REVIEW: BEE

I was just looking through some old bits that never got into print for one reason or another and found this article written for Re:Mix; turned out that they ran out of space to run the story...




Bret Easton Ellis appeared in the literary scene at the age of twenty-one with 1985’s Less than Zero, a brilliantly wrought novel that evoked Catcher in the Rye’s disaffected Holden, but was closer to the 1920s fetishes of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Having written four novels before turning seventeen, BEE hit his stride with his third published work, American Psycho, published when he was twenty-seven. A $300,000 contract was cancelled by BEE publisher Simon & Schuster on sight of the manuscript and Norman Mailer asked that it be reviewed by a panel of twelve writers before it was printed in 1991 on Random House’s Vintage imprint. American Psycho was initially banned in New Zealand, and was released shortly after on the condition that it be sold shrink-wrapped and stickered R18. BEE followed American Psycho with the quietly deceiving The Informers in 1994 and made a confident return in 1998 with a celebrity satire cum thriller, Glamorama, where he refined his style to perfection.[1] The Washington Post called BEE’s fictions “the literary equivalent of a snuff flick.”

Already notorious for the unrestrained stylised characters and smoothly repetitive plotless narratives of Less than Zero and 1988’s The Rules of Attraction, BEE burst into infamy with American Psycho. Inflammatory, controversial and bitterly protested against, American Psycho gave the capitalist era its Frankenstein in psychopath Patrick Bateman, who perfectly illustrates the selfish greed and insanity of the Eighties. It was a book that strapped you down and mocked you through a welter of amoral fantasies and material depravity described with clinical, detached precision. Death threats were sent, anonymous phone calls made, feminists were up in arms, and Fay Weldon wrote, “Look, I don't want you to actually read BEE's book. I did it for you.”[2] And BEE agrees with her; if you’re a teenager, he doesn’t want you to read it either.

It is these palettes BEE dexterously wields that compel readers to return to his books: his narcissist dislocated youth; his obsessive detailing of surface perfections masking inner emptiness; amoral social requirements to conform; and lives spent chasing the dragon. It’s slasher pornography wretched out of its plastic molds, but it’s no less pornographic than news media pornography, fashion pornography, or war pornography, and that’s the point.

Everyone’s disappearing, and they can’t find or feel themselves anymore, but nothing much happens, anyway, in BEE’s fictions. Money, designer clothes, restaurants, brand names and objects replace their selves, and they are no longer capable of affect, desensitized by random acts of violence, sexual brutality and remorseless prose. Material wealth is taken for granted, and spirituality comes down to what brand of health food is consumed. Nothing shocks; the mention of a snuff movie in Less than Zero has narrator Clay wondering if he should be concerned. Yet no matter how dreadful the action gets, BEE is a master of the American novel; peering into the underbelly of what it means to be an American and unflinchingly documenting his amoral people with a deep sense of moral perspective, as Thomas Pynchon, and Don Delillo did before him.

The characters that people BEE’s books search for their feelings, they try to find something to make them have feelings, something to anchor them to reality. Their tales of disaffect illustrate our prisons, and while BEE is most likely to disappear from the library stacks, ending up a lonely “Lost” in library databases, his fictions will yet reserve pride of place upon the bookshelves of these feeling BEE’s satire, and most likely to be borrowed and never returned. You know who you are. It’s okay; I would too, if I were you.


books

Less Than Zero [Simon & Schuster, Inc: New York, 1985 / Picador: London, 1986]

“You can disappear here without knowing it.”

Clay returns to Los Angeles from college in New Hampshire at Christmas to find his best friend Julian is sleeping with his girlfriend, Blair, but he doesn’t care. As their drug use goes from recreational to habitual, homogenous blond/e and tan teenagers search the suburban Xanax haze of Los Angeles for something to give meaning and feeling to their lives. Julian develops a large drug debt and sells himself for sex, then disappears. Clay observes it all, unsure whether he should merge because people are afraid to merge in Los Angeles, and then he leaves.



The Rules of Attraction [Simon & Schuster, Inc: New York, 1987 / Picador: London, 1988]

“The scene of us standing there was too real and too pointless.”

It’s all stereotypes with haircuts; the diary of a group of confidently hot New Hampshire college students drinking, having sex and doing drugs, in no particular order. Paul’s in love with Sean, but Sean acts straight; Victor Ward’s looking for a girl in Europe; Lauren’s post-virginal and sleeping with someone who’s not her boyfriend, isn’t sure if she likes it or not, and she’s missing Victor; Harry’s dead, suicide, with no heartbeat, but he’s still alive; others gravitate around nothing; Stuart wants to fuck Paul; Patrick Bateman’s Sean’s brother; and Clay tells us people are afraid to merge on campus after midnight.



American Psycho [Vintage: New York, 1991 / Picador: London, 1991]

“Murders and executions ... mergers and acquisitions”

A sadistic, psychopathic Wall Street merchant banker, Patrick Bateman, obsessively details every element of his daily life; recording an extensive bathroom routine with the same relish as his mutilations of prostitutes, rats in vaginas, decapitations, beggar shooting, dog knifing, and what his peers are wearing, eating, and saying. His life is whiled away in a succession of lunches and parties and fucking and killing. No one notices anything behind Patrick’s blank face, and if they notice, they don’t react; there is no exit anyway.



The Informers [Borzoi: New York, 1994 / Picador: London 1994]

“We’ve already been there,” I tell him. “We’ve already seen it.”

In a collection of inter-related stories about a group of friends, it’s been a year since Jamie died in a car crash outside Las Vegas. Tim looks good but isn’t quick on the uptake, and his friend Graham’s mother self-medicates with Libriums and Valiums, fantasises about sex with the pool-tender. She follows Graham to his drug pick-ups, and catches him in lies, as does Tim’s mother; meanwhile vampires stalk Los Angeles, and bodies are found skinned in rubbish bins. The impressions of their lives flash past, and as the stories get bleaker and disquieting, there is left a passed-out intoxication, a drained emptiness.



Glamorama [Borzoi: New York, 1998 / Picador: London, 1998]

“The better you look, the more you see.”

Victor Ward, a blandly handsome twentysomething New York model with a semi-successful sideline in movies and two girlfriends, becomes lost in an increasingly surreal reality. Victor imagines he’s always being filmed, considering how a director would shoot the scene, how the light would appear on his face, and perhaps he is always being filmed, or perhaps his whole life is a glamour. The line between film and real life is hovered up through a rolled-up Benjamin. Victor accepts $300,000 to go on a cruise ship to the UK and somewhere along the way he is replaced by a double, disconnected from his old life and becomes unwillingly entangled in a conspiracy, where everyone’s involved, and he’s a pawn manipulated through broad lashings of cinematic terrorist attacks, which may be staged.



cutoffs:

“But the precise facts of his substance use, like those of his sexuality, or his social life, or his future ambitions, remain out of reach.” [3]


footnotes:

[1] Less than Zero was filmed in 1987 with brat-packers Andrew McCartney and Robert Downey Jr., and Mary Harron sympathetically bought American Psycho to the screen in 2000, and this year Roger Avery brings us The Rules of Attraction; it’ll be interesting to see what he’s made of a book panned as a too self-conscious college diary.
[2] Weldon, Fay. “An honest American psycho: Why we can’t cope with Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel.” The Guardian. Thursday April 25, 1991.
[3] Beckett, Andy. “Leader of the Bret pack.” The Guardian. Saturday January 9, 1999.

How Deaf Am I?

Just so you know:

I found this graphic and I hear naturally at the top of the scale, around 130-140db...

Genesis Meditations

Every now and then I find or am directed to writing online that opens my eyes to elements of meditation.

XM (from an email group I participate in) sent me a link to Organelle last week.

The site is absorbing and provides a concise insight into many of my interests. Particularly, I am grateful for its provision of Ain Soph, a text called the Unknown God by F. J. Meyers.

It all goes back to Genesis.

In meditation, at first, the mind can "see" only darkness. The sensations of the body are present, thoughts fly past in the cartesian theater, but it is darkness above the deep, above the waters of the body.

And slowly, after some time, Light appears.

Anyway. It's all about Genesis, and Organelle has so much interesting detail on various elements of alchemy, the tree of life and its corresponding matrix to the pattern of life.

It's a Long Way to Tipperary

It's a long way to go.
It's a long way to Tipperary
To the sweetest girl I know!
Goodbye Piccadilly,
Farewell Leicester Square!
It's a long long way to Tipperary,
But my heart's right there.

Yeah, so I was thinking about my given names, and the question of the origin of Fogarty came up. Now, Fogarty Researchers might give me clearer answers.

The family story is that we came from the Tipperary / Galway area during the potato famines and ended up on the West Coast, supporting the gold rushes.

Before that, legend is that we are dark Irish, descended from Moor sailors held for ransom after their ships sank off Eire as Wes Ulm corroborates.

"Fact: The Spanish Armada battle at Gravelines itself was definitely not a titanic naval clash, but a short, inconclusive, rather anticlimactic encounter between two large fleets, both of which committed major blunders and neither of which damaged each other significantly. It’s true that the Spanish Armada caused little damage to the English ships, but then, neither did the English ships cause much harm at all to the Spanish fleet, as discussed in the main text below. It was an unusually ferocious September Atlantic storm as the Spanish vessels were rounding the tip of Ireland, that damaged and/or sank most of the Spanish Armada ships that did not return to port, either directly or in compelling the vessels to beach on the rocky Irish coast. Most of Spain’s casualties from the Spanish Armada invasion resulted when sailors died of or were incapacitated from disease and exposure, not from battle wounds. In any case, most of the Spanish Armada ships did manage to return to port in Spain or Portugal. Many of the lost ships had already been in a state of disrepair, while Philip II’s crucial Atlantic class vessels—the most seaworthy in the Spanish Armada and designed for oceanic traversal, the key to Spain’s New World empire and the newly conquered Philippines archipelago in the Pacific Ocean—returned to the Iberian Peninsula largely intact. In fact, excellent seamanship was displayed by both the English and Spanish sides in their encounter, and it is quite remarkable that the Spaniards did not suffer greater losses considering the unremittingly powerful storm they had encountered."

- Top 10 myths and muddles about the Spanish Armada, history’s most confused and misunderstood battle,” by Wes Ulm, Harvard University personal website, © 2004.

There are several narratives that either support or debunk this theory. Another site says that modern scholarship has not proved or disproved the Spanish Armanda theory:

"When the Spanish Armada sank, several bands of Spanish sailors managed to reach Ireland, where they were stranded. Over time they married into the Irish population, and their descendants, with their darker or blacker hair, eyes, and Spanish complexion, naturally stood out. They were and are called the Black Irish."

Looking at photos of my family I can almost see this, yet we're European in appearance, if not clearly Irish, as we do look quite continential. I am always asked where I am from, probably due to my Deaf accent and dislocated look. I usually say, Noo Zild via Spain, France, England and Ireland and that settles it.

I'd like to know if this is more than just Romance.

Time to look at our whakapapa.

Why I like those the best

The articles I reposted below are the ones I like the best out of what I've published because they are clean.

They represent my honest opinion and the year 2002 was a good year for my writing.

I think I wasn't feeling silenced then, as I feel now. I don't feel like writing because I see it as being futile. There isn't much point. So why bother. I gotta change this mentality. Hence a blog.

I think I was more optimistic about the future and so felt the need to write, back then. Or maybe that's just how I feel right now.

A Thousand Ways of Density

Null density :: We spun in after the 27-day spiral
sunwards on electromagnetic rails from the tear edge.
We’d been out on routine testing the termination shock
limning the subsonic, that glistening pane of tension
before the heliosheath teardrops away from the
interstellar wind. For slowtime days we combed and
wove the flux for density, braiding the tessellating
groove so that Sol’s coruscating field curled on. The
vibrant rayon-ionized and counter-rotating spheres of
our interstellar bodies dissolved into invisibility as we
crossed the threshold of Golden. Golden! We the
Delany’s golden, we who somehow could traverse the
edges of Sol’s radiation and live: he golden, she golden,
null golden, golden to the lost density of light and its
gardeners. Heliosurfers, solsailors and sundancers
came here to depolarize and we were no different.




One density :: And we were no different. Oh! We were
as different as anyone could be. We each rotated down,
we each dropped notches of dimensionality, and our
glowing unity fragmented and I am again. Everything
started with desire and I am no different, I’m at war with
my self on my body’s battlefield: subtle pushes and tugs
down at the resisting dense. The bar was dark, but we
were light, polarized, and individuated after our passage
through the aether gateway grid. There were humans
here, other golden, other species, and various energies.
The bar wavered in the collective light; coloured
shadows shifting like mandlebrot sets. We, the Oh and
the I, we sat, the three of us. No need to order in the
Golden. Our muscles ached from our tense weight. To
be golden is a curse and a blessing. Ionized water
sprayed around us and for a moment our stars showed
like diamonds in the mist.



One density :: Mirrors folded in upon themselves and
we stood at the bar, to amusement of multi-dees and
the consternation of the humans by whom we
apparated. Humans, hah, could never handle
downshifters to their dee. The condescension of
downshifting assaults pride, always; better to arrive
downshifted than to emerge from the very air in the
semblance of one of them. Us, we energies, must
become human to be visible on their dee. And the pilots
who drink at the Golden, they’re no mere human.
Sense hardened from thunder through silent space,
they, who endure the slow death of space because to
leave earth is to become the ance-spacer on the Galileo
run, returning every ninety-year to the grandchildren of
grandchildren, they’re the original human beings. I
saluted the valiant tragedy of their lonely centuries as I
sat at the bar next to a creased triplanetary, probably
the seer of a seven. Leaning from a high stool at the
bar and tall with a face like rainforest midnight, eyes
flecks of moonlight in the trees, and as his breathing
returned to normal through his broad nose, he said,
looking up at me, “you do that to me every ‘me
do you?”



Two density :: “It wasn’t that long ago when it was light
above, all around and in the waters-between.” Slipshift.
We were eating raw vegetables on a moon beneath an
orange sun and a bright star. A simple matter it was,
through a vesica piscis between twin orbs, to timeslip at
the Golden. Still looking, “waters-between?” he asked,
“need a singalong? See how dense I get on you?” And
surfing his countenance: why do you fly on thought
while we scar space why we so dense you subtle I see
nothing you up pushing down and my senses ‘plex the
multi intertwined in mine. Oh, to live so slowly, to
comprehend so little, every micro-expression unread,
and needing to brute the air to produce those clicks and
whistles as he spoke me and I listened him thirteen
ways but five only he shared.



Three density :: Bone, he archaeologies of a life
drunken with emotion. The cold expanses between the
planets shed whispers at shadelow. A stolen embrace
between two moist three-brained bodies become two
from within the nine. Deeper yet, Khushi sings under
the bluest sky, a brook joins her, and the trees tickle one
another. Falling; a wet crown pushes from her lips, pain
of the sun explodes in my eyes and burning air by my
heart beat. I gasp and scream as I fall free; now three.
Beat. Waters-between, heavy yet? Waters-between, o
that name flows through my hair as my arms pull and
push warm liquid as I swim with the Sirians. Float upon
the waters of my homeworld, golden. Castles condense
above the reefs and drift on the wind.



Five density :: He stood against the bar ignoring sounds
(singing angels, my Love, my guides?) and watched his
fleeting thoughts: I am that I am, seer, with my eyes and
ears and nose, with my math and jets. Here not
because I’m tall, not because I’m golden, oh no, but
because I waver with golden now. Never saw tell (?).
Here first, you see, now then. O how you golden avoid
the density of lightness. Then you wouldn’t be golden
and I wouldn’t be human. Katipos balloon from their
nest under the pingao grass. They drift over my face,
spiderleg shadows dervish round my eyelashes, and one
lands on my cheek. It tastes me with its tiny black
palps and I see fanged chelicera about to sink venom; I
slap it dead to the sand.



Eight density :: Bone taps a tailormade jane from his
pocket. Hark at the fool sucking on hot coal, eh watersbetween.
On the cornices, four circles imprint his palm
as he knuckles the Audi round a hairbend, rear wheels
skidding in the verge. White crystals spill from his nose
and he laughs with a blonde woman, her hand on his
knee as he shifts up a gear. Tullamore Dew on his
breath, hot red meat in his belly, and cocaine in his blood.
The wind rushes in his ears and he sounds like a violin.
The Oh and the I, we are sated now; how our shoulders
ache and our forehead flower’s afire. Thanking Bone, we
bade him farewell and the Oh and the I, we left. Thirty
four counterclockwise and twenty one clockwise and at
nine tenths of the cee it is all just light.



Thirteen density :: I saw her face float over my nicoflare
like a ghost in smoke. Pale gold and emerald quarks
whorled at me. She (?) shimmered and shifted; caught,
I blinked away the burn and peered into the bar, gone.
Talking I was to . . . (?) Oh, musa been angels again,
oheah, the Golden. Funny, lighting here’s shady
nowdark, brillig was when I inschooned. Shebeen type
of face to suicide for, a ko-omote, ah fib on the acci: on
the lip of the return to the one, end of mean loop cycles
back to thirteen, a one a three is four. Step it upout!
He scaled back up to one density :: as I, the Oh and the
I, rotated back to null density :: we saw (?) his wry
smile, the traceries of micro-expression and left with a
gentled sigh, . . . is all light.




a thousand ways of density . . .

A SF prose poem published in Foxymoron #3


By Peter Fogarty

Original titles included Fibonacci Density and Fibo-den-acci. I'm kinda glad that Georgie and Mel used the subtitle instead.

Telephone service gives new voice to the deaf

Go to New Zealand Herald link

14.05.2002

The use of new telecommunications powers has finally brought one disabled group in from the cold, writes PETER FOGARTY*.

Life has been changed dramatically for the deaf and hearing- or speech-impaired by the Government's announcement that a telephone relay service will be established. The decision comes after 25 years of lobbying by deaf and disabled activists.

A telephone relay service is a simple technology that enables people who cannot speak or hear to make phone calls to those who can. Deaf and hearing- or speech-impaired people will use a special keyboard, a teletypewriter (TTY), which connects to a standard telephone, to type to an operator at a specialised call centre. The operator reads out the written words and transcribes the spoken reply to text which callers then read on their TTYs.

This service has been proven remarkably swift and practical overseas. In New Zealand the deaf have used TTYs to call one another since 1982, but it was impossible to communicate with anyone who did not have a TTY of their own. Also, most deaf people could not afford a TTY because of the poverty created by the business community's inability to integrate them into society.

The devices were also more expensive to use than normal telephony because it takes about three times longer than a spoken conversation to transmit the same information.

When Telecom took over the public telephone system in 1986, several submissions were made on improving access to telecommunications for the deaf. These included reduced costs for toll calls, a relay service, TTY rentals, and access to emergency services. Telecom ignored all these submissions.

Four years later, its marketing manager said the company was in business to make a profit, and would not subsidise these services.

In 1989, fax machines became widespread and affordable. The deaf rapidly adopted faxes because they were cheaper than TTYs for toll calls.

When the internet became popular, the deaf shifted to email and instant messaging, and now use these to communicate with one another and the hearing community.

This remains unsatisfactory because most deaf people still have to wait to get a response to their emails or faxes, while a telephone call gets an immediate reply. This is very important when emergency services and businesses are concerned.

The Human Rights Commission received two complaints from deaf people, Kim Robinson in 1995 and Victoria Manning in 1997. They claimed that Clear (now TelstraClear) and Telecom were in breach of sections 44 and 65 of the Human Rights Act because they directly and indirectly discriminated against the deaf and the hearing- or speech-impaired by refusing to provide a relay service to access voice telephony.

The telecommunications companies' response was that they had no obligation to provide a new service, that their provision of voice telephony required an ability to hear and that there was no incentive to provide a relay service for so few people.

Last December, the Human Rights Commission found that Telecom, TelstraClear and Vodafone were in breach of the human rights charter by refusing to provide a telephone relay service.

Now, the Government has announced the compulsory establishment of a telephone relay service by the end of the year as a telecommunications service order under the Telecommunications Act.

This act requires telecommunications companies to provide the services defined and negates all the arguments the telecommunications companies had against their provision of a relay service.

"All citizens need access to instant two-way voice communication, not only in an emergency, but to participate fully in the community, which is a fundamental principle of the New Zealand disability strategy," said the Government.

Millions of calls will be made with the relay service. A total of 204,700 people were identified at the last census as having some hearing loss. Of these, the Deaf Association says, about 8000 identify as deaf.

There is also a large number of people with speech impediments. This number is easily trebled by including the hearing people who cannot contact the deaf and hearing- or speech-impaired people because of the lack of a relay service.

The Fitzgerald Report commissioned by the Government in 1999 estimated that 14,000 people would use this service.

However, this figure does not include the hearing family, friends and colleagues who will also use the service to contact the deaf and hearing- or speech-impaired. The relay service will enable all these people to communicate more easily.

I am deaf. We will now be able to make emergency calls, call for pizza, and invite friends over. We will be able to apply for jobs where only a phone number is given.

We will not be refused work because we cannot use a phone. We will be given a voice after being silenced for too long.

The Government has finally ensured our right to full participation in the community.


* Peter Fogarty is a freelance writer and editor.

SIDEBAR: London Times

Go to London Times link

July 23, 2002

'It is not easy. But it is beautiful to have the choice of sound or silence'
by Peter Fogarty

At first I heard nothing. Instead I felt pain: a piercing, terrible stabbing in my auditory nerve. Three to four months like this went by. I wore the implant at the lowest setting, slowly increasing the sensitivity of the microphone over time as my brain grew accustomed to the pain. I could distinguish the sounds of objects as different kinds of pain. A door slamming was a firm, heavy jolt to my cortex, while a siren stroked my nerves with a razor blade.

Not surprisingly, I did not flick the switch on all that often — I could spend weeks without turning it on — and I learnt a truth: silence is golden.

Then I went to a drum’n’bass party at a nightclub. I don’t remember who played but I remember the end of the party. I have always had good bone conduction hearing — everyone has this, so dance music was perfect for me, especially breakbeats: drum’n’bass, two-step, R&B and hip-hop. Anything with arrhythmic bass lines moved me: I felt the tunes and thus heard them.

But this time, when I walked out, I heard the early-morning traffic down the road. The sun was coming up and I could feel, and hear, the party going strong behind me. I could hear!

Everything after that was a new experience. The sound of my nylon jacket as I walked was a whisper on the wind. The loud sound of my urine splashing into the lavatory basin was a revelation. You guys listen to this stuff every day? People’s voices were incongruous, an oddity, but appropriate to appearances.

The sound is still as painful as before, although I have developed a tolerance. The simulation provides me with information, but also with a strange feeling: a magnetic field spins on the left side of my head behind and immediately beneath my ear on the surface of my skull. The flesh gives if I push in behind my ear and I feel the edge of the internal processor.

I still don’t switch myself on all that often. When I’m in a club, or when I feel like it, or just for the hell of it. Or when people want to talk to me. This is why I have a cochlear implant: to help the hearing people around me to live with me — so they can understand my speech. It’s my attempt to cross an uncrossable divide so that I may live and work as a human being in society.

I hadn’t expected a “miracle” cure. In fact, I was ambivalent about the implant and refused to have it until it became apparent that I was unemployable because of my deafness. What I had hoped for was a higher quality of hearing, and that I might be able to use the telephone.

Now I can, after a fashion, based on 80 per cent guesswork and 20 per cent technique. OK. The first letter of the word is a, b, c, d, e, e? OK. The first letter of the word is E, right? Yes. How many letters? Four? OK, what’s the next letter — a? Yes, easee? Oh! easy.

No, it is not. But it is beautiful to have the choice of sound or silence.





Peter Fogarty, 27, a writer, lost his hearing at 22 months after a meningitis infection. He had a cochlear implant three years ago.

VIGNETTE: Across The Silence

Someone touches me on the shoulder as I walk down the steps of the Clock Tower at Auckland University during Orientation Week. I turn, shading my eyes from the midday sun, to look at who tapped me. I see a man who seems familiar, but I cannot place him.

He looks in my eyes. I see the tower, trees and passersby reflected in the lens of his glasses. With this look, I see that he is deaf, but how Deaf is he? His next gesture gives me the answer. He is Deaf. His lips shape a word as his hands come up. He said "remember?" and I translate his sign: "Remember me?" He has the facial musculature typical of the Deaf, an oddly slack, but expressive way of adding nuance to sign language.

"I'm sorry, your face is familiar, but I don't remember your name," I said while making the signs for sorry face don't remember name. My face adds the emotional meaning for sorry, a slight frown, and familiar, I raise my eyebrows, and shake my head for don't. I shrug on name.

He smiles at my amateur sign language. He adopts the body language of talking to a hearing person, and tells me his name. Michael Preston*. The namesign is right hand in the shape of the ASL M, which then 'bites' across the chest to the left.

Michael guesses at my namesign which is right-hand thumb to index finger, keeping forefinger straight in the American sign for 'P', hand up under the chin, making a universal speaking gesture. He comes pretty close, his hand forms the P, but held in front of his chest. I smile and show him the right way.

I sign "nice to see you, what are you doing at university?" (nice see what doing university), and Michael tells me that he has just come from seeing the disability counsellor, Lynne Crabb, about interpreters, note takers and tutors for the two papers he is taking this semester.

Our conversation is slow as we negotiate our words past our mutual disability. He is just as deaf as I am, but he is Deaf and I am not. He is fluent in NZSL but because I have never lived in the Deaf community, I am not. I understand NZSL when it is signed to me, aided in large part by lip reading and body language but my own NZSL vocabulary is around fifty words or so. My first language was body language, then reading unlocked the universe, and with reading came spoken language. I never quite acquired the ability to sign as I was mainstreamed into general education for the Hearing after a year at the Deaf kindergarten at Van Asch College for the Deaf in Sumner, Christchurch.

So we're talking past one another outside the Clock Tower on Princes St. Because it's Orientation Week, the footpath is crowded with streams of students stepping past. I catch a few looks, and read their body language as they digest our visual information; that we are Deaf, and the still beauty of our punctuating arms. After ten minutes of talking; Michael signing and I speaking carefully so that I may shape my words as well as I can with the manuscript of my face; I learn that he does not have an interpreter yet for his classes.

"What? No interpreter?" What interpreter, shake head, frown, I said.

"No" Michael signed, "I work for AUT, and AK University has no interpreter for Deaf, but at AUT they have 3 full-time interpreters" No work AUT AK university no interpreter but AUT have 3 full interps, Michael shrugs, as if his body adds "what can you expect from these people?"

I ask about notetakers, aren't they enough? Michael looks at my eyes. A pained expression crosses his face, and he signs hard read, lots words, shake head, understand. I translate, "It's hard to read the notes, there are a lot of words that I don't understand." I gasp.

Michael sees my reaction. He frowns and asks "What?" Over about twenty minutes I explain that I'm a born writer, and find reading very easy. I explain that the quality of my note takers was reflected in my grades. Michael marvels, his expansive face opening in a wry smile as he nods slowly in understanding. Over these twenty minutes I learn a large number of things. That he cannot read very well, and must have tutoring immediately after some classes to have the notes explained to him. That the quality of educational interpreters is low, and there are far too few for the numbers of Deaf students who need them. That the reason there aren't more Deaf at tertiary level is because there are no interpreters there for them, and without interpreters, Deaf are adrift.

"But interpreters cannot do the job properly," I said, "they simplify the language far too much, and you lose too much information because of their editing."

Too many long words. I can't sign them. I hold back a sigh, and keep my face still as Michael asks me for clarification. I tell him that I have a major problem with interpreters. I tell him that I believe that interpreters are to a large part responsible for the state of Deaf education today.

"How much can you read" I ask Michael again. In response he reaches into his bag and grabs a folder and shows me a page on the folder. It is a conversation with his tutor.

Michael points at a word, "acquire", and asks me, "means 'get', right?"

"Yes, and no" I sign. Yes, beat, and no. "Acquire means get at the very basic level. You understand?" Michael nods.

"Acquire means more than just 'get', it means that you have worked to get something, or that you have been given something as a result of a plan, or maybe inheritance."

Slowly, I unpick this for Michael in sign. Acquire mean get. But acquire mean work get. Or give get. Maybe uncle die and you get. When Michael understands, he smiles, then frowns slightly and asks why couldn't the interpreter tell him this?

"You see! That is exactly what I mean, that interpreters are the problem; they don't teach how words are subtly different in meaning, but just teach you the sign for that word, and you do not attribute the extra meaning to the sign, with maybe a prefix sign like work-get . . ." Too many words again. I try again.

"Interpreters are the problem. They simplify your language, and so you see the world in simple ways where it is really more complicated. But because the words you use to talk about the world are simple, you can only have simple ideas about it, and when you try to read, the language is difficult, isn't it?" I said, interpreter problem. They simple your language, so see world simple where more complicated (fingerspelled). Words use talk about world simple, you have simple ideas about, and when read, language difficult?

"Do you understand?" I sign. Michael nods, slowly, not quite convinced. I tell him that the english language is abundant with examples where more nuanced versions of simple words have no sign equivalent.

"Meaning is stripped from the words when they are signed to you, and you are not told that it has been stripped from the word. All you get is the basic meaning, which is not enough for translation purposes," I said, painstakingly signing it out with the few words that I could use. Michael nods again.

"I understand what you are saying now," he said, and we both turn to look at the time on the Clock Tower. To our surprise this conversation has taken almost two hours, although we have exchanged a fraction of information that hearing people would have in the same time, we came away from this meeting with a richer insight into the complex layers of being Deaf in a Hearing universe.

I am reminded that I exist in a kind of limbo, neither a Hearing person, nor a Deaf person. I drift in the between of the margins of both worlds.

I have glimpsed the inner life of a Deaf person, Michael Preston. I have been reminded that educating the Deaf necessary comes in a multitude of variations depending on the language skills in sign, oral, and reading that they have acquired in the morass of Deaf education in New Zealand, and that only an approach tailored to the individual will help the Deaf succeed in life.

I am sure Michael Preston walked away with a richer understanding of how meaning is taken away from him by the inexpertise of his interpreter, and that he will use his position at AUT to teach the interpreters how to avoid this invisible trap that so often locks the Deaf down.

I walk down the hill through the dappled sunlight beneath the trees of Albert Park, Auckland; my mind expanding with insight.






Vignette written as part of the requirements for the post-graduate diploma in applied journalism qualification at Massey Extramural, May 2002.

*Michael Preston is not his real name. He was slightly offended by the way I represented him, due to my lack of understanding of NZSL and I may have reported the conversation inaccurately and so I have changed names to protect his identity. Everything written here is from my own perspective.

Why am I not posting enough?

I don't really know why. It's not that I have nothing to say, but probably that I don't think I care enough about what happens day to day in my life to say something about it. That must be false, because I'm here, talking about it.

Last week I came to the end of a trial working in a second-hand book shop down on High street. It was the other one, the one with really rare books, you know, Rare, as in collectible, expensive and all that. I was managing the shop two days a week, doing mostly cataloguing and helping customers out. I hooked the job through my aunt who was friends with the owner. I think we all had doubts about my ability to work there because it was a sole-charge and that meant there was no one to answer the phone for me.

Honestly, the worst thing in the world after hearing a bus brake on a steep hill next to you is the telephone. I don't know if it is the cochlear implant, or it is universally horrible, but when you are the only person around to not answer the call, which is always going to be a business call asking for some book or another, it is excruicating to sit there and wait out the rings.

Anyway. I didn't keep the job for that obvious reason. Once more, stymied.

I thought perhaps I should load the blog with the previous pieces of writing I got published and liked enough to keep. Here we go.