John (also SNOW EVERYWHERE)
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/mountain-goats-john-darnielle-discusses-the-satan-record-20120120
The lake is frozen. I do not know what.
Well Milwaukee you’re a very strange place, but the aliens seem to have built a house there, so they must like it.
Rich beyond my wildest dreams!
Skating on the Midway this afternoon was amazing. Chicago in winter isn’t bad at all!
Things to remember
Sitting in a lovely quiet cafe on the river in Hamilton, listening to the Mountain Goats with a quite incredible moccachino. There are some things about New Zealand that I will surely miss.
Bon Iver - Bon Iver
This is a very, very good album. I could listen to it for days. I have listened to it for days. I will listen to it for days.
Wellington - The Pros and Cons
I’ve decided to rant a bit about the things I like and dislike about Wellington. This is a post mostly aimed at future me, who will be thinking “should I go back there?” in approximately one year’s time.
Six months ago my reply would have been “definitely yes - Wellington is amazing!”. Nowadays I’m not so sure, so I’ll recast it as “definitely maybe”. Why? Well once you get past the so-called ‘bohemian’ inner city, Wellington doesn’t have a whole lot else going for it. So let’s list some pros and cons:
Pros:
- Wonderful inner city layout;
- A far more laid back stereotypically ‘Kiwi’ culture than Auckland;
- Interesting enclaves and suburban areas;
- Neat scenery, hills, parks and public amenities;
- Climate is very livable in the summer (no humidity!);
- Close to the heart of government and the civil service;
Cons:
- Very small city overall with little or nothing ‘happening’;
- Quite socially isolated, you are either a Wellingtonian or an outsider;
- Little in the way of culture, art or philosophy to enjoy;
- Limited or very few nice places to live (can be expensive!);
- No viable music scene, unless into dubstep or reggae;
- Too many young urbanites with little else to do but be intoxicated;
- Limited or very little corporate firms, dependent on civil service;
- Not large enough to have any kind of ‘scene’;
- Freezing cold in the winter;
- Extremely earthquake prone;
- Very small!
These are all of course, subjective impressions that largely reflect my own meandering about the city. But I’ve reached the view that for all its benefits, Wellington might not be the place for me, which is a bit of a shame, because its otherwise a perfectly nice city. I just don’t think I could live here long term. Which leaves a fairly stark choice: Auckland or elsewhere. I don’t really like Auckland all that much, so perhaps it will be the latter option upon my return. Who knows!
Go break their hearts
A few minutes ago I turned on the radio and out came Okkervil River - Lost Coastlines, which caused a memory of my indifferent escape from Auckland some two years ago. I had quit my job at the Big City law firm, left the lovely house in Albany, and said good bye to a number of pretty awesome people - all in order to take up a job with Crown Law in a city hundreds of miles away where I didn’t know anyone. When I look back, it was a pretty scary thing to have done, but it made sense at the time and honestly I wouldn’t do a single thing differently. I have absolutely no regrets, it was the best thing I ever did.
The journey was in itself a fairly cathartic experience. You tend to think about quite a lot of things when you have just turned your life upside-down. It didn’t help that I had loaded pretty much everything into my car in such a way that it was impossible to open the glove box. Unable to get to any of my other CDs, I was left with The Stand Ins, which I put on repeat and must have listened to right the way through a good dozen times over the course of the journey. Which is probably now why listening to it brings back such strong memories, and is likely why I know the words to all the songs off by heart. Not because I like the album especially much, but because it has meaning to me that transcends the music itself. Lost Coastlines is the one song in particular that will always evoke a memory of arriving in this city for the first time. Its rather nice to be able to recapture some part of that memory and relive the experience to some degree. I’m sure other people have similar sorts of songs that evoke fond (or not so fond) memories. This is just one of mine.
A Short South Island Tale
Recently I went on a road trip to the South Island with a few friends. It was a trip where I wished I had had the time to stop, think and take in the scenery, but were I was instead pressed along with a relentless fervor to the next destination. Rarely was there a time to spend time outside the cramped confines of the car or the hotel room.
It wasn’t all bad however! I like to think it was a scouting trip for my next big proper New Zealand adventure. I found a lot of places I really wouldn’t mind not going to again and a few places I would really love to spend a great deal of time exploring. I am going to skip over (most of) the silly places and only describe the nice ones. There may also be pictures that I took with my camera phone (better ones taken by a real camera to come); be prepared.
This is the Nelson Lakes National Park - or rather, it’s Lake Rotoiti on a cloudy day. It may not look terribly inspiring, but those are mountains in the distance. It is absolutely stunning on a nice day and is one of my favorite places. The walks are amazing and go right around the lake, through the bush and up into the mountains. It is a very neat place and I would quite like to go back there to do some of the hikes. It really is a neat place.
This is the West Coast. Those are the Pancake Rocks. It is a silly place. I’ve added it here because although they are quite interesting rocks, it is a terrible tourist trap which includes a cafe, a gift shop, an information center and a store. All the native flax they have planted looks awfully fake and the whole thing just screamed “this is a tourist thing, you must look at the rocks then buy a postcard and some earrings that look like rocks or pancakes”. Dreadful.
This is Arthur’s Pass. It is difficult to describe just how much I love spending time in the Southern Alps. New Zealand is quite a large small country and there are lots of incredible places, but the Alps are by far the best and most amazing part of it. Arthur’s Pass is a very small village on the main pass through the mountains. Only sixty people live there year round. Nevertheless it has absolutely everything one could want and nothing one doesn’t want. Mountains, incredible scenery, rivers, huge waterfalls and wonderful cheap accommodation. There are dozens of hikes leading out from the village and dozens more within a short walk. I had only a day to explore, so decided that I would see the Devils Punchbowl Falls, which are amazing (and half an hour from the village) and walk up the Bealey Valley.
This was taken after about an hours walk up the Bealey Valley. Most of the walk from then on required a lot of boulder hopping up the river, which made a very nice walk even more interesting. It took about four hours to complete the round trip.
This is the view from the other direction up into the mountains. It is a very very long way up from here. But thankfully it is impossible to go all the way up without serious mountain climbing gear.
This was the end of our journey. The glacier and the waterfall look quite small against the mountain, but rest assured they are absolutely massive. Going any closer would have been very dangerous. Even getting to this vantage point was quite tricky because of all the rockfall and scree. But it was definitely worth the hike! The whole walk was certainly the highlight of the trip, but it was only one of the many different hikes that were on offer.
As for next time. This is a shot of Avalanche Peak (in the distance). I think I will climb it when I return. It is the second highest peak in the Arthur’s Pass National Park and takes about ten hours there and back from the village. I think if I could climb that, I could go just about anywhere. Next time.
As for the trip as a whole. There were a number of other places we visited, but only two really held my attention. The Nelson Lakes and Arthur’s Pass are two of the most spectacular parts of the country. I know from previous trips that further down in the Mount Cook National Park the scenery and the mountains are even more impressive. Lake Te Anau and Fiordland are also incredible places to visit. I think those are the places I will venture to on my next trip; in exactly that order. I think it would take at least two or three weeks to do it any justice. But it would make for a very special trip.
Steven Erikson - The Novels
This is the first collected edition of the three novels in the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach collection. They retell the travels of the aforementioned sorcerers and their luckless manservant, Empancipor Reese. Previously the novels on their own were quite rare, very expensive, and difficult to source, so having them all in a combined mass market paperback edition is terribly exciting! After reading them through I have nothing but splendid things to say about them.
The thing I have come to appreciate about Erikson is his ability, so often lacking in the fantasy genre, to write characters that drive the action. And it is the characters that are by far the most engaging aspect of the three novels. Who better to drive the plot forward than a cynical summoner, a psychopathic necromancer and their hopelessly dull witted, foolish and unlucky manservant? Erikson manages to deliver a fast paced and fascinating plotline in each novel that is at once well paced and engaging precisely because he lets his characters nuances, proclivities and less than noble motives drive the story forward. In doing so, he manages to condense into 100 pages a story that would take most of his contemporary authors a doorstop novel to flesh out. Erikson, unlike most fantasy authors, can write.
