Janelle > Recent Status Updates

We came to New Zealand by ship. There were lessons in English and my brother Josef and I were soon speaking more English than Hungarian, and our father too, for it was his English that had helped him to be chosen. It would enable him to “fit in”, they said. The New Zealand aim was to have people who would “fit in” readily and painlessly (painless for those already there). Like invisible mending.

I explained that in the very early morning a troop of deer and fawns came down from Grizzly Peak and moved from garden to garden on Grizzly Peak Road, eating the vegetation. I knew that home in New Zealand the shotguns or the poison bait would be out at once, for the land is our saviour and we insist that we have no partners when we exercise our presumed right to destroy it.

He was young, charming, and he’d written two novels, Seed on the Shore, and Leaf in the Wind, both in a kind of blowaway tradition — women with streaming hair and eyes, horses with flowing manes, and trees and men with flowing seed, set in storm and hurricane country.

Of my writing he said, ‘I see. It is like the camomile—the more it is trodden on the faster it grows.’

The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.

‘For my part,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘I would be glad to be let die in peace. But the doctors would be horrified to hear me say it. They are so proud of their new drugs and new methods of treatment — there is always something new. I sometimes fear, at the present rate of discovery, I shall never die.’

The only good that could be discerned in the arrival of the new sister was the fact that the ward was now more alert. Everyone’s wits had improved, as if the sister were a sort of shock treatment. The grannies had forgotten their will-making, and no longer threatened to disinherit each other or the nurses.

Both tourists and natives face the daily struggle of giving in to the addictive delights of sizzling fats and the Western unity offered by those neon sign giants, or handing themselves over to the old-school exoticism of a slightly burnt sausage served by a man who doesn’t waste words or offer a customer comment card.

His corpulence, double chin and puffed out cheeks spoke of the blissful life of a landowner.

Opiskin has been claimed as the ‘spiritual progeny’ of Uriah Heep and Mr Pecksniff, besides which it may be observed that Dostoyevsky’s unbuttoned delight in caricature and the depiction of outrageous and eccentric characters is as much Dickensian as Gogolian.

Another literary presence stands behind Gogol in The Village of Stepanchikovo — Dickens. During penal servitude Dostoyevsky, starved of reading-matter, had eagerly devoured David Copperfield and Pickwick Papers; Dickens’s works were available in Russia in translation not long after their original publication. …

Back then, when you died, you didn’t have Mick Farrell coming along shoving a pipe up your backside. Pumping you full of Roundup and paint stripper. There was no embalming then. Dead people looked like dead people and that was it. Nowadays you could put a corpse on the catwalk and no one’d be any the wiser. They make them look that good.

…… Romeo isn’t any better or worse than he was before all this drama took place, in fact he’s just a boring old fucker who doesn’t even have a fat wife to hide behind any more. Mark my words, you’ll be hopping mad with yourself that you wasted your young days waiting on a roll in the hay twice a week with a fella who has his head halfway up his arse and who doesn’t have a clue whether he’s coming or going.

You’re not to go next, nigh or near that shite hawk and if he wants someone to drive around listening to the sound of him puffing and sighing in the car, he can go find some other poor eejit who’ll do that for the price of a bag of chips. Fuck it, Paula, you’re worth more.
He could at least throw in a battered sausage, Stacey said.

I followed up by saying that I thought the stripper was all right in her own way. She could’ve been worse like. Never went in for the baby oil or any of that stuff.
It was a fortnight before I was allowed back into the bed. Another week after that before I got a hot dinner. Three fuckin’ weeks without a spud all because of that gobshite and his stripper.

Many of the writers here portray insomnia as beyond time : the insomniac is an immortal being whose reality makes sleep seem sentimental by comparison.

People make presumptions about nurses, thinking they’re all kind and motherly and warm. Well, I’m here to tell you that’s a load of bunkum. Some of the worst description of hures I’ve ever come across were nurses and with good reason. You’ve no use looking to be a nurse if you’re soft and have the sympathy of the world for people. What use is that?

Then there was the funeral….What a glory. Mammy brushed his teeth over&over before handing them to the undertaker. They have to be fitted into the mouth,….It fills out the face. And I wondered at that. All the eating he had done with his bare gums& now they put teeth in. Michael Farrell was right. He looked different. Younger somehow. With the teeth. His cheeks rounded. Cheeks that we had stood in line to kiss.

Australia, new word in itself, has primarily two categories of people, First Nations and other, and although some people have raised the question in settler-colonial contexts of when is a settler a local?, I would say when the horizontal axis denoting years is casually and even conservatively estimated at 60 000, then two hundred years is notable only for its staggering insignificance on any scale graph.

But when it comes to tropes, there is one often heard in Australia when Palestinians enjoy the implications of the rednecked epithet. Someone yells from a car with the windows rolled down and music blaring, ‘Go back to where you came from!’, and the dear Palestinians nod to their interlocutor like he’s on their side and they say, ‘Inshallah, God willing!’.

..like the story of what happens to his second-born daughter, third child, Salma, who at six years old is beaten so brutally on the back of her legs by the nuns for being left-handed that she is obliged to lie face-down on her stomach for three whole months before she can stand to walk again.

I am standing in a queue which is short but moving slowly,&the metal detectors are whizzing in overdrive&I remove all the obvious things&then the unobvious ones,which include my bra,glasses &hairpins (&an Israeli, who is holding my bra aloft in one hand as I walk through the security arch with no shoes on, says ‘beautiful eyes’,&I think this scene captures for you the intimacy of structurally ingrained oppression).

Palestinians, as I have told you, know place, and they know about origin, and while I tell you that Ellen was born in Bethlehem, the Bethlehemites say, ‘Well that may be, but the name’s from Jerusalem’.

And you may have heard of the exhumations from the cemetery, and then injunctions, and the flood and then the drought of funding that was raised for a Museum of Tolerance, designed by a great but hapless architect, to be un-ironically erected over the bodies of dead Palestinians.

I give him an example,because although he is trying to see, it’s hard to see what you have been taught to ignore,the way Australian children are taught about Gallipoli but know nothing of the Frontier Wars. When I am first planning to visit Jerusalem, I find an apartment available on Pa’s street, which boasts Arab style fittings. I tell him that quite obviously this apartment is not ‘Arab style’, but ‘Arab in fact’.

The Palestine Restaurants follow the modern science of nutrition. The League of Nations sets a base requirement for calculating calorific intake, and sets also a reduced Palestinian level. It will not be the last time that external parties impose diets on Palestinians.

..the cultish doctrine of neoliberalism was/is the weapon of mass destruction.

In the Nights, as in the Arthurian legends, as in so many fairy and folk tales, women gain magical power to offset their lack of social and political power. This trope carries right through to the witch frenzy to the 16th and 17th centuries in Britain, mainland Europe, and the early American settlements. It is intimately connected to male fear of autonomous female sexuality.

The truth of the world, it’s peoples, it’s cultures, it’s art and inventions, is so much richer and more fascinating than white exceptionalism allows.

It’s an example of Science Darwin, the fieldwork, evidence-based biologist, versus Story Darwin. His discoveries are sound science. He knew that creationism was a story that needed to be rewritten, he never understood that the Boys’ Own tropes of empire were inventions masquerading as fact.