Something to share for Easter

St Alban’s church at Pauahatanui is one of the more historic buildings around where I live in New Zealand.

It’s on a site where history extends far before settler days. In the 1840s, it was the site of the pa belonging to Ngati Toa chief Te Rangihaeata. During the war of 1846-47, the British reconnoitred and then tried to take it; Te Rangihaeata refused battle and withdrew up country where he was attacked on what became known as Battle Hill.

My photo of St Albans’ church, Pauahatanui.

The abandoned pa site became a farm and was shortly given to the Anglican church. The old rifle pits became a graveyard. Today it is kept tidy by volunteers.

We happened to pass by it yesterday, on a silvery grey day. Stopped, got out with the camera – and a few minutes later the sun sprang out. I thought I’d share the result. Enjoy.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: New Zealand’s wild wild west

A century and a half ago, New Zealand could easily have been mistaken for mid-west America. It was the spitting image of the frontier across the Pacific.

The towns had the same limed roads, hitching posts and clap-board buildings. When the railway went in, even the locomotives were the same.

In a literal sense our ‘west’ was actually our south, our middle and our north. Oh, and our west. The whole country, really. It wasn’t surprising. Colonial-age New Zealand was part of the ‘Pacific rim’ – a frontier subculture that shared values, look, speech patterns and even people. Many of them were gold miners, rushing from California to Victoria and finally to Otago.

You can still see traces of it today – a point that came home to me a little while ago when I was in Cromwell for the first time in many years.

Cromwell’s preserved historic district – once a road at the top of the town, now lapped by the waters of Lake Clyde.

I have to say, the phrase ‘yeeeee-haw!’ went through my mind when I took this photo. Inappropriate, really…

Cromwell is unique; the town was part-flooded during the 1980s when the Clyde Dam was completed and Lake Clyde began filling. There was a scrabble to do some last-minute archaeology. And what had been one of the upper town streets was preserved as a historic district, redolent of the way the town had appeared during its golden age in the 1860s.

Elsewhere,  glimpses of later history still poke through – in places, redolent of mid-twentieth rather than mid-nineteenth century – less American, but still here and there with that cross-Pacific influence.

This scene is pretty classically mid-twentieth century New Zealand, complete with English car - except for ‘gasoline’. We usually call it ‘petrol’.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up: more sixty second writing tips, ‘write it now’ – structure, and total geekery with ancient astronauts.

Inspirations: Music, art, writing and unleashing the inner geek

As a writer, I have never regretted chugging through the Royal Schools of Music grade system. Music offers skills that feed directly into writing. Learning how to write a tune to words, for instance, rammed home why it’s important, even in prose, to have rhythm.

The panel of one of my analog synths… dusty, a bit scratched, but still workable. Pop quiz: can anybody identify it from this clipped close-up?

There’s a more subtle side to it, too. Music is about evoking emotion in the recipient – the satisfaction of listening, hope, despair, anger, laughter. So is writing. That’s one reason why rhythm of words is important. For writers, as for musicians, it helps evoke a response.

I still have a small collection of vintage analog synths. They all work – including my Moog, which was old and battered when I bought it in 1987. The fact that it functions 37 years after it left Moog’s Trumansburg factory is testament to the quality.

It is also an expressive instrument, meant to be played like a violin, not a piano. You can do things with pitch-bender, potentiometers and modulation wheels that give the sound life. If you have never heard a Moog 24dBa high-pass ladder filter being overdriven, you’ve missed something. Here’s someone using the filter as a resonator. Here’s Erik Norlander playing the biggest Modular Moog I’ve ever seen.

The worn out ribbon pitch-controller on my Micromoog. Apparently Bob Moog invented that device for Beach Boys keyboard player Brian Wilson.

One of the doyens of the Moog, way back, was Brit prog-rock icon Rick Wakeman. He defined the ‘rock opera’ via such classics as Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1974), essentially a modern oratorio.

I saw him in concert, here in New Zealand, last year – and @grumpyoldrick didn’t disappoint. He spilled off a flight from the UK and gave a 2 1/2 hour show, using the Wellington City Council’s Steinway Model D, all from memory. He had the audience in stitches – he is a great comedian. Along the way he explained how he had been taught to put feeling into music. You close your eyes and imagine what you want to convey – the feeling of a summer’s day, for instance.

To me, that summed up music as art. Art is about conceptual shapes and patterns that convey feeling and emotion. Notes are flawed tools to express an inexpressible form – idea, which is emotional. The essence of art is conveying that emotion, however imperfectly, by whatever medium, to others. And that is true of writing, too. The medium is words; but the essence is emotion.

Wakeman was taught that about his art from the beginning. Others, including me, had to learn it later. The hard way.

Do you find art in music, in writing? How do you see these things?  is music inspirational for you in these ways? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: Scotland away from Scotland in New Zealand’s deep south

In the late 1840s migrants from Scotland poured into New Zealand’s deep south, looking to build a devout Presbyterian settlement untrammelled by the schism that had ripped the Church of Scotland asunder, unbothered by the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution.

It didn’t work. When they arrived, they discovered the Anglicans – the ‘little enemy’, as they called them - had got there first. The Scots also brought their social problems with them. And then the gold miners arrived, with their rough and rouse-about life, sending shivers up the spines of the more God-fearing Dunedinites.

Still, there were some compensations. After travelling half way around the world, they found their little corner of New Zealand was altogether familiar. I covered that story in a book I wrote a few years ago for Penguin, Old South. But what I didn’t mention there was just how awesome that landscape is.

Lake Clyde – an artificial ‘hydro’ lake formed in the late 1980s after the huge Clyde Dam and associated hydro plant was completed.

Not surprising in a way; similar latitude, similar geography and similar climate combined to make things – well, similar. Shortly intensified by the settler effort to import every plant and animal they could find. Including deer, rabbits and – if urban legend is anything to go by – at least one puma.

A photo I took of the Kawau gorge, north Otago, 2013. It wasn’t easy, the place was socked in with rain most of the day I was there.

Today, Southland and Otago are the only parts of New Zealand to have any trace of a regional accent – a slightly rounded ‘r’. Nobody outside New Zealand would likely spot it amidst the universal ‘I’ll have sux fush and a scoop of chups, eh’. But that slight ‘Southland burr’ is definitely there – a legacy of that old Scottish heritage. Cool.

Are there any places you know of that are weirdly similar – despite being geographically distant? Is there any landscape you’ve found that’s totally awesome? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: I have seen the sign, and it is funny

It’s a funny old world, if you look at it. Last weekend my wife and I found this in a café:

Meanwhile my brother-in-law found this on a freeway while visiting Pittsburgh, and remarked: ‘I guess if it’s an emergency, it’s an emergency…’

Then there’s the sign I found in Napier, New Zealand – a significant gauge of the sign-writer’s abilities. Gauge. I did say ‘gauge’, didn’t I.

Not to mention grocer’s apostrophes  in Wellington (took these with my iPAQ, a Hewlett Packard PDA that used the i prefix before Apple did…but isn’t in the league of my SLR):

Have you seen any funny signs around lately?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Bohr, Dirac, Planck, Heisenberg et al vs the ‘Law of Attraction’

Last week there was a post on the ‘Change Your Life’ blog (down in my links list) inviting readers to have their say about the ‘law of attraction’. Fact or fancy?

I posted a short comment, but there’s a lot more that I could say. I did physics before I swung into the arts. (My niece doesn’t call me ‘Uncle Sheldon’ for nothing).

The ‘law of attraction’ was made popular a few years ago in The Secret, a book by an Australian author. I did read it. As far as I can tell, what you desire is attracted to you via this ‘law’ which, apparently, works by ‘quantum physics’. Apparently thoughts create ‘vibrations’. Positive thoughts create more powerful ‘vibrations’ than negative, travel further, and so attract the desired object or outcome to the individual. If it doesn’t happen, it’s because the person making the wish didn’t have enough desire for what they wanted.

It is, of course, gibberish. As I understand it, the ‘law of attraction’ not only violates macro-level physics – specifically, the Second Law of Thermodynamics – it also violates the real laws of quantum physics. As a friend of mine pointed out, quantum physics is stochastic – that is, it’s about probabilities at scales below the Planck length, which is 1.616199×10^-35  metres.  Kind of small.

By contrast, the ‘law of attraction’ is deterministic and operates in terms of abstract human desires.

Niels Bohr in 1922. Public domain, from Wikipedia.

This is something that has always bemused me – how so much that is actually metaphysical can be attributed to ‘quantum physics’. I know Einstein called it ‘spooky’, but it’s not THAT spooky! The principles are well established. Subatomic objects are waves and particles – the duality is an artefact of our classical physics approach; the blend is the closest we can come to defining what the subatomic object actually is. It’s possible to determine EITHER velocity OR position of this ‘wavicle’. Work by various physicists in the early twentieth century – Dirac, Heisenberg, Planck, Bohr and others – explored how the universe worked if the positions and velocities of the particles that made it up were indeterminate – if they existed as probabilities, not discrete and defineable numbers. It was utterly counter-intuitive. But it was also entirely about probabilities at subatomic level.

The cause of the ‘new age’ version, as far as I can tell, came out of a misunderstanding of Heisenberg and Schroedinger’s efforts to describe how a watching human might see the ‘spookiness’. This was then conflated with the problem of observational interference – that is, an effort to observe or detect a quantum event collapses the probabilities to a single outcome. This led to the idea that human consciousness causes the outcome. However, in real quantum physics, no human consciousness or personal observation is required. This was proven by experimental demonstration using a machine ‘observer’ as far back as 1998. Here’s the link.

To me real quantum physics is amazing enough without making it apparently magical as well. As for the ’law of attraction’? Hokum. People get what they want because they work to achieve it.  Affirmations and visualisations can be part of the journey , helping direction – a motivation, a spur to happiness - but they don’t create anything of themselves. Only our own actions do that. I think people need to have faith in themselves, in their own abilities – and to be proud of what they achieve. To accept that they get what they want through their own efforts – which to me is a far, far more rewarding result than wish fulfilment.

What are your thoughts on this?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: summer in the middle of Middle Earth

We’re having a heatwave here in New Zealand. Ten days of settled, golden weather, like when I was a kid – and no, that’s not just nostalgia on my part. The climate has changed.

I thought I’d share a few pictures I took over the past few days of the city I live in. For some reason it’s been tagged ‘the middle of Middle Earth’ just now, though I suspect Tolkien never envisaged his world looking like this.

Oriental Bay – named after one of the original colony ships that arrived in 1840 and a popular walk for Wellingtonians today.

Karaka Bay – on the eastern side of the city where Port Nicholson opens out to the sea through a narrow channel.

Crowds heading to the ‘Sevens’ rugby – really, more a chance to dress up and have fun than about the sport. Was the guy in front trying to swim upstream? And no, this is not tilt-shifted. It’s what came out of the camera.

Brick monastery on Mount Victoria with the sandy beach of Oriental Bay below. The sand was imported from Golden Bay, all 30,000 tons of it.

A rather busy photo of the ‘Bucket Fountain’ in Cuba Street. Iconic since the 1970s.

Immortal words from Iris Guiver Wilkinson – journalist and author from the 1930s, better known as Robin Hyde, a woman whose personal story was as tragic as some of the tales she wrote. Part of the Wellington Writers’ Walk.

I find the place inspiring. Do you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Kindness 2013: thinking about kindness the Asimov way

 I posted last week about how difficult kindness is to really pin down – how to make it work we have to find a philosophy that encompasses many virtues from tolerance to reason to acceptance to thoughtfulness.

It struck me that a lot of what I was talking about can be found in the stories of Isaac Asimov. More often than not, his scenes involved characters talking. It is a measure of his extraordinary talent as a writer that his novels were dramatic, gripping and compelling througb the tensions between the characters as they talked. Wonderful, wonderful writing.

Asimov’s greatest legacy remains his ‘Three Laws of Robotics’, designed to break the early twentieth century trope of psychopathic metalloids turning on their creators. In essence they said (a) don’t hurt humans, or allow them to be hurt; (b) obey orders, except where it breaks the first law; and (c) protect yourself, except when it breaks the other two laws.

Asimov imagined societies where robots were ubiquitous – where they would prevent humans from hurting each other, a kind of active conscience for the dark side of humanity.

Needless to say these ‘robot laws’ were problematic. Asimov knew it – most of his ‘robot’ plots involved showing up loopholes. How do you define ‘harm’? (‘Galley Slave’ involved a robot fixing an author’s galley proofs, because the stress to the author of doing it himself, the robot judged, amounted to harm). Suppose you re-define ‘human’ so the First Law doesn’t apply? (Asimov explored this in Robots and Empire). What happens if a robot is met with equally balanced choices between the laws? (‘Runaround’).

A lot pivoted around the premise that robots operated by if-then logic. Asimov’s key robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, was just that – literal minded, a point Asimov used in a plot turn in The Caves of Steel. But in his later robot novels, robots could reason their way through dilemnas. By the end of the cycle, R. Daneel was largely indistinguishable from a human in behaviour – and, unerringly, working for the good of humanity.

It would be nice to imagine af ‘First Law’ equivalent for humans – but we already have this. We are exhorted from childhood to look after others – to help others – in short, to be kind. It’s just that we don’t. Not often enough. Things seem to get in the way. A pity, really.

I’ll explore some of those ‘things that get in the way’ in the next few posts. Meanwhile – what do you think about a human ‘first law’ equivalent?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: Sixty second writing tips, more on Tolkien, and continuing the series ‘Write it now’ – an A-Z of how to write.

Dreams stay with you in a big country

It’s a big country, in places – New Zealand. Quintessential Middle Earth, to some. And suddenly my wife and I find ourselves in this part of it:

Open road, big country and big sky. To me, my SLR and polariser, irresistible.

Not planned, though we’ve been planning this road trip for a while: a wander through New Zealand’s South Island, over Haast Pass into Westland – a spectacular bush-clad landscape that looks like a downstream slice of the Jurassic. Mainly because it is. But we never get there.

The view towards Glenorchy at the top of Lake Wakitipu. Fog rolled in as I took this one. Of course…

Our plan rests on good weather, not too big a gamble in January, except for my astonishing capacity as a rain god. Clouds roll in as we look around Glenorchy, home to a branch railway line that, at 50 metres, is regarded as New Zealand’s shortest. By the time we reach Wanaka the district is sodden and the information centre jammed with annoyed tourists.

TSS Earnslaw, 101 years old now and a New Zealand icon.  An old family friend of ours was the engineer on board this classic triple-expansion steamer until his recent retirement. You’d never guess, but I took this picture of the Earnslaw berthing at Queenstown, on Lake Wakitipu, with just two hours to go before rain socked in.

The pass is closed by a slip. Come back at noon. We dash through pelting rain to find brunch. An hour later nothing has changed, except the information board which tells us to come back at 3.00 pm for more news. The tourists fume: ‘Sie Kiwis! Ist Ihr Wetter so völlig undiszipliniert und ohne Ordnung!’

Quite. We have family to meet in Westport in two days, and Haast Pass is the direct route.

‘Let’s go up the east coast,’ I suggest. She Who Must Be Obeyed agrees. We set out for the Lindis Pass – the road to north Otago and the MacKenzie country, better known to the world as ‘Rohan’.

A few minutes later we break out into bright sunshine. Of course.

And we enter a gigantic landscape with a big sky and rolling ochre hills that defies the imagination. It is the antithesis of Westland; a vast land of vast form that leaves us breathless with its beauty.

We keep stopping. I am on a photography jag. What’s the point in lugging  a camera that weighs over 1kg with a lens that looks like a ½ scale Saturn V rocket, if you don’t use it?

These days anyone can create a perfect panorama. For reasons associated with ‘the emotion of art as a dada concept’, I still prefer the old collage effect with hand-held SLR. I took these shots of the Lindis Pass, deliberately moving the camera to create that jigsaw look, and pasted the results together manually.

Besides, this landscape is not to be missed. It is not just a big country. It is a huge country. It unfolds around us in a vast carpet of tussock and rolling yellow-brown, mythically gigantic when beheld from the puny scale of mere mortals. I find myself thinking not of the fantasy riders who pounded across it in Jackson’s ‘The Two Towers’, but of the hardy Scots and English folk who took it on for real in the 1850s, throwing sheep across Crown leasehold with enthusiastic abandon and reaping financial rewards that made them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Tussock and Echium – Patterson’s Curse - in the top of Lindis Pass.

Otago tussock. Distinctive – and means the disbelief, for me, isn’t entirely suspended in ‘The Two Towers’.

It’s a big, big country down here.

Not to mention James MacKenzie, the alleged sheep-rustler who, legend goes, hid a stolen flock in the midst of this enormous landscape – a land that, today, bears his name.

It is a fantastic place, a land of legends, a land of history, an inspiration – and a place for dreams.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: the spirit of deco and the art of the abstract truth

A while ago I spent a delightful few days in Napier, New Zealand, enjoying a weekend celebration of 1930s elite lifestyles, an annual event inspired by the architecture that dominates the centre of town. By design it was more Hollywood fantasy than reality, but that made it all the more fun. An inspiration.

The ‘art deco weekend’ also brought just about every 1930s car in the country into one spot, and that got me thinking. There were hundreds of them, polished, preened and restored. And they were more than just demonstrations of the love their owners had poured into them. Though they were that. They were more than just world automotive history. Though they were that too.

They were art. Art in the sense of abstraction – of the way concepts can be poured into something real, then invoke emotion in the recipient. Perhaps, if the artist is lucky, the intended emotion.

These cars encapsulated the spirit of the early twentieth century, an age of shapes and forms made possible by the wild collision of new thinking, new materials and new demands – particularly the need for genuine streamlining in ever-faster aircraft. That translated into art, it translated back into the everyday on the ground, mingled with infusions of Mayan styling, and lifted everyday objects like cars, tea-cups, buildings, vases, furniture – and everything else it touched – above the mundane. In part it was a product of depression thinking; a rejection of gloom. And ultimately the whole floated on a conscious effort to transcend the nineteenth century – to simplify, to streamline. Literally.

It came out in writing. What is Hemingway, with his sparse style, if not art deco? The styles that emerged in everything from ashtrays to pens to cups to buildings to cars to art were an explicit rejection of art nouveau. Modernism – of which ‘art deco’ was a part – took the new and exalted it.

To me it came together in the cars, because they were art for everyman, art in a real sense; an ultimate expression of the materials of the twentieth century – metal, chrome, glass, rubber and bakelite. Conceptually they carried a vision – accessible to everyday people, even if only as a drive-past glimpse – of hope in an age beset by war and depression.

Suddenly it was 1940…

And isn’t that inspiring?

That relationship between time, society and art hasn’t gone away. And art is an expression of human abstract endeavour - encompassing not just painting, drawing or sculpture, but all the ways in which we can communicate through the abstract. Writing, for instance.

What do you figure?

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I’ll be back blogging full-strength from 14 January. Here’s what’s coming in 2013:

- posts on kindness and the positive side of the human condition…with
- some posts on my favourite writers
- some posts on New Zealand scenery and photography
- a systematic how-to series on writing
- some science geek posts
- a short series on history mysteries
- and more

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013