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I went along to the latest in Women On Air‘s series of conversations with writers on Wednesday night. This time it was with Elizabeth Knox, most famous for her book The Vintner’s Luck. I have not read any of her books, but I do have two of them in my ever-growing pile of books to get around to sometime, and having heard her talk I am more keen than ever to get around to them sometime.

The talk was advertised as being about the role of the supernatural in fiction, but in fact Knox spent a lot of the time talking about the broader genre of fantasy, and how it relates to “literature”. It was refreshing to hear a literary giant such as herself talking about science fiction and fantasy without embarrassment, and adopting the notion that SF&F books and writers have something to contribute as a default position, rather than being embarrassments to be hidden away from the sight of decent folk.

The compere started proceedings by commenting on the appropriateness of talking with Knox about the supernatural in Our City O-Tautahi, a wonderful building which originally served as the Christchurch City Council’s Municipal Chambers. (“Christchurch gothic at its best.”)

The compere initially asked Knox to define supernatural, which she broadened immediately to fantasy, and which question she answered piecemeal throughout the rest of the talk.

She talked about how she wavered in her own writing between using fantastical elements and not. She talked about the divide that other people see between literature and fantasy, and wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, and therefore felt obliged to downplay or remove fantastical elements from her writing. While pondering such matters she eventually realised that she was dedicated to fantasy, mostly because of her childhood love of Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr Who and so forth, (“it’s where I come from”) and in particular because of the “Imagination Game” that she and her sisters played obsessively as children. She alluded to this game several times during the talk – clearly it played a big part in the formation of the writer she is today. As kids they invented two enormous ongoing sagas – “supernatural soap operas” – populated with thousands of characters, some of whom they became very familiar with. They would take these characters, forged in the sagas, and place them in new and different and interesting situations and genres.

Knox is of the opinion that writing fantasy enables the writer to be honest about moral questions. That trying to discuss the same questions in realistic fiction risks coming across as didactic.

Knox likes the surprise of being presented with a new set of rules that you can find in fantasy fiction, and she likes following along as the characters in these settings learn the rules of the world they live in. Despite this, she said that she doesn’t like “portal” fiction, wherein people from our world are magically transported to other worlds. She stressed that she personally felt that such rules should be internally consistent to get the best story.

She said that lots of books these days are “catastrophic” fiction, wherein people do horrible things to each other, and she finds this distasteful. (I’m not sure, but this was in the context of discussing moral questions in fantasy, so I think that she meant that catastrophic fiction was a subset of realistic fiction.)

She has decided that what she likes to write is “Fantastic Naturalism” – strongly imagined worlds with natural and social structures that feel real but aren’t.

And of course, when it comes down to it, she “just likes making things up.”

She talked a bit about the ubiquitous vampire books, claiming that our stories of creatures that live forever derive from our fear of not being important enough in our own lives.

When asked about her foray into Young Adult fiction, she said that it had been “crazy mad successful”, not least because Stephanie Meyer blogged about her. She said that the paperback edition of Dreamhunter sold out in twelve hours. She also claimed that 20,000 copies of the audiobook version of one of her books were downloaded illegally, which she doesn’t mind – she sees it all as good publicity. And the producers of the Twilight movies have optioned one of her books. She claimed that “nerdy hyper-intelligent teenagers” liked her book Black Oxen, but that others struggle with it.

When asked about writing to the market, she claimed that she never made mercenary decisions, she simply wrote what interested her. She said that people frequently congratulated her on her canny acumen, “as if I’d thought it through!”

She talked about her current project, an epic fantasy in a world that doesn’t resemble ours very much. There are no zombies and no elves in this world, but there are creatures that are both zombies and elves. Or something.

She described fantasy as being the bastard sibling of modernism. She explained this by basically blaming modernism for the splitting up of fiction into “Literature” (good) and “Fantasy” (bad), giving examples such as Shakespeare being free to write about fairies in the pre-split literary world. She conceded that there is lots of bad fantasy around – but that of course there is lots of bad literature too. She said that literature “literary fiction” is a genre and is no better than fantasy – it just claims the moral high ground. She reckons that the best fantasy today is being published as Young Adult.

After the main talk she gave a reading from her latest book, The Angel’s Cut, which featured the surreal image of a angel with his wings cut off falling from an airplane, instinctively trying to deploy his missing wings before remembering to deploy his parachute instead.

A very interesting talk from a fascinating person.

Update: Helen Lowe also blogged about the event.

I went tonight to see a talk by John Connolly, the Irish crime novelist. These events usually take the form of a “conversation” between the writer and an MC, but in this case, once the MC introduced Connolly, he was off. He talked for an hour solid, scarcely pausing to draw breath. He was very funny and entertaining, and had a lot of interesting things to say, but his tendency to wander off on tangents and to repeatedly interrupt himself as something more interesting came to mind made it hard to take meaningful notes, and he spoke so fast that I occasionally had trouble understanding unfamiliar names of people and places. It was a very fun evening.

Connolly started off by posing the question: Why do we read mystery fiction? (Throughout the talk he used “mystery fiction” and “crime fiction” interchangeably, despite accepting that they were different.) Do we read for plot or for character? He concluded that we read for character, and it’s the characters – not the plots – that stick with people long after they’ve finished a given book. He accused us in the audience and readers in general of being disloyal – to writers. We are, he maintained, loyal to characters, not to writers. We readers form relationships with characters, not with writers. And he asserted that mystery fiction tends to maximize these relationships with characters. And writers can earn a good living by exploiting this fact.

He claimed that readers want “the same thing, only different” year after year. So, he posed, how does the mystery/crime novelist avoid atrophy if they are producing the same but different, year after year? Some writers don’t avoid atrophy. “I’m not going to mention any names Patricia Cornwall.” He then launched into what I considered to be an ill-advised discussion of where he thinks Patricia Cornwall has gone wrong. He said she had signed The Devil’s Pact – a six book contract, and that she’s tied to a series she’s tired of.

He claimed that Robert Parker has also atrophied, by never letting his character grow old. (The character was in the Korean War, and yet is still a young man in the 1990s.) At this point he launched into a hilarious aside about one of Parker’s characters: Susan, whom he claimed was one of the most hated characters in all of fiction, and that if the readers of the world could conduct a metaphysical assassination – having someone turn up in the books and kill a character unexpectedly for no in-book reason – it would be of Susan.

He claimed that James Burke tried to avoid atrophy by starting a new series featuring a new character, but that this was just the old character in a new hat.

When he first started thinking about this problem, Connolly decided to write a collection of short stories to allow him to try out different voices. Now he deals with the atrophy problem by writing his Charlie Parker books under contract, but alternating each contract book with a stand-alone book unrelated to the series. This allows him to keep trying new things, while allowing him to come back to the series each time refreshed.

Connolly said that the only duty the writer has to the reader is to not waste his or her time. He said that there is no such thing as a ‘guilty pleasure’ when it comes to reading. Reading for entertainment is not a guilty pleasure. He asked how many people had read The Da Vinci code. About three quarters of the audience raised their hands. “It’s like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in here,” Connolly quipped. “Hello my name is John and I haven’t touched Dan Brown for 18 months seven days.” If you like Wilbur Smith, don’t be ashamed. In fact when he was a young man Connolly read lots of Wilbur Smith, because there were frequent smutty bits. He would go to the book shops and find that the Wilbur Smith books had their spines cracked in such a way that they would fall open at the smutty bits. He has never forgotten one such line, “She gasped at the sight of Tom’s wondrous man-thing.” Even since he was wanted to ask Wilbur Smith what was so wondrous about it: did it light up? Play a tune? Many years later when he was asked to interview Smith, he chickened out of asking the question.

Nowadays of course, bookstores contain whole sections of erotic novels. He told the story of looking at the spines of books in the erotic section of a bookshop. Each book had a symbol on the spine, so that you could easily identify the perversion contained within. He said that he didn’t even understand some of the symbols – such as the gas mask. “What? There is WW1 trench porn?”

Connolly talked about ebooks, concluding that physical books were under no threat from ebooks. He pointed out that no-one ever felt affection for a CD: people switched from vinyl to CD to digital download just because it was more convenient. But books are different: people form associations with particular books, they act as markers in a person’s life. Books are like sharks and spiders – they have not needed to evolve because they are perfect. He thought that there might be a market for ebooks in genre fiction, as people tend not to want to reread genre books.

He gets annoyed when people stuffily claim that they never read fiction. He would like to hang such people outside libraries (“like Mussolini and his wife”) with signs around their necks saying “I Don’t Read Fiction”.

He reads 100 books a year, and talked a bit about the problems associated with this. If he were to hang on to every book be bought his house would collapse around his ears, and people would say, “That’s how he would have wanted to go.”

His friend Lee Child keeps his books hidden from view in his house, as he feels it’s pretentious to have thousands of books on display – an attitude Connolly can’t understand. He claims to judge people by the books on their shelves. He reckons that even if someone spent their time saving blind kids in Bombay, if they didn’t have books on their shelves he wouldn’t like them.

He claimed that big volume buyers like himself keep the publishing industry going, and mentioned his despair that people in general buy so few books that someone who buys five a year is considered a large volume buyer.

Connolly says that has been criticized for putting supernatural elements into his crime fiction books. “It’s just not the done thing in crime fiction.” He laid out an argument in defense of his position that I didn’t really understand. He claims that crime fiction grew out of rationalism, and that what is expected of crime fiction is a solving of the crime based on rational steps. He said that in real life it was possible for the rational and the anti-rational to co-exist. (I never quite got a handle on what he meant by ‘anti-rational’.) Anti-rational is not the opposite of rational, irrational is. As an example of this co-existence he talked about a woman in real life who murdered her children in a calm and methodical way. He says that he has talked to many police officers, psychologists, and doctors, who deal with people who do these appalling things, and none of them have ever been able to tell him what evil is.

In crime fiction, you’re not supposed to have the rational and the anti-rational together. Crime fiction hates miscegenation – the creation of hybrids.

As an example of how strange the “rules” of crime fiction are, he talked about the vast mystery-only bookshops in the United States that stock every kind of mystery/crime novel. He claimed, for example, that there are whole sections of “cheesecake mysteries” – which is not a euphemism, he meant mysteries involving the baking and eating of cheesecakes. There are whole sections on “cat mysteries”, wherein sentient cats set out to solve a murder – usually that of their erstwhile owner. (He sidetracked to point out how ridiculous this is – a real cat whose owner has just been murdered would just eat the owner. “Cats are alligators with better hygiene.”)

Finally he talked about why he sets his books in the United States, even though he grew up in and lives in Ireland. He said that, when he was a kid, Irish writers were expected to write stories set in Ireland, involving “Irish” things such as Catholic guilt. But he found that he didn’t like reading that stuff, and instead spent his time reading the American crime authors. And so when it came time for him to start writing, it was natural for him to set his stories there. “But you take who you are with you,” and so he says his novels are not American novels.

After the main bulk of the talk, Connolly invited questions from the audience.

He was asked about The Gates, his first Young Adult book, and in what ways writing for YA was different from writing for adults. He claimed that he made no intellectual compromises to kids: “You can patronize adults, but you can’t patronize kids.” He said that adults live in a world of shades of grey, while kids live in a world of black and white, and believe in right and wrong, and that therefore he had to be sure to keep the good and evil in his book clearly separated.

In response to a question about the writing life, he said that he did not find writing easy, and that at about 20,000 words into any new project he hits The Wall, and is consumed with self-doubt, and becomes sure that the book is rubbish and he should throw it out and start again. It’s especially hard to push on when he hears the siren call of the “better idea”. But he claims that there is no such thing as a bad idea – there are just problems with execution. He said that self-doubt is part of the process, and that writers are simply people who finish books, nothing more.

After the Q&A, Connolly signed books, taking the time to shake people’s hands and find out a bit about them. When I went to get my book autographed, a part of the conversation went like this:

Me: May I take a photo of you for my website?

He: Sure. What’s the website?

Me: Just my personal one – not anything anyone has ever heard of.

He: Until you go to the shopping center and start shooting that is. Then everyone will visit your website, and they’ll say things like, “You see? The clues were there all along.”

Crime writer to the end!

I went to Armageddon over the weekend. You can read my report here.

Last night I went to see Andrea Levy, noted UK novelist, who was in Christchurch to support her new book, The Long Song.

The format of the talk was a conversation between Levy and Christchurch writer Helen Lowe. The two writers sat in magnificent throne-like chairs in a magnificent room of one of Christchurch’s magnificent old buildings. Helen conducted the proceedings with aplomb, and Levy had many fascinating stories to tell.

Levy is the daughter of Jamaican parents, and while she has lived all her life in the UK, she clearly identifies very strongly with her Jamaican heritage and the legacies of the age of slavery.

The Long Song is set on a nineteenth-century Jamaican plantation, and tells the story of two slave women. As well as conversing with Helen, Levy gave two readings from her book, switching from her UK accent to a Jamaican one (clearly based on her mother’s accent) to great effect.

When asked about the sudden success of her fourth novel, Small Island, Levy said that she had been writing for ten years before she became successful, and that it was like whispering in a small room before suddenly looking up to find that the whole world is listening. When asked about the long gap (six years) between Small Island and The Long Song, Levy said that part of the reason was the demands placed on her by the sudden success of Small Island.

Levy said that The Long Song came from a desire for her to find out about her Caribbean ancestry and heritage. When she started researching, she found “this amazing hole in history.” According to her the age of slavery lasted 300 years – and yet there exists almost no testimony from Caribbean slaves. No records of births, deaths, or baptisms, no personal journals. The only information about the life of the slaves comes from the plentiful journals and other records left by the white slave owners. She had to put together the story of the slaves from these references, a process Helen suggested was like trying to make a puzzle with reverse pieces.

When asked about how modern people felt about their slave heritage, she said that it used to be a source of shame for people, to be descended from slaves, but that attitudes were changing, and likened it to how Australians feel about their convict heritage.

When asked whether she had found it difficult to use her imagination to bridge the gaps in the historical record, Levy replied that she had no problem at all. She said that people all have the same emotional reactions to things, and so felt confident about writing about how slaves would have felt about their lot in life, even in the absence of direct testimony. As an example, she talked about a story (from one of the white owners) of how the slave women had to collect manure in baskets which they then balanced on their heads for the trip to the fields, a long walk in the hot sun with the “juice” running down their faces. The white owner was convinced that the slaves didn’t mind, and were made for it, while Levy said she had no problem imagining what the women would actually have thought about their situation.

Helen talked about the scenes of brutality in the book, and asked how much of that was made up. Levy said that she felt that it wasn’t right for her to make such things up, and so used real examples from the records, such as the white men who put a slave boy in a barrel, drove nails into it, and the rolled it down a hill.

When asked about the amount of humour in the book Levy suggested that history tends to concertina time such that all the brutal bits tend to get left in and the happy bits tend to get left out. But in all times and places people love and laugh, no matter how bad things get, and so she wanted to inject some of that into the brutal story. As she said, “people survived, and I’m testament to that.”

Helen pointed out that there were two accounts of the narrator’s birth in the book: one almost mythic, the other realistic. Why? Levy said that when reading about slavery she repeatedly found the slave trade described in almost mythic terms, and put in the dual birth stories to make it clear that these were real people.

When talking about gradations of skin colour, Levy said that even today the Caribbean operates a ‘pigmentocracy’, with the suggestion being that the closer to white you are the better a person you are. She said that historically there where many terms for different shades of skin, and claimed that one island identified over 100 shades between black and white. She claimed that – bizarrely – the system, while derived from British ideals of white supremacy, was policed and enforced by the slaves themselves, with those with darker skins being expected to do harder and more unpleasant jobs than those with lighter. Levy claims that these attitudes are still present in the Caribbean to an extent, as can be seen for example in the existence of whitening creams.

When talking about her earlier, less-successful books, Levy suggested that she had problems convincing publishers to pick up her books because they felt that books about black families would only be of interest to black people, and couldn’t tell universal stories, but that the success of Small Island had helped to change that perception.

When asked about how her family had reacted Levy said that at first it was tough on them, as it felt like she was telling the family secrets, but attitudes changed with the success of the books, and that now her mother actively encourages her to write more about their background.

Levy said she became a novelist almost accidentally, as a result of taking a creative writing class on a whim. She claimed that she didn’t even start reading regularly until she was 23, something she put down to the trauma of being forced to read books like Bleak House as a kid. Levy greatly enjoys doing the research that inform her novels. In fact she said she loved it so much that she wished she could just do research all day and then go home and watch TV.

Small Island has been made into a TV series which has shown in the UK and will be screening in NZ in mid 2010. It took five years to get from lunch to TV. (“Everything in publishing starts with ‘lunch’.”) Levy admitted that the first time she saw the production she didn’t care for it, because of all the changes they’d made to her story, but on a second viewing she decided that it was a really good drama, and reflected the tone of her book well.

As a final question Helen asked if she was going to keep writing in the same subject area, to which Levy replied with an emphatic yes. As Helen pointed out, the legacy of the British Empire gives a lot of scope.

Last night I went to a very interesting talk by Tracy Chevalier, a novelist best known for writing Girl With a Pearl Earring, which was subsequently made into a film.

She was in town under the auspices of Women on Air, supporting her new novel Remarkable Creatures, a fictionalized account of the real-life prolific fossil collector Mary Anning. About 70 people turned up to meet her.

Ruth Todd from Women on Air introduced Chevalier, saying that she had been delayed in Auckland because of the fog, and so had spent six hours that day in the Auckland airport terminal. (“Thank goodness it’s such a nice place,” muttered Chevalier in exasperation.) Then Todd took an informal count of how many of Chevalier’s books people in the audience had read: one? Two? … I would guess about three-quarters of the audience had read one, while several had read five. Fortunately Todd didn’t ask who had read zero of Chevalier’s books, so I didn’t have to embarrass myself .

What followed was a discussion between Todd and Chevalier, interspersed with a couple of readings from the book.

Todd started off by asking Chevalier about her permanent move, in her 20s, from Washington to London – did this have anything to do with her writing aspirations? “No – I went to London for fun, folly, and romance.”

Todd pointed out that Chevalier’s novels all had strong historical bases to them, and asked about the research side of things. Chevalier said that the research was her favourite bit, and enjoyed it much more than the writing. She said that her novels always started with a very specific thing, which broadened as she researched it. For example, the genesis of Remarkable Creatures was coming across a display about Mary Anning in a museum. She hadn’t heard of her before then. So she started researching into her life, which then broadened to researching about Lyme Regis (where Anning lived) and then to geology and paleontology.

As part of the research she visited Lyme Regis, which she found a fascinating and unusual place full of eccentric people. She talked about the geologic structure called Jurassic Rock, a crumbling cliff by the sea which fossils regularly come tumbling out of.

When asked about the advantages of writing historical fiction, Chevalier said she did it because it enabled her to remove herself from the writing. She didn’t start out to be a historical novelist, but her first novel was part-historical and part-contemporary, and she found the historical aspect much more satisfying.

When asked about her blending of fact and fiction, she said that some readers found it frustrating that there was no easy way to tell which aspects of her novels were made up and which historical. She is constantly getting letters from people pointing out various “errors” she has made. She (jokingly) likened herself to the Persian rug-weavers who deliberately put errors in their rugs, as perfection is for God alone.

When asked about science vs religion, Chevalier said that Mary Anning lived in a very interesting time, just before Darwin came onto the scene, in which even men of science were frequently vicars and were certain that the Earth was only around 6000 years old. She claimed that Anning’s discoveries of the fossils of whole, clearly extinct animals were very disturbing to a society that considered the world static and unchanging and God-made.

In the Q&A session, a member of the audience asked about how much input she had into the movie version of Girl With a Pearl Earring. She said that at first she had toyed with the idea of writing the screenplay, but had been talked out of it by her agent (something she described as the best bit of advice he’d given her), and in fact had very little to do with the movie. For all that, the differences between the book and the movie didn’t bother her, and she was very happy with the movie, especially how it looked.

When asked about how she decided on the titles for her books, she told a long story about the eleventh-hour decision to call the book Remarkable Creatures. Her UK publishers were immediately happy with this idea, but the US publishers didn’t want another two-word title because her previous book, Burning Bright, hadn’t sold well and they feared that some of that bad luck would rub off on the current book because the number of words in the title was the same! They wanted to call it “In Pursuit of Remarkable Creatures”, but fortunately they got talked out of it. She reiterated a point often made by writers, that they have very little control over the look of their covers, but was very happy with that of Remarkable Creatures.

Once again the talk was a fascinating glimpse into the life of a working writer.

I went tonight to a book launch for two of New Zealand’s leading writers: Fiona Kidman and Fiona Farrell. Kidman was promoting the second volume of her memoirs, Beside the Dark Pool; Farrell was promoting her new novel Limestone.

A woman from the group who had organized the talk, Women On Air, introduced the writers, commenting on the confusion possible with having two Fionas on stage. Then the two Fionas each talked a little about the genesis of their new books and gave a reading. Then the moderator asked a few questions of the writers, before the audience was invited to ask questions of their own. Finally there was the opportunity to buy the books and have them signed.

Before her reading, Kidman commented that writing a memoir was a strange project to undertake. She wrote the book while residing in Menton, France, as the 2006 Mansfield Memorial Fellow. She admitted that she was far more interested in living in Menton than writing the book! She found it strange that writing about your own life requires a lot of research, and she found it very hard to be objective. The said that even non-writers should consider writing some sort of memoir, as it was a great gift to leave the family. As an example, she said that the forty-page document hand-written by her elderly arthritic mother was one of her most cherished possessions. Kidman drew a distinction between autobiography and memoir: she said that with an autobiography the writer undertook to tell the whole story, while in a memoir the writer could choose what to tell and how to tell it.

Kidman then read a funny section from her book concerning the time she met Peter Ustinov. It was an interview for a TV documentary that Ustinov was making. In it, she was supposed to talk about famous New Zealand murders, but found herself unwilling on the day to talk about such matters, so just had a general chat with Ustinov. Her segment didn’t make it into the documentary.

Farrell also wrote her new book while on a writer’s residence, as the Rathcoola Fellow in Ireland in 2006.  She started off with a fascinating discourse about limestone (the stone itself, not the book). She said that she had always been drawn to limestone country, a feeling I personally know very well. She said that she had been born in Oamaru, which sits on a bed of bryozoic limestone. She said that the limestone was made from the remains of tiny little creatures that lived about 30 million years ago. She claimed that each creature spent its life in a tiny little box, repeatedly dying and being regenerated before eventually dying for good and becoming part of the limestone. She said that she was innumerate, and had no concept of millions or billions of years, but these little creatures living out their lives before eventually forming the rock upon which she was born have her a good handle on how old the planet is.

She got the idea for the novel Limestone while driving through limestone country in Ireland. She decided that she wanted to write a book that told both a small, human-scale story, plus a larger story of the whole world.

In the structured Q&A session after the readings I found the question of how politics informs their writing the most interesting, if nothing else as a study in contrasts. Farrell said that she had been brought up in a very socialist family, where cups of tea would be thrown at the TV in outrage at footage of Muldoon, and considered politics the most interesting aspect of human nature. She found the efforts of people to organize and get their voices heard fascinating. Kidman on the other hand grew up in a right-wing household, where the biggest quarrel she ever had with her parents happened on the day she joined the Labour Party. She described herself as a accidental activist.

The most interesting tid-bit to come out of the audience questions concerned post-completion rituals. When Farrell has finally finished a project, she takes all the manuscripts and burns them in the vegetable garden, and then plants vegetables in the ashes!

Today was the official launch of Thornspell by Helen Lowe. It went very well, and was pretty much a perfect book launch.  The event was held in the Fendalton library, and was exceedingly well organised. Helen and Andrew had made two giant posters of the book cover, which they hung on the wall behind where Helen talked. The library had made a cake, with the cover of the book printed in edible ink on the top. About fifty people turned up, with kids sitting on bean-bags and pillows right at the front, grown-ups on chairs behind, and several people standing at the back.

Helen talked for about 30 minutes, interleaving stories about where the ideas in the book came from with readings from the book which introduced many of the important players.

Then two men from the SCA turned up in armour, and acted out a climactic battle from the book, with Helen narrating. It was an inspired idea, and worked very well.

Then Helen took questions from the floor, before ceremonially cutting the Thornspell cake with a Katana.

Tonight I went to an event organized by the local Green brigade, consisting of a couple of short movies and a talk by Jeanette Fitzsimons. The talk was held at the church on the corner of our street. (I used to say, “at our local church”, but people felt the phrase was too discordant to parse.)

The Green candidate for Port Hills opened the event by asking why New Zealand imports such a large amount of food. He repeated the often-made claim that the reason why food is so cheap is because modern farming techniques externalize much of the cost of production to the environment. He also thanked various people who had helped organize the meeting, especially the people who did the “flyering”.

Then they showed two rather well-made animated movies. The first was called, “The True Cost of Food”. It concerned a frazzled housewife heading off to the supermarket to buy supplies for the evening meal. She winds up taking her purchases to “Aisle 16½” – the True Cost Aisle where she gets charged the true cost of her food. This turned out to be $32,000 for a load of groceries. When she expressed her shock to the crusty old checkout operator, she took her to a farm to explain the price: that normal grocery prices don’t take into account the huge amounts of water used, the wasted nutrition (caused by feeding plants to cows and cows to people), the destroyed grasslands and rainforest, the massive pollution caused, the poisoned water, and the top-soil destruction. This segment culminated with the claim that the average American meal moves 2000 miles from farm to plate.

Suitably horrified, the woman curtailed her supermarketting and went instead to the local farmers’ market, where she was informed that the food sold at such concerns was produced with about 17 times less fuel than the big industrial farms, and that the food was produced in a sustainable way. The True Cost of her purchases? $27.43.

The second movie was called “The Meatrix”. It concerned a pig who was happy on his idyllic farm until one day “Moopheus” turned up to show him (via the red pill), that the idyll was all an illusion, and that the reality was animals packed in horrific conditions into industrialized farms. These farms had been created by the big companies (represented by a multi-armed metallic monster) gobbling up the small family farms of yesteryear.

After the movies Fitzsimons talked for a few minutes, starting with a story about how many New York apartments were now being built with no kitchens at all – just a microwave in the lounge.

She talked about the good old days of her childhood, when she lived on a dairy farm that had two cows to the acre. Nowadays farmers aim for 5.5, and they achieve this by pouring on nitro fertilizer and feeding the cows with oil cake made from palm oil grown in South America where rainforests used to be.

She claimed that seventeen years after the Resource Management Act, NZ still doesn’t have an effective waterways policy for regulating what farm runoff is allowed into the rivers.

She said that a recent study shows that 2.3 cows/hectare can be as profitable as 5.3 because of the massive recent increases in the price of oil.

Fonterra has apparently set a target of a 4% increase in milk yield every year in perpetuity. As Fitzsimons pointed out, this can only be achieved by ever-increasing stock rates and converting ever-more land to dairying. No-one wants to think through the consequences of this because dairying makes up about 20% of NZ’s national income.

She told a story about an apartment complex she used to live in 25 years ago, where the local farmers would regularly show up to sell fresh produce to the dwellers, and would take away all their organic scraps to turn into fertilizer.

During question time someone asked a fascinating question: What happened to farming in Cuba after the fall of the USSR? With the collapse of the fuel supply it wouldn’t have been possible to maintain modern farming practices, and yet they didn’t starve. How did they adapt and is what happened a model for what might happen world-wide? No-one seemed to know for sure.

I asked about whether it was even theoretically possible to feed the current world population – let alone the 10 billion expected by 2050 – using a return to the family farm idea. Fitzsimons made the interesting point that current food production was not aimed at feeding the world, but at maximising profit, and that thus the modern system wasn’t feeding the world anyway. Various people in the audience claimed that sustainable/organic farming was actually more productive than modern intensive techniques, which struck me as self-evidently untrue because if it was true then the big bastard corporations would have all gone organic. One guy in the audience claimed that a recent five-year study had indeed shown that, long-term, “agro-ecological” farming was more productive. He promised to send me a link to the report, which I await with interest.

Today I went to see Richard Stallman’s talk at the university. You can read my report on events here.