The Daily Rose

Collected by Rose Hoare, editor and journalist.

[rosehoare]

The future of love

Published in Sunday magazine, 2014

Ready for Valentine’s Day? It’s the day we celebrate the romantic notion that you can love the same person your whole life!

I mean romantic, as opposed to realistic. Because, let me tell you, my friend: by committing ourselves to monogamous relationships with one person (just one! That’s half what’s considered reasonable to help yourself to from a biscuit sampler), we are behaving like sexual anorexics, starving our basic, hardwired hunger.

From a computer scientist’s point of view, forging a face to face connection belongs in the too hard basket. And from a philosopher’s point of view, we are living in an age of such overweening narcissism that we might not be capable of real, scary, grown-up love anyway.

Nevertheless, since our weak minds cling to the delusion of love and our culture obsesses over “cute couples”, and since being single can get to feeling like a slow withering of the soul, the question persists: how can we stay in love and be happy?

Last September, ethicist Brian D. Earp and some colleagues at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Neuroethics co-authored a paper proposing a chemical intervention to a crummy problem we have inherited.

That old “men just aren’t built for monogamy” cop-out turns out to be backed by data observable across species, and championed by evolutionary psychologists.

“The engine of natural selection is that you want to maximise reproduction,” Earp says. “We’re not puppets of our genes, but from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes no sense to have one sexual partner your whole life.”

Things were simpler for our Pleistocene-era ancestors. They lived half as long as we do, roaming around in groups of about 150 relatives, raising their kids communally. And after three or four years, the parenting was done, whereas we live in a more information-rich world, where raising a child to the point where it can fend for itself like the feral kid in Mad Max doesn’t really cut it anymore.

(Procrastination being what it is, I could tell you a lot more about this colourful Pleistocene era, with its woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and other such “megafauna” which we may, in our lifetimes, see “rewilded” in a Jurassic Park-like situation. Google it if you don’t believe me.)

The point is, Pleistocene parents used to be able to get back amongst it very quickly, while today’s parents are committed to parenting until the child is 16. And even after that, couples are expected to spend decades more as monogamous romantic partners.

Clearly, Earp says, “there’s a gap to make up between what our human dispositions are like and what we expect of ourselves. The question is how do we make up that difference?”

Currently, we respond to the problem with infidelity (10-54% of wives and 20-72% of husbands) and divorce (around 42% in New Zealand). We go to relationship counselling but plenty of couples don’t benefit from it. So Earp suggests we try huffing oxytocin.

Oxytocin is the hormone we naturally produce in situations related to attachment. It floods our system when we orgasm, when we go into labour, when we breastfeed, when we hug. When you come home and see your dog, you get a burst of oxytocin, and your dog does too.

On the face of it, oxytocin seems like a miracle drug for couples counselling. It reduces anxiety and stress (even when couples are discussing a ‘chronic source of conflict'). It boosts trust, eye contact, empathy and attentiveness. Under the influence of oxytocin, couples remember their good times more readily.

It even improves monogamous impulses: last year, neuroscientists found that after inhaling oxytocin, men in relationships displayed less interest in a pretty female than single men.

But it has a few wacky side effects. Oxytocin can turn the volume up on us-and-them feelings like envy, schadenfreude and ethnocentrism -- it makes people less friendly to strangers than they would otherwise be. For people with aggressive tendencies, oxytocin seems to actually enhance aggressive behaviour. It also brings up more bad memories for those with anxious attachment to their mother.

“Oxytocin isn’t just this universal enhancer that makes everything more positive, happy and trustworthy,” Earp says. “It interacts with the person, who they are and what their attachment styles are.”

All the same, for the right people and in the right environment, Earp thinks oxytocin shows promise. “I don’t want to have to be constantly spraying something up my nose in order simply to function in my relationship, but if I used it in a counselling session while I’m learning more productive communication behaviours or something like that, and then I weaned myself off of it but I retained what I’d learned, that could be very useful.”

But enough of bringing our Pleistocene impulses into the 21st century with experimental chemicals! Hasn’t technology already brought us further than that? Set the flux capacitor to 2045, Marty. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!

Dr James Hughes is a sociologist and executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Connecticut. I wanted to ask him about the possibility of love with an artificial intelligence (AI).

Some futurists predict that, by 2045 or thereabouts, we will experience something called the Singularity, a point when artificial intelligence will overtake human intelligence, and keep improving at an exponential rate, leaving us all in its dust.

Some people find the prospect of AI menacing. Dr Hughes is not one of those people (although he is concerned about the effect it might have on the labour market). He doesn’t find the idea of a relationship with a disembodied AI all that outlandish.

For one thing, he says, we already interact with AI a lot. Software that uses algorithms and big data to predict what we want -- Netflix, Google, dating agencies -- are a form of AI. And Hughes says we already know that humans “anthropomorphize and seem to take a great deal of emotional comfort from relationships with technology”. In the 1960s, an MIT scientist created a rudimentary chat bot and programmed it with a script for psychotherapy. He was disturbed by how readily people opened up to it.

“The Roomba is another example: the little circular robot vacuum cleaners that wander around your house and suck up your dirt? People were naming them. They would feel heartbroken if one got broken and they’d send them back, and if asked ‘do you want a replacement’, they’d say ‘No, I want my one back’.”

Hughes says the attractions of electronic forms of love and romance are manifold: an electronic partner is constantly available, there’s less risk of sexually transmitted disease or unwanted pregnancy, and you don’t ever have to bicker with your robot lover, unless that’s what you’re into.

And yes, let’s get to the part you have probably been wondering about: sex with a robot or a remote human, via teledildonics and whatnot, promises to be fulfilling and, according to robot sex expert David Levy, commonplace by 2050.

When it comes to the burden of emotional and sexual engagement in a relationship, technology is already helping pick up the slack: a new sex app developed for Google Glass allows partners to stream each other’s points of view, can flash up sex advice in flagrante delicto and can even dim the lights. (Can you imagine anything sexier than watching your partner issue a pre-coital voice-activation command to their wifi-enabled home lighting system?)

Researchers are currently programming facial recognition software to help people with autism read emotional cues, so, Hughes says, “We’re looking at a future where ‘Your wife seems to be happy right now, but she’s really mad at you’ suddenly flashes up on your Google Glass.”

Regardless of whether it’s with a human you only connect with in World of Warcraft or a robot, Hughes believes technology will enable unimaginably richer connections. We’ll use haptic technology that responds to touch; facial recognition software that helps read moods, and nano-neural interfacing that enables us to share thoughts and memories.

“There may be AI in the future who, because of the depth of their programmed understanding of the human mind and emotions, knows you ten times better than anybody else could,” Hughes says.

Ah, but would I feel known? However nice it might be to have a robot lover who can suggest a movie I’ll love, wouldn’t I somehow still compartmentalize my feelings for an AI as being of a different, lesser order to what my feelings could be for a human?

Not if you can’t tell them apart, Hughes says. A classic test designed by math genius Alan Turing pits an AI against a human intelligence, and asks us to guess which we’re communicating with. “Every year, we see AI getting higher and higher thresholds of people guessing they’re human,” Hughes says. “The interesting thing about the Turing test is lots of humans fail it. There are humans whose interaction and style of communication is such that they can’t communicate as fully realised human beings.”

Given how important and universal the experience of love is, philosophers haven’t made a very impressive job of explaining its mysteries. In fact, some of the most influential philosophers had abysmal love lives. Nietzsche sprang a proposal on a girl he barely knew, was rejected and died alone. Kierkegaard had a nice girlfriend, but got emo and broke off their engagement. Sartre and De Beauvoir came close with a markedly bohemian relationship - lots of intellectual chats, no fidelity, no marriage, no kids.

So far, so romantic. Then along comes Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love.

In an interview format, the elderly French philosopher describes love as a sharing of perspectives that creates a new reality, an event as irrevocably life-altering as when Keanu takes the red pill in The Matrix.

Dr Tim Rayner, a philosopher at Sydney-based consultancy Philosophy for Change, has been pondering love ever since he gave a disastrous speech about its essential unknowability at his brother’s wedding years ago, and he thinks Badiou has come closest to nailing love, on behalf of philosophy.

“Badiou thinks when you fall in love with someone, you see your life again -- not just as it could be, but as it should be.”

“It’s a real world that we’re drawn into,” Rayner says. “It’s not like a window that we can look through and go ‘that was interesting’ and move on. We feel compelled to actualize it, because it’s part of who we are.”

That’s Badiou’s philosophical ideal of love, but it’s not how he sees things enacted. Rayner says Badiou is especially cranky about people looking for “risk-free” love based on mutual compatibility -- the kind of casual, exploratory relationships orchestrated by dating services, where, if things get tough, it’s easy to walk away. Anyone hoping to make love more convenient, to gain the ecstatic feelings without hazarding any disruption to their life, is missing the point. Love, the only way Badiou would have it, is necessarily fraught.

“It’s a very frightening place to be,” Rayner says. “You’re violating the sanctity of the ego and putting yourself in a position of vulnerability. But you need to go there to create the common space of love. And since we do live in a fairly egoistic society, for some people, that’s too much of a leap to make. But if you are going to commit yourself to the love experience, you have to say ‘my life is no longer just about me, it’s about us, and everything I do from now on is about strengthening that bond’.” Then you have to figure out how you’re going to change the world together.

Maybe the new reality you create together is being Hollywood’s hottest power couple. Maybe it’s doing a really sensational home renovation. For a lot of couples, it’s having kids -- a transformative experience that can have meaning for couples beyond fulfilling an ancestral drive.

That’s a traditional perspective, but Rayner says you can experience Badiou’s kind of love outside of a romantic relationship, too. For Badiou, a militant Maoist who agitated in the ‘68 uprisings, comrades can have a kind of comradely love forged by being engaged in a common struggle. And Rayner thinks colleagues -- workers or artists -- collaborating on a project can feel powerfully bonded by the experience of co-creation.

And if you’re single this Valentine’s Day, take heart: you, too, can experience Badiou’s world-reconfiguring, romantic love, all by yourself.

“When you meet another person who just sweeps you off your feet and gives you a sense of how your whole life could be different, often those kinds of relationships are unrequited”, Rayner says. “I mean, the best romances are, right?”

[rosehoare]

the colour of money

Internet millionaire Seeby Woodhouse has gone green – after all it’s where the money is. But he’s not abandoning his Maserati, his North Shore mansion, or his bunnies, writes Rose Hoare

Sunday Magazine

12 Oct 2008

“I was a kid growing up in Glenfield, doing my own thing. I wasn’t at school but I still had my circle of friends and all I used to do was play outside or read. That was all I did. Then when I was 11 – August 1987 – my parents put everything into the sharemarket and, two months later, lost everything.

“Rainbow Corporation and Ariadne and Goldcorp. I remember having the prospectuses and my dad breaking open my piggy bank to get the last few remaining dollars out to put everything in the sharemarket, and then losing it. So my finances were lost by a decision I didn’t make.

“I was like, ‘ How come my parents – they’re librarians, they’re supposed to be the smartest people around – don’t know anything about this? They got suckered. And these other people like Brierley – business people – are fine? From that point on I was like, ‘ Oh well, I want to be a business person.’”

The kids who entered intermediate school in time for the ’87 crash, when Tomorrows Schools reforms and WWF Superstars of Wrestling were being introduced, and who reached their twenties as the Kyoto Protocol was being signed, are now hitting their 30s, just in time for a recession of their own. And a food shortage. And a climate change crisis.

When we met, Seeby Woodhouse had just returned from attending a party at the Playboy mansion. Over the course of two hours, as he talked almost without pause, I started thinking of him as New Zealand’s own Howard Hughes. An internet rather than an aviation magnate but, like Hughes, a sports car enthusiast, tit man and autodidact. A fearsome intellect coupled with a paucity of social awareness that’s resulted in a Hughes-like myopia: he seems unable to focus on or even perceive limits that hinder most others from succeeding on such a grand scale.

Woodhouse, like Howard Hughes, was a child prodigy. Aged 11, Hughes built a wireless broadcasting set so he could communicate with ships in the Gulf of Mexico, and taught himself Morse code overnight so he could decipher their signals. Woodhouse began building his own internet company as a teen, and would later buy and, for a year or so, run his own radio station… 106.7 on your FM dial; if you’re listening, that’s CBFM.

Like Howard Hughes’ father, who made his money not from oil but by leasing a patented drill bit to oil explorers, Woodhouse recognises the value in equipping others, rather than in investing in raw materials.

“In a goldrush, it’s often not the gold miners who make the money, it’s the people who sell the picks and the shovels along the way,” he says, explaining the genesis of Orcon, the telecommunications business he sold last year for a reasonable $24.3 million.

While studying electrical engineering in the 1990s, he heard a university lecturer mention “this thing called the internet”, which was doubling in size in America every three months. “As soon as I heard that I thought, holy crap, something that’s doubling in size every three months is a good horse to hitch your wagon to. I had to get into it any way I could.”

This year, Woodhouse hitched his wagon to a new horse and headed into the wild west of carbon trading. In April, he launched Green Carbon, a business that audits carbon footprints and brokers carbon credits.

He read in Forbes that sustainable energy will be 10 times bigger than the internet boom, “so I’m hoping that, by the time I’m 40, I’ll be worth quarter of a billion dollars or more. Just because that’s the levels we’re talking. If I can make $20 million on the internet, I expect to make $200 million in sustainable energy.”

Woodhouse isn’t obsessive-compulsive, or kept in a Dramamine-fuelled stupor by an all-Mormon staff, but there’s a naïveté to him, something still ripening about his character. At 31, his social life is the kind of cashed-up, glamour-model-adorned spree every Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Gamer would envy. His patio is the setting for bikini shoots. His kitchen is stocked with a full complement of liqueurs including Midori, butterscotch schnapps and something called Wipe Out.

His bookshelves contain such how-to titles as NLP in 21 Days by Harry Alder and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson, as well as biographies of business role models. His home is full of grown-up’s accoutrements, assembled with a juvenile enthusiasm for grown-up’s accoutrements – a tank of African fighting fish, potted David Austin roses with the price tag still attached and, on one wall, a canvas on which foreign currencies are artfully arranged.

He lives on his own in an eight-bedroom cliff-top house with an infinity pool overlooking the Hauraki Gulf. It’s about five kilometres from his childhood home. Seeby’s name is a multifaceted linguistic pun, the invention of his father, who is a fan of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a novel Seeby seems to like about as much as Vladimir Nabokov, who called it “a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room“. (“My dad spent 20 years studying one page of it,” he says, irritably. “I don’t know why anyone would spend 20 years reading one page of a book over and over again.”)

About a week into term, a “really nasty” teacher who “enjoyed belting the kids with rulers” kept Seeby’s tearful standard one class in until 4.30pm. Seeby’s father withdrew him, intending to home-school Seeby while his mother, Helen, worked as Takapuna library’s manager. But, according to Seeby, his father didn’t show much inclination towards the actual schooling, “other than giving me books and things”.

It’s the first of several examples of cack-handed parenting that Seeby attributes to his father, who, he says somewhat dismissively, “hasn’t worked for a long time” and “lives in the South Island”. In fact, his father, Nigel, has published novellas, poems and short stories on an Orcon-hosted site, as well as a book of Finnegans Wake criticism (“Dedicated to Helen and Seeby: they suffered my writing”) and several sustained, freewheeling polemics about distributive justice.

Although Seeby attributes his business-mindedness to the trauma of the sharemarket crash, the acquisitive impulse must have been in him beforehand. When his piggy bank was raided, he estimates it contained about $500, in small denominations – and this is back when a 20 cent mixture could, if prudently compiled, yield 20 lollies. Losing his piggybank money on Black Tuesday crystallised what was already circulating. From then on, Seeby was a little tycoon in the making. “What’s the difference between a company and a person?” he would ask his uncles. “What is a partnership? How does it work?”

He became a glutton for industry, fibbing about his age in order to obtain a third paper round. “I was actually the one that said, ‘I want to go back to school, because I need to know more about how the world works if I’m going to be in business.’”

Enrolled at Glenfield College, it was discovered that, although he had a highly advanced reading age and a large vocabulary, Seeby couldn’t write or do maths. He was put in the lowest class. “As soon as I got to school,” he recalls, “I went, ‘Okay I need to get my A into G and study really hard.’” He embarked on five years of “intensive bringing-myself-up”.

He’d missed five years of classroom and playground schooling. “Because I’m an only child, I’m an independent thinker,” he explains. “I didn’t have much social contact until I was 12. People that are home-schooled are often a bit different.” Used to interaction with grown-ups, Seeby found it hard to adjust to life at school where, as he puts it, “people weren’t so polite”.

“The whole bullying thing was a bit weird. I don’t really care about all that now but at school it was a bit of a shock. There’s always the cool kids that can wreck your life, but I had a group of independent, free-thinking geeks and we didn’t play by anyone else’s rules and I think, in the end, people respected us for it. We got hassled but we just didn’t care.”

He notes, with satisfaction, that his geek squad took out the school talent quest one year with a well-received sketch parodying a lame Christian wrestling troupe that had just toured the country and was a popular standing joke with the student body.

Towards the end of his schooling, it became apparent that Seeby had a chance of graduating as dux, but because, he says, “there always has to be some goal with me”, he reasoned that he ought to try to be dux of a better school.

So, in 1993, aged 16, he called a meeting with the principal of King’s College,

who agreed to waive the school’s $14,000 annual fee. This left Seeby with the cost of boarding to cover. He placed an advertisement in the North Shore Times Advertiser seeking a benefactor. As he explained at the time to a TV3 reporter doing an Are-state-schools-so-bad-that-this-is-what-it’s-come-to story, “I think I’d really like to get into the Old Boys’ Network because, you know, it’s a help.”

He had takers, but his dad put the kybosh on the scheme. “I had some old guy that wanted to sponsor me but my dad ended up getting paranoid that he was some pervert and told him to get stuffed.”

The whole thing was a disaster. He would have been head boy, he says, but, because of the bad publicity, “my school shunned me and didn’t give me any awards”. All the same, he came top in English, sat eight bursary subjects (three were just for fun) and graduated proxime accessit to the dux. Back in the 1990s, connecting your computer to the internet was a long and involved process. Seeby had a friend demonstrate it a few times. It took about three hours. Reasoning that there would be others who wanted to be connected but didn’t know how, Seeby decided to call himself an expert and began charging $100 as a call-out technician, eventually working for internet provider Iprolink’s helpdesk.

He was 19, driving his $800 car around the North Shore, setting people up on the internet, and so increasingly busy that he quit university, which made his dad mad. But he was averaging four jobs a day, making $2000 a week, $100,000 a year, “which back then was huge money”.

Since his customers would often ask him who their internet service provider should be, he negotiated with ISPs to get a finder’s fee for his customer referrals: $100 from the customer, plus $100 from the internet company for signing them up – he went from earning $100,000 a year to $200,000.

Next he started to take a cut of their monthly billings, which wasn’t easily negotiated, but he got it in the end. Then he switched his 200-odd customers over to his own phone number and bulk-bought their internet service at wholesale rates. “There was a jump where all of a sudden I was actually running tenders between the internet companies. My margins went from 10 percent ongoing every month to 60 percent, and once I did that I just added more and more customers, but that was hard because I was using our home telephone as my business number and my dad was really shitty.”

So Seeby did what anyone pulling down a six-figure salary while living and quarrelling with their parents would do. He rented office space, a tradesman’s unit in industrial Albany, on Auckland’s North Shore. “I used to go in there each morning and sit at my desk with the roller door open and look at the mechanics working in the courtyard.”

Each year he would develop a new business model that made more money than the previous one, continually reinventing the company and his role in it, until he’d refined himself out of existence. With the spectre of unbundling approaching last year, Seeby realised that the new optimal business model was to sell. Orcon had more than doubled each year, and its sale left him with $19.44 million, and two property holdings in Northcote.

Seeby had possibly been lacking mental stimulation. While director of Orcon he had also sponsored a V8 racing team, part-owned Crow bar in Auckland for about six months (“for fun”), and ran CBFM from a Karangahape Road location for a year. “I prerecorded everything and had 24 hours of music queued up. I’d go in each night and do all the intros and then the music would just play throughout the day. There’d be no phone-ins or anything like that. I went through my music collection and picked the 1000 songs I liked most and just had them on rotation. I didn’t do too much, just had a few sweeps and said ‘You’re listening to CBFM’. Had the occasional ad. It was good fun.”

While at Orcon, he also took a programmatic approach to travel. “Even though I was working, I’d force myself to take two weeks off every three months, so I had eight weeks of holidays a year spread throughout four quarters. I’d pick a destination and do two weeks there.

“One holiday period, I did Brazil. So I went to Brazil for two weeks, went to Rio de Janeiro and went hang gliding off the cliffs, went to the Rio carnival and all that sort of crazy stuff and was like, ‘Okay: so that’s Brazil.’”

“It’s physically impossible to see the whole world,” he suddenly insists. “There’s no one that can do it. It’s impossible. I did the numbers a while ago and realised I’m never going to see the whole world.” One of Green Carbon’s first marketing ploys was to underwrite the carbon footprint of an Imax climate-change documentary, Earth.

Although he would like to start companies that generate sustainable energy projects or new technologies, for the moment, Green Carbon simply audits carbon footprints, dispenses advice on how its clients can minimise their emissions and work through regulations, and it also sources and sells credits to offset emissions. Then the client gets to display a logo. “The Green Carbon brand is how we end up making our money. We licence the brand to the companies that have gone through our certification process. Ultimately we want the brand to be recognised by consumers as a low-carbon brand in the marketplace, kind of like the Heart Foundation tick.”

So far only about 15 companies have been audited – clients in the tourism and hospitality industries; “anyone that can see a benefit in measuring their carbon footprint and offsetting it, and promoting that to the public.”

Seeby has been working from home, with an assistant who has previously worked for Eric Watson and Matthew Ridge. His lifestyle is now as green as possible, while still in keeping with the luxuriance of all that crisp, infinitely stackable wealth.

Although he could switch to a Prius, he says it’s better if he drives his Maserati to the end of its natural life. And in any case, he uses a Segway for short trips. In fact, he’s on New Zealand’s Segway polo team, the Pole Blacks.

Demonstrating that “the best thing for the environment is to reuse stuff rather than buying new stuff”, he says if his bread sprouts mould, he just scrapes it off and toasts it. “Blue cheese is just mould,” he reasons, “and we pay heaps for that.”

He is simpatico enough with John Key that Key spoke at the launch of Green Carbon and, last year, Seeby posted an encouraging, jovial comment on a John Key Facebook account that turned out to be fake: “Good to see you using the power of social networking – us young people are suspicious of people in govt who can’t use computers or iPods.”

But he claims no political affiliation and says, “I think it would be very silly to start taking sides.” All the same, he’s prepared to admit that, while he likes Labour’s aggressive stance towards achieving carbon neutrality, he feels National’s policy shows a better grasp of some of the inherent dangers – such as carbon leakage – of regulation. There are lots of reasons to get into the carbon market: the scary pressures on the world’s resources; the dynamism of its energy market; the appeal of having a new source of mental stimulation. It’s hard to tell which reasons are prior for Seeby.

For the moment, anyway, altruism and profit are dovetailing neatly. “A clean airline is kind of an oxymoron because airlines are polluting, but Richard Branson has put a billion pounds toward biofuels. He’s got to be commended because the changes that Virgin rolls out will ultimately make them more competitive, more efficient, probably make him a bigger airline but also be good for the environment. That’s the way I think it’s got to happen: we, as a civilisation, have to find ways to make money out of being green, because if we don’t, no one’s going to do it. The greatest public good that you can do is show people there’s money to be made out of being green.”

[rosehoare]

Can I put a link to your piece on Ronald Hugh Morrieson on my NCEA revision wiki for my students? We've spent quite a bit of time discussing him as an author and a person and this would be great for my students to read as they head towards their exam next month.

Go for it! 

[cxlossus]

Mean Earls

[rosehoare]

They put Kanye in a Bill Cosby sweater... cracks me up.

[rosehoare]

The future of love

A look at new love-related developments on the horizon -- a version was published in Sunday magazine, Feb 9, 2014

Ready for Valentine’s Day? It’s the day we celebrate the romantic notion that you can love the same person your whole life!

I mean romantic, as opposed to realistic. Because, let me tell you, my friend: by committing ourselves to monogamous relationships with one person (just one! That’s half what’s considered reasonable to help yourself to from a biscuit sampler), we are behaving like sexual anorexics, starving our basic, hardwired hunger.

From a computer scientist’s point of view, forging a face to face connection belongs in the too hard basket. And from a philosopher’s point of view, we are living in an age of such overweening narcissism that we might not be capable of real, scary, grown-up love anyway.

Nevertheless, since our weak minds cling to the delusion of love and our culture obsesses over “cute couples”, and since being single can get to feeling like a slow withering of the soul, the question persists: how can we stay in love and be happy?

Last September, ethicist Brian D. Earp and some colleagues at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Neuroethics co-authored a paper proposing a chemical intervention to a crummy problem we have inherited.

That old “men just aren’t built for monogamy” cop-out turns out to be backed by data observable across species, and championed by evolutionary psychologists.

“The engine of natural selection is that you want to maximise reproduction,” Earp says. “We’re not puppets of our genes, but from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes no sense to have one sexual partner your whole life.”

Things were simpler for our Pleistocene-era ancestors. They lived half as long as we do, roaming around in groups of about 150 relatives, raising their kids communally. And after three or four years, the parenting was done, whereas we live in a more information-rich world, where raising a child to the point where it can fend for itself like the feral kid in Mad Max doesn’t really cut it anymore.

(Procrastination being what it is, I could tell you a lot more about this colourful Pleistocene era, with its woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and other such “megafauna” which we may, in our lifetimes, see “rewilded” in a Jurassic Park-like situation. Google it if you don’t believe me.)

The point is, Pleistocene parents used to be able to get back amongst it very quickly, while today’s parents are committed to parenting until the child is 16. And even after that, couples are expected to spend decades more as monogamous romantic partners.

Clearly, Earp says, “there’s a gap to make up between what our human dispositions are like and what we expect of ourselves. The question is how do we make up that difference?”

Currently, we respond to the problem with infidelity (10-54% of wives and 20-72% of husbands) and divorce (around 42% in New Zealand). We go to relationship counselling but plenty of couples don’t benefit from it. So Earp suggests we try huffing oxytocin.

Oxytocin is the hormone we naturally produce in situations related to attachment. It floods our system when we orgasm, when we go into labour, when we breastfeed, when we hug. When you come home and see your dog, you get a burst of oxytocin, and your dog does too.

On the face of it, oxytocin seems like a miracle drug for couples counselling. It reduces anxiety and stress (even when couples are discussing a ‘chronic source of conflict'). It boosts trust, eye contact, empathy and attentiveness. Under the influence of oxytocin, couples remember their good times more readily.

It even improves monogamous impulses: last year, neuroscientists found that after inhaling oxytocin, men in relationships displayed less interest in a pretty female than single men.

But it has a few wacky side effects. Oxytocin can turn the volume up on us-and-them feelings like envy, schadenfreude and ethnocentrism -- it makes people less friendly to strangers than they would otherwise be. For people with aggressive tendencies, oxytocin seems to actually enhance aggressive behaviour. It also brings up more bad memories for those with anxious attachment to their mother.

“Oxytocin isn’t just this universal enhancer that makes everything more positive, happy and trustworthy,” Earp says. “It interacts with the person, who they are and what their attachment styles are.”

All the same, for the right people and in the right environment, Earp thinks oxytocin shows promise. “I don’t want to have to be constantly spraying something up my nose in order simply to function in my relationship, but if I used it in a counselling session while I’m learning more productive communication behaviours or something like that, and then I weaned myself off of it but I retained what I’d learned, that could be very useful.”

But enough of bringing our Pleistocene impulses into the 21st century with experimental chemicals! Hasn’t technology already brought us further than that? Set the flux capacitor to 2045, Marty. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!

Dr James Hughes is a sociologist and executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Connecticut. I wanted to ask him about the possibility of love with an artificial intelligence (AI).

Some futurists predict that, by 2045 or thereabouts, we will experience something called the Singularity, a point when artificial intelligence will overtake human intelligence, and keep improving at an exponential rate, leaving us all in its dust.

Some people find the prospect of AI menacing. Dr Hughes is not one of those people (although he is concerned about the effect it might have on the labour market). He doesn’t find the idea of a relationship with a disembodied AI all that outlandish.

For one thing, he says, we already interact with AI a lot. Software that uses algorithms and big data to predict what we want -- Netflix, Google, dating agencies -- are a form of AI. And Hughes says we already know that humans “anthropomorphize and seem to take a great deal of emotional comfort from relationships with technology”. In the 1960s, an MIT scientist created a rudimentary chat bot and programmed it with a script for psychotherapy. He was disturbed by how readily people opened up to it.

“The Roomba is another example: the little circular robot vacuum cleaners that wander around your house and suck up your dirt? People were naming them. They would feel heartbroken if one got broken and they’d send them back, and if asked ‘do you want a replacement’, they’d say ‘No, I want my one back’.”

Hughes says the attractions of electronic forms of love and romance are manifold: an electronic partner is constantly available, there’s less risk of sexually transmitted disease or unwanted pregnancy, and you don’t ever have to bicker with your robot lover, unless that’s what you’re into.

And yes, let’s get to the part you have probably been wondering about: sex with a robot or a remote human, via teledildonics and whatnot, promises to be fulfilling and, according to robot sex expert David Levy, commonplace by 2050.

When it comes to the burden of emotional and sexual engagement in a relationship, technology is already helping pick up the slack: a new sex app developed for Google Glass allows partners to stream each other’s points of view, can flash up sex advice in flagrante delicto and can even dim the lights. (Can you imagine anything sexier than watching your partner issue a pre-coital voice-activation command to their wifi-enabled home lighting system?)

Researchers are currently programming facial recognition software to help people with autism read emotional cues, so, Hughes says, “We’re looking at a future where ‘Your wife seems to be happy right now, but she’s really mad at you’ suddenly flashes up on your Google Glass.”

Regardless of whether it’s with a human you only connect with in World of Warcraft or a robot, Hughes believes technology will enable unimaginably richer connections. We’ll use haptic technology that responds to touch; facial recognition software that helps read moods, and nano-neural interfacing that enables us to share thoughts and memories.

“There may be AI in the future who, because of the depth of their programmed understanding of the human mind and emotions, knows you ten times better than anybody else could,” Hughes says.

Ah, but would I feel known? However nice it might be to have a robot lover who can suggest a movie I’ll love, wouldn’t I somehow still compartmentalize my feelings for an AI as being of a different, lesser order to what my feelings could be for a human?

Not if you can’t tell them apart, Hughes says. A classic test designed by math genius Alan Turing pits an AI against a human intelligence, and asks us to guess which we’re communicating with. “Every year, we see AI getting higher and higher thresholds of people guessing they’re human,” Hughes says. “The interesting thing about the Turing test is lots of humans fail it. There are humans whose interaction and style of communication is such that they can’t communicate as fully realised human beings.”

Given how important and universal the experience of love is, philosophers haven’t made a very impressive job of explaining its mysteries. In fact, some of the most influential philosophers had abysmal love lives. Nietzsche sprang a proposal on a girl he barely knew, was rejected and died alone. Kierkegaard had a nice girlfriend, but got emo and broke off their engagement. Sartre and De Beauvoir came close with a markedly bohemian relationship - lots of intellectual chats, no fidelity, no marriage, no kids.

So far, so romantic. Then along comes Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love.

In an interview format, the elderly French philosopher describes love as a sharing of perspectives that creates a new reality, an event as irrevocably life-altering as when Keanu takes the red pill in The Matrix.

Dr Tim Rayner, a philosopher at Sydney-based consultancy Philosophy for Change, has been pondering love ever since he gave a disastrous speech about its essential unknowability at his brother’s wedding years ago, and he thinks Badiou has come closest to nailing love, on behalf of philosophy.

“Badiou thinks when you fall in love with someone, you see your life again -- not just as it could be, but as it should be.”

“It’s a real world that we’re drawn into,” Rayner says. “It’s not like a window that we can look through and go ‘that was interesting’ and move on. We feel compelled to actualize it, because it’s part of who we are.”

That’s Badiou’s philosophical ideal of love, but it’s not how he sees things enacted. Rayner says Badiou is especially cranky about people looking for “risk-free” love based on mutual compatibility -- the kind of casual, exploratory relationships orchestrated by dating services, where, if things get tough, it’s easy to walk away. Anyone hoping to make love more convenient, to gain the ecstatic feelings without hazarding any disruption to their life, is missing the point. Love, the only way Badiou would have it, is necessarily fraught.

“It’s a very frightening place to be,” Rayner says. “You’re violating the sanctity of the ego and putting yourself in a position of vulnerability. But you need to go there to create the common space of love. And since we do live in a fairly egoistic society, for some people, that’s too much of a leap to make. But if you are going to commit yourself to the love experience, you have to say ‘my life is no longer just about me, it’s about us, and everything I do from now on is about strengthening that bond’.” Then you have to figure out how you’re going to change the world together.

Maybe the new reality you create together is being Hollywood’s hottest power couple. Maybe it’s doing a really sensational home renovation. For a lot of couples, it’s having kids -- a transformative experience that can have meaning for couples beyond fulfilling an ancestral drive.

That’s a traditional perspective, but Rayner says you can experience Badiou’s kind of love outside of a romantic relationship, too. For Badiou, a militant Maoist who agitated in the ‘68 uprisings, comrades can have a kind of comradely love forged by being engaged in a common struggle. And Rayner thinks colleagues -- workers or artists -- collaborating on a project can feel powerfully bonded by the experience of co-creation.

And if you’re single this Valentine’s Day, take heart: you, too, can experience Badiou’s world-reconfiguring, romantic love, all by yourself.

“When you meet another person who just sweeps you off your feet and gives you a sense of how your whole life could be different, often those kinds of relationships are unrequited”, Rayner says. “I mean, the best romances are, right?”

[rosehoare]

Lolcougars

Exploring the myth of cougars (Sunday magazine, 2008)

It was during the late 1990s when I first heard the term, from a Canadian. Dan’s brother was working in a bar in Vancouver, and he would get hit on all the time by these exceptionally forward older women. They would proposition him quite bluntly, and so Dan said these women were getting called “cougars”. I remember Dan’s clenched teeth as he laughed, half grinning, half grimacing.

Cougars. Sleek, feline, deadly. New Zealanders might not appreciate what it means to call someone a cougar. A World War II veteran who was attacked by a cougar – wrestled its teeth out of his neck, put it in a choke hold and tried to suffocate it in the snow - said it was scarier than being captured by the SS, “because you knew where the Panzers were coming from.” Cougars are unpredictable, importunate predators who stalk their prey with uncommon stealth and dedicate themselves wholly to the kill.

Cougars are common in ski towns, apparently. Skiing magazine ran a story advising its readers to “keep an eye out for animal prints on clothes; hair that doesn’t move; a purse that’s bigger than your head”. It warned that white wine spritzers are “cougar pheromones”, that "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones and anything by Sheryl Crowe are cougar mating calls. It called the back-door escape routes of bars “cougar chutes” because, like a dangerously steep couloir, they are “you-fall, you-die territory”.

(At this point, you are probably wondering exactly what age a woman might first become a cougar. That depends on your age. If you are in your early 20s, a cougar is an old lady. Like, 30. Maybe even older. If you are nearing 30 yourself, a cougar is 35+. Once you’re in your 30s, a cougar is 40+.)

Now, the term has been introduced into North American culture, and has arrived in New Zealand, too. Suddenly, cougars are everywhere. This month’s Cosmopolitan has a feature in which women complain that their boyfriends were stolen by a cougar. “Cougar” beat “Surge” to the number one spot in Time magazine’s 10 best buzzwords of 2007. Competitive reality dating shows - Cougars: NYC and The Cougar - are in development, as well as a comedy series with Courtenay Cox, Cougar Town.

There is already a woeful movie called Cougar Club, starring Faye Dunaway, in which two enterprising law graduates throw members-only parties where their buddies can meet cougars. The club’s members perform a signal whereby they raise their arms aloft, crossed at the wrists, and form Cs with their hands. (It vaguely, perhaps purposely, resembles the Chanel logo).

A young man in my office delivered some cougar-related print-outs to my desk recently. Was I writing a story about cougars, he asked? I was. A strange look came over his unlined face as he gazed into the distance over the cubicle walls. He looked grimly fatigued, like a ‘Nam veteran recalling some atrocity, before he finally said quietly, “there’s a few of them around here”.

Later, he submitted the theory, via email, that cougardom might be “a woman’s version of a mid life crisis”. It transpired that he had a friend who had dated a cougar, who enjoyed sunning himself by his cougar’s lap pool and generally “basking in the luxury of someone else’s success”, but the catch, he explained, was that “you have to “feed” the cougar and I hear they can have very large appetites!”

There’s a tension inherent in the notion of older woman/younger man - that it’s gross because it’s a mutually exploitative relationship. Young men get money, at a point in their life when they’re not getting as much of it as they’d like; older women get sex, at a point in their life when they’re not getting as much of it as they’d like. That it’s a coldly transactional coincidence of wants is lettered, in fine print, on DateACougar.com where, in tiny 6 point lettering, it actually specifies: “This site is the premier cougar dating site for single guys looking to meet a rich older cougar who likes young guys and sex.”

Do cougars really exist, other than in the febrile imaginations of young men? Much of the talk you hear about cougars sounds like the braggadocio and feigned expertise of the reluctant virgin. In poorly spelled, over-capitalised postings to internet discussion threads, people say things like “Peow peow!!” and paste up animated emoticons winking and giving the thumbs-up.

In one fantastically nerdy thread, concerned comic book readers were debating which character from the DC Comics universe is a cougar. Was Catwoman one?

Cougars are one of 75 under-acknowledged groups identified by the pollster who popularised the term “soccer Mom”, Mark Penn, in his book Microtrends. Increasingly, women in their 40s and older are finding themselves single. A 2003 survey by the American Association for Retired Persons found that 34% of American women over 40 were dating younger men.

Whether those women dating younger men conform to the stereotype of the vamp in capris is another story. At Family Planning, clinicians were reporting that some patients in their 40s and upwards, re-entering the world of dating, needed a brush-up on sexual etiquette. They released “Upd@te Me”, a brochure that covers internet dating (“Keep in mind that the profile is a constructed version of the person, it is not really them”), sexually transmitted infections (“You can’t judge that someone is “safe” to sleep with because they are well-dressed or drive a nice car”), and the possibility of unplanned pregnancies (“A woman can still be fertile up to a year after her last period, or two years if menopause was early”).

It’s possible that women who think they’re taking home a blushing naïf might be surprised to find that today’s young men, raised on internet porn, are more sexually savvy than the young men they grew up alongside.

A self-confessed cougar, in response to a Rachel Glucina thinkpiece on “Milfs, Gilfs and Cougars” on the New Zealand Herald’s website, posed and answered the question of why she likes younger men. “They’re cute, they’re liberal, they have energy,” she wrote. “Most old guys out there are homophobic, sexist oiks with no dress sense and no regards for looking after themselves, worrying about their cholesterol levels or their property values or how their ex-wives done them over. A bit like Norris from Coro St. Tell me why I should have to settle for something that society thinks I should have, rather than something I want for myself?”

Until a month ago, 22 year old bodybuilder Sam Pennell worked as a bouncer in Wellington. Thursday nights at Hummingbird or Friday nights at Dockside, he says, are where cougars are reliably found, sitting at the bar with a glass of wine. They’re easy to spot, he says, because they show no interest in men their own age. “They’re usually successful. They’re lawyers, accountants, legal secretaries, real estate agents - any job where it’s high stress and well paid.

“And they’re the ones that initiate everything. They kind of wait for you to be by yourself and then out of nowhere they appear, but they’ve been there all night. There’s obviously a big age difference but they just approach you, and they’re completely up-front. It’s never ‘How’s your night going?’, it’s more like a ‘I hate my job, let’s get out of here’.

“I think they’re only after one thing, to be honest. They don’t want a relationship. The one way to ruin things, if you’re talking to one, would be to mention anything like that.

“If you’re sitting in a bar and there’s a cougar there, you’re pretty much set. You know you’re going to have a good night. You know that you’re not going to be sleeping at their sister’s house and they’re not going to call you 20 times a night and harass you.”

“It’s not easy to sleep with them,” he insists. “Don’t get me wrong: it’s their choice. They’re the one that pursues it. You have no real say in what happens all night. They’re the ones buying you drinks. They’re the ones taking you out. They’re the ones choosing what bar you go to. You’re just, hopefully, along for the ride.

“Sometimes it’s a bit sad if they are trying to approach your friends and they’re not interested (although that can be a bit of fun). They can’t really fit into the social scene. They don’t know how to dance like young guys do. They don’t know what people do these days. So, you wouldn’t spend the night hanging out with one, with your friends. It would be awkward. There’s too much of an age gap.

It’s kind of a ‘meet, greet, get a number, get out of there’, and you’ll hear from them on Sunday”.

“Cougars”, Pennnell explains, “don’t have the shame that younger girls do”. And yet, he says they are customarily stealthy in their advances. “They’re not going to come up between your group of friends and start hitting on you. They’re going to make it look to everyone else like they’re not flirting with you.”

Such stealthiness suggests some measure of embarrassment or anxiety on the cougar’s part. And it doesn’t sound as if cougar romancing is respected much by Pennell’s peers. “To guys my age, it’s hilarious,” he laughs. “Bro, you took home a cougar last night rah rah - we’ll talk about it. It’s pretty funny.”

What does he talk about with cougars? “Not a lot, to be honest. They talk about what they want to talk about it. Generally, it’s how successful they are. That sort of thing.”

“I’m sure my Mum and Dad would be pretty surprised if they knew how it all happens.”

Demi Moore is a cougar. Jane Seymour is a cougar. Ellen DeGeneres – 15 years older than Portia de Rossi – is a lesbian cougar. But call a woman a cougar to her face, or even try broaching the topic of cougars, and make an enemy for life. Cougar is a deeply ambivalent term.

Women fear that getting older makes them less sexy, and they fear that trying to stay sexy makes them ridiculous. In September, three women sued the makers of a reality show called The Great Cougar Hunt who had filmed them at a club in California, presenting them as cougars on the prowl. Their beef was really that they had been filmed without their consent, but they might not have sought US$1million in damages had the show’s voiceover not been so persistently nasty – making cracks about sagging knees and breasts, about fear of strong lighting, and more or less suggesting that their drinking was fuelled by depressive self-loathing.

Valerie Gibson, author of Cougar: A Guide For Older Women Dating Younger Men, prides herself on reclaiming positive connotations for the word. (Although she blanched when I repeated the suggestion I’d read somewhere that, once a woman was in her 60s, she is not a cougar but a sabretooth).

“I heard of it just as it had barely got into the lexicon and I thought Blasted pity! Here we go again: older women put down with yet another label. Older men have done it for centuries, and yet they weren’t always told they were sluts.”

Gibson (she wouldn’t tell me how old she is, but I was guessing early 60s) says she has always dated younger men. Men her own age are “either sick, gay, attached or too doddery.” Also, they don’t ask her out. “They’re all afraid of a woman who obviously loves sex and is outspoken about it. They’re absolutely petrified! Whereas the young men go Whoo! Wow-wee!”

“Women should expand their horizons”, she argues, in a cooing Scottish lilt. “Men have always done it. They’ve always looked at other generations and said ‘Oh I want a little chickypoo, much younger’, and it’s worked for them.”

Although society has always demonised or at least looked askance at the spectacle of older womens’ sexuality - “in the 13th century,” Gibson muses, “I would have been burned for writing a book like this” - women who date younger, she says, are pioneering, and their relationships will become increasingly normalised.

As an example, she cites the “Cougar Cruise”, an annual night-time event in Toronto pairing older women with younger men, which Gibson ran for four years. “Everyone said ‘You’ll have real trouble getting the guys’, and the first year…well, it was a bit of a struggle, I must admit. We managed half and half. When it got to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th year, we were swamped with younger men. Swamped! They lined up on the quayside five-deep! Because it had got out there that this was acceptable.”

Yet Gibson stresses that the cougar phenomenon is about more than just women having sex with younger men. “This is far more. It’s telling older women that they are great, they are sexy, they’re to get this old-fashioned out-of-date nonsense in their head, where they worry about what people would think. At 45, you’ve got another 45 years to live, if not more. So what have you got: 50 years to sit around in a shawl knitting booties for grandkids? For heaven’s sake, fulfil your life!

“It is a complete social tsunami and it really is going to envelop the whole ageing process.”

We went on the hunt for cougars in Auckland. We’d been told the bars around the Viaduct were full of them, so we bellied up, ordered a round of pomegranate martinis and surveyed the joint. Here’s the thing: in the dark of the club, a woman in her 20s, depending on whether life’s dealt her some rough road, or on whether her night got started early, could easily resemble a woman in her 50s.

So we leaned in and gave the bartender a big smarmy grin and asked, Mate, where are the cougars at? The bartender busied himself wiping the bar top for a moment. Then he confessed that he’d been in a relationship with a woman 16 years older than himself. Bingo. How old was she? How did they meet? Is there a darkened corner in here somewhere where it all goes down?

He shook his head sadly. He’d lost his heart to this woman, he explained. She’d been the love of his life. He didn’t much care to throw up the Cougar Club sign.

“People don’t believe me,” Valerie Gibson had said, “but younger men get very hooked on their older women. They really get attached. They discover this whole world - this beauty, this sexuality. They don’t want to let go.”

[rosehoare]

All about Goody Goody Gumdrop icecream

How the guy who invented Goody Goody gumdrop icecream got it into sticks (Sunday magazine, 2008)

In a time of recession, we need to believe in the possibility of change, in the transformative power of innovation. But we also need to take consolation from reliable standbys. In short, we need new types of ice cream.

Well, they’re now making Goody Goody Gumdrop ice creams on a stick. The bubblegum flavoured ice-cream with chewy jubes comes covered in chocolate, for $2. (The addition of chocolate around the outside of the ice cream was partly due to its favourable ice cream holding-in capacities, and also because the marketing department advised that a bit of chocolate never seemed to turn anyone off a product, and also because the wisdom of rolled ice cream purveyors tutored that people often liked their Goody Goody Gumdrop that way.)

Now, people are saying things like “Why didn’t they think of that before?” and “This, in some small way, makes up for the loss of Snifters” and “Om nom nom nom”. They’re speculating as to whether this 80s-retro confection might be the first serious contender we’ve ever had to take on the Jelly Tip, that Colin Meads of the ice cream scene, which has enjoyed popularity and respect since its arrival in 1953.

It was Murray Taylor, the same guy who, as head of New American ice cream, invented the flavour in 1983 who has now, as Tip Top’s Technical Manager, worked out a way of getting the stuff onto a stick.

Distribution was the dilemma. How can you be sure that each ice cream gets an equitable number of gum drops? How would a person feel if they were to eat their way to the bottom and not get any gum drops at all? “That would be a shame,” Taylor says, in a Willy Wonka-ish deadpan. “You’d have to buy another one”.

The new Goody Goody Gumdrop ice cream is a technological triumph that Taylor and his team spent more than two years trying to achieve. Initially, the gumdrops would come out in one big lump and because the manufacturing equipment isn’t see-through, they would have to guess at what was going wrong. They graphed the gumdrops, drawing up a mathematical model of normal distribution. Danish experts consulted said it couldn’t be done.

It’s early days yet and we’ve heard a couple of reports of ice creams that were disappointingly low on gum drops (they’re supposed to have around eight to 10 each), but still: propelling 100 gum drops per minute into ice cream, getting the stuff onto sticks, and keeping the ice creams rolling through the machine – 300 per minute – is something, Taylor brags, few ice cream makers would have even attempted.

At Tip Top’s factory in Auckland – a stripy building visible from the motorway – we put on white coats, gumboots and hair nets. Murray Taylor wears an additional hair net over his beard.

We’re going deep into the heart of the factory, past Licky Lane, the brightly painted bay where visiting schoolchildren routinely huff and salivate on a window overlooking the factory floor.

Inside, it smells overwhelmingly sugary, as though you were inhaling deeply through a pink wafer. Everywhere you look, gloopy ice cream is oozing out of giant pipes, and it’s a truly gladdening sight, definitely up there with sunsets and rainbows.

Huge 10,000 litre-capacity tanks rise to the ceiling. Fresh milk and cream are delivered daily from Maungatoroto, and fresh liquid sugar from the Chelsea Refinery on Auckland’s North Shore. It’s all pasteurized, homogenized and concentrated on site, then mixed together.

On a pallet in the corner, are boxes of frozen boysenberries which will go into some enormous stainless steel kettles to make sauce which is pumped, via pipes that go up the wall and disappear into the ceiling, and rippled into the ice cream next door. In another corner is a vat the size of a bath tub full of melted Belgian chocolate, one of which I hope to have in my house some day.

Many of the machines are tended by workers in white overalls speckled with ripple sauce. Towards the end of the tour, a worker emerged with a satisfied air about him, clutching a Colossal Cone trumpet ice cream, with caramel sauce sploshed on his white gumboots. Taylor says there have been some glorious snarl-ups on the factory floor - he once found himself wearing marshmallow sauce head to toe when a pipe came apart.

Some processes are still not automated - a woman was using a palette knife to slap ice cream into one of those 16 litre boxes from which dairies serve their rolled ice creams. Nearby, little fish-shaped pieces of chocolate were jumping in a delicious-looking treadmill that fed them into a caramel-rippled marshmallow and chocolate flavour called Gone Fishin’.

Watching it being extruded at a rate that so vastly defies human consumption - 40 tubs’ worth per minute – is a dizzying experience.

It was around about this time that I realised the necessity of making your own ice cream. Once a tub has been squirted full of ice cream, it goes into a freezer where it’s taken from 6 degrees down to -30 degrees, in a process called hardening. (The ice cream is creamier if it’s frozen quickly, otherwise icy crystals form). But if you snaffle a tub off the conveyor belt before this process (or, presumably, if you make your own), it’s the most knee-bucklingly delicious ice cream you’ve ever eaten in your life. As soft as soft-serve, but not granular or stingily tasteless (Margaret Thatcher was on the research team that developed soft-serve ice cream). The richness of the flavour is unbelievable. I went all silly. As Taylor talked about how, every morning at 9am, a tasting panel gathers to eat ice cream in their official capacity as scientists or marketers, I could only concentrate on how much more of the tub I would be able to get through.

Presumably many of the people who work in the ice cream industry have been initiated into this quasi-religious experience. You can make ice cream by beating and stirring cream and sugar in a bowl surrounded by crushed ice and salt, which lowers the temperature of the ice. And there are small ice cream machines for sale on Trademe for as little as $30. (There’s also a Mr Whippy ice cream truck going for $30,000).

Growing up in Shanghai in the late 1940s, the child of missionaries, Taylor remembers making his own ice cream. “The coolie used to come up hanging two big blocks of ice across his shoulders. He’d deposit it up in our laundry and we’d break it up and put it in a barrel, and we’d have American ice cream powder we’d mix with some water, pour it in the middle, put our salt and ice round it, turn the handle and then pull this out and have ice cream.”

Ice cream has an ironic nostalgic appeal, the irony being that, in the early days, when refrigeration and pasteurization may have been iffy, ice cream consumption was often marred by scandal. There were 150 cases of typhoid (and 14 deaths) in Lancashire in 1911, traced to ice cream. In Ravenna in 1910, 800 people were poisoned and nine killed by ice cream made with rotten eggs. About 200 people got ptomaine poisoning from eating dodgy New Years Day ice cream in Wanganui in 1913.

Every summer, Tip Top releases eight or nine new products, which are planned at least a year in advance. While it’s initially daunting to face the prospect of researching and trialling so many new flavours, the difficulty isn’t in coming up with the ideas - “there’s actually no such thing as a bad ice cream idea,” one employee says.

Each factory floor trial costs about $15,000, but it’s an industry driven by novelty and the best way Tip Top can compete with its big multinational adversary, Unilever, is in the sphere of product development.

Taylor’s 12-person R&D team is headquartered near the factory and when we visited, one researcher was futzing around with some sort of chilli-chocolate sauce, wearing a white lab coat and with traces of chocolate around his mouth. There are kitchen benches and on a wall cabinet are brown chemist’s bottles, labelled things like “COOKIE” or “MARSHMALLOW” and “CHEESECAKE”.

Taylor says the ideal team of ice cream technologists comprises a mixture of temperaments. “You need people who are just way out there, highly crazy, and they come up with lots of ideas but often they’re not so good at actually completing the idea, so you need other people to take that idea and finish it, run the trials and get it to market.”

Taylor cuts open a Gooey Raspberry Memphis Meltdown and explains how, rather than being swirled through, the gooey sauce enrobes the ice cream, mimicking a sundae. It was a complicated manufacturing process to design, and then Unilever managed to copy it and take out a patent on the process before Tip Top had. Unilever also managed to patent Streets’ Viennetta, although it was invented by a Swede who wasn’t an employee. (It was a serendipitous invention - a hose came loose one day and was flapping around, dispensing ice cream in waves).

Taylor is pleased that, when Unilever launched Streets’ Solero, a vanilla ice cream coated in a shell of frozen fruit juice, his technologists were able to figure out how it was made and get Tip Top’s version, the Paradiso, to market in New Zealand before Solero arrived. (The Solero is no longer around but next week, Tip Top is re-releasing the tropical Paradiso.)

Each week Taylor consults a “special database” that reports which new ice creams have launched around the world, and Tip Top is part of an international ice cream consortium whose members meet annually to taste each others’ products and scout for new ideas. “Generally there’s nothing totally different, flavour-wise,” Taylor says. “Sometimes you can get some real weird things: South American salty ice blocks - things we wouldn’t like.” America, he says, is the “big centre” for ice cream in a tub; Europe, especially France, Denmark and Italy, are big players in the novelty scene – anything on a stick or in a cone. Spain has great desserts for young adults; England, he says, tends to be “more of a follower”.

It’s not so much the creation of new flavours that seems to excite Taylor the most, though.

He takes obvious delight in tinkering with all the variables – freezing this, heating that, triple-dipping, fruit sauce-rippling – in the closed system of ice cream’s manufacture. Ice cream, to him, seems an enjoyable puzzle. Like a crossword, but with a better, more edible outcome.

In summer, they’re too busy for experimentation. All of the factory’s machinery is turned full-tilt to manufacturing enough icecreams for the country’s licky appetites. 8000 palettes (about four tonnes) of ice cream are stockpiled for summer.

The ice cream biz is driven by weather and Taylor is hoping that climate change will mean more sunshine hours. “Good summers are good for us, and good for our business. People don’t eat ice creams in the rain. They don’t like it when it’s windy and overcast either - it blows the ice cream away – but they eat it when it’s cold and sunny.”

But while some research shows that ice cream sales increase by 15% with every degree of heat, we seem impervious to weather. New Zealanders, the hogs, eat more ice cream per capita than anyone else in the world: 27 litres each a year – more than Americans, more than Australians.

According to Tip Top’s research, the most ice cream is eaten in Nelson, Taranaki and Southland. You can form your own theories as to why that might be.

In October, Auckland student radio station bFM’s snack reporter Carlton Crisp reviewed Goody Goody Gumdrops somewhat unkindly. Audaciously, he criticized the ice cream’s flavour, theorizing that the gumdrops somehow “justify” the otherwise-not-that-nice bubblegum flavour and suggesting that a superior product would be jubes in vanilla ice cream. He found the choice of Goody Goody Gumdrops, as opposed to, say, orange choc chip, “interesting”, which led his co-host to muse, “maybe this is the beginning of a trend of putting interesting shit on sticks.”

Crisp concluded that the ice cream was good as a novelty but predicted that it won’t have the “staying power” of a Jelly Tip or Choc Bar”, before opining “what happened to the Topsy?”

This sort of attitude is disappointing, but unsurprising. Goody Goody Gumdrop has always flown under the radar. Colourful but unpretentious, juvenile but gratifying. At least it is now getting the treatment it deserves.

Now they just need to retire the car crash of a flavour that is rum ’n raisin, bring back ice cream Snickers and do something new with Neapolitan.

[rosehoare]

How did protest get so wacky? (1972 magazine, contains strong language)

In February 2008, two days before President Medvedev would become president of Russia in an election some monitoring groups contested as unfair, members of absurdist-anarchist group Voina ("war") gathered in the Moscow Biological Museum to stage a peculiar protest.

In a room containing a large taxidermied black bear, they unfurled a banner that read "Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear", stripped naked and had sex on the floor. Photographers, videographers and the museum's CCTV captured the action, which looks about as far from erotic as you can get -- five grave-faced couples earnestly having satirical protest sex in a cold Moscow museum, under posters explaining how intestines work.

But the point was never to create a "make love, not war" buzz anyway. The point, one member explained, was to offer "a portrait of pre-election Russia" in which "everybody fucks each other".

The bear functioned as a symbolic proxy for Medvedev, whose name comes from the Russian for "bear". (Continuing a longstanding Russian tradition of alternating bald and hairy leaders, the ursine Medvedev succeeded the semi-bald Putin, who took the role back in May). As the symbolic orgy was happening, the poor bear looked on, according to one member, “with an unconcealed scorn”.

Four years later, former Voina member Nadezhda Tolonnikova (who was nine months pregnant when she participated in the Biological Museum action, and who later split from the group acrimoniously), would gain fame with Pussy Riot, the all-female art punk band convicted of hooliganism.

Even John and Yoko’s bed-in seems tame compared to Voina’s repertoire, which also includes painting a 65m phallus on a St Petersburg drawbridge which, when raised, offers an erection to the FSB headquarters opposite; throwing live cats at McDonald’s workers whilst chanting “Lets strike at globalization with homeless cats!”; performing an indecent act with a frozen chicken in a supermarket, and a sneak courthouse performance of hit song “All Cops are Bastards - you ought to remember that” by punk band “Cock in the Ass” (it’s off their album “Fuck the Police Those Motherfucking Bosses”).

How did we get here? When Downton Abbey-era English ladies were campaigning for the vote in the early 20th century, they smashed up windows, spat on coppers and -- my favourite -- cut slogans into stadium turf which they then set on fire. One, Emily Davison, was killed attempting a pitch invasion at the Epsom Derby, where King George’s horse was racing.

Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King later favoured non violent civil disobedience for their political ends -- marches, sit-ins, boycotts -- and when young civil rights activist Abbie Hoffman was in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, they did things like organising voter registration, leafletting and establishing schools.

But by the time Hoffmann formed the Youth International Party in 1967, protest had come to encapsulate things like funny spellings and flags, pie-throwings, and a mock levitation of the Pentagon. The seeds of Voina -- satire, gratuitous swearing and ‘pranking the system’ -- were sown around this time: the Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers, a New York anarchist group in the late 60s, took rubbish that had been left uncollected in a poor neighbourhood and dumped it into a fountain in front of a gala event.

Protest was ripening into something that didn’t just garner attention, but also seemed like a really fun game. By the 1990s, when The KLF were sponsoring a ‘worst artist of the year’ award, handing out booze to homeless people on Christmas Day, and burning a million pounds, it was hard to tell who was serious and who was some sort of protest artiste.

ATTENTION WORKS...

What Voina has clearly figured out is that weirdness equates to attention. Their exploits have been covered by Haaretz, Reuters, the BBC and The New York Times, and one of their protests won a contemporary art prize.

Sex and nudity is catnip to editors. FEMEN, the Ukrainian group that uses bare breasts as a tool for their protest, has been covered by major US and UK media outlets like the BBC, the CNN, Der Spiegel and Reuters, despite having only 20 members who participate, stripping-wise.

Depending on the tone of the coverage, media reports of protest action can obviously sway public opinion, and help a cause to gather new supporters. Column inches can make even more of a difference than the numbers who turn out to march.

Cornell researchers found that a comparatively small protest could still have a big effect, if it received sufficient coverage. For every paragraph in the New York Times (covering a protest against a company between 1962 and 1990), stock price declined by a tenth of a percent.

In some cases, simply delineating the appearance of instability can be enough to force action on the part of an otherwise stable company.

In 1991, when American restaurant chain Cracker Barrel decided to implement a policy of dismissing all of its gay and lesbian employees, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force organised a boycott. People kept patronising the company’s Southern-themed restaurants anyway and sales remained stable, but stock prices fell by 26% in the space of a month. Shareholders were spooked, and the CEO was forced to adopt a non-discriminatory policy.

Media attention also helps cement the internal solidarity of protest groups, too. If they don't get it, "they tend to shrink, to fall apart, to take a sectarian course, or to radicalize", writes public administration professor Wim Van De Donk in his textbook CyberProtest, adding, "while the latter guarantees attention, it does not often trigger much applause".

...UP TO A POINT

It may attract attention, but the danger of gratuitous strangeness is that it risks alienating people. Even if you agree with their take on things, it’s hard to feel an affinity with a group that seems like they care more about celebrating their own cleverness than about castigating their political foes.

And besides undermining the seriousness of their own cause and corroding public responsiveness to protest, there’s the problem of brinksmanship: another museum orgy would just seem cliched. How do you top something like that?

Besides being majorly weird, celebrity patrons are another fairly reliable means of gaining attention: Voina’s members were bailed out by street artist Banksy, and Pussy Riot’s supporters include Madonna, Kim Gordon, Yoko Ono and Garry Kasparov.

In New York last year, when the Occupy movement took over Zucotti Park, celebrity cameos became something not just for ailing sitcoms, comedy roasts and Christmas charity variety shows, but a valuable branding opportunity.

Photographed at the event, which was sans red carpet, were Jay-Z and Kanye “No one man should have all that power” West, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore. Some celebrities even wore slogan t-shirts and put out supportive tweets.

But as much as our culture loves paying attention to celebrities, even they have their dangers.

Those with a film or album to market can align themselves with a cause simply to augment their personal brand. They may still help a little, but sometimes they don’t.

Sharon Stone famously raised $1 million in pledges for mosquito nets to end malaria in Tanzania, after an impassioned impromptu speech made at Davos one year. This turned out to be expensive for UNICEF to administer and deliver, and the nets ended up, according to some reports, being sold on the black market as wedding dresses.

Research done by the UK government’s Department for International Development in conjunction with Oxfam suggests that most people are largely inured to celebrity shine, and even if famous faces garner more attention for a cause in the short term, it’s at the expense of longer-term engagement.

Gamely, the report admitted that people “understand and relate to global poverty no differently now than they did in the 1980s.”

When 26 year old Tunisian fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight outside his local government's office, it galvanized action that eventually sparked the Arab Spring. Nobody sets themselves on fire to be funny, or because they have a new single out. It was an unequivocal and viscerally appalling gesture. And whether or not he intended it to, it worked. Within a month, President Ben Ali was gone.

For decades, Tunisians had tolerated a corrupt and oppressive regime that increasingly put the burden of fiscal care back onto an already-impoverished society. Bouazizi’s self-immolation tapped into a wellspring of genuine feeling that was already there.

Protest groups in places where there is democratic government and freedom from violent oppression can’t do this. Their target audience doesn’t feel the same desperation. Many don’t even have any awareness of the issues at stake. In fact, sometimes neither do the protestors.  

Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 video, demanding the arrest of Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony was viewed more than 100 million times in less than a week, but it was less than entirely factual and lacking in complexity, and ultimately it became a punchline.

Of those 100 million views, many were by people who are, broadly speaking, happy with their own lives. It is only slightly glib to speculate that, if they weren’t clicking Share on a slickly edited video about a militant, theocratic Ugandan warlord, Kony 2012’s viewers might otherwise have been deploying a Thu’um to ward off a doomsday dragon in the Elven empire depicted in Skyrim.

The massive response to the Kony video shows that our culture is still capable of being swept up by the rhetoric of protest, and that would be a reassuring thing, if protests hadn’t come so closely to resemble HBO-grade entertainment.

Would we still respond to protest in the same way if it didn’t involve tits, lols, famous names or enjoy meme status? Isn’t it better, healthier, if displays of political conviction, fearlessness and anti-authoritarianism were just respected, rather than fetishized?

- Published in 1972 magazine

[rosehoare]

The seriousness of men in black turtlenecks (1972 magazine)

"For me, the black turtleneck was my symbol of rebellion…Its smart lack of color and density of spirit appealed to my personal design aesthetic. Minimal, brooding, ponderous, the black turtleneck may have been the physical embodiment of my soul. I was a very complicated 10 year old." - anonymous, blogging professor at a New York fashion school

When you are a mould-breaking thinker and an artistic soul and your goal is to spread your dangerous, avant-garde ideas like so many disruptive Jaffas in the movie theatre of people’s minds, there is a particular garment you can wear that will help your cause.

It will protect your vital organ -- your voice! -- by keeping your throat nice and warm, and it will freeze any body-snarking haters mid-snark, so long as you are wise enough to opt for slimming black.

Most importantly, you will look like the intellectual dynamite you are, and people will know with one glimpse that you are someone to be taken seriously.

Cruise. Jobs. Beckett. Shakur. All of these high-achievers -- and many more -- have, at some point, signalled the seriousness of their creative intentions by harnessing the ‘density of spirit’ of a black turtleneck. It is, we believe, the most serious garment a human being can ever wear.

1. When Tom Cruise appeared in that leaked Scientology video talking about how "We are the authorities on getting people off drugs, we are the authorities on the mind, we are the authorities on improving conditions...We can bring peace and unite cultures," he wore a black turtleneck. It was serious work, for a serious cause and he wore an appropriately serious garment.

Who knows, it might have been the same black turtleneck he wore for his appearance on Inside the Actor’s Studio. (Inside the Actor’s Studio is a great place to pop a black turtle. Academy Award-winners James Cameron and Kevin Costner, both opted for one, as did Glenn Close, Barbra Streisand and Martin Lawrence.)

2. Apple founder Steve Jobs wore a black turtleneck pretty much every day, after a certain point. He ordered them from Japanese designer Issey Miyake -- he’d hoped Miyake could design an Apple uniform, but that idea didn’t fly with employees. Not at all.

Instead, Jobs adopted the black turtleneck as his own personal daily uniform, because it made getting dressed each day that much simpler, and conferred a distinctive idiosyncrasy to his style.

After his death, his acolytes followed suit. “I've washed my black turtleneck and am wearing it as I test the 4S,” one tech blogger noted, as he and thousands more prepared to observe Black Turtleneck Friday, in honour of Jobs.

3. Picture yourself in the murky depths of a Factory party in New York in the 60s, and then ask yourself -- how freaky must it have been to navigate a sea of Cheshire Cat-like floating faces, as everyone grooved away to the Velvet Underground, their bodies encased in black turtlenecks?

Like Andy Warhol, Lou Reed enjoyed a black turtleneck -- but then, if you’re the kind of person who is going to record an 11 minute, spoken word track like “Street Hassle”, it goes with the territory.

4. Stern, miserabilist playwright Samuel Beckett, who ate one meal a day and was really mean and dictatorial to actors, wrote minimalist, absurdist plays, and lived in France. Being French, and associated with any ‘-ist’ is a major indicator of black turtleneck wearing.

5. It is not easy to be certain, due to shadows pooling about his person, but it looks very much as though pioneering rapper and hip hop producer Dr Dre has opted for a classic black turtleneck for the cover of his anthology of bangers, The Chronicle. And why not? He has certainly earned the right -- with hits like Gin & Juice, and Nuthin but a G Thing to his credit.

Turtlenecks are a perennial favourite at Death Row Records, which released the largely unauthorised album. Label boss Suge Knight has been known to wear them under a signature red blazer, and he, Dre, Snopp Dogg and Tupac Shakur all wore them for an important ‘96 Vibe magazine cover. The sartorial equivalent of a jeweller’s display velvet, their black turtlenecks were the perfect setting to show off their matching label chains.

6. Japanese avant-garde artist Kazuo Shiraga, whose practice involved making works with his body, not unlike Julianne Moore’s character in The Big Lebowski, often did so in a black turtleneck. One of the first action painters in the late 1950s, Shiraga would dangle from a rope hanging from the ceiling and smear paint around a canvas with his feet. The resulting paintings, described as “paint-laden” by one art critic, sell for six-figure sums. Shiraga later became a monk.

- Published in 1972 magazine

[rosehoare]

Syndromes & Effects (1972 magazine)

Taking a crumpled garment from the laundry basket, folding it neatly and piling it on its pals, all of them ready to be put neatly into a drawer, who among us can't help but feel deeply at ease? It's not just the smell-good factor of your fabric conditioner, it's the sense of imposing order on chaos and, however briefly, dominating your environment.

We do this not only with laundry, but with science, too. Sociologists, journalists, pollsters and scientists all smooth the crumplier phenomenon in our world by naming it a syndrome.

In medical terms, syndromes are collections of symptoms that can be arranged under an umbrella term to denote a multi-faceted, spectrum-like disorder. But there are also culture-bound syndromes -- collections of symptoms that just happen, and might or might not cause problems to their bearers.

Generally, these take place within a particular context -- "Retired husband syndrome", a type of depression and illness that afflicts the wives of men who are about to retire, has mainly been noted only in Japan, where certain cultural expectations are experienced. But some syndromes are more global. "Genital retraction syndrome", the feeling that your penis is shrinking and will, in fact, retract right into your body, has been noted around the world.

Syndromes are quirks, notable deviations to the norm, which coalesce and make themselves noticeable enough to deserve a nametag. But looking at a bunch of them in tandem, you can't help but be struck by the fact that strangeness is more common than you'd think. It happens not just in isolated flare-ups to weirdo individuals, but in pockets and puddles, and to normal people, too. You might be going about your day minding your own business, and bam - you could wind up in a syndrome…

PLACES

Sometimes, people are struck by a syndrome just by visiting a new place.

Dr Hiroaki Ota, a Japanese physician working at a Paris hospital, noted what he considered unusually high numbers of Japanese tourists being treated for psychiatric problems -- including hallucinations, feelings of persecution and violent behaviours -- apparently brought on by the impossibility of reconciling the Paris promised by perfume ads and the one they actually encountered, which is grimier and ruder than anticipated.

In a 2004 article, "Les Japonais en voyage pathologique a Paris", he and some colleagues noted that 63 such patients had been treated since 1988. Some had already experienced mental health problems, and landing in a new city was a trigger for existing issues, rather than a cause of new ones. (One of Ota's patient visited Paris because she had seen a subway poster that proclaimed "France is waiting for you" and, on arrival, felt certain that she was the Queen of Sweden, Finland and Denmark.)

But others had no prior history of mental illness. One 30 year old art student had lived in France for several months, in "isolated" conditions, before heading to Paris, where he finally had a breakdown. Although he had no prior mental health history, by the time his Paris hotel phoned the hospital, he was anorexic, insomniac and hearing voices threatening to kill him.

Ota and his colleagues, documenting what became known as "Paris syndrome", speculated that, in these latter cases, people with "fragile personalities" were experiencing psychotic breaks caused by disappointment. They had hoped that travel would be the answer to their problems -- work, marriage, family, whatever -- and when it hadn't panned out that way, their agitation was too much to bear.

Something similar happens to some visitors to Jerusalem. Between 1980 and 1993, doctors treated 1200 tourists who, upon visiting the holy city, lost their shit.

In an article published in a British psychiatric journal, doctors at Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre helpfully broke these cases into three groups: those who were already mentally ill before arriving in Jerusalem; those who aren't quite mentally ill exactly, but who harbour ideas that psychiatry considers deeply weird -- such as that the resurrection of Christ can be brought about if only we can make a red heifer. (It’s in the Old Testament, along with a lot of other strange and novel ideas).

Finally, there are a few people who are perfectly normal, drug-free and without any notable mental or behavioural problems -- until they get to Jerusalem. Then, they lose their shit and, according to the doctors, this tends to happen in a remarkably consistent way.

The first warning sign is when they start feeling like they really need some alone time to tour Jerusalem properly, away from the group. Next, they indulge in compulsive bathing and nail trimming; fashion a "toga-like gown" -- "often with the aid of hotel bed-linen" -- and start shouting psalms or hymns.

The final stage of "Jerusalem syndrome" involves a procession to a holy site where a sermon is delivered. "The sermon is usually very confused and based on an unrealistic plea to humankind to adopt a more wholesome, moral, simple way of life," the paper notes.

In the study's 13-year period, there were 42 cases like this, and the weird thing is, these people tended to snap out of it after a week or so, especially if they put some distance between themselves and Jerusalem. (A Swiss lawyer spent a week in Greece without incident, came to Jerusalem and lost his shit, then continued on to Egypt for a week, with no further problems.)

Almost all were from ultra-religious Protestant families and for them, the study suggests, Jerusalem is a place which they "possess an idealistic subconscious image of" and which they "are unable to deal with the concrete reality of". Their mental breakdown is an attempt to bridge that gap, to preserve something they didn't realise they held so sacred.

FAMOUS PEOPLE

A similar problem can crop up when people are confronted with an idealised work of art. "Stendhal syndrome" was coined in 1989 to account for people having dizzy spells and fainting fits in Florence, upon viewing so much Great Art.

And, more than a century before Beatlemania or Directioners, fainting fits could be brought on by idealised artists. In the early 1840s, fandom for the composer Franz Liszt was so intense and rampant in Europe, especially in Berlin, that "Lisztomania" was suspected by some to be literally contagious.  Hits of his, like "Liebestraume No 3", were just that good, and his style of piano playing was also considered weirdly infectious: "His high-intensity, often frantic bravura manner provoked involuntary physical reactions -- shaking, shuddering, weeping," one historian has noted.

Likewise, author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe started something he couldn't finish when he published The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a lovelorn young artist who finally takes his own life. As popular in its day as Fifty Shades and Harry Potter put together, it sparked off a Europe-wide fan frenzy known as "Werther Fever" that involved a harmless vogue for dressing like the title character, but that also eventually claimed lives -- it's one of the first recorded instances of copycat suicide, which has become known as the "Werther Effect".

Although she is an EGOT (an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony winner) and has sold hundreds of millions of records, "The Streisand Effect" is something altogether different. That's the name given to the phenomenon whereby you try to cover something up and, in doing so, bring even more attention to it.

Singer Barbra Streisand earned the double distinction of both suffering from the effect, and having her name forever associated with it when, in 2003, she tried to restrict pictures of her beachfront Malibu property from being included in a publicly searchable database of images documenting coastal erosion.

Some of the people who use the internet the most really do not take kindly to anything they consider an attack on their freedom of internet use. And, after Streisand had brought a lawsuit against the photographer and image bank, she found herself the target of a campaign to publicise the otherwise unexceptional photograph.

Another famous person to have an effect named after them is Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Father and inventor of lightning rods. According to Franklin -- and the effect has been proven -- you are more likely to do someone repeated favours than you are to repay a favour they've done you, because doing someone a favour makes us like the recipient more. (So, if you want someone to like you, ask them for a favour).

You'd think it would work the other way around, but the "Ben Franklin effect", an incredibly psychologically astute and powerful formulation, demonstrates that, rather than doing nice things for people we like, we actually grow to like the people for whom we do nice things. This turns on the little-recognised fact that sometimes our attitudes are formed by our behaviours, rather than the other way around.

ATTRACTION AND REPULSION

A lot of syndromes are documented with a view to explaining (and hopefully predicting or even manipulating) what we are drawn to -- whether that's buying something, voting for someone, or procreating with someone.

Some of these observable rules of attraction or repulsion have a certain "no shit, Sherlock" quality to them.

The "Coolidge effect" demonstrates that the sexually satiated can revive their flagging libido by being introduced to a new partner. (This has been observed in rats, hamsters, sheep, cattle, humans, and even hermaphrodite freshwater snails).

The "McClintock effect" -- debunked by statisticians but widely supported by anecdotal support -- suggests that cohabiting women's menstrual cycles synchronise over time.

Other effects aren't quite so intuitive, though.

Although we generally try to make our most important decisions very carefully, we are also guided by innate preferences that make no sense whatsoever.

As the economist Daniel Kahnehman has demonstrated, when making decisions we impulsively rely on the first piece of information we get about our options, prefer not to risk small losses in the pursuit of large gains, and continually overestimate how happy or miserable any particular choice will make us.

We are nowhere near as rational as we think we are. Given a choice, for instance, people will demonstrate a preference for the letters in their own name and the numbers in their birthdate. This is known as the "Name-letter effect" and the "Birthday number effect", and scientists have speculated as to whether it influences decisions about things like where we live, what job we do and who we date.

If allowing lucky numbers to rule our lives sounds silly, consider the "Hound of the Baskervilles effect", whereby people with heart disease are more likely to die on a date they consider unlucky.

Like a character in Arthur Conan Doyle's story, who dies from a heart attack due to psychological stress, Chinese and Japanese cardiac patients who associate the number four with death are most likely to die on the fourth of the month. (People can also suffer heart failure from a relatively new phenomenon scientists call "Broken heart syndrome". Under extreme emotional or psychological stress, such as that brought on by the death of a loved one, sometimes one wall of the heart suddenly enlarges and doesn't pump properly, leading to heart failure.)

However much we might think of ourselves as logical, rational machines, scientists are almost constantly delineating new ways in which we are preyed upon by unconscious instincts, and pointing out different ways in which we say one thing and do another.

The "Bambi effect" describes the way people will champion causes that involve cute animals, but are less impassioned when it comes to less adorable, though perhaps no less needful, species. "Missing white woman syndrome" could be viewed as a variation on the same theme: the fate of a missing person who is white and female is more likely to become a media cause celebre, than the whereabouts of a person who is male or from an ethnic minority, but no less missing.

Unconscious racial preferences are also behind the "Bradley effect", a phenomenon whereby voters will tell pollsters they intend to vote for a black candidate, but then go into the voting booth and vote white. Named for Tom Bradley, a gubernatorial candidate in the 1982 California mayoral elections, it's deemed extinct since Barack Obama's presidency. In British politics, the "Shy Tory Factor" -- when people pretend to be more liberal than they really are -- has been detected as recently as 2010.

As well as what we think of others, scientists have also revealed ways in which we are often misguided about our ourselves, too.

Studying a cohort of Cornell psychology students, two male professors asked students to estimate their own abilities in humour, grammar and logic, and found that the least impressive students routinely overestimated their own skills. The "Dunning-Kruger effect" which they posited in 1999 as a result of their research, essentially holds that incompetent people don't know enough to realise their own incompetence, while those who have acquired a few measly skills tend to believe that everyone else is as skilled or more skilled than they are.

Funnily enough, 20 years before them, two female psychologists published a study of "Impostor syndrome", whereby smart, capable people, especially women and especially academics, can't quite bring themselves to believe that they really are as smart and capable as they are. Even as their achievements pile up, they tend to feel like a fraud who hasn't been caught out yet.

(This is not to be confused with "Capgras delusion", a terrifying side effect of brain trauma whereby sufferers are convinced that their family and friends have been replaced by imposters).

If scientists are increasingly spending their time explaining to us that we aren't as smart as we think we are, I for one am not surprised. Science itself isn't as smart as we think it is. According to the "Decline effect", some published scientific studies appear to lose their truthfulness over time.

You might have put your lab coat on, performed an experiment in accordance with all the most rigorous, best-practice rules, demonstrated that your results are replicable, published them, and enjoyed a hearty pat on the back from your colleagues, but chances are that, if you return to your now-scientifically-proven theory in a few years' time, you won't achieve the same results.

Medicines that appeared to work miracles have been shown, in successive studies, not to have the same efficacy over time. Ecological or psychological theories that appeared to be confirmed by hard evidence have been weakened, to the point of being disproven, by a diminishing amount of evidence when subsequently retested.   

The decline effect calls into question the infallibility of science -- not its founding principles so much as how rigorously its methodology is followed, by people who are scientists, yes, but human beings too. Editors want to publish breakthroughs that are shocking, but shocking breakthroughs sometimes turn out, upon further study, to be illusory.   

So, science, which taught us about all these handy effects in the first place, may itself be a sham. But, with our fragile egos, our unconscious prejudices and our propensity to melt down over the collapse of a beloved ideal -- perhaps we get the science we deserve.

- Published in 1972 magazine

[rosehoare]

Grief

Many of us are not good with grief. We form our faces into a grimace of sympathy and adopt sick-room hushed tones. We rack our brains for something comforting to say, but every condolence we offer is haunted by the misgiving that our efforts are pointless. We feel embarrassed for having caught sight of such naked pain. Shortly, we’re yearning to go off and have a stiff drink, take ourselves back to work, retire to the television, to whatever distraction is available. A tiny amount of exposure to grief, a few hours at a funeral, is by far enough for most of us.

In 1969, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross unwittingly set the template for grief by introducing the world to DABDA - Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance - a flight of emotions she’d noticed people going through after they’d been told they were terminally ill. The stage theory came to be applied to the bereaved, to the divorced, to children of the divorced, and some contend that DABDA is now so renowned that it’s more prescriptive than descriptive.

Yet studying bereaved people, identifying trends in their collective emotional turmoil and calculating what type of grief is normative is still a hot topic for researchers. In February, a group of psychiatrists from Harvard published “An Empirical Examination of the Stage Theory of Grief” in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which established that yearning, anger and depression was common for 233 bereaved people. Another piece of research, this time out of Pittsburgh, focuses on “complicated grief”, “a debilitating disorder associated with important negative health consequences”, that can be diagnosed six months’ “postloss” and treated with therapy similar to that used for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Six months? Six months! It seems practically obscene to suggest grief ought to be considered problematic, or a “debilitating disorder” after just six months. What’s more, the notion of tabulating and graphing grief so that it can be compared with a hypothesised norm seems clumsy.

Lois Tonkin, a grief counsellor, writer and teacher, thinks stage theories of grief are outdated, reductive, reassuring for professionals (“they can tick things off as they go”) and misleading: “Grief is a much more complicated and messy business than that, actually. Most people just don’t fit it.”

Tonkin takes issue with the “medicalisation” of grief, which began in the last century and which is evidently continuing. She doesn’t think grief can fruitfully or truthfully be identified as a pathology, with identifiable norms and a “cure” and she thinks this pathologising has weighted the grieving process with a lot of unnecessary and unhelpful anxiety. “People are always saying things to me like I don’t seem to have done the anger stage yet or I seem to be back in denial, and instead of thinking there’s something faulty about the model, they’re thinking there’s something faulty about them.”

People go to doctors because they want to be cured. Grief, while unpleasant, isn’t an illness. It’s part of life. Unavoidably so. “It’s not something you have to get over,” she observes. “It’s something you have to learn to live with.

Dealing with grief, she says, isn’t a question of feeling very bad, then feeling not quite so bad, and eventually feeling ‘back to normal’. It’s not like recovering from an injury, with the object being to return yourself to the state you were in before the injury was sustained. Rather, it’s a question of learning to accommodate a new dimension in your life. Those who think of bereavement as a sort of temporary wound tend to suffer a great deal when their expectations of returning to their former state aren’t met.

Asked to parcel up her own theory of the grief process, Tonkin says that how people grieve depends on lots of factors: how their loss is understood in their community, how their expressions of grief are encouraged or discouraged, their gender, age, life experience and family background. There’s an initial shock and disbelief, she says, and many people are surprised by the horrible intensity of their feelings. Some find themselves thinking I should be grieving 24 hours a day and I shouldn’t be feeling any happiness about anything else because if I do, I’m being disloyal. Some hold on to the first, most difficult emotions, because they worry that these represent their last connection with the deceased.

People experience a range of emotions (sadness, relief, anger, guilt) and physical sensations (eating a lot, not eating, sleeping a lot, not sleeping, feeling cold, feeling shaky or short of breath) as well as behaviours, like wanting to isolate yourself or distract yourself.

Grief does violence to our trust in continuity. No one wants to anticipate losing what gives them comfort. Whether we know it or not, we build our worlds on relationships that define and sustain us and losing those fundamental people is an affront to the very idea of stability. It raises up a great cloud of confusion - about what happens after we die, about how to protect ourselves and our loved ones from the invasion of death, about how to find any meaning in a life that is so fragile and conditional - and many find that such confusion augments their sense of loneliness.

“They get past the initial shock and the time when people are sending cards and muffins and then everybody else gets back to life as normal. A few months after the death, it really starts hitting home to the bereaved person: that this is true, and it’s going to stay true. This isn’t going to change. But people start giving messages, one way or the other, that it isn’t okay to talk about it any longer. They say Aren’t you over that yet or change the subject.

“So people pretty much just go underground, really. They talk about feeling like they have to wear a mask: there’s how I really feel inside, and then there’s the face that I have to show in society.”

Does talking about it help? Some don’t find it helpful to talk, but most do, although it’s not their feelings that people want to talk about. Most find it helpful to talk about their lost loved one, what their relationship was, the good and bad parts.

People also find it helpful to talk to the dead. “They’ll be wondering what to do and they’ll say in their head What do you think, Dad?, drawing on their memory and knowledge of what their father might have said. If their father was a guiding sort of person in their life, he continues to be that way even after he’s died, because they’ve been able to internalise some of the messages he’s given over their life.”

“Or when something special happens, a lot of people want to share that with a person who’s died, so they chat about it with them. That’s just recognition that when people die, they’re not finished and over. The fact that they are still alive in our hearts and in our memories is another way they continue to live in our lives, just not in an embodied way.”

  Dr Shear’s complicated grief treatment posits that “grief proceeds optimally when attention to loss and restoration alternate”. This is called the “dual-process model” of coping. It’s the 1999 innovation of a Dutch psychologist named Margaret Stroebe, and its wisdom is that people cope best with loss when they alternate between thinking about the dead person and thinking about how to keep their life moving forwards.

Tonkin says it’s a useful approach, and that “acknowledging both parts of the business” is important. “What I’ve noticed with people is that sometimes their life only gives them an opportunity to do one part, and they come back and do the rest later.”

In Still Life, Tonkin wrote about the grief of women whose babies were stillborn more than 20 years ago. “In those days, they thought women would cope best if they just put it behind them. They were told to go home and have another baby, and because everybody thought this was going to be the most helpful thing for them, a lot of these women would go home and all their baby and pregnancy gear had been taken away and nobody would mention the baby. They went on, had children and had very busy lives, but a lot of them described how, when the busyness was over – when their kids left home, when somebody else died, when they stopped work – then they found themselves thinking about the baby that had died all those 20, 30, 40, 50 years earlier.

“At that point, many of the women went back and did things like named their baby, got a birth certificate, got a place in the cemetery for them or tried to find out where they were buried.”

Grief doesn’t go away, says Tonkin, and its reappearance years later doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. Grieving isn’t a matter of briefly feeling great sorrow, it’s a lifelong process of sifting through our memories of a relationship for new meanings, and all sorts of changes or milestones in our lives can reanimate this process.

“It’s not a stable thing you get used to. It’s something that continues to change over time. You keep revisiting it and renegotiating it.”

“If a person starts talking about somebody who died many years before, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with them, it just means that they’re engaged in that process of trying to make sense of it, maintain some sense of connection with them and understand what that connection is now.”

Is there anything we can do to prepare ourselves for grief? Tonkin has become aware of “things that trip people up afterwards”, and her first piece of advice is the gnomic epithet: “Clean up as you go”. “People tend to feel like I’ll have the rest of my life to sort that out. You might not. Things change.”

What gets overlooked is that, like the disastrous Apollo 13 space mission or London during the Blitz, grief can be a defining moment, and a proud one.

“We’re painting grief as this dreadful, dark, awful thing,” says Tonkin, when I ask her how anyone could have the emotional stamina to be a grief counsellor, “but a lot of people – maybe even most people - when they get to look back and reflect on a major loss in their life, they say it was a terrible and difficult thing that happened, and they wouldn’t ever want to go through that again and they wouldn’t wish it on their worst enemy, but I am a much different and better person because of it. A lot of people find and develop qualities that they really value in themselves. They find compassion. They find courage. They find joy, you know? They find the ability to take pleasure in small things. They find a change in their perspective about what’s important in life. Those are such essential and important human qualities – compassion, kindness, persistence, courage. People talk about those things a lot. They’re really inspiring to be around and to be working with.”

- Published in Sunday magazine

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A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

This is a recording from 1959 of Flannery O’Connor herself reading A Good Man is Hard to Find at Vanderbilt University.

Probably one of the coolest things in the world right now. Also, it’s included in the special features of John Huston’s film version of Wise Blood, recently released in the Criterion Collection.

[rosehoare]

Part time jobs

Part time jobs suck. No one talks to you. No one bothers to learn your name. They save up all the worst chores for you. They can barely suppress a smile when they explain what you have to do. It’s terrifically boring. A monkey could do it. You sweat and you ache. Your feet are wrecked. The customers abuse you. The manager is an idiot. His underling is a creep who’s constantly looking over your shoulder like you’re some kind of moron, and spazzing out about the dumbest little things. Your uniform makes you look like a jackass. You miss out on all the fun your friends are having. All for $5 an hour.

What choice do you have? Even if you get home and most of your wages have gone into the car, into rent, or they were already spent before you even clocked in, you have to do it. Part time jobs are a wretched fact of life.

Yet how much better they seem, how much more momentous and influential, when recollected from a distance! From the armchair, through a haze of pipe smoke, our part-time jobs become good, useful, lovable things. For all their hassle and muck, they marked something important in our nascent working lives.

Certainly, part-timers learn things. How to fold a napkin around the neck of a winebottle. How to have sex in service lifts. How to operate antediluvian computer systems and minefield-like tills. How not to treat waiting staff. They might not all be things that are valuable or interesting for longer than it will take you to read this sentence, but they must add up to something.

In exchange for all their vigorous suffering, part-timers get a pass key into the moving centre of things. They get dominion over the storage cupboards, the break room, the spot out back. They meet new kinds of people, hold new responsibilities and see all kinds of otherwise hidden processes. They might come out the other side a somewhat more enlightened person.

I’m not saying part-time jobs are a great, spangled Narnia where fauns and princesses frolic, but part-time jobs can bring a new dimension into your life. Even if it doesn’t always feel like it at the time.

After high school, Therese worked for $7.25 an hour at Auckland Central Library, from 1990 to 1996. The way she tells it, libraries are turbulent, parlous places, more like Tijuana than one might imagine.

Its regular patrons were the homeless, the addicted, the authentically weird, and people whose hatred of the council was such that they would get aerated over a $1.20 overdue fine. “You’d get people standing there for 45 minutes hassling you,” says Therese. “I was in court once because a guy tried to attack me over the desk.

“Every day, at some point, you’d get harassed by a freak or something really awful or weird would happen. Every day. You were always on edge.

“We had a man we nicknamed Mr Poo. We put a trespass order on him. He hangs out up at TVNZ now. He used to poo in jars or McDonalds cups and leave it behind books so someone would pull a book out and it would fall out. He was terrible. He’d poo all through the disabled toilets and he’d hide in the miniature Māori pa in the children’s department and run out and throw up on people - that was his thing.

“Another man, Mr Tran (I think he was Vietnamese) changed his name to Mr Lotus Body and then to Mr Killing Fields. I had to keep giving him new library cards. He used to wear full army fatigues. He was fascinated by the photocopier. He’d bring in twigs and arrange them in the photocopier and take copies of them. But then he started bringing in dead birds and squishing them down really hard in the photocopier. We had to get rid of him because he caused so much damage to the photocopier. A year later I read in the paper he’d been arrested in K Rd for barbecuing a cat in the Jewish cemetery. There were people like that - to us, they were harmless but they were quite disruptive.

The disabled toilet was the library’s trouble hotspot. “You never went in there. I felt really bad when disabled people would ask where the toilet was because there’d always be a fruit in there.” Therese worked her way up to the Literature, Arts & Music desk. It was calmer up there, with a different clientele. “The freaks didn’t go up there. They stayed in Commerce, Science & Technology or Social Sciences.

All the same, Therese stayed for six years. Extra shifts were always readily available and, if you worked a Sunday or a public holiday you’d get time and a half. While a part-time librarian, she took two degrees from the University of Auckland and graduated without a student loan.

In the end, it was RSI from opening CD cases on the cushy Literature, Arts & Music desk that did her in, not the rest of it. Despite “disruptive” behaviours, it was cosy.

“There are people who, 13 or 14 years later, are still there,” she says, not entirely approvingly. “They will never leave. It’s easy: everybody knows who you are, you turn up to work, you put your things in the locker, you come and sit on the desk, you deal with the same freaks all the time, and the same regulars.”

Therese says amongst the staff, there were many “stereotypical” librarians - “short grey hair but you’d find out later they were 35” - but also many of them had serious alcohol and drug problems. “It was a haven for odd bodies on both sides of the counter.”

“You could be odd, you could be very shy, and no one questioned it. No one ever said ‘You’ve got to be more outgoing so you can go and do a presentation’. It didn’t matter if you were shy and introverted and smelt a little bit. It was a great equalizer, working in the library. As long as you knew your stuff, it didn’t matter what kind of person you were.

Such a dystopian utopia! You might be spewed on or assaulted, but at least you’re treated as an equal.

When he was 15, Leon, now a grown-up newspaper columnist, had a three-week stint fitting out coffins at a West Auckland undertakers - screwing in the faux-metal handles, installing waterproof lining to stop fluids leaking, stapling in the satin lining (which is stuffed with shredded newspaper), and affixing the name plate to the casket’s lid. His father, a minister, had obtained the work for him, and he was paid $10 per casket.

“The gruesome aspect of the job was that the mortuary was adjoining and the spring was broken on the door, so it would just fly open at all sorts of odd times. You’d try not to look up because one of the funeral directors would be embalming, but of course you couldn’t really help yourself.

“You’d see these people on slabs. One in particular was a woman in her early 40s who’d died of cancer and I just remember her body was covered in these big black tumours.

“I did have a few bad dreams of what I’d seen. This old Māori guy had died, aged 79. He’d seemed quite fit but obviously had just had a heart attack and so he had to have a post mortem. I remember looking up and the flap of his…it was all peeled back and you could see the brain. It had come to the embalmer from the coroner’s like that. He was scalped and it was an appalling sight.”

“There were some very sad aspects to the job. I did a couple of little children’s coffins and that’s pretty sad. Of course, they’re much easier to get down off the shelves.”

“They weren’t corner-cutters - they were really respectful of bodies - but one day there was an influx of bodies and we had to put two (in body bags) where the coffins would go ordinarily, and another body bag on a trolley beside me and an embalmed person in an open coffin beside me as well. And this is in a really cramped space: the floor area, not including the coffin shelves, would have been no more than 3m by 3m.

Tucked into the very place where unpleasant reminders of death are hidden, Leon was surrounded by all the stimuli he needed to reflect seriously and profoundly - on the futility of vanity, on the pitilessness of time, and on the fact that it is only in death that we are individuated from the crowd and impelled to discern our freest and most authentic means of being in the world.

Except when you’re 15, that’s not really where your priorities lie. “You still just live like a teenager. I didn’t say ‘Gosh I must make the most of every last moment’.”

“It was the best paid job I’ve had, probably to this day. I would have done about 60 coffins a week. That would have taken me about 20 to 25 hours. Up until that time, I’d done a paper run for the Western Leader for two years, $4.06 a week. To this day, I don’t know if I average $25 an hour.”

If you’re a 15 year old boy and you suddenly find yourself with nearly $2000, what do you blow it on? Cartons of smokes for the whole form? A sweet ride? A Gibson Flying V? Some sort of Risky Business-inspired cartel of prostitutes?

Leon laughs uncomfortably. We have a conversation about not using his real name. “I’m ashamed to say this, but most of it went on 200 ANZON investment shares.”

This, from someone whose political leanings are…well, let’s just call him a “friend of Chris Trotter’s”.

“I sort of am a socialist,” he explains, “but this was coming up to 1987 - everyone was caught up in this nonsense! They were a good little saver in those days. I bought them at $3.30, they went up to $3.95 in a great hurry and, not really understanding anything about shares, I thought ‘I’ll sell them when they go over $4’. They might have gone to $3.97 and then they collapsed.”

If you’re lucky, your first part-time job will grant you a first, delectable taste of financial independence.

My grandfather still tells the story, tinged with grim pride, of his first part-time job. He worked to make the bus fare from Temuka to Timaru, so he could attend Timaru Boys High.

“I wanted to get away from the district high school curriculum which was focused on dairy science and ploughing and all that sort of stuff. I wanted to do history and geography and French.”

“I was a butcher’s boy on a Saturday morning. I worked from 8 o’clock until about 1pm. I cycled all round the district getting orders and delivering them and when I’d finished that I had the job of cleaning the sausage machine and doing anything nasty around the place. For that, I got 5 shillings.”

“I’ve never forgotten it. It was a supreme gesture of my wanting to go to Timaru. It was helpful to me. My further life was predicated on what I learnt at high school, and what I did.”

I can imagine him cycling around Temuka, a basket of splendid meat packs tethered to the handlebars of his bike, his little calves pumping with righteous indignation and resentment towards his tightwad father. His income was a means of revolt against uninspiring circumstances. And, on the school holidays, a source of chocolate and movie tickets.

But of course, part-timers don’t always get to be the defiant hero of their story arc. While at university, a guy we’ll call Jason wore a sandwich board advertising the services of Dr Shoe on Queen St, for an hour every weekday for six months. For three months, he also wore a board spruiking for the Auckland Star.

Jason was paid $10 an hour, before and after tax, a sum he considers fair. It wasn’t as easy as it looks. “You had to concentrate. Queen St is quite busy so you had to make sure you didn’t hit people. I had to do the Auckland Star sandwich board when all the schoolgirls from Epsom Girls Grammar were leaving (I guess they figured that’s when marketability was): there’s me walking around in this bizarre raincoat (because it always did seem to rain) and they’d walk by and giggle.”

Did Jason’s friends visit him at work? Did they perhaps fetch him a reviving sandwich or a hot drink? “No. They’d come down and say, ‘What an asshole’. You can’t run when you’re wearing a sandwich board. You couldn’t really chase them.”

After a biographer recorded that James Thurber had borne “drudgery on several newspapers”, Thurber wrote an essay that put the claim into some perspective.

“There is, of course, a certain amount of drudgery in newspaper work,” he observed, “just as there is in teaching classes, tunnelling into a bank, or being President of the United States. I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the RCA Building, would pall a little as the days ran on.”

Perhaps this is why a colleague likes to dream about part-timing in a garden centre. A friend always imagined herself working behind the stocking counter at Rendells. Another friend used to talk about us moving to Hawaii to work at The Gap, where we would wear headset microphones and fold sweaters. (Her idea, not mine.)

I can’t walk past a Help Wanted sign without considering applying. A part-time job would free up the time and headspace for my musical comedy ideas to develop. I might be given the keys to a roof terrace where I could sunbathe afterhours. I could get on with knocking off A La Recherche under the counter.

I don’t try to pretend, anymore, that the job would be enriching or inspiring.

I had three part-time jobs while at university; one of them tutoring high school kids who were doing inadequately at their fancy streamed schools. I taught French, Latin and English and then, presumably after a bit of feedback had come in, just English.

My students were all boys. They passionately hated studying English. It was too wishy-washy. The rules were unfair. Their teachers had told them that there was no such thing as a wrong answer in English class - you just had to say how a book made you feel – but when they got their assignments back, they’d been failed. What kind of a lousy trick is that?

One kid, a Korean Holden Caulfield, was studying Catcher in the Rye and thought it was completely phoney. He’d thumb through the pages and make chopping gestures at the text, moaning “How can this be a classic?”

At this point, I should probably say how, in the process of tutoring, I learnt so much myself and all that kind of crap, but if you want to know the truth, I don’t remember that happening. The work was repetitive, and even when the kids acted like I’d imparted something inspirational or useful, I was primarily conscious of how many more hours I had to do before I could go home.

I don’t expect my dream part-time job to nourish that part of the working soul that needs sustenance. I know what it is like to drive past your old workplace and say abstractedly, I used to work there, and no one cares, but you watch closely as you pass by, remembering all the hours you put in there, realising that you’ve got precisely nothing to show for it, other than fragments of an obsolete institutional memory.

But something must remain.

Published in Sunday, 2008

[rosehoare]

Berlin

It was July, 1998. We were two philosophy students, backpacking around Europe. I recorded my observations in a travel diary, which I doubtless hoped would some day be filed with my other juvenilia in a university’s collection. Apparently, in a bookshop near the Sorbonne, we made Derrida jokes. I do realize how all of this sounds, but I am sacrificing my pride to give you the straight story here.

We met James in a Lonely Planet-approved place called Dicke Wirtin, in Berlin, after a day spent looking at the graves of Bertolt Brecht, Fichte and Hegel, in the rain, and feeling very profound.

James was a big fat man in his forties. He wore a broad-brimmed felt hat, a sort of Drizabone coat and a salt and pepper goatee beard that forked in the middle. He was an actor and singer, from Boston. He had appeared in a Philadelphia cream cheese commercial, which he expected us to have seen, as it had played in cinemas throughout the States in the 1980s. My travel diary doesn’t record how he’d wound up in Europe, but he was pursuing a musical career there.

How do I describe his music? His album, which he had committed to cassette tape, was titled Sexy Sadness. On the cover, there was a photograph of a much younger James reclining on a low-hanging tree bough in a rather brief toga. It featured a song called “Cruisin’ on the Autobahn” which, he explained, was too frankly sexual for radio play in Berlin.

He showed us his university ID card, which appeared to designate his profession as “karate teacher”. This surprised me, given his corpulence. He explained that karate is primarily mental. If you can make your mind carve up one second into split-seconds, …well, that’s karate.

He demonstrated his point. “From here,” he said, extending his hands in front of him, as though he were telling us about the size of a fish he’d caught, “to here”, he said, swishing his hands past each other rapidly, setting his mid-section jiggering, “is all in your mind.” In addition to his skill as a karate sensei, musician and actor, James also mentioned that he had psychic powers.

He made a lot of jokes about shooting people who irritated him. He would adopt a Dirty Harry drawl and say “then I pulled out my .44 Magnum and blew him away”, then he would say, “that’s just my American black humour.”

He also told a lot of lame, bawdy jokes that we’d heard before and when we didn’t laugh much, he’d say “So you’re young and uptight. That’s okay. When you’re older, you’ll remember the joke and be able to laugh about it - you won’t feel that your body’s a bad thing anymore”. (I think about that sometimes. What I think is, I can’t remember any of his jokes and I haven’t noticed my body getting any less of a bad thing as I get older).

He was clearly an eccentric character and his girlfriend, an English nurse named Valerie, seemed nice. We made plans to meet up for a night out.

When we arrived at their place, James was practising with Ernesto, a quiet, reserved German engineer who played second violin in an orchestra but who said that improvisational playing with James “satisfied” all his “musical requirements”.

Also at James’ place was his friend Ralph, a narrow, six foot four, ZZ Top-looking biker who claimed to be the best English speaker in Berlin, but who, in reality, spoke very little English at all. All the same, he was very animated.

James and Valerie had made sauerkraut, bratwurst, wienerwurst, smoked pork and Black Forest ham, and boiled potatoes. After dinner, we headed for East Berlin in Ernesto’s old Mercedes. We were going to an open mic night at a place called Café Harlem.

The running order was written on the wall behind the stage as well as the motto: Jeder der will – Kann; Jeder der Kann – muß (If you want to, you can; if you can, you must). A man in a Batman t-shirt and leather vest did a rendition of “Hey Joe”, singing only “Hey Joe” in English, and speaking the rest of the lyrics in German.

An extremely short, intense man called Bjorn got up and said, “I don’t do covers, I only sing my own songs. This one is in Hebrew. It’s an Israeli language. I know it.” When he switched to English midway through a song, it became clear that Hebrew had been disguising the awfulness of his lyrics, which had all the clumsy, sophomoric angst of a poetry-writing workshop.

Ralph laughed hard at Bjorn. He laid a finger against the side of one nostril and somehow whistled loudly out of the other one. I’m not sure what kind of sentiment this gesture was meant to express. He and I were both drinking beer shandies made with Fanta instead of lemonade, an unlikely drink for a biker.

After Bjorn, a hamster-faced guy with lots of wild black hair got up with his guitar and mouth-organ. He looked a lot like Bob Dylan and sang a mixture of Bob Dylan songs and original compositions that sounded like Bob Dylan songs. He introduced one such work by saying, “This is another Bob Dylan song I wrote”.

We left soon after this, and went back to James and Valerie’s house. We were tired but James insisted on sitting up because, he said, he was excited by the rare opportunity to talk about philosophy. It was decided that we would stay the night on the little couch of his studio apartment.

“Things got pretty hairy,” my diary records. “I can’t remember in what order the insanity came, but he talked the most shit I’ve ever heard.”

At some point, James started talking about a knife he had when he was 14, describing what a good, what a handsome knife it was. I asked what a 14 year old wanted with a knife. He said, matter-of-factly, that it was “for magic”. Misconstruing our surprised and concerned expressions, he added that he only did white magic.  

Somewhere around that point, I started thinking about how much I loved my family, who were so far away in New Zealand and who I would never see again because this American freak was going to knife us and make us into wurst.

James returned to the topic of his being psychic. Earlier in the evening, at Café Harlem, he had been in a corridor on his way to the men’s toilets, staring at the bottom of a woman walking in front of him, and she had self-consciously touched her hand to her butt. When she emerged from the toilets, he’d said to her, “You have psychic abilities, don’t you?” She replied, “Why do you say that?” This happens a lot, he told us. He stares at women’s asses and they touch them, in an unconscious demonstration of their psychic powers.

Later on, I was trying to take my boyfriend’s new watch off but it broke and a spring flew through the air and we didn’t see where it landed. We looked for it, but couldn’t find it. The apartment was dimly lit. The carpet had a complicated pattern. In the condescending but affectionate tone of a bloke opening a tight jar for a lady, James instructed us to let him find it: he would put his psychic powers to work.

He got down on his hands and knees and swayed there for a while, then declared that the spring had gone into a parallel dimension, and that my boyfriend evidently “wasn’t meant to have” the really nice watch I’d just bought him.

We were leaving for Prague the next day, he reasoned. There would be gypsies there. The watch wouldn’t be safe. So the universe had taken it from us until such time as it was appropriate for my boyfriend to have his watch back. The thing that bugged me about this was, the spring just had to be down there somewhere.

We went to bed. James snored a lot louder than he’d sung, which was very loud. His breathing and the clicking sound of his mouth and tonsils made him sound like Darth Vader. We lay awake, giggling helplessly, for a long time.

 Published in Sunday, 2008

[rosehoare]

Chuck Palahniuk's Rant: a book review

Rant’s intriguing first sentence: “Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead.” Chuck Palahniuk’s eighth novel is presented as an oral history - interpolated testimony from friends, academic experts and peripheral characters builds toward the spectacular and mysterious death of Buster “Rant” Casey. Rant is a nobody from a trailer-trash town. Seedy, repellent and often droll, his body is pitted with poisonous spider, scorpion and racoon bites, which he seeks out for their aphrodisiac properties. He inhabits a dystopian American future, in which the urban population has been segregated, by means of a curfew, into Daytimers and Nighttimers. A superspreader of rabies, he’s now a celebrity and everyone claims to have met and been infected by him.  

Disgust and wonderment habitually intermingle in Palahniuk’s writing. He knows grubbiness, and he knows our guilty, fascinated attraction to it. The author of Fight Club and Choke, he has been accused of using shock value tactics, of mistaking ugliness for truth. In interviews, he tends to brag about the number of people who pass out at his readings and his previous novel, Haunted, was criticised for being handicapped by its own indigestible goriness. He’s also been criticised for writing books that are too samey-samey – violence, gross bits, surprise ending that undermines the preceding narrative. Rant won’t do much to revoke this charge. 

If it reads like a just-add-water Chuck Palahniuk book, Rant is nevertheless crammed full of ideas, enough for several books. A town’s economy is debased when its children come into possession of antique coins worth thousands of dollars, which they claim the tooth fairy left them and, rather than asking questions, the greedy adults sell them overpriced candy and toys. The novel describes a technology that enables people to record their experiences (make “neural transcripts”), edit them like movies and “outcord” them for others’ consumption. Palahniuk also introduces the thrilling and horrifying notion of “Party Crashing” – a subculture built around decorating, chasing and crashing cars for fun: “…they’re just trying to milk out the moment their life gets slow. The pulse when two cars come together.” 

Most of Palahniuk’s ideas are as barbed as this. He seems to be making a point about the kinds of things that hold a society together (collectively held stories, family tribalism, sex) and the kinds of things that pull a society apart (paranoia, boredom, apathy, ruthlessness, avarice).

Regardless of whether you find him persuasive on these counts, Rant is undoubtedly engaging. Although it’s not especially well-written - Palahniuk, despite his cult following, is no great stylist – he at least knows how to get on with it, and while his flair for lurid, vivid grottiness might be a stumbling point for some readers, it’s probably a drawcard for others. To be in the company of such a febrile mind is exhilarating, in the same way that pulling the remainder of a torn scab off yourself can be exhilarating. 

- Published in Sunday Star-Times

[rosehoare]

The Illusionist: a film review

The Pitch: Even illusionists need love.

Watch Out For: Shades of The Sound of Music at the end. 

Stars: 3 out of 5.

Eisenheim is an illusionist working the moneyed, presumably Freud-fatigued crowds of fin-de-siecle Vienna. By means of a searingly intense gaze and outstretched hand, he can make an orange tree grow from a pip in a matter of seconds. He can roll the orange between and over his fingers like David Bowie does in The Labyrinth. He can effect a switcheroo on a handkerchief held in a box on a lady’s lap, such that the handkerchief is delivered back to the lady by two butterflies. (The Illusionist’s producers availed themselves of the services of Ricky Jay, the extraordinary sleight of hand magician, a man who can fling a playing card so it pierces the rind of a watermelon). 

While entertaining an audience that includes the haughty Crown Prince Leopold, heir presumptive to the Hapsburg throne, Eisenheim re-encounters his old girlfriend, Duchess von Teschen (played passably by the toothsome Jessica Biel), who is now betrothed to the prince. Leopold, who prides himself on being an enlightened, rational kind of guy, is irritated by Eisenheim’s magic and is threatened by the charm it holds for the Viennese people and in particular for his fiancé. Since he is not the sort of villain to bear such irritations lightly, he sicks his hapless police chief onto Eisenheim, demanding that he be arrested. 

Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, as Inspector Uhl, together deliver the film’s best scenes. Norton is wonderfully enigmatic and Christ-like in the calm way he suffers persecution and, while there’s little chemistry between he and Biel, Norton sizzles opposite Giamatti who, as usual, portrays a character at once likeable and vaguely disgusting. Prague does a wonderful job of portraying Vienna. 

Although less sophisticated in plot and tone than expected, and with its fair share of bad phony accents and moustaches, The Illusionist nevertheless manages to engross, without lifting the curtain on too many magic techniques. 

- Published in Sunday Star-Times