In spite of the news

In spite of the news,

the body got up next morning

continued to

go for a pee,

wash its face,

eat breakfast,

put on clean underwear,

check for holes in the toes of socks,

put one leg into trousers and then the next,

make sure it had a handkerchief,

brush its teeth,

comb its hair,

kiss its wife goodbye

and head off to work.

No one noticed the news on the bus.

The bus driver was cheerful as usual,

the passengers nonchalant, or oblivious,

or listening to their MP3s.

The traffic in general was busy,

checking for red lights,

beeping at drivers cutting in,

whistling along with the pop songs

and, some of them,

talking on their cellphones.

In the office, all was normal,

the news was not remarked upon.

Not even when the body told them.

It barely rippled the surface of their

newspaper, magazine, Codecracker lives.

And the ripples it did make caused

no more than an

Oh.   Ah.   Sorry.

I wrote this poem on the 29.10.08, and have slightly revised it.   I have no idea what the particular 'news' was anymore, and of course, it's not important....

Photo by Olly F

Two Dunedin poems

Two Dunedin poems

A small boy

Turns over each of the

Octagon’s metal chesspieces

With a clang reminiscent of a

Coke can being crushed.

When he has finished,

Having excelled in the

Art of overturning chessmen,

He stands arms akimbo.

There is a man I see everywhere I go;

In fact there are two.

The first always wears a t-shirt over his skivvy, and

Always carries a bag slung over one shoulder.

The other one is always seated drinking coffee,

Always talking intently to at least one other person –

Mostly one other person.

The first man is always alone.

I never know whether the second man’s conversation

Is as intellectual as it looks, or whether he is a fool full of words.

I know nothing about the first man.

He is always alone.

13 ways of looking at race

 An attempt to write a piece along the lines of Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird ...

13 ways of looking at race

1.      One way is looking for my pen before I can write.

2.      Race is black, even when it’s brown.

3.      The opposite of black isn’t white. 
Sometimes it’s brown.

4.      White Michael Jackson.

5.      In New Zealand black is
Maori, Tongan, Fijian, Samoan -
you name it.
Do they all think black?
Do they all look black?
Is that my reflection looking back?

6.      Do I see black when I watch
(a) Sione’s Weddding?
(b) Once were Warriors?
(a) No. 
(b) Yes.

7.      Black is someone’s anger expressed in
news reports, TV reports, negative reports:

“They always...” “Just what you’d expect....”

8.      Black is our national colour,
but not the colour of most of our

nationals.

9.      No, I am not a colonialist.
No, I am not a chauvinist.
No! I am not a white supremacist.
            Sometimes the man in the mirror is.

10.  The Dominion Council of the
Returned Services Association
has adopted a recommendation
from its Immigration Committee
to reaffirm the policy of
“a white New Zealand”
and express the opinion
that every obstacle should be
placed in the way of
Asiatics entering the Dominion.
Mr C J Dickie, the MP, in

moving the motion, said it applied,
of course, to Hindus and other
Asiatic British subjects, and it was a
serious problem.
Once they were admitted they would
soon overrun the country.[1]

11.  Dear God, don’t let me be like Mr Dickie.
Of course I’d love all people to be white,
just like You are;
was it Your fault You put some
tint in the mix?

12.  I love Maori people.
What choice do I have?
                But I don’t love Muslims.

13.  We’re All Blacks at heart.
Aren’t we?

---

[1] June 5^th, 1926  Otago Daily Times

Image from Edward Picot's blog. 

Two recent haiku

This blog has been out of action for some time, since the subject matter is no longer top of the pile.   So I thought I might utilise it for the odd poem I write...

If you search for #haiku on Twitter, you'll not only come up instantly with a heap of haiku of all shapes and sizes, but even while you're beginning to read those on the screen, another twenty to forty tweets will appear with more haikus in them (if haiku can be pluralised like that....) 

It's a simple form that everyone and his/her brother/sister has a go at.  Including yours truly...

Cooking silverbeet soup

last year's crop

stalks of gold, red, yellow, green.                                           23.9.11

curly-headed blonde toddler –

mysteries of genes –

straight-haired ginger-coloured dad                                       28.9.11

At the moment I'm trying to get the hang of the form itself, in its best-known arrangement. 

Alibris comes alive again

Yesterday I arrived home to find an email from Alibris telling me that they were charging my credit card US$19.95. I was a bit puzzled about this, as there didn't seem to be any obvious reason why they should be charging me, but an enquiry to them got an answer that this was (of course!) the annual fee.
I haven't had a thing from Alibris over the last year, so in a way it's a bit of a fizzer to be charged that annual fee again.
However, within 24 hours there was another email telling me that a book that's been on there since I first joined up with Alibris has sold. Weird. Things being what they are in the exchange rate at the moment, it's probably a good time to sell to the US. The postage rate they automatically pay us Kiwis is US$10, which at the moment translates to about $18.90. The book price is quite tidy too, though not quite on a par with my last Alibris sale. (My one and only other Alibris sale!)
The book that's just gone was The Book of Books, by Annalee Skarin, one of those strange versions of Christian thinking that seem to intrigue some people. I got it with a bunch of other similar titles from a secondhand dealer, to sell on behalf. It's the first to go in a long time!

Nothing happening

Nothing happening on here at the moment, because I've stopped selling books for the time being. Just got too busy doing other things, and decided to give it a rest. To be quite honest I make more money more regularly out of doing paid posts on the Net than I do out of Trade Me, even though the latter has its moments. I'll get back to it maybe in the summer when the days are longer (!)

Nearly a month

It's nearly a month since I posted on here. In part that's because I've been fairly busy with a different aspect of my life, namely rehearsing for a play. Originally I only had a small part, but then circumstances turned out that I've been asked to take over as assistant director, a role which has actually meant that I've done virtually all the directing for the last couple of weeks. And since this quite time consuming at the moment, other things have had to take second place.
To be honest, while I was certainly making money with the bookselling, it wasn't much money, and some books certainly weren't pulling their weight in terms of getting themselves off the shelf quickly.
So for the moment, I'm giving the bookselling a rest. I'll be back, no doubt.

Well, if I thought I was doing well selling nearly 40 books when I wrote a couple of posts ago, I've now sold 49 for the month. Pretty good going.
My latest was Hitmen, a book about the music industry, which I only put on Trade Me last night. It was gone this morning. I'd had it on Alibris for some time as well, but never got a whiff of a sniff on there. That site's a bit of a dead loss for non-American sellers, I think, since by default the site puts the postage up very high for overseas customers.

Books on the roundabout

I've probably mentioned here before that I sometimes acquire very good books at the local Rubbish Dump's shop (sorry, it's called the Transfer Station these days!).

Two or three weeks ago I found a box with several books in it and amongst them were the two volumes of Hans-Joachim Kraus' Psalmen (or Psalms, to you non-German speakers). They were in very good condition.

These books came out as part of the Biblischer Kommentar Altes Testament series in the early 70s. The two volumes are in German, otherwise I'd very likely hang onto them myself, but my German isn't up to reading thick tomes with technical language, so I decided to put them on Trade Me, in the unlikely event that someone would buy them. So far no one has, but while I was talking to a friend from church the other day I mentioned these, and he was interested in them - he apparently reads German a good deal better than I do.

So they've found a new home. A slightly different kind of home to the one I expected, but a home, nevertheless.

The state of play

I've been a bit pushed for time over the last couple of weeks, so notes on this blog have suffered as a result.
It's been a busy patch: I've sold nearly 40 books since the beginning of April, which must a fair record in my terms. Things are still trickling along, but not with the speed they were.
Several things may not be helping: petrol's well and truly up in price; NZ Post altered their prices considerably at the beginning of the month, which affected all the Trade Me sales; a lot of people are edgy over the economy, I suspect, with talk of recession and mortgagee sales (70% more in Auckland this year than last year, when they were comparatively rare. )
On the plus side, I finally took the plunge and signed up for Trade Me' s credit card set-up, where you get paid straight away. I thought the cost of it would outweigh the benefits, but in fact, I've found more people paying by c/card than I expected. So that's been a bonus.

A record week!

I suspect that this is my best week ever on Trade Me, although I'm not going to say that for definite, as I had some pretty good weeks when I first starting selling on it, a year and a half ago.

Anyway, as of now, the book count is up to 13 and there's a pile of wrapped up books sitting on my floor waiting for the payments to show up in my account. And it hasn't just been the really good stuff that's gone. As I said yesterday books I've had for some time have suddenly decided to move, and today I sold another one I've had for a good while.

I'm not giving up my day job just yet, but at least there's a decent bit of income turning up. Now, of course, with the 31st March just gone, I'm going to have to sit down and work out what I've earned and what's been spent for this financial year. MYOB will help, but it will still need a bit of sorting.

Things Look Up!

Suddenly it's boom time, on Trade Me - at least as far as I'm concerned. Nine books sold since the beginning of the month. Someone picked up two of the Alistair McLean titles I had; two other people have bought sporting books when I was beginning to wonder if anyone ever did anymore (and one of those books I've had almost since I started back in late 2006); an audio book on CD went (Minette Walters' Devil's Feather); a thriller went, a sci-fi collection, and a hymn book. How's that for a mixed bag?

I'd picked up the hymn book at the recent Regent Theatre non-book sale - it cost me rather more than I really wanted to pay for it - and it was only after I'd begun to advertise it that I discovered that it had a church's name stamped on it. Dear me. Let's hope it wasn't 'borrowed' long term!

Ins and Outs

Last Saturday we took the morning off and went to some garage sales and the St Hilda's School fair. There were some reasonable bits at the garage sales, but the fair was selling off books that were really worth picking up - although at first they were selling them rather too expensively. This must have become evident to them pretty quickly, as the prices went down just while we were there perusing.

Anyway, I got a fair bunch of books, and two of them were onsold before the weekend was out. That's the way I like it!

One of these was a children's book in really good condition (in fact very good condition was the general state of what I picked up), and the other a book on Anatomy for Artists, which went to someone who'd bought off me before - something that doesn't often happen to me on Trade Me.