up to the mosque and bid us good day!" another agha said. "It pokes its way wherever it finds an opening, oink oink!"

"I must I kill, My Aghas, the cochon", said the Muslim-Albanian bulbashi, a kind of police sergeant, who represented all authority in the village. And he fully approved of the decisions taken in the meeting.

The following day, as he passed in front of Alefouzos' house, he drew his gun and killed the pig.

"Why you no tie up, Lady, the bête inside, pox on it, que Dieu le damne, but you let it poke among our feet?" he said to Alefouzos' wife, who had heard the gunshot and appeared worrying at the gate.

Alefouzos was stubborn, and in a week's time he brought another, bigger pig, from Platania.

"For God's sake, are you looking to get killed, Mikhalis?" one of the fellow Christians in the village asked him. "Don't get up their noses, they'll murder you!"

"They're not killing me", Alefouzos replied calmly. "The Janissaries' time is past."

But the time of the Janissaries was not as past as he supposed. The bulbashi killed the other pig too, now with the excuse that it up-ended his hookah pipe. And Alefouzos concluded that, if he kept insisting on buying pigs, he would be helping the Muslim Albanian at target practice.

But Karim Agha, who was livid, finally got his release one day, when he met Alefouzos in the street:

"What is this effronterie you're doing! Pigs, you infidèle, is that what you're bringing to the village!"

"It's no effronterie, Kerim Agha", Alefouzos said with a respectful but steady tone. "Our faith tells us to eat pork, begging your pardon…"

"Your faith! F… your faith!"

And at the same time he lifted up his pipe and struck it down at Alefouzos. But he avoided the strike and held the agha's hand.

"You raise your hand at me, dog-worshipper!" Kerim Agha cried and started hitting him rabidly. Other Muslims ran to him, and Alefouzos was soon led to his house, unconscious and blood-drenched. After a month, as he went out one night to feed his oxen, he was shot by parties unknown and wounded in the shoulder; he came close to dying, and was bed-ridden for a long time. Certain that the Muslims had decided to do him in, he was forced to sell up and seek refuge in the mountain village of Akaranou.

His son Stamatis had often heard this story from his father, and from childhood he built up in his soul hatred of Muslims, and of the Modians in particular, and he dreamed of vengeance. Kerim had died, old man Alefouzos had died too; let both of them fare well in the Netherworld, where they assuredly took their hatred with them. But just as Alefouzos had left a son behind, so had Kerim left behind a son, Arif Agha. The two of them would settle their families' accounts. But Arif was completely different to his father. A kindhearted man, who loved wine and entertainment, he was on good terms with Christians and Muslims, and split his time between Modi, where he had a wife and children, and Chania, where he had lovers and drinking buddies. His only care was to have fun and to borrow or sell, when his income was insufficient for his needs.

Stamatis had inherited his father's industriousness and his particular vindictiveness against the Muslims of Modi. He was of around the same age as Arif, a young man of thirty-five, of Herculean build, with a rough blond beard, and eyes full of spark and cunning.

One day the Modians suddenly discovered that Stamatis Alefouzos had bought back his father's property, and in a few days he settled in his father's house next to Arif's villa. One of the first things he did was to bring from Akaranou a sow with six or seven piglets, so noisy and incessantly moving, that you'd think the whole village was full of pigs. And indeed it was, for whichever Christian Modians didn't already have pigs bought some, and whoever had pigs tied up let them free to wander in the village and the surrounding farms, to visit the Muslim café, to enter Muslim courtyards to the houseladies' great distress and horror, and to destroy the aghas' vegetable gardens.

Now there was no more bulbashi, and the time of the Janissaries was so distant it was almost forgotten. Modi was turning from a Muslim into a Christian village, because during the latest rebellion many Muslims were killed or stayed back in Chania. The Muslims were succeeded by Christians from the mountain villages, following Stamatis' example and buying the farms the Muslims were selling. As he saw the Christian population of the village growing and the Muslim population falling, Stamatis exulted. And one day he said to Arif, with a mocking smile:

"Hey, Arif Agha, if only your père décédé was alive to see what has happened to the village!"

Arif frowned.

"And what has happened to the village?", he said in a choked voice.

"Why, it's turned Christian, I tell you! Look, look!"

And with a triumphant gesture he pointed to a herd of piglets going past, following their slow-moving mother. But Arif observed the piglets without spitting or swearing, as his father would have.

"If your père was alive," Stamatis added, "he'd be fit to burst."

But as he saw that Arif was not getting angry, but instead was saddened by his mockery, Stamatis' stubbornness abated. And he abandoned the act of vengeance he had planned long ago—to send Kerim Agha's son his best piglet as a present for Eid ul-Fitr.

But Stamatis' soul must never have rejoiced so much as on Christmas Eve, when Modi echoed with the sound of pigs being slaughtered. To bolster his rejoicing, he kept repeating, grinning from ear to ear as the saying goes:

"For the first time today I can see that Modi has turned Christian!"

And he always had the notion that, despite the apathy Arif displayed, he must have been devastated within. It was no small thing, to kill two pigs right in front of their door! But after a few days Arif, returning from Chania, stopped on horseback before Stamatis' door.

"Good evening, neighbour," he said to Stamatis as he appeared. "Bring me wine to drink as your guest. I'm in a good mood tonight."

Stamatis went to bring wine, but Arif stopped him.

"And something good to nibble on."

Then he learned down from the horse, and said quietly:

"A nice piece of… pork sausage."

Solage: Le basile

2010-03-13T23:50:00.002+11:00

Le basile, like Pluseurs gens voy, counts as Ars Nova rather than Ars Subtilior, and there aren't the rhythmic games hallowed in Subtilior. The rhythms are still wackier than Pluseurs gens: there is enough syncopation across barlines to justify the Mensurstich notation, and there is confusion about whether voices are off by half a bar or not, which the score indicates with alternative barline arrows.

This rendering also doesn't sound quite as smooth, because of clashes in accidentals: the score needs more ficta accidentals than the source transcription shows, but I didn't want to take over with my own editing. And some of the jarring intervals look to be in the source, unrelated to accidentals.

I can't say Le basile has grabbed me in the way the Subtilior pieces have, or even Pluseurs gens: it's not as tight as the latter, and not as funky as the former. But the more musically cluey may think differently.

This piece has broken LilyPond, btw, even more than the previous ones: the combination of Mensurstich, changing metres, and syncopation across bars has proven too much for the software, although I haven't been able to replicate the error in a score snippet. So you'll see a couple of barlines within the staff that shouldn't be there—bar 2, for starters.

This is the last of the transcriptions in my friend Christina's Honours thesis. The other pieces definitely by Solage don't present the same rhythmic challenges; so she did not feel it necessary to retranscribe them from the four-square existing score published by Apel. That means I don't get to put Fumeux fume par fumée up; but Daniel Buxeda Rodriguez already has. I think the license allows me to put it up on YouTube as I have the others; I'm checking.

So, if you'll pardon a few wrong notes, and a synthesised French Horn, here is Solage's song on the basilisk:

The scores, midis and so forth are all linked to at my Solage page.

Solage: Pluseurs gens voy

2010-03-08T23:50:00.001+11:00

With Pluseurs gens voy, we're backing away from the crazy of Ars Subtilior, going back to what the Ars Subtilior was a mutant offshoot of: the Ars Nova of Machaut. Accordingly, there is less weirdness about the notation in this ballade; the one exception is in the middle section, where the Cantus, and possibly the Tenor, are half a bar off from the Triplum and Countertenor, which in turn are half a bar off from the first section of the piece. This is noticeable, because it is punctuated by rests in the Cantus; but having the first beat of a bar as a rest does not presuppose metrical shift. So it doesn't sound implausible the way the Ars Subtilior shifts do.

Because Pluseurs gens voy is more musically conservative, it isn't as attention-grabbing as the preceding pieces. I don't even remember hearing it in the Gothic Voices recording—it sounded like the Machaut pieces they alternated with Solage's. But apart from what looks to be one complete blunder, it is a tight, smooth block of part-writing, the four voices interweaving at close range, without drawing undue attention to themselves—and not marking time between syncopations as obviously as in the Subtilior balldes. Now that the Cantus has a descant, and there is less rhythmic complexity to deal with, the two top voices are freed up to imitate each other.

(You'll hear the blunder btw: bar 18, the Cantus is c♯, the Countertenor is d. At least that's what my source transcription has.)

In all, it's a serious-sounding, earnest piece—though the lyrics are playful: "I see many people who clothe their thoughts in nice dress; one wears an embroidered cote, the other a villain lined in gray, they wear coats great and small—to each their own: a Jaquette is good enough for me." Where Jaquette was some member of the nobility or other.

Herewith then:

Solage: S'aincy estoit

2010-03-04T23:35:00.007+11:00

This is the third of the Solage ballades, and the tricks of notation get worse and worse. We have one voice in a different metre than the other two (6/8 vs. 9/8, 3/4 vs. 2/2)—and not with the same measure length either; so the bars in the three voices coincide only every three or four bars. Of the two voices that do coincide, one is written twice as fast as the other (6/8 vs. 6/4). We have routine interruptions of bars by other bars, some interruptions running for a dozen bars. We have several runs of 2:3 duplets.

We have interruption a 3/2 bar interrupted by a 6/4 bar, and the next 6/4 bar interrupted by the completion of the first 3/2 bar:

We have a 6/8 bar interrupted halfway by 11 bars of 6/8; its completion is another half bar of 6/8, which is itself interrupted by a new bar, one eighth note in:

And Solage saves the best till last: the 9/4 cantus runs into... this:

Which is... well, I'm not sure what it is.

1	2	3	2		2	3	3	2	3		1	2	3	2	2	3	3	2	3	1	2	3	2	2	3	3	2	3
2	e2:	f3		a3		g4		f3		e3		e2	d4		d2	c2:	d4		2	f2	a2	g2	e2	f2:	e2	d6
group							group							group			group			group						group
																					group

Um. OK.

And what does it sound like? Brassy and fanfaring—as befits its subject matter. (Yolanda Plumley has written on the politics of the song, extolling the Duke of Berry, including echos in its lyrics from other songs in his honour.) Each of the three metre changes sounds like a new landscape opening up before you. The bar interruptions are mostly mid-bar, and don't sound particularly untethered like Corps feminin's—at least until that passage I've tabulated above, which sounds stumbling, because of the alternation of eighth, dotted eighth, and quarter notes. As for the mismatch of metres, the music is slow-moving enough that that passes unnoticed—one of the particularities of Ars Subtilior that's more Gedanken than real.

Here it is; downloads as in the previous posts.

Solage: Corps femininin

2010-02-27T03:16:00.004+11:00

Calextone has some polyrhythm going on, but the disruptions are localised—they resync after a couple of bars, and the metres are displaced by a beat or a third of a beat, which makes for some very pleasant syncopation. Calextone also has some interrupted half bars, but blink and you'll miss 'em: there's only a couple. So Calextone is a little complex in notation, and sounds recognisable to us.

Things with Corps feminin are different. The top voice is passionate and melismatic—and again, mostly well-behaved metrically. The one beat interruptions from Calextone show up again in the cantus, and syncopate it forward as well. But there are also a lot more interrupting half bars, in all voices; so the disruption of the beat in different voices is greater, and lasts longer. Just three bars in, in fact, you get a double interruption in the countertenor, vs. a single interruption in the tenor. Let me illustrate:

The cantus is going along with five melismatic bars of 6/8. The tenor does half a bar of 6/8—then switches to three bars of 3/4, and then finishes its initial bar of 6/8. I've inserted "1…" and "…2" to indicate these half bars; Christina had a bracket notation, but that was clashing with the bars used as ligatures, and the point of this notation is to make the original more accessible, not less.

The countertenor, like the tenor, does half a bar of 6/8—"1…", then switches to 3/4. After just one beat of 3/4—"(1…", it gets bored of that, and switches back to 6/8 for three bars. What undermines the double switch to our ears is, his three bars of 6/8 𝄾 𝅘𝅥 𝅘𝅥 𝅘𝅥𝅮 sound like syncopated 3/4 to us now; but switching metres was a way of doing syncopation back then anyway. After that, the countertenor has to sync back up with the other two voices. That means first finishing off the other two beats of his 3/4 bar—"…2 …3)", and then finishing off his original 6/8 bar—"…2"—one measure after the tenor finished his.

I don't know if graphics will make this any clearer, but:

C	1	2		1			2		1			2		1			2		1		2
Ct	1	1	1			2		1			2		1			2		2		3	2
T	1	1	2		3		1	2		3		1	2		3		2		1		2

Why on earth is Solage doing all this? Because he can, of course. And also because the notation made it easy. If you wanted to change from 6/8 to 3/4, all you had to do was change ink colour, from black to red. If it was that easy, and if you were in an experimental phase already, then of course you'd switch ink after one note, just to see what would happen.

And what does it sound like? Like I said, the cantus is impassioned, and its syncopations work. The other voices sound—well, random. They're too displaced to sound syncopated, so they just sound like they're from somewhere else. Not unpleasant, at times effective—but untethered.

The Taruskin Challenge bloggers have a great post on why music historians view the Ars Subtilior innovations with distaste, though in general they approve of innovation. Their take: historians are unsettled by old art that comes too close to contemporary art, and doesn't stay in its historical box. Historians don't like stuff that resists fitting into historical boxes to begin with. There is a lot to this: we can't make sense of music that sounds mediaeval, but is also more adventuresome than Richard Strauss—it disrupts our notion of lineal progress. We're frustrated because we don't see the progress leading somewhere; but where we expect 14th century progress to lead to is madrigals (or, as the Taruskin Challenge say more knowledgeably, John Dunstable before we get to the madrigals); not Stockhausen or Babbitt.

To be fair to ourselves, though, we're also frustrated by the things Solage does, because we can't hear them make any difference. What performance of Corps feminin will bring out the fact that the Countertenor has 6/8 interrupted by 3/4 interrupted by 6/8, and make sure the catch-up half-bars sound like the completions they are? Given that it's just an accompanying voice, what performance *should* bring it out? The syncopation will come through alright; but our ears are ears molded through the path that led away from Solage: can we hear the bar resumption business at all? For that matter, could Solage's audience hear it, as opposed to seeing it? Or to use a fairer example: the first bar of the cantus is in 6/8, the second in 3/4. There's supposed to be a world of difference between Dum-dee-dee Dum-dee-dee and Dum-dee Dum-dee Dum-dee. Can you hear it in the recordings that have ended up in YouTube?

Perhaps, but it's work to bring out the subtleties, even more work to hear them; and these guys are obscure. As the Taruskin Challenge puts it, "a new breed of composers—none of whom are known today outside of the academy". (And these are musicologists to whom Machaut and Dunstable are old hat.)

It's work to transcribe these guys too. I got quite lost in the line above, and that was not as bad as it got; by the second page, I was obligated to break a couple of lines mid-bar. Lilypond was valiantly avoiding it, but it was making its staves a soup of dots; the alternative of course has made its staves a rather thinner broth. The MIDI this time is a prog rock combo: guitar, flute and bass. The default instruments in GarageBand are embarrassing enough that I've forked out the money for the Symphony Jam Pack. So the arrangements from now on will still sound embarrassing, but embarrassing in different ways.

The PDF is available for download at my site, and also at IMSLP.

Solage: Calextone qui fut dame terrouse

2010-02-22T14:04:00.005+11:00

The Ars Subtilior was a brief period in the end of the 14th century, when composers went nuts. The Ars Subtilior composers wrote music that was more complex that anything heard before—and often anything heard centuries since in Western music: more modulations, more polyrhythms, more music scores shaped as eye music.

It was a short-lived movement, and even its name was bestowed it by a twentieth-century musicologist: the 15th century backed away from its experimentation. Likewise it was a geographically restricted movement: basically the antipope's entourage in Avignon, although one of the Ars Subtilior manuscripts is from the court of the French kings of Cyprus. And it has remained a bit of a niche even in contemporary recordings. CDs are few, and the first CD I knew of played down the intellectual stuff in its selection, in favour of the imitations of birdsong.

I was introduced to the Ars Subtilior by my friend Christina Eira, who I did my linguistics PhD with. Christina had done her Music Honours thesis on a new transcription of Solage's music.

[McCarthy, Eira. 1986. An analysis and alternative system of edition of the seven ballades of Solage, MS Chantilly. BA (Hons) Thesis. University of Melbourne, Department of Music.]

Solage was one of the main composers in the Ars Subtilior school; Christina's transcription aimed to reflect more closely what Solage had originally written, rather than fitting to the expectations of later classical music.

The piece Solage is best known for is Fumeux fume par fumee, "The smokers smoke through smoke", which involves a dizzying series of low-pitched modulations. Annoyingly, it gets more attention for people trying to work out what kind of weed you could get hold of to smoke in the 14th century, so as to write that kind of trippy music, man.

But the piece where the clash between notations is most obvious is Calextone qui fut dame terrouse, "Callisto, who was a mortal lady". The lyrics aren't really the point of Ars Subtilior, but two trends converge in Solage's lyrics: the notion of courtly, romantic love which the troubadours invented, and a proto-Renaissance fascination with Greek mythology. Of course, the actual Zeus did no such thing as make Callisto his vrai epouse "true spouse"; but Zeus' "love-'em-and-convert-them-into-a-constellation" tactics were not much of a topic for a troubadour anyway.

Calextone is in 6/8, and the tenor is mostly slow-moving bass notes. But the cantus strays off from normal 6/8, and the countertenor strays off even more.
Beyond the hockets you'd expect in this era of music, there is a middle section where the counterenor is playing 2/2 to the cantus' 6/8. That's a hendiadys (two against three) which isn't that unusual in Western music; but Solage ends up with four beats against three—and syncopation in the four beats, at that. The bass also slips into 3/4 on occasion.

What stands out even more, though, is the cantus and countertenor both interrupting their 6/8, interspersing another new bar off one beat. This happens in the very first bar of the piece:

The cantus starts a 6/8 bar—
gets one eighth note in (1)
then starts a new triplet (1+3)
and another two, adding up to one and a half bars of 6/8 (1+3+3+3)
and then closes off its initial triplet, and catching up with the remaining voices, by adding two more eighth notes (1+3+3+3+2)

So the way it is notated—and Christina's transcription tries to capture—instead of two bars of 6/8, you have half a bar of 6/8, interrupted by one and a half bars of 6/8.

This is not as bad as it gets, either. As bad as it gets is further down, when the countertenor does this series of stunts:

gets half a bar in (3)
then switches to a new 3/4 bar (3+2+4)
then starts another bar of 6/8,
gets one eighth note in (3+2+4+1)
then starts two bars of 6/8 from scratch (3+2+4+6+6)
and catches up with the other voices again by filling out two more beats in the interrupted triplet from before (3+2+4+6+6+2)
—while the other voices are not holding dotted half notes, like at the start, but doing their own merry hocketting 6/8 thing, on the beat instead of off it.

This is, like, mindblowing stuff. It's mindblowing enough that the previous editor of Solage, Willi Apel, had no patience for it. I can't scan it in to show you, because the Melbourne Uni Library's copy has gone missing some time in the past ten years. But just as editors don't care about scores being arranged in the shape of hearts or harps, Apel didn't care about this business of interrupting triplets. This is just syncopation, he decided, and that's how he notated it.

Which is not doing as much violence to the text as you might think: it *is* syncopation. The new barlines are merely putting into the top voices the metrical context set by the tenor, and it's not like Solage could notate syncopation as syncopation, with the notation he used. And when you hear the music performed, it doesn't sound like bizarre interruptions of bars: it just sounds like 6/8 syncopation. Solage actually gives his game away by starting his off-beat syncopation half a bar before one of his runs of interrupted bars (countertenor, second bar):

Or, in a less experimental notation:

But the original, polymetric orgy of Solage's Calextone deserves to be seen, so I've put Christina's transcription into LilyPond, and put up a video of the transcription along with the music. LilyPond coped with what I threw at it, although not without some scars. There is no way I could get the final bar to be right justified, and MIDI generation conked out before the end (so there is one countertenor note in the wrong octave).

The lyrics make for unseemly gaps too: the manuscript did not line syllables up with notes, but just dumped one phrase at a time over the music. That's why different performances of Calextone distribute the syllables differently. (Gothic Voices sample, Capilla Flamenca sample.) I tried to reproduce that in Lilypond, which should allow it at least for expressive marks; but that proved beyond me too.

(That lax treatment of text makes for a bad combination with Solange's melismatic runs, and composers at the time were not fastidious about what vowels to do melismata on. /y/ is not melisma-friendly.)

And after repeated frustrations with GarageBand and iMovie, I couldn't be bothered fixing the bar misalignments to the music at the very end. Nor do I feel that apologetic in rendering the three voices as guitar, sax, and bass. I wasn't left with much choice in iMovie 09, which doesn't read MIDI natively, leaving me at the mercy of GarageBand's default instrument selection. (iMovie 09's Precision Editor looks to me a step backward from iMovie 08 anyway, but I get stubborn about things like that.)

After all that, I've put Calextone up on YouTube. It's not as smooth an experience as I'd have liked, and I'd rather you downloaded the PDF, and followed along to a professional recording. Like Gothic Voices', who have recorded all of Solage's works. As of this writing, their recording has been slipped into YouTube as well; but because I'm happy to have forked out the money to buy the CD, I'm refraining from linking to it.

If you do find a vocal recording—like, oh, say, on the Related Clips window of YouTube—it's worth it just to hear the archaic pronunciation of joieux, as [ʒwɛˈjø]. Yes, Solage spoke Joual.

NZ #16: An Australian's History of New Zealand

2010-01-11T19:55:00.002+11:00

As I gaze across the grey waters of Lake Wakatipu, and the soggy car park in between, I think I wouldn't mind right now being in the 43°C weather of Melbourne. I'm wrong: I'd be cursing my lack of effective air conditioning; but I'm bummed out anyway at Nature's air conditioning here, of three days straight of rain.

Ten days ago I'd finished off Michael King's Penguin History of New Zealand. The book has saved me from interacting with any locals to learn more about this place: I can do armchair tourism, with an in situ armchair. That may be dysfunctional—as dysfunctional as being bored in Queenstown, Adrenaline Capital Of The World. But then, if I was functional, I wouldn't be blogging while on holidays in the first place.

So what did I learn from my reading?

New Zealand in King's account has had contradictions in its history, contradictions that I don't know what to make of. It was a colony better to its indigenous people than the others; but that still made for paternalism and dismissal. It disengaged from the ANZUS alliance after the Rainbow Warrior bombing; but before that its troops had been the foremost in the British Empire's wars. It was a laboratory of progressivism, introducing universal male suffrage, women's suffrage, and the machinery of the welfare state when they were still a gleam in the eye of European social-democrats. But it was also a drab monoculture, which punished people for being different. Gays were closeted and prosecuted decades longer than elsewhere; the meagre Chinese population was still large enough to provoke White New Zealand activism; and Wellington was not a safe place to speak Norwegian.

Seriously, Norwegian. King tells the tale of a New Zealand poet as a child in the '20s, hanging on the straps with his father in a Wellington tram, and chatting in their native Norwegian. A stalwart of New Zealand monoculture goes up to the father, and punches him to the floor, yelling "Speak English, damn you!"

Norwegian, of all things. But then, Australia was hardly better in the '20s.

New Zealand is not that place any more. The controversy that greeted the new, slit-the-throat haka of the All Blacks was greeted by a local sports columnist's chortle: anything that got the Poms that riled up had to be a good thing. The Kiwis have found their anti-Pom moxie, they can pronounce statements that are positively Australianesque in their contempt of the mother country.

But it took Australia a long time to move away from the mother country, and it took New Zealand even longer. Australia at least had the leaven of convicts and the Irish, and some strands of republicanism articulated in the 1890s. It was a long national sleep after that, and through to Menzies' last cry of loyalism; but there were still spots of autonomy: the hatred engendered by the Bodyline tests in cricket; the national myth of egalitarianism and comradeship (things that were never British virtues); the realisation during World War II that Britain was not going to defend the Pacific, and Australian troops had more pressing terrain to defend than North Africa.

Not so in New Zealand. Its laboratory of progressivism bought in to egalitarianism, and the attempt to reproduce English class structure in Canterbury did not prosper. And unlike Australia, sectarianism did not take hold here, even if the Anglican church had primacy (so much so, the Maori for Anglican is Mihinare: Missionary). New Zealand elected Catholics to be Premiers far earlier than elsewhere.

But notwithstanding, the New Zealand experiment was articulated as an aspiration towards Better Britons. And in King's account, I didn't see any competing aspiration to be other-than-Britons, nor a defining date for putting together a new polity, like Australia had. The Australian Commonwealth can hoist its flag to 1901, when Federation was enacted—though in truth, Australia was not much less British afterwards than before. But in New Zealand, premiers changed into prime ministers imperceptibly in 1902: there was no landmark date as in Canada and Australia, to declare this was now a new country.

The negotiations leading up to 1901 did make their own declaration, however: New Zealand ultimately declined to join the Australian federation. Whatever New Zealand was to be, it would not be run out of Melbourne.

The United Kingdom gave New Zealand the legal grounds to be its own country with the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which granted its dominions (its white colonies) autonomy in foreign and domestic affairs, and made their parliaments the equal of London's. Australians don't commemorate 1931, and the last tie to British jurisprudence was severed only in 1986. Australia accepted the Statute, but only in 1942, when it was turning to the US for its defence. New Zealand refused to ratify the Statute until 1947. (Newfoundland became Canadian rather than be independent, in 1949.) And while the Japanese were bombing Darwin, and sending submarines to Sydney, New Zealand kept its troops in the European theatre.

From my vantage point, in a post–British Empire world, I cannot comprehend that. At all. The closest I can come is to picture New Zealand as a bright and diligent student, more prudent and more with it than its elder, loutish brother—but refusing to move out of home, even after Mum had already arranged alternate accommodation.

What figure of mid-century advertising kitsch does Australian nostalgia define itself as? Chesty Bond, the ludicrously Aryan 1930s undergarment model?

Maybe not, but it was an archetype with a certain traction. Kiwiana kitsch is never far away from the Four Square Supermarket cartoon. Perky, short, and very very 1950s.

He gets reinvented in bookstore iconography as a Maori, as a bungee jumper, as a guitarist, as any of the current manifestations of New Zealand identity. He's beloved by the iconographers of this country, despite looking nothing like Chesty Bond. In fact, he looks kinda dorky. Kinda like that bright and diligent student not moving out of home.

It speaks very well of a people when they choose Mr Four Square, instead of Chesty Bond, as the vehicle for their identities: dorks are far more interesting than larrikins. It speaks even better for that people, when they actively reinvent their vehicle, to convey how their identities have diversified. It says their identities have diversified, and that they recognise it, and that they still have an anchor or virtuous dorkiness. Chesty Bond is not so malleable.

New Zealand is not the '50s Four Square Supermarket kind of country any more, of course, and its mascot has moved out of home: he's not such a dork, any more. New Zealand's nostalgia for Kiwiana still has a much more British tinge than the equivalent Australian assertions of identity, and they're nowhere near as strident or mythologised as Australia's nationalism has become. But New Zealand is its own country: it doesn't feel like England, and it doesn't feel like Australia.

I still haven't worked out what makes it different, much more than when I was sniffing the air in Cuba St two weeks ago. I think part of the difficulty is that ultimately it's nowhere near as different from home as the UK or the US is. (Part of it too of course is my general obtuseness, and failing to actually talk to enough people.) The most I've worked out it, it's gentler and more subdued, it's quirkier and more ironic, it's more at home in the Pacific, and it's allowed the People of the Land a greater role in forming its identity.

And as Younger Sibling countries everywhere, it defines itself against the Big Lug Next Door. I've been staying in tourist traps in tourist season, and introducing myself as being from Across The Ditch apologetically, the few times I have interacted with the locals. So I haven't given myself the chance to sample those definitions first-hand. I may have a few more resources now, though, to try those definitions out with the New Zealanders I know back home.

NZ #15: Queenstown, and Haka

2010-01-11T00:36:00.002+11:00

I was struck with awe—in fact, terror—when I pulled up at 6 PM to Queenstown, tourist haven of the South Island, to be greeted by a young man impersonating a moose in front of a moving bus.

It wasn't Janet Frame's awe at the big smoke's granite and bustle. It's an altogether more dysfunctional awe, at a town full of people younger than me, noisier than me, and drunker than me.

And that other business that twenty-year olds tend to get up to on holiday more than me; but this pretends to be a family-oriented blog. It doesn't particularly succeed at it, but I might spare you the psychosexual drama for this post anyway.

The rains took care of the élan vital of the twenty-year olds, I daresay. The party crowds were in merry mood out and about last night; but Queenstown woke up soggy enough this morning for people to keep their party indoors.

Queenstown is impossibly beautiful, even more postcard-bespoke than Akaroa: a comity of mountains and lake and trees right out of a Swiss chalet. There was gold here in the 19th century; but the area now lives on the tourist's dime alone, as the local taxi drivers assure me.

And the tourists still come, both the lowly and the high. That makes it a less Slow News Day here than you'd expect for a place this size. The current headline in the local paper: Muammar Gaddafi's son was in town New Year's Eve, and wanted to party.

The beat reporters were hot on the story, and somehow I suspect this isn't the biggest story they've had to track. They talked to the hoteliers who had to bump another booking for Gaddafi fils and his people. They talked to two of the dozen blondes sourced locally by Gaddafi fils' men to join in their festivities. ("No fat ones", the order specified.) The blondes reported that the visitors were gentlemen, their identities unknown, and they left the vistors after a couple of hours to rejoin their friends, who had not been invited to the party.

I'm not speculating about their friends' weight or hair colour.

The beat reporters got paparazzo shots of the man himself, watching performers doing a haka for him on the tarmac of Queenstown airport. A last minute whim, apparently: Gaddafi fils couldn't leave town without partaking of the local culture. Though not partaking *too* closely: as the bemused Kiwi Haka troupe told the beat reporter, they issued the traditional Pōwhiri challenge to the visitors, but did not drop the fern for the visiting headman to pick up, and prove his good intentions. The headman's security detail wasn't letting anyone get that close.

All very odd. That wasn't the deal when Abel Tasman failed to acknowledge the local tribe's challenge. And there's the whiff of something unsavoury about Maori ritual performed on demand for visiting headmen.

But New Zealand has a long tradition of that, whether the visiting headmen are from Libya or England, or tourists from Across The Ditch. No, of course it's not the same—the Treaty of Waitangi does mean something, after all. But it's convenient romanticism to say the troupes should stay virtuous and poor. The same happens Across The Ditch, when every culturally sensitive conference feels entitled to demand an Aboriginal Welcome To Country—and then are surprised the elders demand remuneration.

But of course they should: it's not like the elders had invited the conference as their guests in the first place (or the 18 million other non-indigenous inhabitants). If the visitors are willing to buy what they're offering, who's to begrudge them asking a fair price?

I don't have a wide standard of comparison for Maori cultural performers: I've only watched half an hour's worth on Maori TV, and the last three hotels I've been in don't carry Maori TV. But I went and saw Kiwi Haka perform tonight, and I was very impressed. The women's singing was excellent. (The men's doesn't have to be, because the men do more chanting and punctuating shouts.) The weapons display was instructive: if the Maori haven't already branched out into martial arts, they should.

The banter was well worked through as well. I was startled at the matter-of-fact acknowledgement of after-battle cannibalism:

"This blow separated the crown of the skull, allowing the warrior to feast on the brains. Mmm! ... But today, like everyone else, Maori prefer McDonalds and KFC."

In a roundabout way, though, it speaks to the resurgence of Maori identity. The mihinare, the missionaries, successfully made the Maori abandon that kind of warfare, and (less successfully) sought to make them abandon the rituals and weapons to go with it. Noone would joke about cannibalism fifty years ago. The Maori now don't do what they did; but neither are they ashamed of their forebears that did. And if it unsettles the tourist, so much the better.

But it was the Pōwhiri, the welcoming ritual, that transfixes. It was explained to us, but it still was alien and confounding: all in te Reo, threatening and solemn and aloof, the peace token of a fern thrown down and jabbed at for the visitor to pick up. The karanga, the call and response of women, from the two sides, only went on for a few seconds; but it too sounded like it was from another realm. Vaguely like Bulgarian polyphony.

All of it is drastically abbreviated of course: no spears were thrown past the visitors, and we did not chase the spearmen or kneel on one knee grasping our muskets, as happened of old. The singers of the karanga were not past childrearing age, as used to happen back then—because an encounter between tribes could still go awry, and old women were deemed more expendable. We didn't exchange oratory or touch noses or feast together, as actually happens to this day in the marae. It wasn't a "real" pōwhiri—of course, we'd hardly earned one.

And it's not authentic, in a narrow sense; but as I keep learning, that's not the kind of authenticity that matters. I'm not sure I got it right, but I gather the poi was traditionally the men's domain, and has become a women's dance for this kind of cultural exhibition. But if all Maoris growing up see women doing the poi, then that's what's real.

Just as they've all been told Aotearoa is the Maori name of New Zealand, and not originally a less common name for just the North Island: it's the name of the whole country now, and that's the new authenticity. The old authenticity was that the very notion of the North and the South Island being the same country was a Pakeha notion, and got a Pakeha name, Niu Tireni. But that's an historical footnote, overtaken by new circumstances, and new constructions of nationhood.

Kiwi Haka did also perform a haka—they hardly couldn't. Though not *that* haka (Ka mate, the one you all know from rugby); that haka is not welcome on the South Island, because of the devastations its composer Te Rauparaha brought to the South Island in the Musket Wars. The haka has even more layers of authenticity wrapped around it, being the most emblematic feature of Maori culture, and appropriated by the Pakeha in ways of their own.

The role of women in the haka is under contention, for example, and the historical evidence for or against is being conscripted to the debate. Tradition (in at least one construal) limited women in the haka to pūkana, dilating the eyes: glowering. But if the haka is a living tradition and not a museum piece, then it will reflect how Maori women fit into their culture now. And from what pūkana I've already seen, I don't see Maori women taking a back seat anyway.

The souvenir shop had a book that went into several of these debates on authenticities of the haka, with good humour and encyclopaedic coverage. (Wira Gardiner. 2007. Haka: A Living Tradition. 2nd ed. Auckland: Hodder Moa.) Not everyone is as sanguine about reinventions of the haka: the All Blacks are notoriously touchy about their opponents not standing at reverent attention while the team gestures they'll slit their throats.

There's a haka Gardiner missed in his survey, which Wikipedia mentions, and I'd love to see the return of: a 1903 challenge to my countrymen, from Across The Ditch.

Tena koe, Kangaroo How do you do, Kangaroo!
Tupoto koe, Kangaroo! You look out, Kangaroo!
Niu Tireni tenei haere nei New Zealand is invading you
Au Au Aue a! Woe woe woe to you!

As you'll notice, in 1903, it wasn't yet Aotearoa. But Australia has indeed been successfully invaded by New Zealanders. Including enough Maori to establish the Nga Kapa Taumata Teitei, with a competition to judge performances nationally.

They should give serious thought to that 1903 haka, I reckon.

NZ #14: Dunedin

2010-01-10T08:52:00.001+11:00

The rains caught me at Dunedin, and I didn't walk around much. Even if the rains hadn't caught me, I wouldn't have walked around much. Dunedin is the one New Zealand city that the Lonely Planet does not include a walking tour for, and there's good reason for that. Dunedin is absurdly hilly. I had pleaded hilliness hardship for Auckland; but Dunedin is hilly enough to claim a place in the Guinness Book of Records for Baldwin St, a residential street with a 1:1.286 incline. That's 52°. What's fearsome is, Baldwin St is only first among peers: there are plenty of other residential streets next to it, with only slightly less incline. And from a safe distance at the bottom of the hill, they look like nothing so much as concrete ski slopes, with cars precariously parked on them.

I succumbed to going on a bus tour of the city: I scarcely had the option not to. The droll tour guide noted that the urban poor used to live on the bottom of the hill, and the rich on the hill inclines, with the commanding views of the city. As the bus wheezed its way up a 30° incline, I could not fathom why people would pay extra money to slide off the floor of their houses. Horses would have found those ascents even more challenging than motor vehicles did.

Cable cars didn't; but like just about everywhere else in the world, Dunedin scrapped its cable car system long ago. God speed the enthusiasts trying to bring it back: it would get use.

Inside a bus was a good place to be in Dunedin, both when the InterCity bus rocked up from Oamaru via Palmerston, and in the Town Belt of parkland around the city; because both times we got hit with hail. That's right, hail. In early January. In the *Southern* hemisphere. I have told my astonishment in Wellington at realising 42 Below vodka meant 42°S. (That's actually Marlborough's latitude; Wellington is closer to 41°S.) But Dunedin is around 46°S. During the bus tour (in *early January*), the temperature dropped to 4°C. In Winter, they get to down –5°C. And this is a coastal city.

As an Australian, whose coastal cities have never known snow, this just plain does not compute. It's like this is a different country or something.

I'd like to report on how the North European weather here turns folk into hardy Southern Men, fearless and stoic. But I'll have to take the guidebooks' word for it: I'm not interacting with the locals as much as I should be, especially not while I'm being rained out.

Dunedin is a college town: 20% of its inhabitants attend the University of Otago. This is said to give the city a liveliness and inventiveness out of proportion to a place of 110,000 people. But at least some of the students are home for the holidays, or rained out as well; so I didn't get to see that side of things. Bath St, next to the central Octagon, is meant to be the local funky café street, like Vulcan Lane and Cuba St and South of Lichfield elsewhere. Maybe it was unfair to survey Bath St on a rainy Saturday morning, but... nah. Bath St was thoroughly empty. And the time of day is no excuse.

The bus tour went past many grand houses of Dunedin's affluent past, and the sprawling grounds of the university, at least somewhat visible through the rain. But on foot, all I had access to was the immediate surrounds of the Octagon, the central square of Dunedin. (Well, OK, the central regular geometric shape of Dunedin.) The central octagon hasn't worked out how to impress the tourists, like Cathedral Sq in Christchurch has: even the Tourist Centre has moved around the corner.

But the north of the Octagon has its portion of monumental buildings. The place that was housing the Tourist Centre looks imposing enough to have been a General Post Office, but I can't confirm that from the tourist pamphlets. Next to it St Paul's Cathedral, angular and slender and striving towards heaven. And in front of them both, the testimonial of Dunedin's Scottishness, the statue of Robbie Burns, looking vaguely bored.

There's something missing to the Octagon, though. Too many of the imposing buildings of Dunedin are not there, but are spread around Moray Place, the ring around the Octagon (which is truly octagonal in layout). That includes the Town Hall, the Courthouse, and the First Church. The placement of the First Church hints that the Octagon was an afterthought—though it can't have been, as everything converges on it. Dunedin was built to be a Presbyterian city, and was designed in Presbyterian Edinburgh; but its First Presbyterian Church is not the centrepiece: it is off to one side of Moray Place. St Paul's is not Presbyterian: Scottish Dunedin is presided over by an Anglican church.

There's sure to be a rich story behind all that which I'm missing, and can't google at the moment. Thankfully, the two churches look cut from the same heavenward-striving cloth.

The crown of Dunedin, though, is not St Pauls' and Robbie Burns, at the north side of the Octagon. The crown of Dunedin faces St Pauls' and Robbie Burns, down Stuart St, on the other side of the Octagon. The crown is not the Cadbury Chocolate factory—at least, not in my estimation, although it too faces St Pauls' and Robbie Burns, and Dunedin is certainly quite chuffed to have a centre of chocolate excellence downtown.

I took the Cadbury tour, I'm embarrassed to admit. I am a chocolate snob, and while Cadbury is better than the horrors of U.S. chocolate ("Hershey's Kisses: Would you like some chocolate with your paraffin?"), it's no Lindt, and no Leonidas. The New Zealand specialties of Cadbury-coated marshmallow did nothing to change my opinion of the product. But Dunedin is credited with giving the world white chocolate. For that alone, they deserve a crown.

But the crown I have in mind—and this cannot surprise anyone who's been to Dunedin—is Dunedin Railway Station, across the road from Cadbury's. A glorious assembly of Oamaru limestone and Dunedin volcanic stone and Edinburgh granite, of Dalton tiled walls and mosaic floors and and stained glass windows, depicting the Passion of Thomas The Tank Engine. The most photographed building in the southern... something or other, the locals proclaim, and it deserves to be.

That's an instance of "the most X in the Southern Hemisphere" trope, btw, which the Lonely Planet derides. ("How do you measure such things?") It's a way for Australia or New Zealand to claim primacy in something, without looking too closely at, say, Argentina or South Africa. I hope Argentina and South Africa don't suffer from similar compulsions.

Back when Dunedin was the financial capital of New Zealand, it raised temples to commerce like Oamaru did. Its temples did not limit themselves to limestone, so they are more dour than Oamaru's—befitting a city intended as a carbon copy of Edinburgh. The money left Dunedin for Auckland in the '50s, and the main source of income for Dunedin now is the University of Otago. The tour guide approvingly mentioned that the downturn resulted in more of the temples being spared the wrecker's ball than elsewhere: there was no call to build metal and glass replacements. But some temples did get levelled; looking around the Octagon, too many of them were in the centre of town.

The Railway Station fell victim to that decline too; it narrowly missed levelling when the railways were sold off. Trains still depart the station, and they go a lot further than at Oamaru; but just as at Oamaru, they are tourist trains, not trains for freight or passengers. And the railway station now hosts art galleries, wedding receptions, and tourists with cameras. It doesn't look as forlorn as the warehouses at Oamaru harbour, but it still is not what it was.

There is a plaque at the entranceway of Dunedin Railway Station, with a sentence from Janet Frame, the novelist from Oamaru. It is her recollection, in a 1982 novel, of her arrival at the station in 1945, the first time she came to a city. She was in awe and terror of the bustle of the station—which wasn't even as busy as it got when the cargo came in.

I might have grown to like dour, wet Dunedin, and I was delighted by the station. But awe is not what I felt.

Queenstown, where I am typing these lines with my poorest internet access to date, is an altogether different matter. And a quite different kind of awe...

NZ #13: Oamaru

2010-01-08T12:31:00.002+11:00

Oamaru is small and flat, like Nelson. But where Nelson is sunny and cheery, Oamaru is windy, with a chill that flies in out of the bowels of Antarctica. Where the tourists around Nelson are ambling hippies in broadshorts, the tourists around Oamaru wear layers of wool, and huddle.

Where Nelson looks forward, past the decline of the timber trade, to a future of winemaking and tourism, Oamaru—also looks forward, to a future of tourism, but it's a tourism that trades on its past.

Oamaru is where New Zealanders worked out how to refrigerate shipments of meat and dairy to Britain, and Oamaru boomed because of it in the 1880s. Oamaru celebrated its affluence in a binge of cream-coloured temples to capitalism, built from the limestone quarried here. It had enough limestone to spare for a couple of harbourside temples in Auckland as well.

As a proudly Victorian town, Oamaru's streets are named for rivers in England; the main drag is of course Thames St, and its gaudiest temple, easily outshining its Christian churches, is the then Bank of New South Wales: a creamier, grander version of the Parthenon. The buildings where the wealth actually was generated, at the harbour, lack the Corinthian flourishes of the Thames St buildings; but they too are proud and cream-coloured and cavernous Places of Business.

The harbour declined since, as many a harbour has; and unlike Nelson again, Oamaru is no longer a functioning port city: the harbour here closed in 1975. The harbour and its cavernous storehouses are now the Oamaru historical precinct, hosting tourists in a display of Victoriana. The building next to the restored steam railway even announces itself as Steampunk HQ. But the abandoned ironware beside it isn't gleaming enough for a steampunk novel.

And "abandoned" is what the harbour precinct looks like. Certainly at night, when the only human habitation are the two pubs, well sealed off from the empty street running past them. But even in daytime, when the artisans and period photographers and bakers and souvenir stalls take up residence in the old Places of Business, they look dwarfed and out of place. Not all the warehouses are even half-occupied by artisans and stalls; and we are not sure what some of the warehouses were originally for. The cavernous warehouses are still in truth empty and abandoned, they are no longer Places of Business.

Then again, the one warehouse that was still fulfilling its original purpose is a woolshed, and has the surprisingly familiar stench of sheep dung. That's the thing about nostalgia: the authenticity it yearns for didn't really smell as rosy.

The New Zealand novelist Janet Frame, the Lonely Planet tells me, grew up here, and mythologised the town in her books. I haven't read her books and am unlikely to, but I wonder if her mythology was haunted by the cream-coloured and emptying temples to capitalism. Possibly not: she started publishing in the '50s, and Oamaru was still a functioning port then. But even when the temples were open for business, there must have been something otherworldy about them: a serene cream stone out of place in a small windswept dairy town.

The old limestone quarry is where the cream stone came from: it too is now closed, and its red sheds serve only as the terminus of the restored Steampunk train. Just beyond it though is the visitor's centre for the other commodity Oamaru now trades in: the blue penguin colony.

What New Zealanders term blue penguins, Victorians term fairy penguins, and I've already been to a viewing of fairy penguins on Philip Island. The penguins are just as adorable here: adorable enough to persevere with, as they hesitantly clamber onto land, shake off the water from their feathers, wait to gather enough numbers, and frantically waddle to their nests, a dozen at a time.

We find them adorable, of course, because they are bipeds like us; such a colony involving arthropods would be a much harder sell to visiting tourists. Especially after sundown, in as windy a place as this, at the bottom of the globe.

Well, not quite the bottom of the globe: I'm typing this on the Devil's Galley, just past Palmerston, on the way to Dunedin. Palmerston is a small Otago town, most famous for forcing the much larger Palmerston, on the North Island, to be renamed Palmerston North. The countryside here, like on the way down from Christchurch, is dotted with sheep and cows; but the grassland and trees are more lush here, the coloured less faded. Then again, I've been either faking sleep, or blogging while on the Devil's Galley, so my impressions of the landscape cannot be trusted.

Next stop Dunedin. Where the rains finally catch up with me.

NZ #12: sɒːmɔa

2010-01-07T16:44:00.002+11:00

I came to New Zealand not knowing much about the place, and I still don't. What I pick up, unavoidably, I refract through my Australian understanding of the world.

To that understanding, New Zealand is not Ulan Bataar or Abidjan: it's not completely foreign, and much is familiar. There are surprises, but they are scattered.

One surprise was that the Samoa tsunami was a very big deal here: it featured large in the overviews of the year's news. I'd already forgotten it had happened.

Samoan is the third most spoken language in New Zealand; in Australia, the third spot was Greek, yielding now to Arabic. The large Samoan community here, which is starting to make its mark on the New Zealand film industry, is reason enough for New Zealanders to care what happens in Samoa. But Samoa is not on the Mediterranean: it's in the Pacific, like New Zealand is.

And New Zealand seems to recognise that it is in Polynesia, in Maori land and next door to Samoan land. The British did their damnedest to transform the land into a New Britain (or, since that name was taken, a New Ulster and a New Munster): they imported mallard ducks and deer and black swans. But not all of it has stuck. Its first cities have British names and British features, reaching parody levels in Christchurch and Dunedin. But most of the towns have Maori names, and they are pronounced like they have Maori names.

Which is another noteworthy difference with Australia. If an Australian town has a name of indigenous origin, and a lot less do than in New Zealand, the name will get put through the Australian English vowel mangler. There's an outer Melbourne suburb called Yallambie, its second <a> honked and drawled the way New Zealanders like to make fun of on Australian Gladiators ads: [jəɫæ̃̃ːmbiː]. That name started out indigenous, but noone has any particular motivating to pronounce it like it is.

Not so here. The Pakeha pronounce initial [ŋ] where they have to. Listening to the weather forecast is like flicking between TV1 and Maori TV: the Maori placenames are pronounced with a respect for their source phonology unwonted in English. Especially the /a/ in long vowels and diphthongs: its a back, rounded [ɒ] that doesn't belong in New Zealand English, but does belong in New Zealand. It's the vowel of Māori and Tauranga and Aotearoa, and it's certainly not what an Australian would do with the vowel.

For what an Australian would do with the vowel, see [jəɫæ̃̃ːmbiː]. And remember, we do NOT sound like the dregs of the London sewerage system. (The business with the [æ̃̃ː] is actually a class marker in Australia, which is why it's possible to make fun of it. Not *seemly* to, but possible to.)

It's armchair sociolinguistics of the worst kind to read much into phonetic loans (or for that matter nasalised front vowels). But armchair sociolinguistics is a fun sport, and I think it means something that New Zealanders of European heritage reproduce indigenous vowels more than Australians of European heritage do. It tells you that the indigenous language hasn't been eradicated, for a start. New Zealand still hears Maori spoken by 5% of its population.

And Samoan by 3%, and that brings me back to the Samoan tsunami. In Australia, when the Samoan tsunami was mentioned, it was [səməʉən], its vowels suitably flattened for Australian consumption. Here, the newscasters use the same vowel as for Māoriː it's [sɒːmɔan], its vowels reverently replicated into English.

More reverent than Maori, which after all has its own phonology to follow, and has different things to prove. Maori has no /s/, so the country is called Hāmoa there.

Maori TV, I've got to say, has been pretty good about its language purism. There is a Maori language body to coin new words, or at least sanction phonological assimilation of English loan words, and the language used sounds like it's falling into line. The only codeswitch I've heard so far on the Maori news was consultant. This was in the piece of the fact finding mission to Hāmoa, and the consultants were the people suspected of pocketing much of the relief money for the tsunami. I can see why Maori wouldn't deign coin a native equivalent.

NZ #11: Akaroa

2010-01-07T16:39:00.002+11:00

Akaroa, "Long Harbour", is a harbour on a crater on Banks Peninsula, 82 km from Christchurch. Captain Cook thought it was Banks Island, and that's how he named it. Ten million years ago, as the volcano rose from out the sea, he would have been right. The volcano has done its rising now, and what's left is an impossibly picturesque view from the hilltop, of grassland and holidaymakers and tongues of water against small seaside villages, in intense blues and whites and greens that are preordained for postcards.

A couple of those villages and tongues of water tell a history that could have been: Duvauchelle, Le Bons Bay, French Bay. Fifty-odd French settlers came to Akaroa in 1840, and founded a settlement there. German Bay would have told the story that German settlers came with them; but in a fit of Great War hysteria, that name was effaced from the map, and what was their bay is now Takamatua.

The French settlers would have founded a colony too, and New Munster would have become Nouveau Nantes, had the HMS Britomart not raced down from New Ulster to claim the island for Queen Victoria.

Mercifully, the North and South island are no longer called New Ulster and New Munster, although Auckland's central railway station is named for the Britomart. In appointing itself as Middle Earth, however, the South Island is reverting to an older name, in a way. The tiny Stewart Island, 35 km south of Bluff, was originally called the South Island; and Aoraki's Canoe was not the South, but the Middle Island.

I'm not going to Stewart Island this trip: the prospect of seeing kiwi birds in the wild would attract many a tourist, but I am not one of them. Instead, I'm going to see what a French-settled New Zealand Town looks like.

A lot more British settlers moved to Akaroa than French, once the French sold their land to the New Zealand Company. With that, and with seven generations elapsed, Akaroa is not terribly French anymore, except where it will help the tourist trade. The car mechanic announces his trade in French, the butcher's is Le Boucherie du Village, and the local police station calls itself a Gendarmerie. But they're not really fooling anyone. The memorial to the war dead has no time for such frivolity: it is dedicated to somberness and the anglophone Empire, and among the fifty or so dead are only a couple of French surnames. (The village now only has 660 permanent residents; the Great War had a rich harvest here.)

But the tourists are here for the French heritage, and the village will not disappoint. French flags are everywhere, and every second shop has a French title. Many visitors have a French accent. The good townsfolk don't take it terribly seriously: I doubt they have sought out French embassy funding for the annual escargot race.

Still, they're interested enough in their French history to do travels of their own. The Akaroa Mail has had a permanent enough Slow News Day that its latest issue breathlessly rereports the Metropole Hotel burning down—forty years ago. It also reports that there will be a slideshow on the 17th from a townsman's recent visit to St Helens. Where the Christchurch willow trees came from.

Akaroa is very agreeable, but I was curious if the French and German settlers left anything behind that wasn't just for the tourists. The local museum confirmed the settlement was French in 1840, and the restored cottage had furniture that came from the continent; but the museum's coverage fast-forwarded from 1840 to 1900 pretty quickly, and there was little hint of how much and how long Akaroa stayed French.

The hints around the town say, not very. There is a Catholic church, but it's St Patrick's, not Saint-Denis. There is a French and an English quarter, and the street names reflect that: Rue Lavaud turns into Beach Rd, and on the French side it probably always has been Rue Lavaud: the couple of newspaper clippings in the museum show it wasn't renamed for at least three generations. But the pubs in the French Quarter from the 1870s don't have French names: Hotel Madeira is as close to the continent as they get. Conversely, the English quarter, where the wharf is, has more than its portion of French-named shops now. Just as the distinctive East German traffic lights are now turning up in West Berlin, in fact: they've spread there now, because they're what the tourists expect to see there.

There is a Catholic cemetery in Akaroa, but the signposts are to "CoE Cemetery" and "RC and Dissenters Cemetery". That dichotomy already tells you you're in Church of England territory, which was the whole point of establishing Christchurch: not only did the Catholics get the other cemetery, but they got lumped in with the Protestants disloyal to the Church of England. That there even is a difference between Methodists and Anglicans is something most of the Anglosphere doesn't bother to remind you of any more.

There was one further hint on how quickly the French past was discarded, before the tourists came looking for it. Up the hill behind St Patrick's is the Old French Cemetery; the new Catholic And Dissenters cemetery is on the other side of the village, next to the CoE Cemetery. The trail up to the Old French cemetery is steep and windy, and barely footworn. And when you get to the top of the trail, all that's left of the Old French cemetery is a small obelisk and a flat enclosure.

The sign next to the enclosure explains what happened. In 1925, the New Zealand Government came to restore the cemetery. It found most of the headstones missing, with only a few mounds and fallen crosses hinting that French settlers were buried here. The restorers put on the obelisk the dozen names they could recover from the crosses, along with the two surviving plaques.

Ci git le corps de Le Lièvre Edouard, Agé de 35 ans, Cap^ne du navire Heva, décedé à Akaroa le 11 mai 1842. Priez pour lui.

Ici repose le corps de M^r Pierre Le Buffe Commis de la Marine age de 26 ans mort le 8 9^bre 1842 a bord de la c^te L' Allier a Akaroa. Priez pour lui.

The local community restored the ground again in 1990. (A safe enough time after the Rainbow Warrior bombing.) A holiday house is being built next door.

Michael King's History of New Zealand writes about both the Maori and the Pakeha life of the island, in separate chapters. King is defensive about the Pakeha side: he argues they had good intentions even if they did not always live up to them. He notes, with more resentment than he should be letting on, the contrast between the Maori, who can now successfully block freeways being built on their ancestral land, and the freeway about to bulldoze over the house and ashes of Frank Sargeson, one of the great Pakeha prose writers of New Zealand. (King died in 2003; I'll assume they succeeded.) There is a sense among some Pakeha, he writes—again, letting on more than he should—that the pendulum has swung too far: that the Maoris' mana and taonga and wahi tapu, their prestige and cultural treasures and sacred places, are honoured, and the Paheka's are not.

A pendulum swinging presupposes that there is a zero sum game in cultural heritage; but the only people who should be tallying credit points that way are the people building freeways. For the rest, there is enough mana to go around, and enough to claim as taonga.

Some Maori may be surprised at the claims, given the stereotypes they have developed of the Pakeha over the years: greedy, cunning, dishonouring their dead. The state of the Old French Cemetery in 1925 fit that stereotype well enough. But if the Pakeha are now asserting that they too have a heritage that matters—then maybe they have learned something from the Maori after all.

NZ #10: Christchurch

2010-01-05T22:34:00.002+11:00

Christchurch is about the same size as Wellington, and it has its CBD precincts set out like Wellington does. It has High St to correspond to Lambton Quay for high tone shopping; the Strip on Oxford Tce to correspond to Courtney Place for eats and drinks; the South of Lichfield alleyway to correspond to Cuba St (or Auckland's Vulcan Lane) for self-conscious funkiness. Everything a little tamer here, But also, everything a little smaller than in Wellington—and a lot quirkier. (There are no bicycles riding up a wall in Cuba St. And Cuban Socialist Realism is no match for fake beer ads about Virgin Ale.)

There are reasons for all this: Christchurch has been behind the starting line in its quest for urban chic, and has had to go into overtime to catch up.

Christchurch, the guidebooks alert you, is the most English of cities in New Zealand, with New Zealand already an inordinately British place by New World standards. Christchurch was founded to bring Anglican and Yeoman order to the South Island, after the French gave up their colony an hour's drive away, in Akaroa. The South Island narrowly missed being annexed by the tribe of Marion, as the Maori termed the French—Marion du Fresne being the French explorer who was skulking around these parts, and the excuse for setting the Treaty of Waitangi in motion. And the British were anxious to stake their claim.

When Christchurch was founded in 1850, then, it was adamantly part of Victoria's Empire; and while most Victorian Empire streets are named after dignities and royalty, Christchurch's streets asseverate their imperial heritage. The East–West streets are named for the recesses of Britain's Green and Pleasant Land: Salisbury, Peterborough, Kilmore, Chester, Armagh, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford. The North–South streets are the furthest reaches of red on the globe: Barbadoes St, Madras St, Colombo St.

Montreal St. Because in 1850, Montreal had no accent aigu, and was as proudly British as... well, as Madras and Colombo were.

There is a Britishness to be seen about the place still: more monumental stone (and less wood), more statues (including a prominent Queen Victoria and a just as prominent Scott of the Antarctic), more inscriptions commemorating patriotic duty. Quid Non Pro Patria, the Remembrance Bridge bellows: What Would You Not Do For Your Country?

That's a dangerous question to have inscribed on your bridges these days:

Is My Country meant to be where I was born and live, or literally the other side of the world? (Most New Zealanders answered the latter for the greater part of their history.)
What Wouldn't I Do? How long have you got? And do we start at paternalistic colonial policies, or move straight to genocide?

I won't single out the Kiwis for this modernist blame; it's the legacy of all nationalisms, and all colonialisms. But the memorialisations of the legacy are thicker on the ground here than I've been accustomed to.

Christchurch is also British in its river. The river, inevitably, was named Avon. With Oxford Terrace and Cambridge Terrace crossing the Avon, we get incongruity such as the Oxford-on-Avon tavern, across from the Bard-on-Avon pub. But situating Oxford on the Avon is not much more incongruous to begin with than situating an Avon on Aoraki's Canoe.

Christchurch is renowned for its British architecture, and (until recently) its British monoculture. But its British river is its glory, and I spent a half hour being punted around the river, in such bliss in the January sun and park greenery, that I was hard put to walk afterwards. I wouldn't necessarily confirm or deny that it was better than sex; but it glowed.

If you go digging, of course, you'll find the river is not as British as it looks.

The Antigua St boatsheds may have been built in 1882, but the Punt On The Avon operators are Est. 1994: the jackets may be straight out of an episode of Morse, but this is cultural reinvention, not cultural continuity from the Thames Valley.
The punters share the river with kayakers and pedal boats from the same boatshed: the Avon is not servicing only the nostalgic slow-motion past, but also the hyperactive action-man present tourist, marking time till they go bungie jumping in Queenstown.
The Avon is lined with weeping willows, but they aren't Ophelia's. A plaque states they were brought with the French to Akaroa—from St Helens. Christchurch may have been bellowing its Brittanicity, but its willows were commemorating Napoleon.
The river is thick with European mallard ducks; but the native Whio ducks, smaller and quicker, persist along them, and dive for food where the mallard just hang around for the river surface's bounty.

The whio can see what's at the bottom of the Avon, after all. Just as well. They wouldn't last five minutes on Melbourne's Beautiful Brown Yarra.

The Cathedral Square also is more layered than I expected. The Cathedral itself is stately enough, although I'm surprised it didn't go more gothic. The Old Post Office (now Tourist Centre and Starbucks—is there any GPO Building that's still a going concern?) is festively Italianate. And with the open spaces of the square, the modernist cone sculpture (a ferny chalice), the fast food carts, the milling backpackers, the buskers (some amplified), and the outdoor café tables, this did not look like an English village commons. This looked like a piazza.

A piazza with a bungee jump platform for infants; but for all I know that probably happens in Italy now too. A piazza with 19th century trams as well (tourist use only); but I hear they have trams in Europe as well.

I did not have a productive time of the Christchurch tourist tram service, I must say. But I enjoyed the punting too much to permit myself to vent here about a bomb scare grounding all trams for at least two hours. It would be unseemly to start grousing about who'd bother planting a bomb in Christchurch.

Nor will I say much about Christchurch's newspaper, the Press—other than to say that the New Zealand Herald, a newspaper of four million people, seemed to suffer from permanent Slow News Day malaise—and the Press has a tenth of the catchment of the Herald.

But what matters is, you can go punting here. And floating across the Avon, I can't say I missed the lack of news at all. Why, I wasn't even itching for internet connectivity...

NZ #9: The Great New Zealand Vowel Shift

2010-01-04T14:47:00.002+11:00

To the dull-eared outsider, antipodaeans all sound the same. Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans all sound somewhat cockney, because all the dull-eared outsider can pick up is that we drop our r's. The most dull-eared I've ever encountered is a colleague in the States, who was looking to deride my accent, and so started doing his best JFK. Right. Because Australian sounds exactly like Bostonian, and the absence of r's is the only difference between dialects of English.

To the over-sensitive insider, there is a world of difference between antipodaean dialects. And having only been exposed to one New Zealander at a time in Australia, I'm still adjusting to the fact that they really do all talk like that here.

There's gradiation of how strong the accent is on TV, although I haven't worked out the rules yet. News anchors sound close to a prestige variant; to my surprise, the prestige variant does not sound very different from General Australian. Weather readers sound more local, and ads trade in accent stereotype, as they do in Australia. Prestige sells news, folksiness sells kitchenware.

There's also the added complexity of Maori and Pacific Islander English, which sounds different again: same vowel shifts as in Pakeha English, but the back vowels more back and rounder. I haven't heard enough to tell whether this is consistently the case, and what the differences are between Maori and the other Polynesians.

So in lieu of actually working out what the social stratification is of New Zealand vowels, I will write on how they shed light on vowel change in Middle English.

English is notorious for its Great Vowel shift. A little after Chaucer, the pronunciation of the long vowels of English rotated, just after English spelling had been fixed. The spelling of long vowels used to make sense: a long <a> was a long version of a short <a>, a long <i> was a long version of a short <i>. Within a century, it all stopped making sense:

Long <i> went from [iː] to [əi] (and eventually [ai])
Long <e> or <ee> went from [eː] to [iː]
<ea> usually went from [ɛː] to [eː] (and eventually [iː] as well). Sometimes it stayed put, which is why weak does not rhyme with steak
Long <a> went from [aː] to [ɛː] (and eventually [ei])

And a similar rotation happened with back vowelsː [uː] to [əu] and eventually [au], <oo> from [oː] to [uː], <oa> from [ɔː] to [oː] and eventually [ou].

Now this is a bizarre thing to have happened; that it affected all the long vowels of English tells us that the vowels are an interconnected system, and a disruption to one vowel disrupts all the other vowels in turn.

Two causes have been proposed for this kind of development. The push model says that one vowel changing caused ambiguity with the next vowel, so the next vowel had to change in turn to avoid the ambiguity; but its shift caused ambiguity with the next vowel along, so all the vowels had to change to make way for each other. So once mate stopped being pronounced as [maːt], and started being pronounced as [mɛːt], it became ambiguous with meat. The [ɛː] vowel then had to change in turn, so meat sounded like [meːt], which was now ambiguous with meet. And so on.

That's a satisfying, logical answer: language is used for communication, ambiguity gets in the way for communication, the vowel shift deals with ambiguity.

The catch is, meet and meat now do sound the same. So it's not like that strategy paid off.

The alternate account is a pull model. Once a shift in the vowels happened, there was a gap in the vowel system, which made it more odd to learn for children. Children compensated by shifting the next vowel up to fill the gap. But this just created a new gap, and the vowels kept rotating, until the gaps in the system were filled again.

So once [iː] turned into [əi], English turned into a language without an [iː]. A language with long vowels but without a long [iː] is an odd language indeed; and children corrected that oddity by turning [eː] into [iː]. That meant that English now had an [ɛː] and an [iː] but no [eː], and so the vowels kept rotating. (English ended up without an [aː], so there's still imbalance in American English, although dropping r's fixed that elsewhere, because [aɹ] turned into [aː]. But the gap filling, like all language change, is by its nature haphazard.)

That account... is not satisfying and logical: it makes of English vowels an algebraic, typological game, and it turns children learning the language into neurotic typologists. The thing is, the shift in New Zealand vowels is its own vowel rotation—this time involving just front short vowels. And the developments in New Zealand support the pull model.

New Zealand English and its development has been thoroughly and meticulously investigated by the linguists here. So the linguists here will be able to tell you precisely when each vowel changed. Because I am not a New Zealand linguist, I will instead reconstruct the sequence based on when Australian ads started making fun of them.

You would have thought a people who some might say sounds like the dregs of the London sewerage system have no standing to deride their neighbours' accent. You'd be wrong of course, self-criticism is not the point of differentiating yourself from your neighbours, and we so do NOT sound like the dregs of the London sewerage system at all.

Ahem.

The earliest and most stereotypical vowel change was [ɪ] to [ɨ]. To the dull-eared Australian, [ɨ] sounds like [ə], "uh". Australian jokes about "uh" were already in swing by the early 1980s. "Australia Sux", the New Zealander is meant to have graffiti'd, to which the Australian daubed underneath "New Zealand Nil". (Because "sucks" is how New Zealanders are meant to pronounce "six".) And most Australian jokes still centre around this vowel change, particularly the more halfwitted variety on breakfast radio.

The change of [ɛ] to [ɪ] doesn't get as much airplay, but it was being mentioned in ads by the 1990s. The first I recollect was for the Mainland Cheese brand.

—Mainland Cheese hilps to keep you fitter.
—Fitta? As in the cheese?
—Not Feta! Fitter!

(I've just found out what Mainland means here: it was the South Island literally, when the South Island was where everything was at, and it is the South Island ironically, for the past century.)

The last change to happen, given the distribution of short front vowels in English, is [æ] to [ɛ]. The comedians Across the Ditch [= Tasman] have not yet latched on to this, and I wasn't sure the change had happened at all; but I have now got confirmation of it. First from a TV ad, extolling the "messive, messive summer sale" at Briscoes. Then a few days later at the winery, with reference to a "desh of gin". ([mɛsɨv mɛsɨv samə sɛɪl], [dɛʃ əv dʒɨn])

And the sequence means that the change wasn't motivated by ambiguity. Bid didn't change to buhd to keep out of the way of bed turning into bid. Bid changing to buhd created a gap, for bed to fill by changing into bid.

I still can't believe they all actually talk like that here though...

NZ #8: Blenheim

2010-01-04T14:41:00.002+11:00

First, some housekeeping announcements.

Note to the dude who stole my seat as I got back on the bus to Christchurch at Kaikoura. (a) If you were sitting there before, how come my History of New Zealand is on the seat next to you? (b) I trust you have had a satisfying holiday and in general a full life, because I will fricking murder you.
Note to self: watch less action movies. A lot less, they're giving me ideas. That film Wanted last night on the Movie Channel was a thuggish mess, albeit with de rigeur impressive special effects. It's all the more annoying because vengeance scenarios are seductive—though maybe less so when the (anti-)hero is shooting his pursuers through his main adversary's head.
Although as a mechanism to discourage tourists from stealing others' seats on the InterCity bus, it does have something to recommend it...
Note to the manufacturers of "Sea Legs" anti-motion sickness pills: it ain't working. I am minded of a book on Cretan grammar I have somewhere, which is a fitting example sentence, begotten of the same combination of mountainous roads and long-distance bus transport that I am currently undergoing: "I hate the devil's galley, the bus (του διαόλου το κάτεργο, το λεωφορείο): every time I go on it, I end up vomiting."
Maybe that would be a more effective mechanism of discouraging bus seat theft.
Note to the visually minded readers of this blog: I am still taking pictures, though I emphatically won't be taking pictures from a moving Devil's Galley. At this rate, I will probably do photo essays when I go back, instead of on the road.

That concludes this morning's announcements.

I am on the bus from Blenheim to Christchurch; I've kept my eyes shut on the first leg, because "Sea Legs" haven't really been working. The first leg has taken me up to Kaikoura, site of whalewatching and overpriced crayfish, As it happens, that is what Kaikoura means in Maori: kai, "food", koura, "crayfish", and Ø, "overpriced". (The "overpriced" is silent.)

Blenheim is pronounced not [blɛnhaɪm], but [blɪnəm], "Blinnum". Blenheim is a small flat country town of three thousand souls, with several churches, a nice public square, five pharmacies none of which were open on Sunday January 3 to dispense "Sea Legs" anti-motion sickness pills, and an on-hotel restaurant, Nikau, offering quite tasty seared Nelson scallops. This makes up for me getting lost in the Nelson waterfront, trying to find Nelson scallops closer to the source.

The reason why tourists stop off at Blenheim is that it is the gateway to the Marlborough wine country of New Zealand, the land that has given the world the best Sauvignon Blancs ever quaffed. Delights of dry and refreshing amber fruitiness.

Although there has been talk of viticulture in New Zealand for a long time, wine here is fairly recent—starting in the seventies. It's also been explosive: the winery count has gone from a dozen twenty years ago to 130, and it's now 90% of arable land or thereabouts. The experts on the winery tour I snuck in on dropped the science on us as to why this is nonpareil wine country: lots of rivers but little rain, microclimates in the valley, Wellington-force winds that keep the bugs away, geologically eventful soil. Well, I just know the wine tastes good.

I didn't make it to a full-day tour, which is truly just as well: four wineries were enough to throw me into a couple of hours of stupor afterwards. For any readers who might be of the oenophile persuasion, these are the highlights:

The Chardonnay is refermented in the bottle, which is supposed to give it a buttery taste. It truly was buttery, and I hadn't noticed that kind of thing before. Best in breed: Bouldevines Chardonnay 2006. I think they're too small a company to export.
Gewürtztraminer is supposed to taste like a combination of lychee and Turkish delight. The Gewürtz I nursed in Wellington, shielding myself from gales and tumbleweeds at the hotel bar, didn't. The Gewürtzen I had here all did, although in line with the rest of what they do, the Bladen went easy on the lychee, and just did the Turkish delight.
It didn't help that Bladen were the last winery I went to, but if Hamlet feared that high tragedy was caviar to the general, then you can call Bladen Beluga, and point out that I live on Ulysses S. Grant Street. Bladen wines are subtle and delicate, their flavours hinted at rather than proclaimed. This wins them awards with wine critics. With my blunt palate, all it wins them is, "WHAT'S THAT? SPEAK UP SON, I CAN'T HEAR YOU. YOU'RE A PINOT QUI?"
Framingham specialise in Riesling (and in very cool cellars, both literally and figuratively). I didn't understand their Dry Riesling: its flavours clashed. But both the Classic and the Select Riesling were very good; the Select in particular was candied on entry, but clean going down, without the cloying aftertaste it seemed to presage.
It helps Forrest that wine tourers are greeted by a walking encyclopaedia of viticulture, but I was taken with both their Doctor's Riesling, and their Chardonnay—the latter easier on the butter than the Bouldevines, and with more of a kick, the former unexpectedly apple-tasting.

I didn't actually seek out the Sauvignon Blancs in the tour, which are the majority of what most wineries do here. The default Marlborough Sav Blanc you see overseas is that bottled by the local behemoth, Montana (who also owns Stoneleigh); behemoth it might be, but its Sav Blanc holds up against its more boutique competitors. The Rieslings were the real surprise here. All of them went down very smoothly, more smoothly than a Riesling should by rights.

"Sea Legs" anti-motion sickness pills proclaim themselves incompatible with alcohol, though, so I need to take leave of talk of Marlborough wine, as I'm taking leave of Marlborough itself. I think I'll close my eyes again, and visualise happy thoughts.

Such as the demise of the dude who stole my seat at Kaikoura....

NZ #7: Musket Wars

2010-01-03T17:42:00.002+11:00

Over New Year's Eve, I read the 500-odd pages of Michael King's Penguin History of New Zealand. There was a hardcover edition, but I wasn't disposed to pay an extra $40 for colour illustrations and callout quotes. I'm not a visual person, and my suitcase allowance is finite. The paperback is still weighty enough, even if it doesn't have daguerreotypes.

(Hey, the Linux spellchecker knows about daguerreotypes. Impressive. If only it could deal with straight apostrophes too.)

So what did I learn about the country? A couple of things, which I'll regurgitate here in my accustomed ignorance.

I'd already read about the Musket Wars from other literature, including the claim everyone professed to be reticent in making, and everyone made anyway, as to how the Musket Wars ended. Around 1820, the northernmost Maori tribes got access to muskets. Even more crucially, they got access to potatoes, which were easier to farm and less perishable than the local sweet potatoes. So their raiding parties could besiege a fortification for months rather than weeks, with thousands rather than hundreds freed up from subsistence farming, and with gunpowder.

In the earliest stage of Maori settlement, the colonial phase, the scholars conclude the Maori tribes collaborated to tame the land, and eat up all the free protein. Once they ran out of free food, the tribes became competitive, and the rules of reciprocity and honour meant tribes could sustain grievances for decades. So when the northernmost tribes got guns and provisions, it was payback time against the tribes further south. And when those tribes further south got guns and provisions in turn, it was payback time for them—not against the northerners who'd been slaughtering them, and still had firepower—but against the tribes still further south who didn't have guns yet.

This kept going for a couple of decades, until the Brits established governorship (with different understanding from the Maori as to how far governorship went), and Christianity was introduced, and—the reticent but obvious conclusion—all the tribes had enough firepower to maintain a balance of terror against each other. Soon enough they were fighting the British anyway. (And each other, as some tribes were loyal to the British and some not.)

You might add that with a fifth of Maoridom killed, and another fifth enslaved, and the white man's diseases coming shortly behind, the Musket Wars would have run their course soon enough anyway.

All this put the tribes of the South Island at quite a disadvantage. The South Island was populated later to begin with, and got guns last: there's a reason only 5% of Maori in New Zealand now live in the South Island. Of course, Europeans have always been more eager to proclaim a tribe has died off than are the tribespeople themselves, and there are iwi who maintain cultural continuity in the South Island. But 80% of the island is just one tribe, and King has a little anecdote which illustrates what was lost: not just the people, but their stories.

Oral history of indigenous peoples preserves memory of first contact with Europeans, which after all was a pretty big deal. The people may have had to cast it into mythological context, or their own societal context, to make sense of it; but the stories did stick around. Fifty years after Captain Cook, the Maori would tell tales of the noble bearing of the visitor. First contact with the Moriori, a Maori offshoot on the Chatham Islands 800 km away, made even more of an impact: the Moriori were so shocked by the Europeans' use of gunpowder (according to King at least), they renounced warfare.

But neither was the first contact the Maori had with white people. The first contact was with Abel Tasman, a century before, at Golden Bay—not far from where I am typing these lines, in the north of South Island. We have Tasman's account of what happened, and his name for Golden Bay: Murderers' Bay. We don't have the Ngati Tumatakokiri account of what happened, because after the Musket Wars, we don't have the Ngati Tumatakokiri account of anything. There are Maori tribes here still, but they came south with the muskets.

No, the Maori were not hippy, peace-loving, in-tune-with-the-land, positive energy plaster saints out of Rousseau. Of course, being human and not plaster saints, no indigenous people are. With the possible exception of the Moriori, and their pacifism got them enslaved by the New Zealand Maori, once they came across on the White Man's ships. It also got them recast as Melanesians by 19th century anthropologists: if a people could be enslaved by the Maori without firing a shot, surely they were an earlier wave of human migration, of inferior racial stock.

Some head hunters from the Indonesian archipelago may want to take issue with that assessment. The 19th century line about the Moriori is no longer being peddled, and the Moriori are reasserting their identity; but it took almost a century to dislodge.

It would be difficult even without the Musket Wars for the Maori to feel like they were one people, and make common cause, unless external adversity forced them to. Which after all is how common identity is normally forged. The Maori had seen noone but Maori for half a millennium; they had no more cause to identify with each other than Russians do with Bolivians. All their identity, their sense of culture and obligation and making sense of the world, inhered in the tribe; to call them Maori, you might as well have called them just Human Beings. (Which, after a fashion, is exactly what "Maori" means: "common, ordinary"—not divine.)

And that's why the culturally right thing to do, whenever a Maori is named—including on Maori TV—is to adjoin their tribal affiliation.

With that, forging a common identity as Maori is an artifice of circumstance, and as such would feel pretty artificial. King's history quotes John Rangihau of Tuhoe on it (p. 366), and I find it's both infuriating, and makes all the sense in the world:

it seems to me there is no such think as Maoritanga because Maoritanga is an ill-inclusive term... I have a faint suspicion that [it] is a term coined by the Pakeha to bring all the tribes together. Because if you cannot divide and rule, then for tribal people all you can do is unite them and rule. Because then they lose everything by losing [the] tribal history and traditions that gave them their identity.

I'm reminded by this, once again, of the fate of East Sutherland Gaelic.

The only way Gaelic can survive in a modern environment is as a standardised language, a prestigious and elaborated language of schooling and media. The people actually still speaking Gaelic, such as on East Sutherland, don't speak a standard Gaelic: the only real Gaelic to them, the language of their identity and patrimony, is a dialect, which diverges from the next dialect down the road, which diverges from the dialect on the other side of the Highlands. It's nonsense for BBC Scotland to transmit in every hill and dale's dialect: that's not a feasible strategy to survive Gaelic. But by transmitting an alien version of Gaelic to the Highlands hills and dales, native to none of them and unfamiliar to all of them, the remaining speakers just feel even worse about what they do speak. A standard Gaelic is not the language of their soul.

Just as a standardised Maoritanga is not the Maoritanga a tribe can claim allegiance to. You needn't posit Pakeha malice to see why One Maoridom could be of advantage to Maori, and having the tribes work together would win them more than having them work in competition. And you needn't posit Maori orneriness to appreciate the importance of authenticity to any identity construction.

All of which is true, but there is some extratribal Maori identity in the mix now anyway, with urban Maori founding their own marae; and the Maori have made common cause in claiming their rights. And that doesn't displace the importance of tribes in establishing Maori identity; it just makes it complicated. As identity tends to be these days.

Hm. That meandered a bit. I have a lot more to learn. That doesn't get in the way of me posting though...

NZ #6: Nelson

2010-01-03T16:54:00.001+11:00

A town of 40,000 counts as the Big Smoke around these parts. Guess I'm in rural New Zealand now.

Nelson's flat, by Wellington and Auckland standards, which makes it feel sunny and open. The Marlborough region which Nelson abuts gets the most sunshine of New Zealand—and they have the vineyards to prove it. They had some sunshine to prove it yesterday too, though once again I've been playing hide-and-seek with the rain: there'd been a downpour just before my plane landed, and the tarmac was still steaming through the coupling of aircraft wheels and morning light.

Nelson is a tourist gathering point, and at Saturday midmorning was teeming with ambling backpackers, oscillating around the Saturday market. A fair hippy quotient, with the requisite crystals and pan pipes and woodcraft, alongside the whitebait patties and cherries and bush honey-flavoured whisky. And universally ignored buskers, all of them on acoustic guitar.

Not my thing, really, but it looked like being most people there's thing.

Nelson is presided over by a cathedral, which took decades to finish as cathedrals usually do, and switched architectural styles along the way, again as cathedrals usually do. The architectural switch would happen in Europe because cathedrals took centuries; here it took decades, but it was the 20th century, when everything started happening faster. Even in New Zealand, by the '60s.

The fusion has worked out here: the slender belltower that the cathedral presents to the town centre is at odds with the squat strength of the entrance at the other side, but both are coherent where they stand.

As a hill in the middle of flatland, Church Hill was known to the Maori as Piki Mai, "climb hither". Church Hill started out as Maori fortifications, and when the Maori weren't using it, as Pakeha fortifications—Fort Arthur, garrisoned for fear of a revenge attack in 1842. There are signs beside the cathedral telling the history, but the cathedral itself sidesteps its forebears deftly with a Maori subtitle: Haere mai, Piki mai! Welcome hither, Climb hither.

To the east of the cathedral is the other tourist attraction of Nelson proper, South St. South St is a street full of 1860s workers' cottages, painstakingly maintained as private residences and B & B's. It's all wood, house after house, which as you'll have read normally gets my back up. But this manifestation at least had the benefit of neatness and affluence to it. They aren't workers' cottages any more. The tourists don't seem to have paid South St much mind: it was deserted apart from a teenager taking his radio operated car for a spin.

Nelson is a port city, its foreshore littered with containers and timber. My taxi driver informed me that lots of timber workers have lost their jobs with the recession, and the timber exporters finding it cheaper to process the timber offshore. But the port is still a place of active commerce.

The port is also a place of waterfront seafood restaurants, and I was aiming to report back on the taste of Nelson scallops. However, the tourist map I was using did no capture the complexity of streets around the port. After half an hour of walking through containers, I gave up and went back into town—one street before the road that actually led to the restaurants. This means I owe myself a scallop dinner further south.

And that's it for Nelson

NZ #5: Wellington on New Year's Eve

2010-01-02T13:34:00.002+11:00

With the necessary preamble that this yet again is terribly disjointed—I'm not managing the grand narratives this trip that I did in England, mainly because I'm not particularly goal driven this time around in where I'm going.

So.

I beg leave to report that the one culinary establishment I was looking forward to in Wellington, as recommended by Lonely Planet—the Maori fusion establishment Kai in the City—has recently closed its doors. That is, unless the Maori fusion has extended to being 100% Thai cuisine. All that survives of Kai is a couple of letters of the sign indicating its bottle bar. The Bastille Bistro across Majoribanks St, which was to serve as my backup on Dec 30, likewise is gone, supplanted by a fish restaurant. (A little more survives of it: a huge PERNOD awning.)

I was rather looking forward to finding out what meat buried over coals tastes like. Yes, I know I'm supposed to be familiar with it through klephtiko, but I don't think I've actually ever had klephtiko. Another Greek delicacy that hasn't quite made it across to Crete.

When I realised Kai in the City is gone, I had a twinge of inauthenticity regret: the rest of my time in NZ will be on the South Island (already started as I type these lines), and with 5% of the Maori population living in Te Waka a Aoraki (Aoraki's Canoe, aka South Island), any Maori food I'd eat from now own would be just for tourists.

As if eating at a restaurant is such an authentically Maori thing to do, I realised, and went next door to a Modern New Zealand Cuisine establishment.

There were people out and about after hours in Courtney Place—the booze and youngster epicentre of Wellington, down the road from Cuba St, the coffee and hipster epicentre. This iteration, I'd been staying near Lambton Quay, the retail and high tone epicentre.

Lambton Quay is high tone enough to terminate at the seat of New Zealand Government: Old Government House (which looked too much like the Old Government House in Auckland, including the surfeit of wood); Parliament Library (a pretty neo-gothic confection); Parliament itself (built at a time when New Zealanders finally realised the innate dignity of stone); and the controversial Beehive building. Conservative fuddy-duddies did not appreciate the bold modernist vision of a round concrete-and-wire tower, antagonising the marble parapets next door. Count me with the conservative fuddy-duddies: it's arrogance, it's an eyesore, and it's dysfunctional. (As the taxi driver defending it conceded to me, a round government building does not allow hierarchical placing of corner offices; and the Civil Service cannot do without hierarchically placed offices.)

The problem with government offices precincts is, nothing much else is going on around them. There is a Backbencher Pub across the road from the parliament; and Kate Shepherd, whose lobbying made New Zealand the first country to give women the vote, is now an apartment complex—facing off the statue of Prime Minister Seddon who campaigned against it. And that's it for the government offices precinct.

The problem with high tone epicentres is, they empty out after 5 PM; and with Cuba St and Courtney Place already set up, Wellington hasn't felt the need to extend the nightlife to the retail precinct, the way Melbourne has. I made the mistake of getting stir crazy at 10 PM, New Year's Day, and wandering out for a bite. I saw nothing for the next kilometre but shuttered shop windows and tumbleweeds.

Well, maybe not literal tumbleweeds, but it was certainly windy enough for tumbleweeds to blow in from the American Southwest. Strong winds. "This is no longer cute" winds. "Now you know why they call it Wuhndy Willington" winds. "Wuthering Heights" winds.

"You're getting something from Room Service tonight" winds.

It hasn't helped that the holiday season sees many of the shops shut down even in daytime. Still, I've been lucky with the weather so far; I've been in the vicinity of rain and wind, but haven't yet had to sacrifice a daytime's exploring to it. But unless you're in the far north of the North Island, the weather so far has barely been springlike, let alone Southern Hemisphere December. I've packed shorts; I needn't have bothered, and as I head from south to more south on Aoraki's Canoe, there's no prospect of the shorts being exposed to sunlight now.

That's probably yet another result of the Weather Going Crazy, and us All Being Doomed. But it's also because New Zealand is closer to the pole. The local vodka is called 42° Below, and as I was nursing a Gewürtztraminer last night at the piano bar, huddling from the gales and tumbleweeds outside, I realised why. That's not a temperature of vodka refrigeration, and -42° vodka icicles would probably be something of a health hazard anyway. No, that 42°S Latitude. And with Melbourne at 38°S, that means I'm no longer in the equivalent of Milan, but Amsterdam. It gets cold here.

Just that smidgeon too cold for an outdoors New Year's Eve to make sense, the way it does in Sydney or Melbourne. There was a concert underway at Civic Square, and families milling about the waterfront. Some on unicycles: apparently a grand unicyclist jamboree is about to start here. But not the critical mass of people to make me tarry. At least, not north of Courtney Place, but I don't know that I was up for the wall-to-wall boozing.

Yes, yes, I greeted the New Year in a hotel room. Reading New Zealand history, no less.

And if I fell down in how I greeted the New Year, so did New Zealand TV. Movie finishes on TV2 at 11:59:50, five second countdown, Happy New 2010, roll credits for the next movie.

Now that is a cosmic error right there. TV is meant to have programming commensurate to the year change. Lame variety shows, at least. (Though TV1 was already plenty lame with their Year in Review show. Dramatic recitation of Lady Gaga lyrics is not pioneering comedy.)

I flicked around the channels to see if anyone was showing "the crackers", the obligatory New Year's televising of fireworks that happens in normal countries. The only channel that was showing the crackers? Sky News. Which is run out of Australia.

Wonder what was on Maori TV...

NZ #4: Maori TV

2010-01-01T14:08:00.005+11:00

Maori TV has not been created for the entertainment of Visiting Whitey. Maori TV is enmeshed in the problematic history of Maori–Pakeha relations, with decades of Pakeha drumming their fingers waiting for the Maori to die off and swindling their land, even as they were congratulating themselves for having the best race relations in the Empire. And Visiting Whitey is not the target audience for the Maori TV news—as I was reminded when a Maori journalist (I think) was being interviewed about her fact finding mission to the Pacific islands in the company of the Prime Minister, and noted her annoyance at feeling like a stranger there, because the rest of the PM's entourage was Pakeha.

And because this is a painful history of a proud people of whom I know nothing (although I recognise the odd word of their language via Tok Pisin or Tetun), it is problematic and fraught for me to venture to say anything about it at all. What I'm about to say is even more problematic. But:

Herewith, you see depicted Amanda Ashton, co-host of the Maori youth program haa. Amanda Ashton is wearing a T-shirt that says "We [heart] Te Reo"—the (Maori) language.

Opoudjis [hearts] Amanda Ashton.

On what basis do I make such a deeply problematic claim? Is it because she is young and cute, and I am a sleaze and a reprobate? No doubt, no doubt; and I was dejected to find out she's already got a kid, which is more than you needed to know about me, I doubt not. Is it because she speaks Maori a mile a minute? Well, yes, that too, although Maori TV is no more there for the edification of linguists than it is for the gratification of whiteys.

But in main, I [heart] Amanda Ashton, because she mugs for the camera. Adorably. I don't know if she had me at kia ora, but she certainly had me by the time the co-host said something about driving down to Queenstown, and she mimed being behind the steering wheel. With a smirk. I surmise that kind of thing is commonplace among VJs, but I haven't actually watched a VJ for well over a decade, so it remains novel to me.

I'm seriously surprised there aren't, like, Facebook fan clubs for Amanda Ashton and all. Maybe it's because that would transgress a cultural precept, and I'm about to be visited by some very angry kinsfolk. They'll have to track me down first, but.

I'm in Maori TV withdrawal right now, because the hotel I'm currently at does not see fit to offer it. (It would get in the way of six-month old releases on the Movie Channel.) But it's fascinating viewing for me, as a Visiting Clueless Whitey, because it's showing me the bicultural tensions of the Maori today. At least, I think that's what it's showing me: most of it isn't subtitled. (It's Maori TV, btw, and not the all-Maori language Te Reo channel, which I haven't spotted yet. Maori TV proper is still something like 70% in Te Reo.)

So on the one extreme, a Maori journalist interviews a Pakeha filmmaker with an American accent on his new film short, which has nothing to do with Maoritanga; all in familiar Government TV film show English—though she does consistently throw to break in Te Reo. Maori TV is already doing what the Ethnic broadcaster SBS does in Australia: it also hosts "alternative" but non-ethnic programming, which the commercial providers won't support. SBS's ethnic audience weren't too happy about that back in the day...

I think the kids' program was also in a familiar enough genre, although that depends on whether the presenter cackling with a green wig on was meant to be a witch, a sea monster, or a punk chick from Cuba St. Like I say, no subtitles.

The News program which I mentioned in comments in a previous post isn't exactly the other extreme, but it did throw me: the intonation and cliches were cookiecutter familiar, but the tribal affiliations and proverbial wisdom were not.

The news content seemed to me to suffer from Smalltown news malaise; Cyprus news has the same problem, and if I can judge from the day before yesterday's issue of the New Zealand Herald, Pakeha New Zealand does too. It's the problem of every day being a slow news day, by BBC News standards. Local social occasions getting airtime; non-politicians being interviewed for longer than a soundbite; unconscious editorialising; no sense of the momentous.

(Bigtown news has its own malaise, of which the most prominent symptom is the soap opera treatment of politics. That's Greece, and US National News, with divergent proportions of slickness to sprawl, and of torpor to hysteria. Australian commercial news is at an unhappy medium: no portentousness, and no groundedness.)

I think I've missed watching the programming that would really have surprised me as alien to me. Not the documentaries; even if the Maoris in the docos speak in their voice in their language, they're the documentary's objects, not the subjects, so that itself is not unfamiliar. I suspect it'd be the Hunting Aotearoa show that I'd have the hardest time understanding.

Even if it is in English.

Maori TV helpfully, and inevitably, has a Teach Yourself Maori show, Tōku Reo, which was the first show I caught while channel flicking (before Amanda Ashton changed my life). I thought testing for listening comprehension through Find The English Loanword was cheating—

Akarae Pokenoe Tariki kirikiti Oamaru whutuporo Tauranga Aotearoa TiiWii

—and there were one too many talking heads cutting up the pacing, and the setup was a bit clunky. But that's a ten minute judgment from a linguist, and don't take my word for it; I'd probably comment on the Pear Stories like an American high school kid too.

OK, now I've got to explain that allusion, don't I. Around 1970, some American linguists made a silent film of a story with some kids stealing pears, showed it to speakers of various languages, and asked people to retell the story. The point was to see how various languages chain sentences together into coherent narratives. Greek was one of the languages surveyed; I think Deborah Tannen did the survey with students from a girls' school.

[Link to Youtube of the video; embedding disabled, because YouTube user Haiweongwas says so...]

And throughout the world, the people shown the film would retell the story of the children who stole the pears, and the farmer who chased after them, each after their own language's predilections. Except for the States. When you showed kids the film in the States, all they'd want to talk about afterwards was how shoddy the cinematography was.

The medium has become the message, and Pop has Eaten Itself, and we're all caught up in style over substance. That "we" probably includes a lot of Maori watching Tōku Reo. The makers of Tōku Reo however are probably doing a much better job than I'd concluded after ten minutes.

They've got podcasts, after all...

NZ #3: Auckland

2010-01-01T12:01:00.002+11:00

A prosperous and productive New Year to my readers, and a' that.

Oh yeah, I was in Auckland, wasn't I? Hm. Scenic alright, especially from the vantage of Devonport, with its "dormant" volcanoes dotted with fortifications and cannons, waiting for Imperial Russian fleets that never turned up, and with a clear shot across to the yachts of Viaduct Harbour. You'd better hope Devonport never secedes. Before they were anti-Russian fortifications, the volcanoes were meant to have been Maori fortifications, pa; I couldn't see the evidence, but then again, I didn't quite know where to look.

Apart from fortifications and cannonwork, Devonport is self-conscious about having a village feel. There was a sniff of Brighton about it, and that the word "village" is even allowed here is another confirmation of how British New Zealand got to be. Australia never calls anything a village, unless an upmarket redevelopment is happening 1 km from the CBD.

Come to think of it, Devonport may have been a ferry-ride across the harbour, but it was still 1 km away from the CBD.

Devonport loves wood as building material. Like Auckland does, and as far as I can tell the rest of the island does. The Pakeha arrived and found the islands a cornucopia of trees, just like the Maori had found it a cornucopia of flightless protein, and they went to work harvesting. Landing in Auckland was already noticeably different from Wellington: there was a lot less forest and more grassland. Auckland suburbia also had a more incoherent mix of wood, brick (from the mid 20th century), and concrete.

But the oldest houses were wood. I do not like wood. Weatherboard has connotations of impoverishment to me, and I steer clear of it—which is a feat in Oakleigh, where people are actually putting up weatherboard in place of brick, to blend in. Wood in New Zealand is not a sign of impoverishment. Devonport adorned its affluent verandas with wood latticework, rather than wrought iron; but to my biased eyes, that looked somewhat daft. On the grounds of Auckland University, the Old Government House stands, buildt in 1858. But it looks like an overgrown woodshed. The fact that the front of it was under scaffolding being restored didn't dispel that impression. So I refused to photograph it.

Actually, I'm having trouble accessing my normal photo repository online anyway, and I'm rationing my Internet time, so you won't be any the wiser about my photos anyway. Pity, you miss out on my mad composition skillz.

Auckland CBD itself is a huddle of ill-conceived skyscrapers, punctuated by parkland and funky alleyways. I had high hopes for Aotea Square, but it too is currently a building site. Vulcan Lane is less precious about its alternativeness than Cuba St in Wellington, but it's also over a lot quicker. The Chancery precinct is agreeably snooty; but it's over even quicker. In all, I can't say Auckland grabbed me.

Other than its hilliness. That grabbed me alright. There's no need to go hiking outside of Auckland (let alone tramping, which is what the locals call it). Walking through the CBD is tramping enough; I'm halfway convinced my ears popped on the way back to the hotel.

NZ #2: Wellington (not written in Wellington)

2009-12-29T09:46:00.001+11:00

So, I've been in Wellington for, oh, 17 hours, 11 of them in a small hotel room. I'll be back for more tomorrow, but the report so far:

Wellington as seen driving in from the airport is implausibly scenic for a capital city. Suburban houses perched among hills and forests, moving in and out of view like a Magic Eye picture; the suburban houses in odd pastel colours, subtle greens and yellows.

Cuba St is as self-consciously bohemian as I'd been told. Its buildings are agreeably—and purposefully—ramshackle; its erstwhile banks converted to restaurants. The street was named so long before 1960; there's a Panama St to match further north; but the hip cafés have profited from the name, and there's a Fidel's and an Ernesto's Café with prominent Socialist Realist iconography. One does not have to be a devotee of Reaganomics to see a problem with the cuteification of totalitarianism; then again, Ernesto Guevara had already turned into a T-shirt long before Ernesto's Café set up shop.

Coffee in Wellington is fetishised, the way it would be in a city that has emerged from culinary monoculture recently, and has something to prove. They do well to take pride in their coffee here though: it is fierce and raspy.

Cuba St is diverse enough in its culinary offerings to confirm it has something to prove. If I hadn't dined at Cuisine nouveau nouveauzélandaise (Logan–Brown, around the corner from where I was staying), the taquería was next on the list, or the Malay noodle place. Not much past the taquería could be on the list, as it turns out: it's the wrong time of year for restaurants to be open.

Wellington is a compact place: the city proper is 2km end to end. Cuba St, and its purposeful ramshackleness, is over very quickly. I got as far as Lambton Quay, and its closed department stores. (It's that time of year, and Wellington doesn't strike me as a 24/7 kind of place anyway.) I didn't see the government buildings; Thursday I guess.

But I did get to Civic Square. A bit small for a national capital, and I'm not sure I approve of the polka dots on the Wellington City Gallery building. ("Ooh, I'll postmodernly improve on an Art Deco building by piddling on it with paint, aren't I clever.") But it is (otherwise) a dignified setting for the National Library; and the National Library of New Zealand does enough wonders online to merit the dignity.

There is something non-Australian about the Cuba St streetscape (duh), but I couldn't place what constitutes it yet. The streetscape doesn't have rotated vowels, so it isn't the accent. More Polynesian and less East Asian faces on the street, but I don't think that was it either. I'll see if I can work it out in Auckland.

NZ #1: Wellington (with no mention of Wellington)

2009-12-28T22:28:00.001+11:00

I salute you, those of my readers who have not already wiped me from their RSS feeds. A couple of months of radio silence have passed: once again Your Correspondent has fallen off the blogging bandwagon, as has happened before and may well happen again. With the benefit of paranoid introspection, I can even venture a guess as to why I'd fallen off the blogging bandwagon, after returning from New Orleans. Although, Dear Remaining Reader(s), neither of us are inebriated enough yet that I can divulge why.

Not that I can tell this side of the Intertubes, anyway.

But lapsing in blogging calls for drastic measures, to restore my voice and pedantry to the Ether. And so it is, Dear Remaining Reader(s), that I am typing these lines from Cuba St, Wellington, New Zealand.

Following the pattern that sees me find more oddity to blog about when I'm out of the country, I have just hauled myself to Aotearoa, for the next 18 days. My connectivity will be spotty: I'm already having; to rely on citywide commercial Wireless, rather than anything in my hotel, to get online. So there'll likely be less hyperlink treasure trove goodness than usual this time around in my posts.

(The wireless provider I'm resorting to is CaféNet. Of course. It *is* Wellington, after all, and Wellington deems itself to be all about coffee and Peter Jackson.)

A drastic solution to a blogging lull, perhaps, going across the Tasman Sea; and that's not quite the reason I had bought the airline tickets. What was more of a reason is, I am embarrassed to acknowledge that I know exceedingly little about the sister country next door. As is the norm for someone from an elder sibling country (US vs Canada, Germany vs Austria, Greece vs Cyprus, Brobdignag vs Liliput). To rectify that, I'm doing what Australians abroad tend to do: I'm going to entirely too many places in entirely too short a time. The itinerary, as far as I can tell right now, is:

Wellington
Auckland
Wellington again
Nelson
Blenheim
Christchurch
Akaroa
Oamaru
Dunedin
Queenstown
Tourist Daytrip stuff in the vicinity of Queenstown
Wellington Schon Wieder Mal

Lots of downtime in buses. Good thing I'm typing this on something portable.

And while I could spent my first blog post in New Zealand writing about the three-dimensional picturesque of the Wellington back hills, instead I'll write about what I'm typing this on.

You'll recall that I had purchased a 9″ eeePC in Heathrow in March. I didn't actually need an extra laptop, what with me already onwing a 13″ MacBook, which was plenty portable. Nor did I really live out the dream of taking my eeePC to the café or the park, and communing in agile computational portability against a backdrop of live people walking around. And the 9″ keyboard was just that little bit too small to type on comfortably anyway. At least I'd bought an ex-display model, so I hadn't broken the bank.

Persons unknown, and possibly affiliated with the security scanning of my suitcase in LAX, took care of the 9″ eeePC conundrum for me. Once back, I had no 9″ computer, and no 13″ computer. I did have a 15″ MacBook—lovely screen, can almost put two documents side by side, but just that little bit too large to whip out comfortably in public transport—and utterly impossible in planes. Which means that now there was an ecological niche around me for a Netbook after all.

I still didn't actually *need* a Netbook, as such; but in a bout of Holiday Retail Therapy on Boxing Day, I picked up an eeePC 1000H. At 10″, it confirmed what my colleague Steve found when he purchased his 10″ model: the 10″ keyboard is almost comfortable to type on. And mercifully, once more, I got to pick up an ex-display model. It still cost a smidgeon more than last time, and I still don't actually need it...

... but this one's black. I mean, that's got to count for something, surely.

It's also reimmersing me into the world of Linux. The world has changed since 2007, when the eeePC was introduced. Then, there was a serious prospect of Linux (or at least the preinstalled Xandros version of Linux suitable for children and small animals) making serious inroads on the netbook market. A year later, no computer retailer in Australia was selling anything on the eeePC but XP Home. But my household does not enrich the coffers of Redmond. And the Hackintosh on eeePC, which you get when you bit-torrent Some Guy's edit of MacOSX, cudgel into the eeePC as long as it isn't a 900, and cross your fingers, remains what it was a year ago: just like a Mac netbook, only crippled. Having to type in my wireless password each time I wake the computer from sleep really is a deal breaker.

So, I've hoisted eeebuntu onto the eeePC. Which has made my reacquaintance with the world of 1GB distros and 1GB system updates.

Short of an initial hiccup or two (as is inevitable under Linux), the installation has happened, and in all it's a pleasant surprise how much Linux can do these days. The essential software is all there, and Linux even manages to communicate to my digital camera. The applications I've ended up with are rather more opaque to me than I'm used to; I don't yet know what the division of labour is between Banshee Media Player, Rhythmbox Music Player, and gtkpod iPod Manager. And I'm not sure I'm going to feel compelled to find out. But the machine is doing what needs doing so far, and I'll be giving it the baptism of fire over the next couple of weeks.

I've managed not to post about Wellington, and I'm already in Auckland tomorrow. Must post about Maori TV soon though. The mix of classical anchorwoman cadence and tribal warrior metaphor in the sports news certainly took me aback:

"Is Britney Teei old enough to understand that she must regain her mana at the Māori Tennis Championship?!"

There was enough cultural weighting to make the Maori News feel quite alien. And that's greatly cool: alienness in this age is something to be cherished. I think I'll be spending a lot of time watching Maori TV while here.

(And is it just me, or does Maori sound unexpectedly like Japanese? Not just because of the CV syllables either. I swear that u was unrounded...)

Also nice to know Kiwis deride Australian accents on their TV, just as we deride theirs on ours. Ad for Australian Gladiators just came on (not on Maori TV). In a whiny, nasally, Dave Hughes kind of voice:

"Everything's Big in Australia! Big Muscles... Big Talk... and Big Idees!"

To explain: Australians love to deride the New Zealand backing of [ɪ] to [ɨ], immortalised as "fush and chups". Across the ditch, of course, the Australian [ɪ] sounds ridiculously fronted, as in "feesh and cheeps". (Yes, Australians sound to New Zealanders like Speedy Gonzales.) And if that's how Australians sound to New Zealanders, then it has to be idees, and not ideas...

OK, midnight NZ time. More later. Preferably not another two months later...

.sig quoting Marcel Cohen, corrected

2009-11-18T16:04:00.003+11:00

My listing of email signatures, from a simpler, Web 1.0 world, has often served as a conversation starter for my friend John Cowan, if I can judge from random googlings (first comment down). The listing includes the following citation of the French-born author Marcel Cohen writing in Judezmo:

No saves, Antonyo, lo ka es morirse una lingua. Es komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada diya ke el Dyo da.

I took the quotation from the Esperanto literary journal Literatura Foiro. I copied it from there and not from memory (I don't have a memory for Judezmo); but it looks like whoever published it did mangle it from memory. Cohen's book, In search of a lost Ladino: letter to Antonio Sauro, is a reflection on the death of both Sephardi Jewry in the Holocaust, and the Sephardic language. It is now available in a bilingual edition (link to the passage), and the passage is also cited (correctly) in a Spanish blog.

Karo Antonio,
Kyero eskrivirte en djudyo antes ke no keda nada del avlar de mis padres. No saves, Antonio, loke es morirse en su lingua. Es komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo da, komo ser sikileoso sin saver porke.
Lo ke te eskrivo, Antonio, es el poko d eke ma akodro despues de estos cinkos syekolos en Turkya. Yo naci en Asnieres, ke es una sivdeka cerka de Paris. Mi padre y mi madre dainda avlavan en franses ke era la lingua de todos los djudyos de Turkya en akel tyempo porke l`Alliance israelite universelle asi les embezo. Despues de este se foueron al Lycée de Galata Sarail en Stambol y es por esto ke tanto les plazya la Francia, ma en kaza nunka decharon de avlar djudyo y ansina es ke yine yo me embezi.
"Una kayda, una kresida"

[EDIT: Changed from "French-born Judezmo author: Cohen is an established author in French, and his use of Judezmo in 1985 was a one-off.]

OK, now I'm back

2009-11-16T11:11:00.004+11:00

Finally back from my Sydney trip—was at the eResearch Australasia conference for a week, and stuck around the most beautiful city in the world for the weekend. That kind of beauty, one should only consume in moderation, lest one start to take it for granted.

And end up a Sydneysider.

So I'm finally going to get back to the natural order of things; and I may even get back to blogging. As we say in Cretan dialect, now, να βρω το σειρά μου "I'll find my series". Where "series" is another word for "order", and Cretan switches the gender of the noun to make that differentiation clear.

I've found no hits for that expression online, which shows either that there isn't as much blogging in Cretan dialect as there is in Cypriot—or that the expression is only used in my mother's village.

Still not posting

2009-11-09T12:34:00.002+11:00

I've been pretty busy since leaving New Orleans, so I'm continuing not to be active here. Distractions have included, in order:

Getting lots of indices nominum at the TLG (which have soaked up a lot of spare time, entering names and spelling variations into the TLG lemmatiser)
Attending the 2009 TLG Conference
Having two laptops walk shortly before or after the TSA inspected my check-on luggage
Taking notes at the Global Registries Initiative meeting in Canberra
Getting delightfully blotto at the Melbourne Supper Club
Attending the eResearch Australasia Meeting in Sydney

I will resume normal transmission once I've cleared my deck, but it doesn't look like happening before next week; I'm staying in Sydney for R&R over the next weekend too...

I'm back...

2009-11-03T13:49:00.002+11:00

... from the States, and so is my dead sexy new laptop. MacBook Pro 15″, 2.66 MHz, aluminium resplendence.

Because my new laptop was in carry-on luggage (and a slightly awkward size), my old laptop along with my eeePC were in checked-in luggage.

By the time I got to Australia, they were not.

Someone has spoken of the TSA as Stasi Dinner Theatre. Myself, I'm even less inclined to use American airports now than before.

New Orleans #5: Mulate's

2009-10-28T13:50:00.002+11:00

In my last evening spent in New Orleans, I have a choice. I can seek out Cajun music and culture, which brought me here to begin with. Within walking distance of my hotel, that rather constrains me. Cajun Cabin no longer has live music. Michaul's, post-Katrina, is only open Thursdays through Sundays. The only option left is Mulate's, a tourist trap next to the Convention Centre, with a cockroach sighting only last week, and with no good words from anyone online about their rendition of Cajun cuisine—least of all by Cajuns themselves. But with a decent rotation of Cajun bands, and the offer of Cajun dance lessons. (Or was that Michaul's that offered that?)

Or, I could follow the advice of my concierge, bypass the horrors of Bourbon St, and go to the genteel surrounds of Faubourg Marigny, for some delightful Cajun/Soul Food at Praline Connection, followed by a performance of contemporary R & B stylings by Charmaine Neville at Snug Harbor.

I am typing this from across the road from the Convention Centre.

Now, I'm white. Not as white as some, but still plenty white. And to me, jazz stopped ca. 1930. (Things White People Like had a good post once on how white people get into black music a generation after black music has moved on to the next thing; make that three generations for me.) So I don't know if I would really get the contemporary R & B stylings. I got a good dose of jazz last night anyway, at Maison Bourbon; and I couldn't leave Louisiana without *some* Acadienité.

And the poor food and hour-long delays and unwelcome crawling guests? I guess I'll just keep repeating to myself: I'm doing this in atonement for the Grand Dérangement.

When the sullen invitation was extended at the door to dine at a table or the bar, I picked the bar. I figured, easier access to alcohol, to dull the pain of the Grand Dérangement Culinaire; and more foot traffic, so possibly less likelihood of creepy crawly gatecrashers. I disappoint my New Orleanian hosts, who have good reason to poke their nose up at the mention of the Convention Centre (never mind Bourbon St); but I'm a reporter dammit, I need to find if it's really as bad as all that (and whether the music redeems it).

Alors, laissez les bon temps rouler!

...

Well, ils ont roulé. Didn't notice any roaches. I stayed clear of the mains (les entrées), and limited myself to a couple of appetisers, which were inoffensive but hardly amazing. The bread pudding *was* amazing—and was the only thing any online reviews had a kind word for: a quivering cube of porous toffee. My seatmate compared it to a blueberry muffin.

There are a couple of downsides to eating at the bar. One is, you have seatmates. And for reasons gone through in a previous thread, American seatmates are inclined to talk, and I was too polite (and too alcohol-fuelled) to say "no, I don't think you're going to have a revolution here to take back your rights, the Feds are always going to have more guns than you."

Oh, hang on. I *was* alcohol-fuelled enough to say that. But I said it in passing and quietly, and this was the kind of bar discussion where everything gets assented to and affirmed, so there was not much point staking my social-democratic ground.

That'll learn me to lug my eeePC along to the bar. I was actually halfway minded to liveblog my food, but mercifully I was out of battery since (a) I had mistaken the plugged in cable for the not plugged in cable at the hotel; and (b) the eeePC was drawing comment. Not adverse comment, or "mug you later in the alley" comment. It did draw "huh, that's a tiny computer", but not of the knuckle dragging "wot iz computer so small" variety; it was either "I've got the next model up" or "that makes more sense than a Blackberry". The randoms across from the Convention Centre may have looked random, but were savvy about their hardware, and the aesthetics of the iPhone user interface. Of course they were: they were from the Convention Centre.

The iPhone has conquered this country, btw. Anything that keeps Cupertino afloat is fine by me, but I will still try to resist the blandishments to buy one. Which will be difficult, now my boss is a convert.

The other downside to eating at the bar is, it was the opposite side from the music, and what with the din of diners (and the stream "right-on, I hear ya brother" from my seatmate), I didn't hear the band well enough. In the second half, once my seatmate took off to see if Bourboun St had changed any in the last five years, I managed to get a seat up close.

The band was not on fire. I don't really blame them, they were playing three nights a week for bored conventioneers. In truth, I'd say they were playing more for the two elderly white couples that were two-stepping to pretty much everything they played. I'm assuming they were Cajuns, keeping on doing their Cajun thing, and that's great. (My seatmate certainly thought so; then again, my seatmate thought everything about the venue was authentic.)

But with the crude dichotomies that underinform my understanding of the States, I felt they should have been playing more for the black waiter in dreads, who did a little cakewalk to the music at the start, and (I couldn't really see, but I think) two-stepped a round with a colleague soon after.

Because black people have rhythm or something. OK, that's indefensible of me, and given the latest brouhaha about Australian insensitivities to race involving a New Orleanian, I should not be making that kind of surmise in public. But, I plead, they should also have played for this guy because this guy had humour and liveliness about his approach to the music; he wasn't being reverent and slow-mo, he was going to let his toes tingle no matter how sedate the pace of the music. And of course his dancing was likeliest all part of the show and not spontaneous; but he still had an energy about him that the others didn't. Not least because the others were in their 70s.

My seatmate asked what this music was, and was answered it was Zydeco. Now, I didn't know the difference between Cajun music and Zydeco music until I read some CD liner notes yesterday. All I knew about Zydeco was from the TISM song (Leo's Toltoy), about a Melburnian musician anxiously trying to keep up with the latest musical fad, which this month was Zydeco—only to find out that the fad had already moved on.

Now everyone's playing Cajun - Zydeco - whatever you call that thing.
I go off and buy the records, learn how to cook Jambalaya -
Then everyone's dropping Ecstasy; the dance clubs are on fire -
I start talking about Louisiana, everyone tells me to stop:
Just like the coming of click-clacks comes something called Hip-Hop.

Still, I could tell: this was no Zydeco.

Cajun music is what the white Acadiens brought with them, violins and guitars and triangle—and accordions thanks to German immigrants, who passed it on to Louisiana music like they passed it on to Mexican music. Zydeco started as the same music, only played by black people instead of white people. (There are plenty of black French-speaking Creoles; I wonder if they too go to the Congrès Mondial Acadien.) When they turned up to the recording studio, they found themselves typecast with R&B backing bands. The liner notes say the first such recording was a mess, the Cajun and the R&B not communicating with each other. But Zydeco ended up cohering, with more rock, funk, less violin, and I'm pretty sure no triangle: it became more black, you could say. Cajun by contrast became more white: more influence from Country music, to the extent of steel guitars.

The band didn't have steel guitars, and the triangle was probably a deliberate statement of oldschoolness. But it was still more sedate than what little accordion-based popular music from Louisiana I have heard; and I'll have to work out whether that ability to set the dancefloor alight is common to Cajun, or only a Zydeco thing. I made a point of buying both a Zydeco compilation and some '60s Cajun recordings, and will render judgement at an appropriate time, along with my review of the Royal St Doo-Wop. (Unless I've lost the CD already.)

I don't know whether the band was also playing for the middle-aged balding gay couple, who waltzed half-way through the set. I'm glad they did though, and I'm glad that noone stormed out or picketed them. The world is changing, and it doesn't always change for the worst.

And that was an early night for me. I had to keep drinking at the bar to justify my presence there (and to distract me from my seatmate). And the other thing I've learned on this trip is, any more than my usual one drink an hour, and I fall asleep. Why I then wake up at 6 am, I haven't worked out yet.

Scottsdale

2009-10-28T13:48:00.001+11:00

A curious thing; to yield
one's purse, and then one's nerve
endings, both now still chilled
next day; adrift, unsafe,

tentative. Curious, no?
that I can still get tipsy
on brine and Veuve Clicquot,
though little passed my lips.

A sea, of salt and swells,
of stark and fearsome shores,
whose waves have deigned to stall,
whose deeps I will not hear.

A sea, its code unknown,
as mine to hers. I traced
its surface, and left home.
Godspeed its winsome face,

through change of seasons: fall,
winter, spring, summer, Autumn.
The sea restores it whole.
Its beauty arches, awesome.

New Orleans #4: Dinner at Antoine's

2009-10-28T13:28:00.004+11:00

Antoine's is a culinary institution of New Orleans, founded in 1840, introducing the Creoles to the ways of haute cuisine. Diana urged me to go there and have Oysters Rockefeller for her, since she wasn't able to appreciate Oysters Rockefeller the last time she was there. What seven-year old would appreciate oysters, after all.

What grown Nick Nicholas would appreciate oysters, I mused. I've been a late adopter of seafood; mussels, I think I've only stopped minding in the past few years. And I'd never gotten the point of oysters, which I've pretty much always encountered in their natural briny state. Small, smily, briny, and pointless: that has been my verdict, which no amount of lemon or bacon topping has dislodged me from. And I didn't notice any particular aphrodisiac benefit from consuming them.

I don't know where that aphrodisiac notion would have come from anyway. Not from sympathetic magic, that's for sure. "Sexy" is not the image I conjure up, swallowing one of these small slimy briny pointlessnesses.

But, I am here to be educated; so after wandering around the Upper French Quarter, and the obligatory steamboat cruise, I put on my best shirt and slacks, and headed to Louis St, to see what the fuss was about.

Antoine's may have changed a lot in the last 170 years, but it tries not to let on. The exterior is dark, because it was 7 PM. The interior is opulent and padded, silverware and bowtied waiters. One concession to the twentieth century has been, the bowtied waiters include women. Another concession is that the waiters are integrated; I don't rightly know which concession was made first. A third concession, less welcome: the menus were printed in Apple Chancery. I'm only intermittently a typography snob, but the place felt too venerable to be using a default system font.

I rejoice, in the abstract at least, that such places still exist, where jeans look out of place (though they still turned up). Where dining is stately and serious, if not austere. And though I ordered four courses with some trepidation, I rejoiced that the portions did not make the further concession to the twentieth century of being Supersized. I'm happy to pay more to have the portion be civilised-sized.

So how was it? Well, my experience of haute cuisine, such as it is, is Australian and 21st century. That means you're not paying extra just for civilised-sized portions. You're paying extra for the chefs to experiment: to come up with hybrid concoctions and innovative amalgams, to put together two things that don't belong on the same page, and if you're lucky, have them work together. And although all Creole cooking is novel to me, I wasn't wowed with innovation here: it was 19th century food, and I've come to expect 22nd century food from such surrounds. Not that the place *should* have been Yet Another Fusion place, let alone one of those freeze-dry freakshows that flourish in the US latterly (bacon ice cream and whatnot.) But the food was somehow stolid. Not unpleasant, but not exciting.

The Oysters Rockefeller were so named because they had the richest sauce on oysters in existence, so they were named after the richest American of the time. (Would you have a Gates burger these days? A Buffet casserole?) There's a lot of song and dance about the recipe being kept secret, and every chef outside Antoine's merely guessing what the original ingredients are. The more malicious say even the chefs inside Antoine's are guessing at this point.

I was worried to hear about the richness, and needn't have been—although in deference to my recent diet, I did stop at four out of six oysters. The Rockefeller topping is a heated, delicately browned paste of green vegetable puree, rather agreeable. The colour says it should be spinach-based, and the chefs are adamant it isn't; some literal-minded soul has snuck a sample to a lab, Wikipedia tells me, and I'm surprised to read no leeks were detected. The heated paste works with the oyster, and subdues it. Heating the oyster underneath the puree may have that effect too.

Crawfish étouffée is crawfish stew, reduced down to a little bowl of concentrated carameliness. The tiny bowls of gumbo and étouffée have been another New Orleanian delight. Given the density of the stews, you really don't want your serving to be American-sized. I didn't find the étouffée flavour noteworthy to begin with—the crawfish is *really* reduced, I could barely tell it had ever been near the bayou. But I ended up almost emptying the bowl. I stopped short, because my main was next, and I figured it would be American-sized.

The main was not American-sized, which was a pleasant surprise. Poulet sauce Rochambeau: Chicken with a mayonnaise/eggy sauce (in French, Béarnaise), over a strip of baked ham. Very tender, quite petit, and flavoursome: I bet the chickens are from the 19th century too. The white and red meat worked off each other unexpectedly well. The disappointment was the sauce: too generously slathered on, no real savour. Without knowing anything about it, I suspect that lack of subtlety to sauces is the downside of old haute cuisine.

Because I was a party of one, I could not have a Baked Alaska with "Antoine's" embroidered on it in cream, or flambé cherries. Probably just as well. Desert was a tiny, delicate Peach Melba. First time I've had that too. Which is remiss of me, given that the dessert is named for Melbourne, via Dame Nellie Melba. The peaches may have been from a can, but somehow I doubt it: there was something candied about them, which doesn't sit well with Safeway shelving. The almonds were a nice touch to the dessert too: the crunchiness gave it a subtle texture, not all eager to please and sugary.

And all dishes delivered officiously and solemnly—which I delighted in, being an emotionally constipated Australian, who does not want waiters darting across to ask how I'm doing every two minutes, or complimenting me on how wicked awesome my choice of entrée is. Australia is not a Libertarian Wonderland, and we're socialist enough to pay our waiters, rather than have them fend for tips. That's how I was brought up, that's what I think right and proper.

Of course the clientele was not emotionally constipated; and once the waiters worked out the clientele weren't, neither were they. One waiter was doing the recitation of dishes with the panache more familiar in American restaurants; another was telling the customers about how he couldn't understand a word his Cajun grandfather spoke; a third broke into a wide smile chatting with the customers at the far end. But I would have none of that, and the waiters were perceptive enough to discern that too.

Which made my bathroom break all the more disconcerting, because the bathroom was next to the kitchen, and I discovered that the chefs in the kitchen were having a merry old time, yelling and banging and laughing. The occasional nouveau restaurant exposes the kitchen to the customers, like translucent clockwork on a wristwatch, so you can voyeur into your dinner preparation. (After watching one episode of Gordon Ramsay, I'm all voyeured out from that kind of thing.) Antoine's will not expose the wristwatch through its padded walls; and that is proper. The mystique is part of the point of the place.

The highlight of the evening so far, though, was the final exchange I had with my elderly, slow-moving, taciturn, main waiter. (That I got the fittingly reserved treatment was probably as much about him as about me.) I'd signed my bill and left my credit card in the bill. The waiter handed me back my credit card, and said "there's your cawd".

Given my limited interactions with the locals, and the demographic changes in New Orleans, and the overall decrease in US English linguistic diversity—this was my one interaction with Yat dialect. "Yat" dialect is the local dialect of New Orleans, so called after "Where Y'at", the local equivalent of "All hail, my good fellow". I had not done any homework of course; so until John alerted me in comments—and linked to the wrong Yat—I had no idea that a non-rhotic dialect is spoken here. (Or that all the South was originally non-rhotic.)

Of course, I would hardly have noticed that the local dialect drops its r's like Commonwealth English does, because the vowels are still American: it was "cawd" [kʰɒːd] here, not Australian "kaaahd" [kʰɐːd] (or [kʰaːd], if we're trying how Australian we are). So while Americans think it sounds like Brooklynese, I think it sounds like Southern-via-JFK.

But then, my ear was always too tin to have made it as a phoneticist.

New Orleans #3

2009-10-25T16:17:00.006+11:00

It's a couple of hours later. I continue not to know how to have fun, and given how I've already exceeded my nightly budget, I think I'll turn in early and get the full day tomorrow.

[EDIT: Because of having to deal with the ending of this post, I did not end up turning in early. And I may well already have a hangover...]

So having spent my last $2 for the evening on gravy and mash at Popeye's (hm... well, it's spicier than the Other Establishment's anyway), and having downed in total three cocktails in the evening—which makes me decidedly drowsy, I've nothing left to do but lodge my report, and try and work out how to download video from my camera. There is a reason I don't drink much...

[EDIT: Yeah. Hangover alright. At 2 am.]

Royal St has not got a lot going on of a Saturday night; then again, confronted with the contrast of Bourbon St, few places will. It does however have a lot of galleries and antique shops. The antique shops overflow with chandeliers and fine carvings and all the money made off the back of the plantation slave; it's easy enough to tune that out, I'm afraid, and when you do, it's lively and garish itself, but a bit too brittle-looking to match the noise of the next block up.

The galleries have a lot of imitation-impressionism depictions of Gay Paree; that's New Orleans trading off its francicité, a good century after it's become too artificial to. I liked the imititation-impressionism: colour and texture that's still figurative, and not abstract or *shudder* conceptual, but not too caught up in the details of depicting stuff, and impersonating a camera. Regrettably, my suitcases are burdened enough as is, and there would be some logistical challenges in getting a 1×2 m painting into the overhead compartment of the plane. I'll just have to find who in Melbourne Town does that kind of painting.

I didn't quite get what Decatur St's story is, and I got bored too quickly to find out; so I headed back up to Bourbon St for one last lap.

Music here grabs you in the street and won't let go. Which is why you come to New Orleans in the first place. Opposite a hotel in Royal St, the Royal Street Doo-Wop of Jay, Ray and Gee (special guest star: a white dude doing bass) was enchanting its surrounds: they managed to get me to by their CD when they launched into a much improved "What a Wonderful World". The CDs of buskers tend to be a disappointment: they don't catch the spontaneity, the hucksterism, the passers by joining in. A blessing on them anyway, especially for taking the time (as they were singing the next number) to sign their CD for me. Review when I get around to it, likely in Irvine.

The Royal St Doo-Wop was enchanting and sparkling. At Canal & Bourbon—where I kept confidently predicting I would be taking residence in the gutter—I noted no conspicuous gutter to take residence in. But I did note a jazz band that was not merely grabbing you in the street, it was blockading the street, jumping out with baseball bats, and battering your eardrums until you too had to grin and bop along. The trombones were the baseball bats: they'd keep cracking against the sidewalk and ricocheting after each trumpet solo.

The narrative I'd got in my head after five seconds (as I started grinning and bopping along) was that the black folk were on the street bopping, and the white folk were on the sidewalk filming. After a couple of minutes, I worked out that was too convenient a dichotomy: several white folk were bopping along too (though very much on the sidelines), and at least one black guy was filming from the sidewalk.

The band was brash and loud and disruptive, and the couple of upmarket restaurants on Bourbon had their maitre d's staring anxiously out the window. (Bourbon St is a silly place to put upmarket restaurants, and I'm sure they've worked that out by now.) The band was insanely infectious; when they started hatcheting at the Beatles' Come Together, turning it into a cacophonous cosmogony, I hesitated for a few seconds, then decided to join my fellow whiteys (and the one brother), and film as well. Thereby making me upload to YouTube for the first time.

Well, maybe you had to be there...
[EDIT: I was not the only person to have YouTubed them:]

New Orleans #2

2009-10-25T16:12:00.002+11:00

*hic*

OK, I've ducked into a coffeehouse in Royal St, open for another hour after my first iteration of Bourbon St. I am full of red beans & rice, jambalaya, and gumbo, not necessarily in that order. (Come to think of it... it was in that order.) Sampler size, so I was still able to face the rest of the street. Then I went and had some bread pudding, so there goes me ingesting anything for the remaining two days here. That's going to be a problem, inasmuch as I've already booked dinner at Antoine's tomorrow night, as a pledge to Diana who was last there when she was seven. I don't even *like* oysters [Rockefeller], but I'm here to try things at least once.

Today is not looking as effective a day of tourism as it should have been: I got into the hotel too close to 1 pm, but didn't emerge until after 6 pm, as I had at least some sleep to catch up on. Had the Airport Shuttle not squandered 40 mins of my life, I might have emerged to daylight, and documented some of what I saw around me. I'd better get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to make up for it.

Me getting up at the crack of dawn is inconsistent with me coming over here to lodge myself in a gutter on Bourbon St. But then, I wasn't fooling anyone when I kept saying I would lodge myself in a gutter. I don't know how to get drunk, after six years of Thursday or Friday pub nights; and I don't propose to find out in a foreign city, with only my wallet and a tourist map connecting me to my accommodation. I'm slightly buzzed after two cocktails accompanying the New Orleans Sampler, and I've noticed I'm slightly buzzed; that guarantees no booze for at least an hour. I don't relinquish control that easily.

I walked grinning up Bourbon St, until Bourbon St petered out first into a very sedate couple of gay bars, then by Ursulines St into an empty residential street, that was imprudent to hang out in on a Saturday night. I was grinning not because I was having fun per se, but because I was enjoying other people having fun. Bourbon St is tacky and dodgy and garish, and blues singers commingled with Boy George on jukebox, and Authentic New Orleans Po' Boy commingled with empty Pizza By The Slice parlors, and rocking out stately bars mixed in with hole-in-the-wall boozeries out of a hose, and bored strippers standing in their bras to draw in customers from among the moseying men with beers at hand; and Bourbon St pulses with life. It's wonderful, in all its partytownness.

There's even a couple of people on the balcony who haven't gotten the memo about Mardi Gras, and are throwing beads off the balconies in late October. (In fact, a bunch of people who've caught beads have just walked into the coffeehouse.)

There is of course nothing Cajun or French or Spanish or Jacksonian or Antebellum about any of Bourbon St, just a little jazz and a lot of tourists out to have a Good Time. Something like an expurgated Red Light District of Amsterdam, with a familiar smell of aromatic smoking material. Yet the ghosts of the architecture still tell you, if you notice, that there are stories in the walls here. You have to not be drunk to notice of course, and to look at it was an accepting eye. It helps if it's not dark, too, which is why I do need to come by again in the daytime.

Diana has such an eye—certainly in Greece, and she's long ago enough gone from the South that she'd notice things here too. (Then again, she said to me of New Orleans what I've said of New York: it's not really The South/The US, it's something else, something new again.) I forgot to note that she made Iraklion made sense to me last night, bceause she'd noticed what I couldn't. Iraklion is higgledy-piggledy and cramped and oppressive, not because it's no longer a Venetian town, the way Rethymnon is. It's not obtuse Modern Town Un-planners that are to blame. On the contrary: it's higgledy-piggledy and cramped and oppressive precisely because it is a Venetian town. And Venetians did not do town squares (with the exception of the central square, with the lions fountain and the Logggia). They built Iraklion up as town islands, like they did Venice; and the side walls dividing up housing survive, even as the front and back walls are now ghastly Modern Greek cement.

Anyway, I'm becoming gradually more lucid. Not that you'd notice from what I'm typing. Pit stop before the coffeehouse closes, then Royal St and Decatur St, to see what Non-Bourbon St New Orleans is like of a Saturday night. I'll miss a lot, but I've already noticed that the coffeehouse I'm in exudes a genteel hippiness, that I wasn't figuring to find here.

Makes up for the coffeehouses I didn't get to go to in Seattle yesterday.

New Orleans #1

2009-10-25T16:02:00.002+11:00

My first impression of New Orleans: the airport signage is in English, Spanish, and French. A beautiful gesture; not sure whether its audience is the tuthree Quebecois who come over per year, or the Cajuns (pour raisons emblematiques).

Second impression of New Orleans: I had the choice of a cab for $33, or the New Orleans Airport Shuttle for $20. What you gotta ask yourself is, was the $13 savings worth waiting an extra 40 mins. It wasn't the most scenic airport garage I have seen, so I surmise the answer to have been no.

Third impression: the downtown skyscrapers certainly don't seem to have been flood-damaged.

Fourth impression: having heard the shuttle driver announce hotels, and the shuttle coordinator announce routes beforehand—I'm going to have serious issues with understanding the local accent:

SHUTTLE COORDINATOR: Sir? Y'awlre dahn't termnuhnl too.

ME: ....

SHUTTLE COORDINATOR: Sir?

ME: ... Yes?

SHUTTLE COORDINATOR: Sir? Follow me.

ME: ... Oh.

Good. It makes for Opɯcɯlɯklɑr Comedy Gold, that kind of thing.

Fifth impression: the hotel. I'm in love with the hotel. In fact, I felt like I was bringing down property values just by walking in there. The interior is elegant enough,

—but what really catches the eyes is the loftiness of the lobby:

This explain why the interior is full of exposed beams:

Houston

2009-10-25T10:23:00.003+11:00

A month back, commenter matternal (Michalis Nikolaou, who noticed that we have the same surname) suggested that if I ever found myself in Houston, I should pay a visit to Niko Niko's Greek Restaurant, 2520 Montrose, Houston Tx. For that its name was like mine.

On the Super Shuttle equivalent out of Seattle heading to San Francisco, the convivially cheery driver informed me that I clearly had interests in Hawai`i, since Nick's Fish Restaurant in Honolulu was also run by a Nick Nicholas. (If he meant Nick's Fishmarket, it's closed down. So I'm obviously now looking to diversify.)

En route from San Francisco to New Orleans, I found myself in Houston Tx, at 6 am Saturday morning, with three hours between flights.

Those who have a life define fulfilment through family, or work, or study, or companionship. Those who have less of a life define it through outré romantic gestures, or their next high. And then there are those who define fulfilment through the occasional ability to indulge in grand follies.

I don't feel fulfilled for it as I take the cab back to George Bush International Airport at 7 am Saturday morning; but I have gone off and committed my grand folly for the week.

The grand folly did not cost me a grand; it did cost me close enough to a tenth of a grand for me to be taken aback. Especially because the restaurant only opens at 10 am, so what greeted me was fairly dark, with several restaurant workers just arriving on the site, and looking startled enough that I did not seek to inveigle them into the shots.

So I can't really tell you anything about the restaurant, other than what the website shows you. (And the website did not cost me a tenth of a grand to visit.) They serve souvlakis. They have a Greek flag in the window. They're situated on Montrose, which my cab driver informs me is "Half cosmopolitan, half gay". (I know what he means—half ethnic, half gay; but I'm sure there's several members of Houston's gay community who regard themselves as plenty cosmopolitan, and maybe even plenty ethnic.) Their phone number has GYRO in it. The owner has a beard, and looks like me inasmuch as anyone Greek with a beard looks like me.

Houston's downtown looked just as brobdignanian as San Francisco's, and nothing like Seattle; but I could barely see anything at all at 6:30 am (outside of the donut shops).

And I'm disappointing matternal, who I suspect was rather expecting me to visit Houston at a time when Niko Niko's was open for business (and may even have had him in it). But I doubt I could deal with a souvlaki that time of day anyway. Or most times of day, really.

Right, back at George Bush International Airport. May even catch some sleep now...

Seattle

2009-10-25T10:19:00.003+11:00

I don't have much to say about Seattle, because my allotted time there was spent in profuse geek-out mode with Diana and Pierre, whom I thank profusely for their hospitality and good humour. When I grow up, I'd love to be them: in a house groaning with books, with papers on the boil and an anecdote always ready, with an affectionate and non-allergenic cat, in a cosy sprawling house perched by a park in an orgy of greenery and damp timber cheer. And fresh-baked apple pie. I have a sneaking suspicion that's not where I'll end up if I ever grow up, but at least I have a reference point to aspire to now.

Orgy of greenery and damp timber cheer. That's Seattle. A pity I didn't get to wander around it now, but it's wasn't the day for it anyway: I wandered for ten minutes in the autumn wind, and got a maple leaf in the face for my trouble. That, and a reminder of my acrophobia as a forest layered itself in glorious 3-D from the park bridge next door, its depths and deciduous dappling impossible to capture on pixels. So I didn't even bother.

But the damp timber makes sense here, even as I look down on the dry timber of my home suburb. There's something about the varied colours of the houses, and their gabling right out of Brothers Grimm, and the luxurious green of their temperate rainforest backdrop, that makes it all coherent.

I was in good cheer enough, I even engaged the convivial van driver in conversation. (He made it clear I didn't have any other option.) We are a reserved people, we Australians; we don't think so, because we compare ourselves to the British, but from the vantage point of Americans we're indistinguishable. My tram-bound colleagues of the inner city assert to me it is not so in their tram routes, and they have wonderful conversations on the tram. Some of them don't even involve junkies. This data point does not fit my thesis, so I'll make like a Chomskian linguist and ignore it.

So when an Australian is in an American vehicle of group transport, and the friendly and open-hearted locals seek to engage them in conversation, the reserved and laconic Australian tries to Back Away From The Crazy, because no, we don't want to share. But like I say, Seattle had softened me up enough that I humoured the friendly and open-hearted locals.

I see how you could pick up that way.

The trip to and fro was the standard series of misadventures: the Super Shuttle in Redwood City forgot I existed (there's $20 prepaid I'm not going to see again), the shuttle services get you to the airport an hour before you have any business there ('cause they don't want the liability), the airports look and feel like something out of Central Asia, only with vending machines selling e-Book readers.

There's several things that make American airports tortuous. The ongoing farce of Security Theatre is up there, but it's only one. In truth, it's not the pointlessness and officiousness of Security Theatre that are the annoyance; they're old hat now, and I got my Semtex joke at an airport out of my system before September 11 anyway. It's the understaffing of the Security Theatre staff: the procedures are no more invasive or drawn out than in Australia, but the queues are three times as long, because anything involving the public sector in Seppoland is inefficient.

(Anything involving mass service, in fact: Greyhound buses are not state-owned, they just don't have a market driver to do a good job. And unlike the socialist rest of the world, here it's No Market Driver, No Service.)

But it's several things beyond that. The dim lighting of airports, which was just as much a bad-mood–setter in 1999 as it is in 2009. The obligation to pay $20 extra for putting a suitcase on a plan, and the invitations at the counter to pay extra for legroom, food, water, video. It's intended as user-pays exercise of choice; it comes across as extortion. I got a bag checker asking how it was in Australia, where we do not (yet) do any of that on Qantas, we just pay more upfront; and he wistfully sighed "those days are long gone here."

And never again BLT. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson from the Sofitel "mini"-burger, but that's the classic definition of insanity: keep trying, hoping next time it'll be better.

No matter. Seattle, orgy of greenery and damp timber cheer. Thank you for existing.

Even if the Melbourne W-class trams are currently off the waterway tracks. Bring 'em back, good burghers of Seattle. The tourists love that kind of thing. Next best thing to actually having a functioning tram system.

Redwood City #3

2009-10-23T03:39:00.002+11:00

Urrrgl. Mlurt. Fnorghr.

Zhlumpfkh.

And this isn't even me posting immediately after downing a glass of Grand Marnier.

Not much to report from the vista: it's still brobdignanian and empty. What I do have to report is that I finally succumbed and had a burger, a week after I promised myself one. An elite Sofitel burger. An elite Sofitel mini-burger ($13 instead of $16: Sofitel is not an instance where the food is surprisingly cheap.) Surely, a refined and delicate reentry to burgerdom, after six months without.

The Grand Marnier was timely; yes, I needed un apéritif. It worked as un sédatif as well, and I was dead to the world by midnight. I was up at 4 am with a tummy ache (which has not gone away by 10 am, when Yr Obt Svt is writing these lines). I'm giving serious consideration to not ingesting any more solids while in NorCal. Especially as I have been promised pie in Seattle.

I didn't mention Seattle last post, where I'm heading this evening; and that's remiss of me. Truth be told, I'm not visiting Seattle, I'm visiting Diana Wright (of Surprised By Time and nauplion.net); that she is now in Seattle is a bonus. Not that I had any objection to visiting her when she was in DC.

I don't know how much of Seattle I'll see this time, it being a lightning visit. But when I last went there ten years ago, I was so exultant at getting the hell out of Orange County (I'd only been there four months!), I got a riff in my head, and started composing again: MIDI, PDF. I'm not saying I ever became a good composer (you can survey my oeuvre yourselves), and the Seattle piece is sloppy minimalist doodling. But getting on a plane was like switching on a light.

Airports in the '90s to me were misery: it's where farewells happened, where I saw people for the last time. They were freedom and light while I was living in the States. Now that I travel mostly for work, they're a mild nuisance—although they'll be a lot milder if I ever get enough Frequent Flyer points for free membership in the Qantas Club. Not that the Qantas Club is *that* salubrious; but at least it's comfy chairs, free internets, and nibblies.

With no burgers. Mini or otherwise.

Krnarlblumpk. Shtrulphr.

Mlurt.

Frenchville, PA: a distinct dialect of North American French

2009-10-23T01:18:00.005+11:00

This is not about Quebec or Acadia, but this is where my North American French stuff goes, so: in reading a book on Prince Edward Island French,

King, Ruth. 2000. The Lexical Basis of Grammatical Borrowing: A Prince Edward Island French Case Study . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

—I've come across a mention of Frenchville, PA, settled in the 1840s, which appears to have retained a distinct dialect of French into the 1960s.

As Ruth King says, there have been no studies on it apart from a glancing mention in a 1973 dialect survey; and Wikipedia does not even know Frenchville exists (it's now part of Covington Township, Clearfield County).

At any rate, I've now added a paragraph on Frenchville to Wikipedia's French language in the United States article. Frank Merat, an Electrical Engineering professor from Frenchville, has the most material online on the village. And I haven't sighted Haden's 1973 survey, although I don't think it'd say all that much.

I assume it's safe to go to Frenchville without a shotgun nowadays...

Redwood City #2

2009-10-22T05:02:00.003+11:00

Just to give confirmation I'm still alive:

I CANNOT WAIT to get to New Orleans. (Or more to the point, get out of NorCal suburbia.) The three-hour stop over in Houston at 6 AM, not so much.
It never rains in Southern California (with some recent exceptions); it sure does in Northern California (though not today).
Restaurant food's extraordinarily cheap here. Chinese restaurant dishes for $6. Hot and sour soup (which I've dearly missed—it redeems tofu): $3.50. Not for a small bowlful: they give you the entire serving bowl! Similar story with the Japanese and Persian–Italian-minus-the-Persian I've had. I don't remember food being that cheap 10 years ago; is it the recession, or NorCal?
The catch with being in a luxury hotel, it's still a bare room, and you have to now pay for everything—so you can't even improvise instant coffee in your room. That's not really a good deal after all. (And I've never had the heart to call room service for anything.)
Walked over to Belmont for said Chinese meal last night; good to know there is some quaint-looking urban stuff in walking distance. (If you walk long enough.) Clambering over freeways to get there is horrid: it's that unwelcome reminder, which I'd repressed, that Californian suburbia was not intended for pedestrians.
Walked down El Camino Real in the process. Uninspiring as a bunch of strip malls and brobdignanian lanes. In my youth I'd formed a different mental picture of the fabled El Camino Bignum; but then again, I'm not in Stanford.

Redwood City #1

2009-10-20T03:14:00.003+11:00

So, what have I learned in my first day in Redwood City, CA?

Oracle HQ is full of buildings that look like hard drives. Or artists' impressions thereof.
Oracle HQ is full of lakes. No wonder lions drowned here, when it used to be a safari theme park.
Duck shit is green.
I have visual evidence of Larry's Yacht:
[INSERT PHOTO]
Parking your yacht outside your corporate HQ tells you something, I'm just not quite sure what yet.
Sofitel here trades agressively on its francicité. Not something I'd noticed with any Accor Group hotel in Australia. The francicité is un petit peu overdone. From the pamphlet for SoBoutique (You've Slept In Our Bed, Now Buy The Bedspread):
Make your home look Magnifique!
THE ART DE VIVRE: Pure moments of Plaisir
THE ART DE RECEVOIR: The Taste of Bon Goût
From what I can gather, the translations to English in the brochure are deliberately poor, for that extra soupçon of Gallic je ne sais quoi. Alors, moi, je sais quoi est-ce que c'est. C'est de blague des emmerdeurs pretentieux, câlisse!
The roads are brobdignanian and verdant and void of pedestrians, the way that always alienated me from SoCal.
I got lost on the brobdignanian and verdant roads, trying to get from hotel A lobby to hotel B lobby, which makes me even less well disposed to them. They disorient me: they're not meant for people on foot.
Rumi's Restaurant, where I ate last night, was advertised to me as Persian-Italian fusion. Given who and where Rumi was, I'd have thought Greek–Persian (or at least Turkish–Persian) would be more apposite; as it turned out, I was hard put to find any Persian in there at all.
I'd been led to believe the History Channel was All Hitler All The Time. That would have been hugely preferable to the National Enquirer mess of parapsychology and conspiracy theories that was actually broadcast into my hotel that night. A show on the Freemasons' influence on the Great Seal of the US actually kept gravely saying "Conspiracy theorists believe..."—and not as a disparagement. One more reason not to bother getting cable...

OK, time to get some work done: start of my morning workshop session.

Book Review: Ismail Kadare, The H File

2009-10-19T12:05:00.004+11:00

The good thing about being confined to a chair in the sky is, you can catch up with your reading, because internet connectivity has not yet made it to Cattle Class. So I finally have been able to catch up on reading a book I was given for my birthday 14 months ago. Having internet connectivity means I skim instead of reading; it's interesting not to have to, and I even managed to resist the urge to chapter hop.

The book was a present from my friends Vlado and Alison. Vlado is Serbian, the book is Albanian (with a Serbian bit part), and the driver for the book is Ancient Greek via Bosnian (Orthodox and Muslim).

Having established its Balkan bona fides, I'll start again. The book is

Ismail Kadare. 2006 [1981]. The File on H. Tr. David Bellos from the French version of the Albanian by Jusuf Vrioni. London: Vintage Books.

And Vlado and Alison bought me it because one of our pub nights, I mentioned Lord & Parry's research in Albania and Bosnia on oral poetry, that the novel is based on. That's the kind of pub nights I go to. (And I only knew vaguely of Kadare's Three-Arched Bridge; I had no clue he'd written this, a couple of years after meeting Albert Lord.)

So how was it? It's two novels. One's an efficiently brutal portrayal of Nowheresville, '30s Albania; I was about to say "satire", but I'm not convinced its mix of petty officials, bored housewives, grandiloquent informants and taciturn mountain-men is that far from reality. Well-sketched, with some nice touches in the portrayal and denouement of the governor's wife.

The other is a meditation on Lord & Parry's work, tape-recording and setting down oral epic. Because I've already read the original publication, the recap in two chapters of a novel went on a bit much for me. And I'm not sure how much the depiction of the Slavs' and Albanians' claim to priority was a parody of Balkan rivalries, and how much it was a celebration of them. And Kadare mistakes his background reading: the repetitions of epics by a bard between performances aren't that verbatim, but noone notices because they're consistent where it matters. (I wouldn't fact check Kadare, if he hadn't turned two chapters over to a summary of oral epic theory.)

But the climax, though perhaps a little obvious, is effective. The songs were indeed being imprisoned, and they were being already spoiled by their incarceration by the time Parry & Lord arrived—not because of tape recorders, but because of printing: bards were already being questioned if their performances deviated from what the school textbook had printed. The climax shows the revenge of the oral, but it was a short-lived revenge: the oral tradition was indeed dying too fast to salvage by luddite autos da fé.

And the final scene clinches, with the fictional Parry & Lord ending up in an epic themselves, and the fictional Parry becoming a bard. As the translator notes, that happened to the real Parry & Lord. (I remembered it did, but it's a good thing I didn't see it coming in the novel.)

That kind of thing did happen in Greece as well: a folk song in Chios commemorates Psichari coming home to do research. It's not a good folksong, but it still stuck around for decades. Maybe one of the last Greek folksongs commemorating a current event was in 1975. I'm happy to be proven wrong about it being one of the last, but Greece is no longer that kind of culture. And the event commemorated wasn't in Greece: it was the fall of the Whitlam government in Australia, worded like the Cretan laments for the Passion of Christ. Out of place, of course; so much so, the reference to "Lawless Jews" of the song—taken straight from the Passion laments—raised eyebrows, and got defensive commentary. (I'm a few thousand km away from my library right now, so you'll have to wait for the references. Meantime, here's a Greek Jewish blogger's less than sympathetic take on that element of Greek folklore.)

Modern Greece had ballads, but nothing like the thousand-verse epics of Bosnia and Albania. They may have existed in mediaeval times, and given rise to the written Lay of Digenes Akrites. But we're only guessing that there were sit-down thousand-verse performances of Akrites, as opposed to hundred-verse ballads like what has survived orally. Because the ballads are shorter in Greece, they aren't as dense with formula as Homer or Bosnia; but formulas are blatantly there.

Anyway. I'm going to try heading out to dinner now for a second time...

Arrived in USA

2009-10-19T11:07:00.003+11:00

I am in the US. I have celebrated my arrival as is my custom, by having a tub of Cherry Garcia ice cream. It was mehlicious. I hope that means I'm over ice cream.

I forgot to pack my camera into my camera case. That severely sucks. Several-wise.

I'm to dinner, and then I'll upload a book review. Because my stay at Oracle HQ will also be mehlicious...

Bach/Göncz, completion of BWV 562.2 and Contrapunctus 14

2009-10-15T22:41:00.003+11:00

Amazing what you find in the googles. I googled idly at work to see if any of the completions of Bach's Contrapunctus 14, from the Art of Fugue, are online. If you don't already know about it, you may not care to find out, but the final fugue in the Art of Fugue is incomplete, just after Bach brings back all three fugue subjects. The legend is that Bach died before he could go on; revisionist history has contested this, and the piece we do know he wrote on his deathbed, "Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit" BWV 668, is what typically concludes performances of the Art of Fugue.

Many a musician has tried their hand at completing the unfinished fugue—particularly once they worked out that the theme running through the work is missing from this fugue, and fits with the other three subjects—so it must have been intended as a four-subject fugue: a fitting culmination to Bach's tour de force. Not that Contrapunctus 14 is deficient for being incomplete: the first theme is a fugue of such... humane sorrow, it outweighs anything that came before it.

Completing the unfinished fugue has a touch of hubris, but it's far from impossible: once Bach put the music of the spheres in motion, a lot of it is lining up the themes and staying consistent to the style. Far from impossible, but harder than it looks. The version I'd heard was Helmut Walcha's, and it's just wrong: the completion lapses into the 19th century, it's not identifiable as Bach.

The Wikipedia article mentions Zoltán Göncz's proposed completion, based on his theory that this was intended to be a permutation fugue, because of the order in which the subjcts are introduced in the four voices. As it happens, YouTube user Matrix141414 (who is either Göncz himself or a huge fan) has put this version online, with the score scrolling alone, and the permutation matrix illustrated.

(Göncz takes over at 2:04 of the second clip.)

My impression? At around 2:40, I think it starts sounding a bit lost, like Walcha's did; but it gets back on track by 3:00, and the quadruple fugue is just great. (Hard to go wrong when, as Göncz has theorised, Bach had the matrix all planned out.) The five-voice bit at the end is not what Bach would have done—he was purist about the number of the voices he'd use; but the densing up of the texture is a very nice touch.

I still need to find the Tovey version someone recommended online once as the simplest and therefore the best. But I have to mention also the practice run Göncz did for the final fugue: the fugue of BWV 562.

The first tape of Classical music I ever bought was Walcha doing Bach. The Toccata & Fugue in D minor BWV 565, which everyone knows, and which is why I bought it in oh, 1983? The St Anne Prelude and Fugue in E♭ Major BWV 552. The *other* Toccata & Fugue in D minor, the Dorian BWV 538. The G Major Fantasia BWV 572. And rounding off the tape, the melancholy, slow, lachrymose Fantasia in C minor, BWV 562.

I was 12, and I was bewildered by what I'd just bought. (My mother was less bewildered by the racket: "My fault for giving you the $15 in the first place!") I eventually worked out what was going on, though I must admit, I never quite warmed to the Fantasia: the music is deep, but rendering it on the organ is somehow oppressive.

To my astonishment, I discovered today that there was a fugue to the fantasia: it doesn't just end in tearful contemplation of its mortality, as I'd assumed. And Bach never finished the fugue; the musicologists' guess is, the fugue wasn't really working for him. So Göncz thought he'd give it a go in 1989.

The results are also on YouTube thanks to Matrix141414, and Göncz has also published some notes on it:

(Göncz takes over at 1:31 of 5:32. He's good—I didn't notice the seam at all.)

Göncz has turned this fragment—which I think really was running out of steam—into a double fugue at 1:51. And God strike me down for saying this, but I think he's improved the piece. A lot.

The real hubris, though, is following up the C Minor Fantasia with any fugue, even this improved fugue; and that offence was Johann Sebastian's. I find it oppressive, I don't seek it out, but the fantasia ends crying, alone, staring into space. It should be followed by silence. By not finishing the fugue, maybe J.S. agreed after all...

Itinerary Stateside

2009-10-15T13:14:00.003+11:00

So, I'm taking off for the States on Sunday, and this is my itinerary:

18-22 Oct: Oracle HQ, attending IMS Workshop, and doing overtime with boss on the side
23 Oct: Because I announced I'd be in the States, and had a friend say "So, coming to Seattle?" -- Seattle
24-27 Oct: Gutter in New Orleans. I have no idea what I'll find, because New Orleans is a place I know very little about. I'm tempted to keep it that way, I like surprises.
27-31 Oct: Irvine, CA, attending TLG conference.

As always, travel broadens the mind, or at least the superficial prejudices, so expect lots of posts on my misconstruals of the US.

I don't expect to be touring odd roadside attractions in the Midwest, btw, or sampling odd candies; but if you want to see blogging by someone who does, check out The Bewildered Brit, by my erstwhile TLG colleague Richard Peevers.

I actually saw some Razzles in a lolly shop last night, as it turns out. Richard's review help me in my decision to resist temptation...

Elithiolexitherophobia and Coeliomyophilia

2009-10-07T20:06:00.003+11:00

(This post hyperlinks to the Old Perseus interface, because the New Perseus interface is unusable and unacceptably slow. Something regrettably common with upgrades...)

(This post is rated M for Mmmm... Prurience...)

Seen over someone's shoulder in today's MX, the daily free publication of Teh Stoopid, which has already occasioned Your Obt Svt's notice. 2009-10-07, p. 13:

It's True! We've all heard of claustrophobia (fear of confined spaces) but to have lachanophobia is to fear vegetables, while medorthophobia is to fear an erect penis.

NO IT BALLY WELL ISN'T, you utter smeghead. Medorthophobia, as far as it can mean anything, is a fear of Medians Standing Up. Did you get Persians and Penises confused in your abuse of a Greek dictionary? Well then, perchance you might also confuse some gentle constructive criticism with MY BOOT UP YER ARSE!

Actually mēdea μήδεα is also a Homeric word for genitals, but it's the entire package: it's what people threaten to chop off and feed to the dogs ("they drew out his 'vitals' and gave them to the dogs raw"), or what gets lopped off Uranus and cast into the ocean ("and swiftly lopped off his own father's members"). It always occurs in the plural, which should tell you it's not just a penis. And μήδεα ὀρθά is just plain nonsense: genitals standing up? Upright balls? So the criticism stands. Here's a damn funny Greek blog post dedicated to μήδεα and their role in the etymology of Archimedes.

So no, a word for "genitals, standing, phobia" is not the word for a phobia of erect penises. Inasmuch as there should be a word for the phobia of erect penises—and an eminently irrational phobia that is too, for erect penises, I am informed, have their uses—then that word would be closer to ithyphallophobia.

I, on the other hand, have elithiolexitherophobia: a fear of idjits with dictionaries. Or rather, a fear *for* idjits with dictionaries, if they should ever cross my path.

Idiot. Where did this crap come from, Urban Dictionary? At least this page has both the stupid and the correct word for it.

Who do I blame for this, seriously? The OED online doesn't have it, thank fcuk. (It doesn't have ithyphallophobia or phallophobia either.) Google Books has it in a 1969 list of phobias in Word ways: the journal of recreational linguistics (recreate THIS, MOFO! At least they add the correct ithyphallophobia), and a 1967 "Cyclopedic lexicon of sex" (cycle THIS, MOFO!). Only one book on psychology in Google Books seems to have been snookered by the coinage so far, but without snippet preview, I can't tell yet whether to organise a letter-writing campaign.

In other news, I went and seen Chicago last night. I'd refused to watch the movie when it was on, and I don't know what I missed there, but it's ingenious. Especially what they've done with the music: it's an encyclopaedia of '20s musical vernaculars, and presented as that. Cleverly done, and very Brecht. (Which is more a property of the revival than the original, I understand.)

As to the plot, I'm not surprised at the surmise that the revival got more public resonance because it was post-OJ Simpson, and our society even more celebrity-driven than the '70s or the '20s. The plot was a little obvious, granted, but it's a musical, they don't trade in subtleties in the word.

They trade in music and movement. And I'm only startled by it because I don't get out much, but the dancing! It was phenomenal: all violence and exuberance and sex. And the dancers... Good Lord. The men had six-packs. The women had six-packs. I won't vouch for it, but I'm reasonably sure the trumpets had six-packs. And me, i think I'm discovering I have coeliomyophilia: an inordinate affection for or attraction to abdominal muscle.

For we love what we lack in ourselves...

The Authority of Nasrudin

2009-10-06T00:24:00.003+11:00

I've just posted at The Other Place on Nasrudin, the Muslim comic hero whose stories also pervade Greece and Cyprus. I finished my post there with a Nasrudin joke from Wikipedia, which I chose to render in Ancient Greek (and in the process forget the declension of "this".) Here's the joke again:

A neighbour comes to the gate of Mulla Nasrudin's yard. The Mulla goes out to meet him outside.
"Would you mind, Mulla," the neighbour asks, "lending me your donkey today? I have some goods to transport to the next town."
The Mulla doesn't feel inclined to lend out the animal to that particular man, however; so, not to seem rude, he answers:
"I'm sorry, but I've already lent him to somebody else."
Suddenly the donkey can be heard braying loudly behind the wall of the yard.
"You lied to me, Mulla!" the neighbour exclaims. "There it is behind that wall!"
"What do you mean?" the Mulla replies indignantly. "Whom would you rather believe, a donkey or your Mulla?"

I smirked.

Then I shared some of the jokes with a colleague, and he didn't smirk as much. Which led me to wonder whether there was a particular culture dependency on this humour that I was missing, because I had an overlapping culture with it and my Anglo colleagues did not.

That evening, I was invited over to some friends' for an evening of dinner and Settlers of Catan. Well, dinner without me eating, as has been the norm with my dietary regime for the past six months, that has seen me lose 13 kg in 3 months, and then remain static for another 3 months. My friends have a seven–year-old and a six–year-old. Since seven–year-olds make excellent developmental testbeds, and I was informed the kids had recently discovered humour, I took it upon myself to try the joke out on said seven–year-old (let's call her Mary), and see what happened.

NICK: [Joke]

MARY: ...

MOM: OK, let's try translating this to her context now.

NICK: [You mean the context isn't universal?]

MOM: So, we're going to translate this to [Region of Eastern Melbourne, Mainstream Protestant Denomination] Church context.

Let's pretend you go over to Dave's house. And Dave has a big dog. (In fact... he does have a dog.)

NICK: [The pastor's name is "Dave". I think I see a problem...]

MOM: ... and you say to Dave, "I want to play with your dog." And Dave says, "I haven't got a dog!" And then you hear the dog. Woof. WOOF WOOF. WOOF WOOF WOOF.

MARY: *giggle*

MOM: And then you say to Dave, "But I can hear the dog!" And then he says, "Who ya gonna believe. Me, or the dog."

MARY: ... The dog. Coz I can hear the dog.

MOM: *Looks at me triumphantly*

And Mom (er, my friend) then gave me the key to unlock why the joke wouldn't work in a [Mainstream Protestant Denomination] Church context. Which I was halfway there with already, when I registered the pastor was Dave and not The Right Revd. David Davidson.

A mullah, and even more so an Orthodox priest, can summon a lot of intellectual authority over their community. The Nasrudin joke is parodying how far that claim to authority can go. A pastor, on the other hand, doesn't get to do that; because Protestantism is about noone getting in between the parishioner and their interpretation of Scripture.

That's something I knew intellectually, but I doubt I had quite clicked on. As I've hinted before, I'm not entire as fluent in my host culture as I think I am.

Of course, even if Protestantism doesn't afford the pastor that kind of authority, being called "The Right Revd." does somewhat. And with a society radically changed enough that authority figures ask to go by first names, pastors accommodate to the World, and ask to go by first names, and surrender a little more of their authority. Which fits the Protestant ideal.

I think it's going to be a fair while before any Orthodox clergyman in Greece says "Call me Lefteris". (Not Papa-Lefteris, mind you, where the title, however familiarly, is still doing the work of "The Right Revd.")

There is another way of viewing the interaction between Mary and Nasrudin, too. Big Media Matt was a philosophy major before he was a political pundit, and he occasionally lapses into philosophy on his blog. One such recent instance had him disapprove of the simplism of prefacing a cartoon by They Might Be Giants, encouraging kids to get into science, with a Cartoon-Rudolf Carnap: the crude reduction that Science is only about direct experience, and not noting how much of a social process it is.

I don't know my Carnap, though I have been warned by another friend not to assume the Cartoon version. And the thread at Matt Yglesias' went to and fro, but a couple of commenters did point out that after all, the audience was just kids. Get them started early with differentiating between unicorns and horses; you can talk them through the social situatedness of that differentiation by I dunno, their undergraduate History & Philosophy of Science.

And as another friend pointed out, when I retold the previous evening's events (yes, the anecdotes have done the rounds): there are contexts in which you really do have to overrule your sensory evidence, as Nasrudin suggests. Not perhaps for the reasons Nasrudin suggests—but Nasrudin is supposed to get you thinking, not just guffawing. Still, seven is still a little too early for that.

Though not too early for Mary to know a word I didn't. Subitise, quotha. I just knew it as Gestalt perception.

*That* made me feel old...

Summer Glau's Uncanny Valley

2009-09-25T10:48:00.003+10:00

No, I'm not referring to a TV actress' cleavage. In truth, I don't even know whether Summer Glau has a cleavage. No, I'm talking about the robot she portrayed on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

(A post on a TV show?! Well, this is the personal blog, not the linguistics one.)

I don't much watch television at all any more, and when I do, having been washed aside and left behind by mainstream culture, I usually freak out. The double of Shameless and Skins, for example, made me swear off TV for a month.

A couple of nights ago, in taxation-forms-avoidance mode, I switched on the TV and fell upon the start of the Demon Hand episode of Terminator. I vaguely knew the series existed, but had never seen it, and has certainly developed no empathy for its cast of justified psychos. But even if I had, my freakout would have been just as complete. And this is to the scriptwriters' great credit. Man, do I hate them.

So, story is this. The cast of justified psychos is joined by Summer Glau's Cameron, a Terminator sent Vrom Ze Footchar to protect the Messiah kid. The Terminator is a robotic killing machine, as all Terminators have been, even when they grow up to become Governators. There's a little bit of TNG Data humour about how socially maladjusted she is, but the episode still reminds you she is a killing machine. Without her killing anyone.

At least, without us knowing that she killed anyone. I missed the subtlety of this when watching, but Cameron turns up back at Justified Psycho Manor in a cop uniform, and Sarah Connor deadpans:

Somewhere in an alley a naked cop lies bleeding.

Because Cameron had not walked out of Justified Psycho Manor in a cop uniform; if the robot needs a disguise, she'll beat it off you.

So. Cameron is on a mission to retrieve some McGuffin or other, and the Russian dude who knows the McGuffin's location is on the run from the Russian mafia. To find out where the dude is, Cameron joins a ballet class, run by the Russian dude's sister. "You haff donne ballet beforr," Teacher notes. "But yor upper body iss too mekenical, you kno?" Ha de ha. "This dansse is the pas de chat. You are a cat." "I am... a cat." Heh.

On her second visit, Cameron observes Teacher dancing, then kicks away a mafioso threatening Teacher, and having established her bona fides, asks to see Teacher's brother.

They go to the brother, he's freaked out that they could have been followed, no, no, Teacher assures him, she can help us—tell him.

Where is the McGuffin? Cameron asks.

At XYZ, Russian dude replies.

Cameron has the information she needs. Out she walks.

"But you said you'd help us!" Teacher screams.

And the camera follows Cameron, walking down the stairs nonchalantly—no, robotically—as two mafiosi, one in ponytail, run past her, bust in the door, bang bang bang, screams, bang, silence.

"Is he dead?" Sarah asks when Cameron returns to Justified Psycho Manor.

"Yes. His sister too."

"Did you kill him?"

"No. That wasn't my mission."

At the end of the episode (where much more happens, but I'm still freaked out about the outcome of that mission), Sarah voiceovers clunkily that no robot could ever create art, and if they did, they'd be us, and we wouldn't have to fear them any more.

As the voiceover drones on, Cameron puts on her ballet shoes, and dances ballet. Psycho Human Vrom Ze Footcha, who hates robots, is watching her in terror.

As always happens when I am freaked out by TV—indeed, whenever I watch TV at all—I went to the internets for edification, and read the entire Television Without Pity forum on the episode. So this following insights aren't primarily mine, it's synthesised from the discussions there.

The Psycho Human Vrom Ze Footcha may have been freaking out because Cameron is dancing to the same Chopin piece that he had been tortured to in a previous episode. But the episode gives plenty of reason to freak out anyway. Summer Glau was in fact a dancer before an injury redirected her to acting; I don't get ballet, but I'll take the forum members at their word that she did a good job.

Forum members castigated the voiceovers as being obvious and sledgehammer. But in this instance, there's satisfying layering going on, as one poster worked out. (Sorry, I won't go through 20 screenfuls again to work out who.) Sarah's voiceover is not the omniscient narrator's, and she's belied—and then unbelied—by what we've seen. "A robot cannot create art?" Cameron's dancing ballet of her own accord right in front of us. "And if a robot can create art, we need not fear them, they will have become us?" A robot dances what she was taught by someone, whose death she saw no reason to prevent: that's a robot you very much need to fear.

(One forum member went even further: if the robots do become us, they become as violent and irrational as us. Only stronger. Even more reason to fear them.)

That was brilliant of the series. Deep and challenging, the way I had not seen in a long while. Better even than Star Trek's Data—who the forum participants kept citing as an exemplar to avoid for Cameron ("I hope they don't Data her." Harsh, but possibly fair.) It's not tragedy in the proper sense, because the ballet teacher had no tragic flaw; but like tragedy is supposed to, it evokes pity and horror and meditation on one's lot.

And I'll switch the channel if Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles comes on again. It utterly freaked me out.

My only contribution to all that is to note that:

My immediate reaction was, "You're a monster, and that annuls any beauty in your dancing". (One forum poster went there too.) But I'm not convinced that's true. Nazis loved music, at least one composer has been a murderer. And while what Cameron did was horrific, it was well within the bounds of human behaviour.
What particularly gets me about the ballet teacher being gunned down, as well as the computer guy? The art nexus—kinda obvious from the scriptwriters, but that's how the Big Questions get posed. The fact that we see the Teacher on screen a lot more this ep than the brother, and Cameron had saved her earlier on.

But also, that the baseline ethics captured by Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (Law #1:"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm") are trumped by the elemental ethic of Game Theory. Not the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", but the even more basic: I did you Good, Now You do me Good. I did you Ill, Now You do me Ill.

Of course, the Three Laws of Robotics are an encumbrance to a killing machine sent Vrom Ze Footchar, and they're an encumbrance Asimov had already envisioned in his Zeroth law, which takes precedence: "A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm." Still, it was horrible to watch her walk away, and even more horrible to watch her dance. As the scriptwriters intended.
Robotics people, and animators, have encountered the phenomenon of the Uncanny Valley. If our robots and animations look not really like us at all, C-3PO and Toy Story, we're amused. If they look almost like us but not quite—Actroids, Beowulf the Movie, we're repulsed. The Uncanny Valley is a valley, because that's the dip in emotional response as simulations look more human, and it's uncanny, because that's our emotional response. Several psychological motives have been proposed for this reaction, but surely part of it is, we are realising something alien is trying to fool us into passing for one of us.

With the ballet teaching and ballet dancing, I submit that Psycho Human Vrom Ze Footchar (and I so did not recognise Brian Austin Green twenty years on)—is having that kind of Uncanny Valley moment. In the moral rather than physical domain.

It's been two years since this ep screened Stateside; but belated Props to the Television Without Pity forum members, for some high quality discussion. Inamongst the ogling of Summer Glau's bum. I hadn't noticed; I guess she's not my body type, or something. Or maybe I just completely don't get ballet.

Or maybe it was still that Uncanny Valley thing. In which case, even more Props to Summer Glau, for convincing me she is a monster as Cameron.

October in North America

2009-09-24T19:24:00.002+10:00

I've booked my accommodation, so I might as well un-embargo the news. Work takes me in three weeks' time to San Francisco (actually, the erstwhile theme park outside San Francisco that is Oracle HQ, for the IMS Quarterly Meeting), and then to Irvine CA and the TLG. In between, I will visit a place on the other side of the continent, that will capitalise on some of what I've been posting about here for the past couple of months.

No, I am not going to Moncton. Maybe I should, maybe I will yet, but instead, I'm going to the third Francophone dominion of North America. I'm spending the weekend in the Big Easy.

I'm not going to New Orleans primarily out of attachment to Francophonie. You might not know it from this blog, but out of the two languages I learned at high school, I always preferred German—the music had a lot to do with that, and I found annoying the aesthetic I stereotype as French: the unresolved, the ambiguous, the elusive, the balloon floating away. Pah, give me ardour and fists on the table and crunchy consonant clusters. And French may be easier to read for an English-speaker, but I will always struggle with spoken French, and appreciate the crispness of spoken Hochdeutsch.

That doesn't relate much at all to my fun and games trying to speak French in Montreal: I didn't have that much more success in Berlin or Salzburg. But it means I'm not romanticising Francophonie because it's French specifically; there's other reasons I found Quebec intriguing. (And I doubt I'd find Amish Country intriguing just because they speak German.)

Nor will I go to New Orleans out of a great love for gumbo or jazz. The one time I've had gumbo (in Memphis), I loved it, and the two or three times I've heard Dixieland, I've grinned profusely; but I don't own any Dixieland recordings, and I haven't sought out gumbo since. I don't know if you can even get gumbo in Melbourne, though we are pretty good on diverse cuisines as a rule... "Recommended is the organic cajun seafood gumbo with john dory, mussels, vegetables and rice ", you say? OK, I'll have to look that up when I get back.

I'm under no illusion that I'm going to hear any French spoken in the Tourist Theme Park of the French Quarter; nor am I not going to hire a car and head out for two days through the wilderness to whatever out-of-the-way parish along the coast Cajun is still spoken in. I'm not so naive as to believe that the French Quarter will be much more than a Tourist Theme Park; and I gather than post-Katrina, New Orleans still has deep-set problems (which I won't notice from the Tourist Theme Park vantage point), and will likely never be the same.

So why am I going to New Orleans? Because ten years ago, I went to Disneyland.

Disneyland is lame, surprisingly lame even by theme park standards. I went because my mother was visiting, and it's the only tourist attraction in Orange County I could come up with. (Have I mentioned my ill feeling towards the OC lately?) I was wandering around the surprisingly lame and surprisingly small attractions of Disneyland, to see what I could sneer at next.

And as I turned a corner in Backwoods USA Simulacrum, I came across a fake New Orleans.

A bad fake, of course. A solitary ramshackle French colonial shopfront, with two Disneyland employees throwing beads out a first floor window window, and the three or four girls on the the ground catching the beads were fifteen years away from the customary Spring Break response to the activity (as filmed on Girls Gone Wild). The mint julep on sale had the unmistakeable savour of Kool-Aid about it, and no alcohol that I could sniff out.

And yet, otherness can seep through even a bad fake, even a parody. Brush Up Your Pidgin parodies Tok Pisin—and colonialism, and missionaries, and anyone in Papua New Guinea in the '30s; and its Tok Pisin version of "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears" is played for laughs—hence its exaggeratedly English orthography:

Frend, all man belong Rom, wan-tok, hearim me now

Yet when I read it in my teens, I was startled: parody it may have been, but this was unmistakably its own language, with its own spirit (to use the non-linguistic impressionism): it was not a bad English, but something new. (That book could have made me a Creolist. But I don't know if Creolists are that much more employable than Hellenists.)

(E, disla buk, em i ken inap long mekim mi kamap olsem saveman bilong Kriol. Tasol, ol lain saveman bilong Kriol, em i save kisim bisnis i pas ol lain saveman bilong Grik? Mi no save. I don't know if that was correct, but it sure was fun...)

In the same way, this bad fake of America was not like the bad fakes of America I'd already seen on TV: this was not Seinfeld or Family Ties or Cheers or The Dukes of Hazzard (Fake New York Upper West Side, Fake Columbus, Fake Boston, Fake Georgia). This was something new to me, something intriguing and European-worldly and louche, which I had not expected to find in the US. When I went there, I discovered the same of Manhattan. (Well, substitute "louche" with "wired" there.) And I'd like to see that fake more close-up.

So when I'm at the corner of Canal and Bourbon in four weeks, I may not find something substantially more "authentic" to Louisiana than the Disneyland rendition; but I'll see *something* unfamiliar there, anyway. From the underside of a gutter in a drunken stupor, possibly (though knowing me, rather unlikely...)

I don't really know what I'm expecting to see. I know little enough about New Orleans to reduce it to a series of keywords. A rather embarrassing series of keywords, but that's why I'd like to go in person:

Jazz, Big Easy, local pronunciation: Nawlins, gumbo, Cajun, Cajuns, Acadians post-Great Upheaval, Creoles, Dixieland, Louis Armstrong, levees, Katrina, flooding, refugees, demographic collapse, Mississippi, Emeril, Mardi Gras, big-ass floats, beads, boobies, drunken college kids, Spring Break, Bourbon St, French Quarter, Quaint architecture that Plateau Mont-Royal in Montreal is meant to be reminiscent of, House of the Rising Sun, Tulane University, Different Status during Reconstruction but I don't remember what exactly, French, James Carville, Heckuva Job Brownie, Cities of the USA I know too little about, jambalaya, bayou

Not necessarily in that order.

Thank God I didn't post a similar keyword portrait of Montreal before I went...

Shōgun

2009-09-18T19:24:00.004+10:00

Three weeks ago (I'm that far behind in my blogging), I went away for the weekend, to spend my birthday in Bendigo. As I alerted readers here. Two days spent offline; yes, I did get the shakes, and I did propose to pop over to MacDonald's to check my email, and it's a good thing the Macca's was just far enough from my hotel accommodation that I couldn't pick up the WiFi signal.

I chose Bendigo because it's the one regional Victorian town I could picture myself living in. I could picture myself living there for the following sketchy reasons:

it's less than two hours away from Melbourne by train (think of the blogging I could get done in transit!);
it has a block of la-de-dah restaurants;
it has a gallery and an art scene, which is good not because I have anything to do with the visual arts, but because galleries and art scenes bring cool people to town;
it has a teeny tiny tramway, which is now just for tourists, but used to be real;
the Gold Rush bequeathed the town a critical mass of monumental stone edifices, enough statues of Queen Victoria to remind me of Montreal, and a fountain with, um, nicely proportioned maidens. (What's that Greek euphemism again? "She has a rich spiritual world." Where "spiritual" in Greek is pneumatikos.)
And yes, that sadly is the limit of my engagement with the visual arts.
Lastly... their fountains have running water. I doubt any fountain in Melbourne will ever have running water again.

Bendigo is lovely, and I'm glad I went; but it rained for much of the weekend. So I went to the local boozerie and stocked up on Orahovac and Nocello and Icewine. (Mmm, Orahovac. Mmm, Icewine. Meh, Nocello—I've never warmed to hazelnut.) And I watched the full miniseries of Shōgun on DVD.

It is profoundly embarrassing to write this, given that my blogroll includes my former student Matt Treyvaud's No-Sword blog, wherein Matt, now a permanent resident of Japan, explicates the ways of Nippon to the world. It feels like someone linking to Hēllēniksteukontos and writing, "Tsakonian is descended from Ancient Spartan! And I saw 300 yesterday! THIS! IS! SPARTA! FTW!!!1!1"

(Which in Tsakonian would be Ετηνεγί! ένι! α Σπάρτα! γτΠμ! Or something like that. And please don't make me spell out γτΠμ: I may be blasphemous, but my readers need not be.)

So I'm sorry to abase the level of cross-cultural discourse by saying, "I rewatched a 1980 miniseries on Mediaeval Japan! That was anachronistic about Japanese address terms! And it had Ninjas!!!!1!!11"

But it *was* a pretty cool mini-series in 1980, which managed to get a schoolyardful of Cretan kids trying out Japanese phrases on each other. And it's still cool thirty years later. Not because of the plot—Blackthorne's protestations of love for Mariko are embarrassing, the reason Mariko has to sacrifice herself is not explained properly, the cliffhangers are clunky, the struggles of the warlords are remote. (Although as Basil Exposition characters go, John Rhys-Davies' Rodriguez is manic enough to do a three-minute potted history of Japan, with panache.)

But no, Shōgun is cool because of the director's brilliant idea to tell the story from Blackthorne's point of view, a foreigner shipwrecked in Japan with not a word of Japanese (although with plenty of Portuguese)—and to refuse to subtitle any of the Japanese he hears. Which means the viewer is working out what the hell is going on at the same time as Blackthorne, and is learning Japanese at an only slightly lower speed.

These days, I watch little telly, and when I do watch I'm constantly off to Wikipedia, to be edified by the margins. It's a pity the Making Of featurettes didn't talk about the guy Blackthorne is based on, William Adams. (The address term anachronism is, Adams wasn't called Anjin-San, "Mr Pilot"—it appears -san wasn't in use yet; he was called Anjin-Sama, "Lord Pilot".) My surprise, when I did get back to Melbourne and internet connectivity, was that the Wikipedia summary of Adams' life was not that many miles away from what Shōgun showed.

The love interest as fictional, natch; and the names were changed to protect the inaccurate (although you now have a generation of gaijin thinking the first Shōgun of Japan was called Toronaga instead of Tokugawa Ieyasu, *and* was one of the Seven Samurai). But the dude did arrive in the Japans in 1600, and he was English, and he did loathe the Portuguese, and he did become a confidant of the First Shōgun. Though I doubt he looked as good in a jerkin as Richard Chamberlain.

The even more cool stuff in the Wikipedia article on him is, what else Adams did which the TV series left out.

Adams' thing, like so many navigators', was the Northwest Passage, and he kept looking for it even after landing in Japan. (Adams would be one of the few people heartened by Global Warming.)
Adams' influence was not unrelated to the expulsion of the Portuguese from Japan in 1614 (and the banning of Christianity).
Adams did get to build his ship after all, final scene of Shōgun notwithstanding. And the ship got used to drop some shipwrecked Spanish sailors off in Mexico. But it did not get used to launch Japan into the New World: there was no colony of New Yokohama in California.
(Why does the Age Of Discovery always remind me of playing Civ?)
Like the second last scene predicted, Adams was stuck in Japan until the next Englishman showed up in the country; that was 13 years later.
Unlike what Toronaga pledged in the last scene, Iesayu Ieyasu did allow Adams to leave when the next Englishman showed up.
Yet Adams chose to stay anyway. He says in his letter to his wife, it was because he found the Englishman to be vexatious and insufferable. What he found the Englishman to be, of course, was English.
And Adams was not English any more. In fact, William Adams had been declared dead, and his English wife a widow: Lord Pilot was a new man. (But Lord Pilot still sent letters and money to his widow when the next Englishman went home.)
Lord Pilot lived out his days in the Japans, with his Japanese wife and hafu children with gaijin names, Joseph and Susanna; he's buried in Nagasaki, and there's a street of Tokyo that used to be named after him, and a train station in Yokohama that still is.

The first year of Lord Pilot's life in Japan was a damnably cool miniseries. The next nineteen years may not have been as exciting, but they were still damn interesting.

Authenticities and Cretan Musics

2009-09-17T22:14:00.008+10:00

I'm not posting about Quebec or Acadia for a while, for absence of stimulus, and seasonal illness: I've stayed home sick three days so far this month, and those days have not been spent blogging (nor reading those books on Acadian I'd borrowed.)

I'll still post on identity construction, closer to home; and the emphasis is on "construction". Actually, the emphasis is on folk music, but you'll see what I mean.

This post is even more meandering than usual for an Opɯcɯlɯklɑr post on identity, so the nickel summary is: Cretan music is neither as homogeneous, nor as primordial, as it is currently presented. (Obvious parallel to the construction of Greek identity, which I mercifully won't spell out.) That's bad, but the fact that it's changed is not bad: it's life.

I no longer listen to Greek music, pop nor folk nor art; truth be told, I don't consume much art any more at all. But in my teens and twenties, I did a lot more. And I'm grateful to the Greek State, for Government TV screening folk music from a different region of Greece every Sunday: you could easily get a feel just by watching from home, for how diverse Greece is musically. (I doubt my younger cousins, watching in the era of privatised TV, got the same opportunity.)

Thinking back, though, I don't remember any music from the Ionian islands on TV: none of the mandolins or barbershop trios that make the music of Corfu and Zante so unmistakably Italian, so divorced from what was happening in the mainland. That omission should have given me pause at the time, but I was like ten. A smart ten, but not clued about every subtlety in identity construction.

And living in Crete, I got particular exposure to Cretan folk music, which continued when I returned to Australia. Cretan folk music is played on the lyra, a pear-shaped knee-fiddle. Like the fiddle, it derives from the rebab and the rebec, and its antiquarian name is not the Greeks' fault (for once), but the Venetians: lira di bracchio. Three strings, d-a-e′, stopped by the fingernails; a hoarse, full sound. It's accompanied by the laouto, a strummed instrument closer to the Arabic ud than the Western lute. The laouto mostly machine-guns powerchords to the beat, but at its best, it swaps riffs with the lyra—the lyra more melismatic, the laouto in shards.

This would be pretty representative of current practice:

And so has it been as long as I rememember. As it turns out, not much longer than I remember.

When the family went to Greece in '89, my mother asked the local record store owner for a mixtape of Cretan music. (Those of you under 30 may want to google what a mixtape is. We didn't have iPod Shuffles back then.) The store owner asked if he might not put some music on the B-Side by his father, the renowned lyra-player Giannis Dermitzakis. Sure, we said, he was renowned and all.

What on earth was this, I wondered when I got to the B-Side. Guitar accompaniment? (And rather more arpeggiated than I thought tasteful.) Why was the lyra tone so nasal and hollow? And what was with those annoying jingle bells, dogging every bowstroke? This was some kind of joke, right?

This, in fact, was what Cretan folk music sounded like until 1920.

To go further, this is what rural Christian East Cretan folk music sounded like until 1920. Maybe without the guitar; but Dermitzogiannis' guitar was no more inauthentic an accompaniment to the lyra than the laouto powerchords are. The laouto, and before it the boulgari (cf. the Turkish saz), was borrowed as a rhythm section from a distinct musical tradition, tabachaniotika: Muslim Cretan folk music. (Or Urban rather than strictly Muslim, and tabachaniotika may not be its original name: see extensive debate on Rebetiko forum.) The laouto was borrowed to replace the jingle bells, the gerakokoudona "falconry bells", which were attached to the lyra bow and served as its rhythm accompaniment.

And the lyra itself really did used to sound that nasal and hollow. The construction of the instrument changed in the '30s, giving it a deeper sound; struck by this, contemporaries called it the vrontolyra, the thunder-lyre. The construction also gave it a fourth string, and violin tuning (the viololyra); the fourth string did not last, but the retuning did, and the lyra was able to take over the West Cretan repertoire, which until then was the exclusive domain of the violin.

It had to be, because the orginal lyra (now called the lyraki, "li'l lyra") only had a six note range. Sure it had three strings, but the side strings were drones: the tuning was d′-a-e′. And once you know that, you realise that the dances of a Cretan night out really aren't all from the same tradition. The West has its syrtoi, leisurely melodic dances with a reasonable range fit for violin. The East has fitful, manic, repetitive riffs, which typically fit comfortably in six notes. Not the same kind of music at all.

There's more diversity than that. Crete has bagpipes, I've read (askomadoura): but I've never heard them. Apparently my part of Crete, Lasithi, was renowned for its drums (daouli); never heard them either. I'm from the Eastern tip of Crete, and our village musician played the violin, not the lyra. The Tabachaniotika mostly left the island with the Muslims, and they took their boulgari with them, but a couple of songs stayed around.

The boppy Filedem started as a Muslim song, "Friend Adam (File Edem), don't slaughter so many Christians during Ramadan" (unsurprisingly, I can't find a performance online). Then it got appropriated by the Christians to needle the Muslims: "A Turkish lass goes to the mosque, she prays to change her creed; Turkish lass, your veil conceals your beauty, Filedem " (here by the Lesser Xilouris brother, Psarantonis)—

and then was popularised as the anodyne "I'm in love with a married woman, God enlighten her so she may leave her husband, Filedem Alas" (here with the Greater Xilouris brother, Nikos, and '60s flutes)—

The other survival of Tabachaniotika is the Staphidianos, as "I rejoice in my torments, I celebrate my bitterness". It's clear this is rooted in Muslim music once you know it—it's an Amanes (it also gets called Χαλεπιανός Μανές, the Aleppo Plaint), with the unmistakable melismata of the Orient, and a gloriously expansive melody.

This recent instrumental version on lyra is clear enough:

Compare and contrast, moreover, six versions of the Aleppo Plaint: in Turkish, sung by a Greek refugee in the States; two early Greek versions; two tabachaniotika Cretan recordings by the boulgari player Stelios Foustaleris (there's a post about it)—with not a lyra in sight; and finally a recent lyra-and-vocal recording.

I don't like any of the six, btw, because I always get stuck on the recording I first heard, which was a glorious, full-throated plaint. It was on Manuel Dermitzakis' mixtape in fact, so good luck finding out who recorded it.

OK, one more embed. An Arabic performance of the same tune. Linked to the Greek youtube by my friend Aktinotos:

One further deviation from the current Cretan mainstream has flourished—because it fits the Cretan heroic self-image. The south-west of the island, where blood feuds flourish and where no doubt they eat people alive, has Rizitika, "Foot-of-Mountain songs", unaccompanied ballads of virility and vengeance. No instruments are allowed there: they're presumably deemed too frivolous to sing of slaughter to. Those songs—a couple at least—have circulated around the island, although not in the dances where a lyra is played. I have an electrifying recollection of walking past a café late at night in my mother's village, where twenty men around a table were belting out "I shall leave mothers without sons, and wives without husbands".

There's nothing authentic in men from placid Zakros singing a ballad from the murderous other side of the island. Nor is there anything authentic in the Great Nikos Xilouris recording it with instrument backup (and a misplaced dove graphic on the YouTube vid):

But then, there's nothing authentic in any of it. There's nothing authentic in taking a cleancut young man from the Rethymnon countryside, tussling his hair, and making him the icon of an island, and of a nation's left-wing resistance.

That's the Nikos Xilouris legend, and I can see at a more cynical remove the image manipulation that I couldn't at the time. (That he died young contributed to the image building of course, no less than it did with his contemporaries in rock.) But that doesn't meant there wasn't also a Truth to that image.

There's nothing authentic about taking one folk musical instrument among six or seven, and enshrining it as the Sole True representative of an island. The paper where I found out (at 26) that modern Cretan music has been reengineered shocked me—because I'd assumed authenticity. The paper was driven by the complaint of a West Cretan fiddler, that the same State TV which had promoted Cretan lyra performances when I was a child was blocking Cretan violin performances—because only the lyra was felt to be distinctively Cretan. So the lyra changes into a semi-violin, steals the violin's repertoire, and then boots the violin off the stage. There is a rationale to that, but much less of a Truth.

Nor is there anything authentic in what Kostas Mountakis did to the lyra repertoire, bringing it in line with the new tuning of the instrument. The most manic of the East Cretan dances is the pidikhtos, the Jumping Dance. Or the Kastrinos, the Iraklion Dance, or the Maleviziotis, the Malevizi Dance; or, swapping straight lines for zigzags in the back-and-forth steps, the Stiakos, the Sitia Dance. In all its manifestations, the base riffs show you a dance that fits within six notes with notes to spare:

That's not the version Mountakis recorded. The version Mountakis recorded starts that way, but it's also worked out octave runs, and there's no way that's what used to be played on the lyraki. But of course, the Pidikhtos as augmented by Mountakis is now the standard version.

And that's not authentic either, but that's a pretty narrow and thankless notion of authenticity anyway. Greece needed a young Cretan with tussled hair and a heroic voice as an icon. Men in Zakros cafes needed songs to sing out into the night sky. The music is a vehicle, not a museum piece.

True authenticity is not about repeating Mountakis' Pidikthos note for note, as Ross Daly did in a recording I heard once. Ross Daly is cool in very many ways—

—not least being an Irishman who decided to turn himself into the Xilouris Bros' Ginger Uncle, and does interviews on Athens TV with a Cretan accent heavier than any native-born Cretan who's made it to Athens TV. From his fanclub page, here's Daly forty years ago, with Nikos Xilouris in the middle, and his teacher, Mountakis, at the right:

But repeating his teacher's dance note for note is not getting the point of the music. True authenticity is appropriating what was played before you, and making it your own; and that includes adulterating it. Which is what Mountakis did, and what the transmogrifications of the Aleppo Plaint do.

(Daly has more than made up for his failure to innovate on Mountakis, by inventing a new lyra modelled on Indian string instruments, with sympathetic strings. He also has written up a more knowledgeable summary of Cretan music than this. Including something I didn't know until tonight—that the use of the violin in my village on the eastern tip of Crete was not an aberration: Zakros too was violin and not lyra country.)

True authenticity in Cretan folk music is not about playing the selfsame riffs in the selfsame manner as a hundred years ago. It's about having some muso friends over for some roast meat and raki shots and some riffs. And having those riffs pattern into recognised dances. It used to be a lyra in the Eastern countryside and a fiddle in the Western countryside and a boulgari in the towns and just your vocal chords and a rifle in the South-West (and I have no doubt the roast meat was human there). Now it's thunder-lyra and lute. It used to be stern men with headkerchiefs and a knife at the ready; now—why, now there's even female lyra-players.

And the recordings now (not just hers) have dialect consultants, to make sure the rhymes aren't in too standard a Greek.

But the music lives: that's why it changes, because it's not yet in aspic. You can still have musos over in the village, and you can still go to a Cretan music night out in Iraklion. And on a night out in the '20s, lyra players would also play waltzes, and with the mass mobility of Modern Greece, lyra players now will also play mainland kalamatianos dances; none of it's authentic, but I'd rather the inauthenticity of a living tradition, than the authenticity of a museum, or the artificial scrubbing a culture clean of its inconsistencies. Like a Crete that only plays the lyra, or a Greece that only speaks Greek.

I say that, as a Western Multi-Culti; yet even that artificial homogenisation becomes living, and its own organic tradition; so I'm guilty of aspic myself in hankering for bagpipes and boulgaris. The modern monoculture of lyra and lute dates from the '30s; but at its best, it has come up with wonders. An ethnically homogenised Greece is a pernicious artifice, but new diversities and parochialisms and sentiment have emerged, because that's what human beings do. The Ottoman Selanik, where Ben-Gurion saw for the first time a Jewish working class that could make it on its own, is gone. It was been replaced by Thessaloniki, Mother Of The Poor—the new home of the Asia Minor Refugees. But Mother-Of-The-Poor is not more fake or less heartfelt than Mother-Of-Israel because it is newer, and it's certainly not a pale imitation of Athens. It is its own beauty, it too is a home.

The mistake in making a fetish and a museum piece of culture, is it fails to acknowledge that culture changes. The past of Salonica is Jewish, not Pontic. But its present is Pontic, and its past before the Jews was Byzantine, and it's all Salonica, and all valid.

I was shocked to find there were no thunder-lyras in 1900. But there were no rebecs in Knossos either. There was a Cretan music before bowed instruments and manic riffs, although we'll never know what it was like. That doesn't legitimate banning violins and bagpipes and drums from any representation of Cretan music, nor Corfiot mandolins from representation of Greek music: that's the levelling impulse of centralisation, and its main offence is that it's boring. But that is not to take anything away from the greats of the thunder-lyra, from Mountakis or Xilouris or Skoulas or Garganourakis. Saying Cretan music is only the thunder-lyra is a lie; saying there is great Cretan music on the thunder-lyra is not.

Especially when the thunder-lyra remembers that there have also been other Cretan musics, and it too chooses to take up the Aleppo Plaint.

Weekend Acadians

2009-09-02T10:48:00.002+10:00

I've left this post so long (a month!), it's funny; funnier still that I've already said much of what I was going to say in it, in the preamble that ended up as a separate posting. Still, I'm reaching the end of my current backlog of Canadiana—and I'm not finding Angry French Guy's latest inspiring enough to provoke more this fortnight. Besides, as my Gentle Readers remind me, it's more interesting when I write about something I know about, than about something I don't.

So. When I was quizzing Acajack about the complexities of North vs. South New Brunswick Acadians, he brought up another phenomenon, somewhat related to it. My query was about more vs. less assimilated Acadians, and how the tension between the two makes the concept of Acadianness itself up for debate. Acajack brought up the extreme outcome of this debate: fully assimilated Acadians, and whether they can set the agenda of Acadianness on their unassimilated counterparts.

Acajack is delightfully level-headed and well-informed. That's not to say he doesn't have a bias; sure he does, it's impossible not to have a bias about these things. This post is particularly maladroit, in that I accept his report of what has happened, but I don't like his reading of it. That's maladroit, because he's there and I'm not, and he knows what he's talking about and I don't. In all likelihood, he's right, and I just don't want him to be right.

But I'll reproduce the chain of facts he reported first.

Acadianness traditionally has been about speaking French. In fact, the French-Canadian identities have long centred around speaking French, especially once Quebec went urban and secular. (I don't know whether the Acadians have gone as urban and secular; I suspect not.)
Chiac to my ears is still basically French. It's self-consciously bad French (the phone number for the fictional Chiac pour les dummies is 1-800-PARLMAL [TALKBAD]), but it's French. So Chiac vs. Acadian does not illustrate the division I'm about to get into, but it informs it.
The Acadian World Congress convenes every four years, to bring together the Acadian diaspora. (Of course diasporas can have diasporas of their own.)
The Cajuns are descended from Acadians, so they should be involved at the Acadian World Congress.
A lot of Cajuns no longer speak any French—Cajun, Acadian, Chiac, Joual, or Rive Gauche. They're proud of their Cajun heritage, but they speak English.
This is awkward to Acadians, because they have defined themselves in Acadia as the French-speakers, and the Acadian World Congress was a place where it was safe to celebrate French-speaker–hood. But eventually they relented: the Cajuns could come, even if they didn't speak French.
The debate about whether to allow English in the Acadian World Congress would have been informed by the split between North and South New Brunswick—Brayon land and Chiac land. In the south, where French is spoken by a third of the population and not 98%, Acadian identity is constructed differently, and does not necessarily assume speaking French as definitional to it.
That contention came up in the forums of Acadieman (Acadians debating a Quebecois on the appropriateness of promoting Acadia through a Chiac-speaking slacker, rather than a more "authentic" Acadian).
Canada has assimilated anglophones of French-Canadian origin. Not a whole lot in Quebec, but a lot of them in Rest Of Canada, including New Brunswick.
Anglophones of French-Canadian descent are vehement in asserting anglophone identity: Union Jacks, portraits of Queen Elizabeth, letters to the editor about Quebec. [I could have put that in the opinion column, but I don't see a reason to contest it.]
So there are anglophones of Acadian descent. To be contentious, I will call them Anglo-Acadians. (It should be obvious why that's contentious.)
After the Cajuns came to the World Acadian Congress, Anglo-Acadians turned up to Acadian cultural events, and wanted to be involved.
They did not speak French.
They did not learn French, and did not believe they should have to speak French, in order to be involved in Acadian cultural events.

The extra opinions Acajack contributed to that skeleton are:

In the South, being Acadian is becoming a heritage identity, and marginalised ("ethnic"), rather than a hegemony and default identity, expressed in French ("social").
In the south Acadians know a lot of anglophones, and a lot of anglophones of Acadian descent—some of them are their family members. Which is why South New Brunswick is more sanguine about Anglo-Acadians.
The Anglo-Acadians started showing up to Acadian events because the Cajuns made it cool to.
The Anglo-Acadian participation is superficial, because they're unwilling to make the extra effort of learning French: they're engaging on their own terms.

That's my summary, but you can check it against the original.

All this is plausible; the last bit bothers me. In fact, I went fishing for the last bit, because it bothered me, and got Acajack to restate it explicitly.

On the one hand, it makes sense that Acadian events should be a safe haven for the French language, particularly in the south. Acadians are entitled to be annoyed at violating that safe haven, when the focus of their identity is language. That kind of censure is commonplace; I'm reminded of me rolling my eyes at Greek-Americans, or the next generation of Greek-Australians, who cannot speak Greek. I'm reminded of the Esperanto censure against "crocodiling".

"Crocodiling" (krokodilado) is when someone in an Esperanto club uses a language other than Esperanto. (I was going to say "uses a natural language", but it'd be just as applicable if you started bellowing Klingon drinking songs. taHjaj wo', ghuycha'!) Of course, you'll likely be using the local vernacular when you do crocodile, so it's not like the communicative function of language is not being met. But the image is apt of a crocodile, chomping up the safe haven. This is Esperanto territory. Speaking English there profanes that.

So from that viewpoint, I'm with the Acadians. (Or, if I'm being obnoxious, the Franco-Acadians.) Moreover, it's not like the Anglo-Acadians have a clean slate: they assimilated, they overtly sided with the colonialist. And Acajack did use the term "sold out" (= vendus) at one point, though apologetically, so he does have his own reaction to that. There are reasons why the unassimilated kin of the Anglo-Acadians look on them with suspicion.

On the other hand, the Anglo-Acadians are not walking into a solid, "icitte on parle Joual" Quebec. (Not that even Quebec is that solid.) They're walking into a debate between north and south, on whether language is the definition of Acadianness. And I'd imagine the south takes their side. And for better or worse, the Anglo-Acadians will now contribute to the debate; just as the Cajuns did. Long-term, maybe for the worse, maybe New Brunswick turns into Maine. Maybe Prince Edward Island already has.

(I've borrowed a book on Prince Edward Acadian phonology, coz it was in English, and had a sociolinguistic preface. I'll report back on what I find. And yes, I can read French, but only if I absolutely have to, and the books the library had on Quebecois and Acadian were not fascinating enough to compel it.)

There is something superficial about rocking up as a weekend Acadian. Given the past, there's something ungracious about it. Yet I still think Acajack's take is unsympathetic—though I admit, I goaded him into it. You can construct a more sympathetic take: the Cajuns raised awareness among Anglo-Acadians of Acadian cultural functions. They already knew they existed, but the Cajuns gave them a hint they might be welcome after all, even if they didn't speak French. And they went along, cluelessly, without enough humility or atonement, without knowing that really, they were walking into a safe haven for Acadian French. (And more damagingly, from what Acajack reports, without wanting to realise it when they did walk in.) But I'm not convinced that they didn't go along sincerely, and I'm not convinced that they don't belong there.

I think Acajack's take unsympathetic, mainly because I wasn't thinking only of Esperantists or Greeks, but also about the Irish. And Australian Aborigines, who have had their language taken away from them, and who all too frequently react with discourses of purity, and reject those insufficiently like them. As I have meandered elsewhere.

It's not the same as Acadia, not at all; that's just my wires getting crossed. The pain of the Irish or the First Australians is real enough to be debilitating; the Anglo-Acadians surrendered their language long ago, get hegemony out of it, and now just show up to Acadian do's on the weekend. Maybe they just did it because the Cajuns Made It Cool; but after all the history of Anglo-French relations in Canada, how Cool can it really be to be an Anglo-Acadian? Maybe, I surmise, there's a pang there as well, in some of the Anglo-Acadians, of what they have lost. I'm not there, I don't know anything about it; but maybe there's some of that.

I'll close with something ungracious, and then try to make up for it. I was catching up on Angry French Guy past postings, because I'm not finding the latest batch as interesting to me. Acajack said something that stopped me in my tracks, that explains Australian multiculturalism, but that I think also illuminates what could happen in the Acadian identity debate, now the Anglo-Acadians have claimed a seat at the congress table.

And this is why people of diverse origins who have come to live among us are the real instigators of change. They are the ones who diversify the definition of what it means to be Québécois by defining the Québécois identity as their own. In a sense, they *force* the majority into it.

Faced with so many people with various degrees of melatonin (thanks Fon, I love that formulation) who claim to be Québécois (or whatever… Canadian, American, etc.), the majority is coerced, often subtly and unknowingly, into altering its definition of the “national” identity.

First... wow. That's so spot on.

Second: It's ungracious to use the rhetoric of an inclusive Quebec against the survival of Acadian distinctiveness. In fact, it's inapplicable, because Acadia is not a nation the way Quebec is. The most gracious I can get, to make up for it, is to admit that the sentiment is right for Quebec and Australia, but will probably destroy Acadianness (at least in the south, where there are Anglo-Acadians precisely because Acadianness is more precarious there). And there, it should be—not combatted exactly, but guarded against.

Maybe get that guy to write Chiac pour les dummies after all...

Change of e-mail adress

2009-08-31T20:26:00.006+10:00

A special kind of blindness made me ignore the impending death of the optushome.com.au domain over the past five years. The plug has finally been pulled on it (and I've just found out about it); those of you who have been mailing me @ optushome.com.au, please change immediately to optusnet.com.au

[EDIT: it's been a stressful time. that's optusnet.com.au]

Hyphenated Greeks in Movies and Television

2009-08-31T18:51:00.003+10:00

An Anon commenter responds to my latest Will Be Offline notice with:

Don't worry too much, heartless Anglo. :'(

By the way, since you're an avowed Aussie multiculturalist (and because I *actually know*, rather than "eh know", nothing about Australia), could we have your opinion on the first piece here:

NEW AUSTRALIANS

Anon, you fail to let me know whether you're a Canado-Anon or a Greco-Anon (although the first line gives me a hint: this is about that .qc business, no? Attain sovereignty, and all objections are removed. Especially by ISO, who restricts two-letter suffixes out to politically sovereign(ish) entities.)

For that, Anonymous Yet Assiduous Reader, you get yourself yet another meandering and self-doubting rant on my identity!

I worry about the lack of structure of these postings in particular: they're unstructured because they are emotional, more than I expected. But I've embarked down this path of querying Quebec and Acadia, it's fair that I query myself too...

I have occasionally read Dean Kalimniou's columns (reposted from in the English-language supplement to Neos Kosmos, the local Greek paper). He and I do view the world differently. I may not be linguistically as assimilated as most Greek-Australians, but I am probably more culturally assimilated (not many Greek-Australians hang around in the Humanities, or the government IT sector).

I'll illustrate my bias with my reaction to one of his recent posts, condemning My Life In Ruins as Orientalist (from Ms Big Fat Greek Wedding):

The vast majority of the audience in my cinema was comprised of diasporans, mostly women. [...] They were also the ones that laughed loudest at the racist jokes that portrayed Greeks in the most negative fashions. For some reason, we love to hate ourselves, or rather the people who we represent the place where our parents came from, ever so slightly, and take pleasure in seeing them denigrated. I for one do not. Its time that our compatriot film makers are encouraged not to resort to cheap and tacky racist taunts and scatology when portraying their own kind, in the search for some non-existent approval by the dominant group.

I'm sure My Life In Ruins is dumb in ten different ways before breakfast, and I would probably loathe it, not least for its inane take on a real country with real people in it. And yet... I find the resentment of diasporans against the metropolis entirely understandable and inevitable (and as I've hinted, I carry some of it with me). It's not just "Orientalism", and that facile word lets you off the hook too easily when it comes to the ambivalence of the second generation towards the metropolis. We're not seeking non-existent approval by the dominant group. We poke fun at the metropolis because we are *becoming* the dominant group, we are assimilating. We are not Greeks, and Vardalos is not Dean's compatriot the way he would like her to be. That's that whole "seeing the world with Australian eyes" thing I go on about.

We are not yet Anglos either, which makes us... interesting. That's why we care about poking fun at the metropolis, rather than dismissing it as "Wogs begin at Calais". We are also still Wogs; the Chaos and/or Joie De Vivre of Greece shocks us all the more, because it's behaviour we find alienating, in a place we were told was home. (The "We" is rhetorical, and I have spent long enough in Greece to know better—though not long enough to feel differently.)

That's my take, not Dean's; Dean sees the world more as a Greek (to the extent of dropping words like "monophthalmic" for "one-eyed"), so I don't see the world the same way as him. But, to the article in question:

I ignored the Olympics, and I found sports events no real solution to the real problems Greece faces—but that's because I'm an ambivalent semi-outsider, and the Olympics did a world of good for Greek self-confidence. Australian journos did snipe at Greece, because they still buy into the old Orientalist tropes. Part of the reason is that they have access to the local replicas of pre-Western Greece. (That doesn't excuse it at all, but it did give them more ammunition.) Part of it was defensiveness about Sydney 2000 being The Bestest Olympics Ever. And yes, part of it was because they were pricks.

But Dean's real contention, essentialist ("inherent?!"), and tub-thumping, and not unlike what you'll hear in any number of Greek cafés, is that Howard unmasked the Real Australia of racism and intolerance, and that multiculturalism stuff had noone fooled.

All I can say is, there is a racist Australia (which certainly includes Greek-Australians: ask at that café what they think of the Indians, the Vietnamese or the Lebanese); and there is an urbane Australia. The Howard years allowed the multicultural discourse enshrined by the left to be questioned, and brought forth some clumsy moves by the government to assert cultural continuity with Anglo-Australia. (That inane citizenship test where you had to name prominent cricketers.)

But the urbane Australia suffered a set-back; it did not vanish. The new government is not quite going back to the orthodoxy (I'm thinking of Rudd's latest statements in the Australian History Wars). Even so, you don't kill cosmopolitanism off that easily, though you might make it an enclave. For my part, I have not been penalised in my professional or personal life for being swarthy. Granted, I'm not that swarthy. But then, in several ways, I'm not as assimilated as I make out to be either; my cultural predilections have been noted by my friends, they have been queried, but they have not been ridiculed. (*That's* multiculturalism for me.)

And on the other hand, the racist Australia had suffered a set-back; it had not vanished. Yelling "in this country we speak English", as Dean reports, is an attitude that had not died out in the '80s, it was just more delegitimated than it was in the '90s. And there are parts of Melbourne where even the Anglo kindergarten teachers don't dare say so. I can find plenty of people to ridicule my cultural predilections; I don't seek them out. I still believe that time is not on the side of those who would reject me; meantime, my friends, Greek or Anglo, are my friends because they don't reject me.

Dean is right that my story still isn't on the TV though. Neighbours and Home and Awayare still noxiously whitebread, especially when they try not to be. I tune that out too. Is that blinding myself? Perhaps; but is Neighbours really setting the agenda of Australian identity any more, the way it could 20 years ago?

Neighbours. Hadn't seen it in a decade. Happened across it a month ago. Sixteen-year old gets pregnant, boyfriend is unsure whether to commit (why you little shit...), they eventually get back together, they refuse to marry become of some inarticulate pseudo-feminist stance filtered through soapie conventions and hormones, then decide to get married spur of the moment without bothering to tell their folks.

I'm unassimilated enough in my value system that I was reaching for things to throw at the telly by this stage. The thing is, the script writers were trying to be inclusive to my socially repressive viewpoints, by having a Korean student as part of the gang voice her misgivings, and that "where she comes from", family is an important part of weddings.

And the idiot sixteen year old's idiot sixteen year old blond friend angrily dismissed her for being a stick in the mud, and that was the last you heard of that (until the parents accidentally come across them and look suitably crestfallen, roll credits).

I knew which side the scriptwriter was taking. I growled, and switched the telly off.

(Um... I've probably just revealed I would be a bad fit for Quebec—or indeed, for the modern post-industrial world. Thing is, if you have multiculturalism, you will have different views of culture. You don't get to impose uniformity. You do get to require more respect of difference than I've just displayed, I admit. :-)

Yet things do change. Ethnics were predominantly figures of fun in the '80s in the media. I was horrified to rewatch Kingswood Country last year: yes it was supposed to be pointing fun at the old lovable racist, and the show was making some effort to subvert bigotry by showing its ridiculousness; but anyone who calls his son-in-law "oy wog" is now so beyond the pale, he's in Siberia. And even in the '90s Wog craze, there was still a sense that Ethnics were Abnormal. The Anglo waitress in Acropolis Now was overtly the only Normal Person in the show, and even though I found the outlandish Greek stereotypes recognisable and hilarious, having the Anglo be the reference point bothered me. I think it bothered other people too, because the Anglo waitress soon became a caricature of her own (greenie, socially conscious).

To these instances I can only counter the past season of MasterChef Australia, with its Greek chef making nouveau-Greek fish soup, and its contestants including a Torres Strait islander without comment—who was free to be a lawyer and play golf without being made a curio or a token. I'm not saying it was Kumbaya Rainbow stuff, but it was an Australia more recognisable to me, one in which Anglodom was not the fixed reference point, even if it was still the default.

How could Anglodom be any sort of reference point in a cooking show anyway...

That Greek chef founded the Press Club restaurant a couple of years ago, btw. Which launched Greek Fusion cuisine. ("You will find traditional ingredients alongside modern gastronomic tricks, with culturally conventional recipes revamped for the 21st century palate. ") That, I venture to say, is a diaspora thing right there.

If my diet ever ends, I may even go there one of these nights. (5 kg to go...)

Hyphenated and Less-Hyphenated Greeks

2009-08-30T21:10:00.004+10:00

John Cowan has asked me to post about Greek-Canadians. This is a challenge, since I know just about nothing about Greek-Canadians. But ignorance is not preventing me from posting about Acadia either, so here goes.

Canada was one of the list of destinations for Greeks to seek a better life in—back when Greece was not yet an affluent First World country, for Albanians and Nigerians to seek a better life in. We have family friends who have left a grandfather behind to his final rest in Montreal. But Canada was not big on the list of destinations. (And of course, back then there was no notion that Quebec was a distinct destination from Rest Of Canada.) The big destinations were the US before World War II, and Germany and Australia after World War II. As John reports, only a third of the Greeks that went to Australia ended up in Canada.

The Greeks in America are pretty much assimilated by now; the Greeks in Australia are starting to assimilate wholesale. The Greeks in Canada are presumably assimilating now as well, multicultural discourse notwithstanding. The tourist trap Greek restaurant I went to in Montreal (that pedestrian mall bit in Prince-Arthur) certainly didn't feel particularly Greek: I couldn't recommend a single dish to my fellow diners as characteristically Greek. But that was probably as much a function of the location as assimilation. I didn't duck into the Acropolis Ouzeri off East Sherbrooke, which my friend George would do when in Montreal. That apparently is more Greek.

Because I don't know much at all about Greek-Canadians, I'm going to take the one thing I do know, and use it as an excuse to talk about identity Yet Again.

The Greek diaspora are peasantry that fled a poor country; the first generation have maintained their peasant values, and ignored the heathens around them. The second generation got conflicted and rebelled, and the third generation (or maybe the fourth) picks at fragments of the peasant past nostalgically, now that they no longer have to flee poverty and dispossession, and have that past weigh down on them.

The Greek metropolis was peasantry and proletariat, and it was also bourgeoisie and précieux. The bourgeoisie was not compelled to migrate anywhere. And as Greece got more affluent and more integrated into Europe, fewer Greeks were compelled to migrate anywhere, and had the mindset associated with being compelled to migrate anywhere. And Greece moved more and more westwards.

Which means the Greek metropolis now, a run of the mill affluent European nation (though still not as secular as most), is not the Greece that the diaspora left behind. And as a consequence, Greeks of the diaspora are not the same people, with the same experiences or expectations or values, as Greeks of the metropolis.

The connection with Canada (and it is tangential), is that Canada is the only place where this distinction translated into something like conflict. The peasant diaspora was reasonably small there, compared to the States or Australia. OTOH, after the 1967 coup, there was a significant number of Greek intellectuals and bourgeois that fled to Canada. I don't know why Canada in particular, but I presume Trudeau had something to do with it.

But of course, a Greek bourgeois of 1970 is already quite different than a Greek peasant of 1950. They did not have much common experience or values or expectations, and not much patience to explore what commonality they did have; and they had a generation of drift to add to their lack of common background. I'm presuming there was a lot of "you're going to tell *me* how to be Greek?" from both sides.

In Australia or the US, the bourgeois could just stay away from the peasants' parties and newspapers and communities. But in Canada, with proportionately more of the bourgeois and proportionately fewer of the peasants, the numbers were close enough that the intellectuals could form their own communities. I think there were even separate parishes, but I won't swear to it.

In the 1990s and 2000s, there are plenty of bourgeois Greeks in Europe and America and Canada, following the university or the IT trail. It's a new, brain-drain wave of migration; but it feels funny talking about this wave as migration at all, with the circumstances so different from the 1950s. "Émigrés" seems more approrpriate.

The migrants get to go back to the metropolis every decade. And they are nonplussed when they do—although less so, now they get Greek Satellite TV, and can see Greece as a run of the mill affluent European country, live in their living rooms. The émigrés summer in Greece, and are quite plugged in when they go back. The migrants built replicas of the motherland in their Greektowns and their minds, to play-act like they never really left. The émigrés haven't really left, not least because where they've come from is not as different from where they've ended up.

The migrants' children had some disconnect between their life at home and their life in the World, because they are in the World in a way the first generation is not. The migrants' children would have difficulty adjusting to life back in the metropolis, and will stay put. I know I couldn't adjust. In fact, when Greek Idol wanted to manufacture controversy, it would bring in not just Albanian migrants and Gypsies, but also Greek-American and Greek-Australian and Greek-German kids—because it wanted to see the fur fly with the locals.

Greek Idol—or Fame Story as they Engrish'd their name—was a lot closer to Big Brother, and Greek X-Factor is now taking pains to say that oh no, it's not like Fame Story at all. I'll note that the Greek-American and the Greek-German won. The Greek-Australian was apparently too punk and too reserved to get ahead. Yes, Australians can manage to do both, relative to Greeks...

I recognise that émigrés (who are a sizeable chunk of my readers) are just as heart-broken to be away from home, and their offspring is likely to end up just as foreign to them as the migrants' kids are now to the migrants. And I'm really not trying to poke at them (or metropolitan Greeks—who from my vantage point admittedly look pretty similar), just because we're different.

But still, we are different, more than we admit. And the discussion between the two groups doesn't happen as much, because—outside Canada—the two groups don't really have much occasion to talk to each other. (And inside Canada, the two groups aren't on speaking terms.) Given that identity radiates out of the metropolis, it's not exactly straightforward for the diaspora to articulate a defence of their outdated identity. There's a nicety floating about, "oh, you diaspora Greeks are more Greek than we are!" In a sense, that's deeply true. In another sense, I can't help feeling that they don't really mean it.

The flip of "oh you diaspora Greeks are more Greek than we are!" was to be had on Hellas-L. Hellas-L was a storied mailing list for émigrés in the late '80s and '90s: it was an crucial way for them to stay in touch with each other, back before there was a Web, or much of any internet presence in Greece. I subscribed for a fair while, although I posted very rarely; it's where I know Nikos Sarantakos from (permanent resident of Luxemburg). I did notice a dearth of diaspora Greeks there; the diaspora was interacting with émigrés elsewhere, to the extent they were interacting, on soc.culture.greek in USENET. Though USENET rarely fostered quality discussion, and the more uniform culture on Hellas-L allowed a lot more hilarity to happen. (Humour is very culture-bound.)

Now, My Big Fat Greek Wedding (which I have held back from watching) poked fun at the foibles of a Greek-American family. Given how far assimilation has proceeded in the States, I suspect that for most Greek-American the foibles it satirised were well in the past. In Australia on the other hand a lot of people I knew were enthused about it, since the foibles it satirised were still part of their daily life.

I don't quite know what metropolitan Greeks made of Γάμος αλά ελληνικά, "Marriage Greek-Style", as My Big Fat Greek Wedding was released as there. I'm assuming they would have laughed at it rather than laughed with it, the way Greek-Australians did; it must have been fairly removed from current Greek reality. I do remember though that on Hellas-L, one subscriber (name available on request) was indignant that her Greekness could in any way be associated with the movie's shenanigans. "They should have called it My Big Fat GREEK-AMERICAN Wedding"! she fumed.

The subscriber in question was a Greek... in Houston. But *she* wasn't Greek-American, you see. And of course, she wasn't: they were a different identity by now. Just as the Cubans of Miami are by now a different identity than the Cubans of Cuba, or the Vietnamese diaspora from the Vietnamese now coming to the West for study. The ensuing discussions on Hellas-L included much talk of why they couldn't stand to show up to the local communities' functions. In Canada at least, they had the numbers not to need to. Come to think of it, they probably had the numbers not to need to Stateside, too.

It occurred to me at the time that the diaspora didn't have a voice there to voice its own plaint. It doesn't have much of a voice in the metropolis then or now; I remember Greek-Americans ringing up the metropolitan cable channel in the early naughties, indignant about the anti-American bias and conspiracy theories of the news coverage. They weren't engaged with as peers with a valid alternate point of view: they were talked down at as ill-informed naifs.

Not that I expect much more of the hectoring Giorgos Papadakis. Blogosphere blowhards will not supplant the newsgathering of journalists, but they can't supplant the superciliousness of TV pontificators fast enough.

The diaspora have voices enough among themselves, even if the metropolis isn't particularly tuned it. (How many metropolitan Greeks—or émigrés—have heard of Greek-Australian writers?) Yet fittingly, it was a metropolitan singer who gave voice to the sorrow and alienation of the diaspora. Not just any singer of course, but Stelios Kazantzidis, who made his career singing of the sorrow of migrants. (In the metropolis. He was the child of refugees, so he knew something of dispossession; then again, he was a singer, he was articulating dispossession for a living, not a vocation. But who he was doesn't matter; what his listeners got out of him matters.)

At the end of his career, Kazantzidis turned from laiko (urban pop) back to the Pontic music of his heritage. Like Elvis doing a gospel album, I suppose. And you'd be hardput to say Pontic is intelligible to Standard Greek speakers; but my father understood enough of Πατρίδα αραεύω σε [lyrics] to tell me, "that's song's about me."

(Btw, the YouTube quotation of the chorus is using the Wikipedia Orthography of Pontic: εα for [æ], which in scholarly transliteration is α̈. The convention was cooked up just this year, but I can see it taking over the world, the way the world now is...)

Five houses I have built. I am unhoused from all.
Refugee since the cradle. God, I will go mad.

My motherland I seek you. Like a man accursed.
A Greek in Foreign Land. A Foreigner in Greece.

I placed my houses twixt the torrent and the bank.
Wells built of marble. Water flowing like my tears.

Now here I thirst to drink. And water I have none.
I am ashamed to reach and moisten my poor lips.

My motherland I seek you. Like a man accursed.
A Greek in Foreign Land. A Foreigner in Greece.

Offline in Bendigo

2009-08-28T10:06:00.003+10:00

Folks, some excellent comments to my recent posting deluge, both here and in The Other Place. Won't be able to get to them immediately though, as I'm taking off for the weekend for some R & R (well... just the Rest best anyway). I'm going to be offline for three days (if I can last that long) in Bendigo. But the laptop is coming with, so there'll be more postings put in the pipeline for Sunday night.

Tena koe, Kangaroo	How do you do, Kangaroo!
Tupoto koe, Kangaroo!	You look out, Kangaroo!
Niu Tireni tenei haere nei	New Zealand is invading you
Au Au Aue a!	Woe woe woe to you!