Flocking and Shoaling: Culture at Large (Book Review‪)‬

Review of Making Ends Meet: Essays and Lectures 1992-2004 by Ian Wedde, (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005). In this new collection of occasional talks and writing, (1) Ian Wedde charts the shifts and turns of culture at large from 1992-2004. Wedde's distinctive tack is a mode of address that accommodates the unruly, uncalculated and polysemic elements of a local culture at sea in a globalising decade. The titles of essays such as 'The Nation's Narratives: How Are You Placed?', '"Our Place": the Place of the Collection' or 'Prospect: No Worries' indicate central issues. But Wedde's special strength, something less thematically predictable, and, I think, a poet's or writer's strength, is unpacking cultural metaphor: the desire for death by drowning, for instance, in 'Lost at Sea: Drowning in New Zealand Literature' (an 'infantilism'), cultural forgetting in 'Living in Time: A Day at the Footie', or the thematics of the sublime in 'Life Ho! The Maritime Sublime'. Wedde thinks through the lives and works of hermits and fabulists ('Tracing Tony Fomison'; 'Richard Killeen as History Painter: "Stories without Narratives'") and the reality of public memory (the 'Big Smoke' aura of '60s Auckland in 'The Atmospheric Pressure of Culture: Two Moments). Bigger picture essays (think of metaphor as culture-pictures, giving culture pattern) are mixed with slighter, more personal and elegiac reflections ('A Brief History of Derangement and Enterprise: Remembering Alan Brunton'), which pay tribute to the everyday or unheralded (an important critical act of recall). While the writing is often lyrical and moving, the analysis is critical and imaginative. 'Beauty, Sex, Heroism' entwines the metaphorics of Social Darwinism ('the form-follows-function evolutionary goose-step of survival of the fittest' (247)) with the progressivist ethos of locally embedded modernism. (2)