Clik here to view.
Futa Helu on Tongan poetry
[I'm off to Tongatapu, the sacred south, today, along with some friends. I'll be dropping in to the 'Atenisi Institute tomorrow afternoon to talk with Michael Horowitz's sociology students about Marx's...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Talking in Tonga
There's nothing like a week or so in Tonga to expose the shortcomings of an Auckland spring. The temperature dropped twenty degrees as we flew the two thousand kilometres from Tongatapu to Auckland on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Biosmuggling
I'm sorry about the lack of action on this blog over the past few days. The chill that I complained about feeling after returning from Tonga to Auckland turned out to be the first symptom of what my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A top ten for Jack
A few years ago Jack Ross provoked some interesting debates by naming his twenty favourite twentieth century novels and his favourite long poems from the same century. Now, goaded by one of his mates...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A mystery on the motorway
[click to expand the photo and view the mystery]Although most Kiwis shun the charms of poetry, they nevertheless find ways to delight in the ambiguity and complexity of language. Baby naming, for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Dangerous Davies could teach Chris Trotter
I spent some of the coldest evenings of our Auckland winter under a duvet on the couch, watching The Last Detective, a British drama starring Peter Davison, the man who had the honour of being Doctor...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why we should celebrate the Apple Maps fiasco
When I heard about the outcry over Apple's new Maps application, I thought that the company must have pinched one or two ideas from my mate Paul Janman.When he hasn't been jaunting about the country to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Down and out in Remuera
With its multi-million dollar homes and streets full of spotless, late model SUVs, Remuera is no stronghold of the left. It's perhaps unsurprising that John Ansell, a former ad man for both the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Stalin, Pol Pot, Eric Hobsbawm, and me
A commenter with the nom de plume 'poodag' is unimpressed with my criticisms of Martin Doutre, the Holocaust-denying pseudo-historian who has been an architect of John Ansell's new campaign against the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Five anti-haiku written while riding a bus to Hamilton with Paul Janman
[Paul Janman and I recently made an epic journey by bus to the exotic-city state of Hamilton, where Paul's movie Tongan Ark was being screened and discussed by a very nice bunch of social scientists....
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Atenisi looks ahead
[The forward march of Paul Janman's Tongan Ark, which tells the story of Futa Helu and the university he founded in the swamps of Nuku'alofa, has continued lately, with screenings before appreciative...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Back to the future
Some anonymous philanthropist has posted a long dialogue from 1983 between the left-wing historians EP Thompson and CLR James to Youtube. In between blasts of reggae Thompson and James talk about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Choosing new homelands
Last night Skyler and I watched The Tamarind Seed, a slightly cheesy seventies spy thriller starring a smouldering (that, at least, was Skyler's adjective) Omar Sharif. At the end of the film Sharif's...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Studying the Pacific - and the whole world?
I spent the middle of 2005 in Britain, researching my doctoral thesis on EP Thompson by asking elderly men and women in provincial towns like Worcester and Hull about their memories of the great man....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Alternate histories
When I was thirteen I discovered The Warlord of the Air, the first of three novels in which Michael Moorcock recorded the adventures of Captain Oswald Bastable, an Edwardian Englishman who is blessed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Can the Republicans accept defeat?
Opinion polls suggest that today's American presidential election will be settled by a narrow margin. According to the great majority of pollsters, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are set to win similar...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Grounded at Ardmore
We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed. We want to glorify war — the only cure for the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Are refugees from 'Obamanation' heading downunder?
Near the end of Michael Mann's Heat, the best movie to come out of Hollywood in the nineties, the jaded bank robber played by Robert De Niro urges his sweetheart to leave Los Angeles behind and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Shooting the Domain
If you see several blokes wandering across the Auckland Domain this morning, stepping onto dog turds and tripping on their shoelaces as their old-fashioned cameras track slowly across barren turf, beds...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Labour and the F word
Last weekend's Labour conference was a tempestuous affair. Rank and file party members ignored the pleas of their leaders and voted for democratic reforms, while allies of David Shearer denounced his...
View Article
