Hymn for Lloyd Geering

[Sung to The Old Hundredth]


The Bible is but people's words,
Around the sun we're yearly hurled,
Evolving, changing like the birds
On this our only precious world.

We choose the actions that we take,
Forgiveness comes from those we wrong,
We are the choices that we make,
Our lives are lived and then are gone.

Is this too bleak to understand?
Grace, love and fellowship remain.
Let us dwell on the Son of Man.
Is there still good we can attain?

Shihad with strings.

"Shihad have done the unthinkable. They have made a pop record. ....There is even a ballad, with strings."

Suddenly I remembered Hamish Laing's mother in bright sunshine, telling me at a Wilton Playcentre do a long time ago that he and some Wellington High mates had a band, that it was good, that they'd been experimenting with wiring up his younger sibling's violin. (I was reading Nick Bollinger's somewhat inflammatory Listener review of Beautiful Machine of which the gist is that Shihad have changed, but not too much).

Now I'm curious, did Tom Larkin, Jon Toogood or Phil Knight go to Wilton Playcentre too?

Time travel.

The second thesis I didn't write for my Masters in Philosophy was about how time changes us; me-2008 is related to me-1995 but importantly different. The third thesis I did actually finish for my Masters in Philosophy was about how art represents (we pretend). I riffed on themes in Mimesis As Make-Believe by Kendall Walton. A few weeks ago I was checking the VUW Philosophy website thinking that after Iris starts school perhaps there's a course I could do some tutoring for and be able to play Ultimate with the Vic teams during school hours as well as earn a little money. To my surprise I discovered there's a mini-conference celebrating Walton's work at VUW tomorrow. Me-2008 is going because I feel I sort of owe it to me-1995, and besides, I'm still curious.

Where I'm at.

I just wrote a letter to a friend I haven't seen in a long time, I want to go to bed and so I'm not going to write a blog post too but I doubt he'll mind me putting it here.

Hi,
I'd like to write properly, but it seems unlikely this month as Hazel's taking a bit of settling into her second year of school. She's at the primary school I was at, Iris is at the playcentre I was at too. Most people in most of the world and through most of time raise their children where they were children themselves but it still feels odd to me.

I'm about to turn 39. In a very biologically appropriate way I've spent my thirties working with children. Other people's first of all as, of the four years I spent in the US while Sean was in graduate school at Indiana University, Bloomington and I went along for the ride, I spent the last bit working in "daycare". Then we came back here and I puttered around for a year with a couple of part-time jobs, one of which was in "early childhood education" and since then I've been Mum. If Mum is a job it's the best and hardest one I've ever had but we've decided to stop at two (though I wouldn't bet this lovely old sunny house in Northland on that) in order to retain the opportunity for work-life balance.

I'm thinking I might well do some art school courses when Iris gets to school in a year. I have some big scale installation-type projects growing in my mind (eg. a box a person can crawl into and peer out of because the sides are a web of yarns: somewhat related to those nail and yarn pictures of the seventies but less regular) and if I can fight akrasia far enough to get around to tidying the playroom on a fairly frequent basis surely I can get some of them out of my mind and into the world.

I write a blog. Or at least, I text my blog the occasional sentence and form intentions to write more some other time. http://susan.sean.geek.nz if you're curious.


-s

If you're actually curious you could read this: http://karapoti.blogspot.com/