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Volume 22 | Number 1 | Issue 97 | Autumn 2012
- EXTRACTS
- Heart to heart
- Jane Westaway
- Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story
- Kapka Kassabova
- Portobello Books, $39.99, ISBN 9781846272844
Tango is just a dance in the sense that rugby is just a ball game. You live and breathe it. Or you don’t. Fans — and remember the derivation of that term, fanatics — saturate themselves in technicalities and lore, wed themselves to fiercely competing views on minutiae, and build and feed off sub-culture mythology.
There are differences, though. Most rugby fans don’t actually chase the ball around the field: they cheer, groan and bawl orders from real or virtual sidelines. Tango, on the other hand, is no spectator sport. Flashy, throw-your-legs-around-his-waist-while-you-smoulder, stage tango aside, its fans don’t watch it, they do it.
- Windows to wonder
- Tristan Clark
- How to Play a Video Game
- Pippin Barr
- Awa Press, $19.95, ISBN 9781877551314
When I was 10, my brother and I stayed the night at my best friend’s house. While there, we hired a Sega Mega Drive – a game console you plugged into your TV and which was particularly popular in New Zealand in the early 1990s. We rented Sonic the Hedgehog 2, one of the more famous games for the system, and had a fantastic time taking turns to control an oddly fast – and oddly blue – hedgehog.
It’s a vivid memory – not just because of the game itself, but because of the fun the three of us had together. It helped me bond and problem-solve with friends and family; it provided a window into a bright, colourful world where my imagination could run amok; it even taught me to be methodical and patient when faced with particularly nasty problems (in this case, spikes). Pippin Barr’s How to Play a Video Game presents a number of very similar stories. These all serve to reinforce the main point of his book: that video games can provide wonderful experiences, whether you’re a dedicated gamer or a complete novice.
- Fruit bats to faith
- Stella Ramage
- Dark Night: Walking with McCahon
- Martin Edmond
- Auckland University Press, $37.99, ISBN 9781869404833
A meander through Sydney in the possible footsteps of artist Colin McCahon, who once spent 28 amnesiac hours lost in the unfamiliar city, seems a flimsy premise for a book. Fortunately, Martin Edmond brings a poet’s sensibility to the task, weaving a fabric in which art history and personal memoir are the warp and weft, but which is also richly patterned with musings on mind-bogglingly diverse topics — from Roman Catholicism to rent boys, architecture to alcoholism, fruit bats to faith.
But this is more than a dizzying collage of snippets. The strange, sad episode of McCahon’s “dark night” in 1984, as he stumbled further into alcoholism-induced dementia, remains the gravitational centre — the black hole — that holds it all together. “He who had painted so many walks, so many stations, so many journeys of faith and doubt, made this one in silence and darkness and perhaps also in fear,” Edmond writes.
- A lonely Orpheus
- Liam McIlvanney
- The Snake-Haired Muse: James K Baxter and Classical Myth
- Geoffrey Miles, John Davidson and Paul Millar
- Victoria University Press, $50.00, ISBN 9780864736581
“What happens is either meaningless to me, or it is mythology.” Though James K Baxter’s vatic pronouncement is often cited, its implications are seldom heeded. Mythology – and particularly the Greek and Roman legends he imbibed from early childhood – was how Baxter made sense of his world. He didn’t think about myth so much as through it. He saw himself in Odysseus, saw Odysseus in himself. He saw Persephone as a Remuera housewife, pictured randy Otago students as Hero and Leander. These classical figures were archetypes, yes, but they were characters, credible beings who had their counterparts – their reincarnations it could almost seem – in contemporary New Zealand. As Geoffrey Miles suggests in this absorbing new study, myth is less Baxter’s “baggage” than the vehicle of his verse: “Myth is not a trapping which he assumes for public effect, but a fundamental part of how his mind works”.