This is half-pie.

Thanks to Matt from Mojo Becky and I got to go see Meow Meow the other night. It was our first (and probably only) Festival of the Arts gig this time around (and if the truth be known, more or less the first since the kids were born).

It was pretty entertaining, but I do wish Meow Meow’d done more singing and less mucking about. Still, I think the rather savage reviewer in the Dominion Post this morning was over-egging it a bit.

We had gone to the excellent Sweet Mother’s Kitchen for dinner – we’re still working our way through all the variously nominated venues and shops from last year’s Wellingtonista Awards – and on the way to the Festival Tent we passed the now-famous shadow wall (Body Movies) at Te Papa:

I had heard of the shadow wall from someone, I can’t remember who. Every festival has at least one public art installation or free performance that somehow gets into the collective consciousness, to the extent that it becomes the subject of ordinary conversation. This is one; Gravity and other Myths seems to be another (OK, it was from last year’s Fringe and is making a comeback as part of Summer City, but you know what I mean).

Anyway, photos of people are projected against the wall; the twist being they they are only really visible once people create shadows out of the very strong lights positioned behind the picture projectors. We could have stayed there for a lot longer, watching what people (literally) made of it.

All in all, it was damn good to get out for some adult cultural activity. We’ll have to do it again. Soon.

While at the Phoenix Foundation gig we had to make a trip away from our rather good spot (parents of small children will understand why we had to do this, and quick). On our little trip we happened to walk past the Water Whirler, which somehow Becky and I had never seen working before.

So I snapped it with the cameraphone, and I think it came out better than it might have with a real camera, the low-light noise making like Seurat:

The clouds in particular do it for me. But if you want to get a better idea of the nominal subject, there’s lots more photos of the Water Whirler here.

This is probably my song of the year. I can’t stop listening to it.

I love it. I love how it sounds like all my favourite Dunedin songs (anything by the Verlaines, maybe) rolled up together, cycling around and around in minor chords until… suddenly… there’s a full chorus.

Chords change, the sun comes out, it’s bright grey, but even so, all is well with the world, and the girls and I dance around the lounge singing “ooo-ooo” like a small troupe of blond monkeys.

And then we play it again.

Information:

• God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, by Christopher Tyerman.
• From Wellington City Libraries, Wellington.

After reading Eleanor I conceived an urge to read more about the Crusades. (Eleanor had been on the failed Second Crusade, having scandalously and allegedly become the lover of her Uncle, Raymond of Antioch along the way.)

Also, I had a weird moment not long after finishing Eleanor – as I walked past a group of three fairly rough blokes on Cuba Street I could hear them having some animated discussion about Simon de Montfort and the Albigensian Crusades against the Cathars. It was very Cuba Street, even if they were probably really having a dumbass Dan Brown discussion rather than some fevered, learned, and slightly mad group rant about heresies of various kinds as I had liked to imagine.

So of course I had to seek out a general history, finding this book in the Library.

It’s an epic (almost a thousand pages), but well written and very engaging. It covers not just the events and the battles of the various Crusades, but the various forces temporal, spiritual, economic and cultural that supported Crusading, including eventually why it died out. There’s even the occasional first person description by chroniclers who were actually there – and these are strikingly vivid.

The whole book for me is also a useful reminder of the sophistication of medieval culture. Just because these people lived long ago does not (thanks to the author) have to render their motivations opaque to the present day person. I really enjoyed it, although I suspect that most people might prefer it were a little shorter.

Information:

• The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.
• From my bookshelf; bought from Unity Books about eight years ago.

This is a slim volume that I feel compelled to read every few years, just to relive the beautiful prose and sly humour, and to taste writing that somehow manages to evoke regret without any taint of bitterness.

I have raved about this story once before, a story seemingly without promise but sustained by sheer writing ability. I had come across enticing references to this book many years ago while reading Peter Robb’s excellent Midnight in Sicily, and the mystery of The Leopard‘s author, a Sicilian nobleman whose sole novel this was and who died before it even got published.

It’s the story of Don Fabrizio, a prince of Sicily at the time of Italian reunification in the 1860s. Times are changing, and the prince senses himself to be the last of something, but what something? Somehow I find it hard to explain the story, or its attractions, but they are there in spades. Without quoting vast tracts of text you won’t get the flavour of it either.

But maybe I should try. So here’s the Prince, on entering a gilded ballroom full of his peers:

That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio’s heart ache as he stood black and stiff in a doorway; this eminently patrician room reminded him of country things; the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheatfields around Donnafugata, rapt, begging for pity from the tyrannous sun; in this room, too, as on his estates in mid-August, the harvest had been gathered long ago and stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here now, a sole reminder in the colour of burnt up useless stubble. The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylisation of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on those parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, for ever and ever. The crowd of dancers among whom he could count so many near to him in blood, if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made of the raw material of lapsed memories, more labile than even that of disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Penn., was to prove the contrary in 1943.

I’d love to unravel this paragraph, but it would be an essay in itself. The prince’s peers: “useless stubble”; the music an echo of the desiccating Sicilian summer wind; the whole thing ending with a shocking anachronism echoing the destruction of the author’s own property during the Second World War.

So once again I prove myself to be no reviewer. Trust me, and read the book. And then watch Visconti’s cinematic version…

Information:

• Eleanor: April Queen of Aquitaine, by Douglas Boyd.
• From Wellington City Libraries, Wellington.

My usual trick to find random-but-good stuff to read in the biography and history sections of the library is to have a look at the recently returned section first. Which is how I came across this, a highly readable account of the life of one of England’s most famous/notorious queens.

I’d been bored rigid watching The Lion in Winter, a Patrick Stewart / Glenn Close adaptation from theatre of a play about the interminable wars between Henry, Eleanor’s second husband, and her and her three sons. In contrast though this book brought the era and the people to life so strongly that I had to read until very late in the evenings during this last week. Thoroughly recommended.

And now I can sleep.

Information:

• The Modern World, by Steph Swainston.
• From Wellington City Libraries, Wellington.

This is the third in a fantasy series. Yeah yeah, I can hear you all groan with boredom even thinking about it:

• all those linguistically improbable (not to mention downright silly) names;
• those creatures drawn from the same, near dried up pool of Western European mythos that Tolkien first drank from;
• the young/low status individual finding their destiny through some sort of perilous quest for yet another magical fucking macguffin ;
• the strange way that the authors invent a back history that involves cultural stasis in a kind of Middle Ages for thousands of years with no technological advances at all;
• the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pages, book after book, and most so poorly written that I don’t even bother trying anymore.

This series isn’t like that though. Each book is short, so short that you actually wish they were longer… but without being unsatisfying. And Swainston writes vividly and compactly: battle scenes make you flinch; flying scenes exhilarate; but often I have to reread paragraphs because I’m so used to skim-reading the bloated verbiage of others that I tend to lose bits of Swainston’s story.

So, what’s it about? Does it matter? These things always lose in the description. OK. We’re in the Fourlands, led by an Emperor and his circle of immortal, but not invulnerable, champions. The narrator is the Emperor’s messenger, Jant, an immortal and winged man who can fly (this is unusual in the context), but who also has a great liking for drugs and sex. The Fourlands are locked in a 1400 year war with the Insects, a kind of giant but mindless nest-building cockroach (which when you think about it explains the [almost] technological stasis quite neatly – the rulers are immortal, and their principal enemy does not change).

I’d run through the plot, but I can’t be bothered. The books stand on their own as well-written stories without me having to anyway.

Best to grab the earlier books first (The Year of Our War and No Present Like Time ) – they’re also economical and damn good reads. Thoroughly recommended.

Information:

• Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis.
• From Wellington City Libraries.

Anytime I’m in the library and I see a Warren Ellis comic I haven’t read yet, I grab it. Because if I don’t, someone else will. I’m slowly working my way through Transmetropolitan, Ellis’s frankly awesome gonzo skiffy series now republished in the so-called “graphic novel” format.

So I was well chuffed to find this little tome. (Indeed, I have to hand it on to Hadyn immediately, once I let slip I had found it.)

It’s a quick read. It’s about a private detective, a self-described “shit-magnet”, and the plot is basically a thin device to hang more and more of Ellis’ trademark gratuitous psychosexual brainfuck comedic setpieces on.

Essentially it’s Transmetropolitan set in the present day, with the main protagonist having a slightly different day job to Spider Jerusalem.

And if that’s all that you’re after the book succeeds admirably. And it will have legions of trufans slavering for more.

I loved it. But it won’t do it for everyone.

Information:

• Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food, by John Dickie.
• From Dwyer’s Bookstore, Noosa.

I’m pretty sure I’ve read and enjoyed John Dickie’s earlier book on the Mafia, so this one caught my eye.

The central idea is that Italian food is city food; and that the whole rhetorical vision of well-fed peasant families (naturally led by a smiling Nonna) used to promote “mediterranean” cuisine is mostly mythological… and that the real story is more interesting.

And it is.

The book is full of interesting stories… but for me, although pretty absorbing, it still somehow failed to present an entirely coherent whole. It’s light enough reading that this isn’t a huge problem though, and I’d recommend it.

In fact it was exactly the book I needed while on holiday the other week, and I can also recommend Dwyer’s Bookstore for anyone stuck for an interesting read while in Noosa.

Information:

• Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, by Adam Zamoyski.
• From Wellington City Libraries.

To be honest, I never finished this book. I really loved (if that’s the right word) Zamoyski’s harrowing account of the retreat from Moscow in his earlier book 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow, but this one, although brightly written, was a lot harder going. I might try it again in a few months.