Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Apologies for the break

My apologies for the lack of action on this blog over the past couple of days. As some patrons of the frightening phenomenon known as facebook will already know, Skyler broke her arm on the weekend whilst mountaineering.*

*The word 'mountaineering' sounds impressive, doesn't it? Am I allowed, though, to refer to a gentle stroll around the rim of Mount Mangere, the long-extinct volcano that rises a few hundred feet above South Auckland, as 'mountaineering'? I remember Janet Frame talking in her novel State of Siege about how ridiculous Aucklanders and other notherners make themselves, in the eyes of their southern compatriots, when they call small green hills 'mountains'.

But I'm not alone in trying to aggrandise Mount Mangere: on the day of the break we were walking the mountain with Hamish Dewe and his wife Sabrina, and when Sabrina had hesitated, during one of more precipitous parts of the crater rim track, Hamish bellowed something like 'Where's your Kiwi mountaineering spirit? Where's the spirit of Sir Ed Hillary?'**

We'd made it down the steep sections of the track, which some kindly soul had laid with bitumen, and were almost back to the car, when Skyler slid on a small piece of mud, and instinctively threw out her left arm to break her fall. She broke the arm as well as the fall, and since then I've been rushing about bringing her pillows and cups of tea and painkillers...


**In a typically laconic comment deposited under this post, Hamish staunchly denies this attribution. I am not sure, though, whether he wishes to distance himself from Sir Edmund Hillary in a general sense...

16 Comments:

Blogger Giovanni Tiso said...

Sympathies, but could you run past us again how Facebook was implicated in the breaking of Skyler's arm?

3:22 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

'Where's your Kiwi mountaineering spirit? Where's the spirit of Sir Ed Hillary?'

Once again: great quote, poor attribution

-h

4:00 pm  
Blogger Skyler said...

Alas, Giovanni, poor phrasing!

(Maps, posting as Skyler due to continued lockout by blogger.com bastards...)

6:57 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

Broken arm so no good. I recall breaking my leg.

Where is this place called the South Island again?

1:28 am  
Blogger Skyler said...

Your fine poem-sequence 'Hospital' was on my mind as we sat in Middlemore hospital, Richard. I wish the text was online so I direct people to it.

(Maps aka Skyler)

10:01 am  
Anonymous George D said...

Mangere Mountain has fiercely assaulted my mother too, so I hold it to be a dangerous maunga, approached with due respect. It will throw you off at the slightest provocation.

4:20 pm  
Anonymous Keri H said...

As someone who broke their invaluable right arm in 3 places (classic Cole's fracture & an additional upper break) in 2009, my empathy Skyler.

Richard, te Wahi Poenemu is that place that keeps you wee creatures anchored in the here & now -pray to Ruaumoku that we dont decide to up-anchor!

12:15 am  
Blogger Robin Johnson's Economics Web Page said...

Commiserations on your broken arm, Skyler.

6:13 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

Maps - thanks. That sequence extended from before and well after I was in Middlemore when I was reading Smithyman's books (i was going through them one by one in an effort to explicate them , possibly in a book, but nothing came of that yet) and also Rilke and some Baxter and other things.

I used the opportunity to continue a kind of diary so It is quite good thing to do. If you (one) can take a note book into a Hospital and in my case I also got a long piece of dowel for moving the curtains!

Re the poems. Jack was here and we were talking about the new site he and David Howard have done for Leicester Kyle which is still getting done. But it looks good already.

I had a book he needed by Leceister and a few other things.

But re getting up online the (great) thing that Peter Simpson (Jack reminded me of this) has done for Smithyman made me realise hat such a thing partly or largely solves the problem of posthumous things,(executors and so on...)

I will largely disappear on my own demise so executor in my case is too grand a term!! (I think of Casaubon and his poor wife Dorothea Brooke in "Middlemarch").

So I am considering making a new Blog and there I will put all my poems. Or as many as I can , Oso I will start with those I have on my data base at the moment. (Later do hyperlinks etc). Not vast like KS's "Collected" though

Anyone will be free to use or read or download anything on there and later maybe add to the Blog). But it will probably remain largely ignored but even if a few people look...the main thing is they will be there as well as on other copies I have (and in some of my books).

I have many other writings etc which are on note books and scraps of paper etc but that's another story.

I (until this date) have never written first drafts directly onto a computer or in fact a typewriter. My initial things were all hand written for reading live.

For my sins I often don't revise much either. Would I had blotted out a million!

But I should be able at least to get my poems up onto a (new) Blog - I'll give it name and just cut and paste the ones I have on my computer for a start. That would include Hospital.

11:03 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

Re the broken arm, it is no joke. (But we can and do laugh abouthetse things of course.)

Good that Cerian didn't need an operation.

My sympathies and well wishes re that.

11:06 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

Keri H

Cheers! You're a battler!

I just realised..I looked up the map..there is a big long squarish thing attached to New Zealand!

What's it doing there! Is New Zealand ill? !? !!!

11:10 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

Another one for the road Maps-Skyler Inc

..you of course know that Brett is ill with child...ooops!

I m-m-mean Jack said his better half was "expecting"...

Any news on that front...?

11:13 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Cheers Richard!
O, *that* squarishrectangularishindented thing?
It's the waka holding the fish above water of course!
And the anchor = Rakiura (and I know where the rope is supposed to be, tee hee!)

4:53 pm  
Anonymous Keri H said...

Arrrgh! How have I turned into an 'anonymous' when responding to Richard?

OOooo! The word verification is 'carchi' - so reminescent of carches/carcharadons...what *is* Blogger up to?

4:56 pm  
Blogger Richard said...

Keri I actually don't know what carcharadons are! I know you have a lot of dictionaries etc, I have the Shorter Oxford and a lot of other ref books (I haven't yet resorted to Google but I seem to be doing that more and more..)

Silly this North South rivalry nonsense. Some people take it really seriously though...

I started a list of those identification words (there is or was a movement called "flarf" but I..hmm..it's been done)...

To veer vastly off topic - I was looking at one of my own strange poems...and I suddenly realised that (maybe) what I had been doing do some years with my writing was not "postmodernism" per se how ever defined...but in a sense I was (possibly) talking to myself. (And if one talks to oneself it is perhaps what one might wish to say at some level to various others?...not sure what I mean)...

I do literally talk to myself I have no problem with that...

maybe in deep way all writers are?

But "talking" in kind of ..hmm/..libidinal or subconscious way..a kind of "nonsense" dialogue that somehow reflects some deep psychic or psychological state...

Something like that.

Just musing aloud again!

7:01 pm  
Anonymous Maps/Scott said...

Skyler thanks everyone for the expressions of sympathy. She's been more or less parked in front of the TV since the accident...

8:01 pm  

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