Quote Unquote

I have a problem with the Listener

2012-02-12T20:20:00.000+13:00

This week’s issue of the NZ Listenerhas:

A. on the cover (above), NigelLatta pulling a comic face.

B. on the back, an ad for TV’s new show Would I lie to You? with Paul Henry pulling a comic face.

I can’t decide whether to put themagazine on the coffee table cover-side up or cover-side down.Latta or Henry? Henry or Latta? Either way strikes me as sub-optimal.

Ace of bass

2012-02-11T20:57:00.000+13:00

Via Victoria Jones, the Tal Wilkenfeld of the NZSymphony Orchestra, here is Rinat Ibragimov,principal double bass of the LSO, performing Bottesini’s Concerto for DoubleBass No 2 in B Minor on a three-stringed period instrument by Antonio Gagliano.Catherine Edwards is the pianist:

What I’m reading

2012-02-10T19:04:00.000+13:00

Don’t miss the story on pages 26-27 (notonline) of this week’s NZ Woman’s Weekly,the Valentine’s Day special edition: it features the wedding of the year,between KevinIreland and JanetWilson. It was a wonderful occasion: the bride was radiant and so was thegroom. There were at least six other poets among the guests – I counted Bland, Brown, Ensing,Harlow, O’Sullivan and Stead and there may well have been more. There were also ukuleles,posh frocks and, over dinner, brilliant speeches. A very good time was had byall. (The photos, including the one above, are uncredited but I think they areby Gil Hanly.)

LindaOlsson, my favourite NZ-Swedish novelist, tells me that last month she soldan option on the film rights to her second novel, Sonata for Miriam (known in some countries as The Consequence of Silence). This is excellent news: Maurice Shadbolt told me that he made moremoney from selling and reselling options to his novel Season of the Jew (which was never filmed) than he ever made fromselling copies of the book, and he sold truckloads of those. More New Zealandnovels have been filmed than I’d thought – a quick flick came up with Came a Hot Friday, The Scarecrow, Pallet on theFloor, Predicament (i.e. all fourof Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s novels), TheVintner’s Luck, Mr Pip, Sons for the Return Home, Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree, The God Boy, Sleeping Dogs, Hang on aMinute Mate!, The Silent One, Other Halves, The Quiet Earth, Among theCinders, In My Father’s Den, A Soldier’s Tale, Alex, Once Were Warriors,What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, Heaven, The Insatiable Moon and now AnthonyMcCarten’s novel Death of a Superherois in the works. There must be more – what have I missed?

Nick Cohen,author of You Can’t Read This Book:Censorship in an Age of Freedom, in the LiteraryReview:

It is a mistake tothink of repression as repression by the state alone. In much of the world itstill is, but in Britain, America and most of continental Europe the age ofglobalisation has done its work, and it is privatised rather than state forcesthat threaten freedom of speech.

Too much information: the Economist urges us to forget.

Detailed supportfor the StratfordTheory of Numbers. Money quote:

“It should be a compulsory part of atrainee journalist's education because people mislead all the time withnumbers, or mislead themselves with numbers. I think a healthy scepticism, ahealthy doubt, an inquiring mind and some modicum of technical ability is abasic requirement.”

Well, you’d think so.

More stats from StatsChat, critiquingthe Sunday Star-Times front-page leadstory of 5 February about selling farms to overseas buyers. I liked it because itran counter to the received “wisdom”, but StatsChat found fault with thepresentation: the comments there are good too. But I don’t believe theLuxembourg number – surely this reflects a buyer or buyers registered but notnecessarily based there.

Captionof the month, from Jan Banning’s book Bureaucratics,via David Thompson:

Marlene Abigahit Choque (1982), detectiveat the Homicide Department of the Potosi police. The department has only brokentypewriters, no computer, no copy machine, not even telephone. It shares a carwith the Vice Squad: “If there is no petrol in the car, we have to buy it fromour own money. If the car is gone, we take the bus. We have to pay the ticketsourselves.” The head on the cupboard to the right is used to make witnesses ofmurder cases show where the bullets went in or out.

Monthly salary: 920 bolivianos ($114)

Niru Ratnam writes in the Spectator about “the manipulationof the contemporary art market”:

‘Contemporary art used to be of interest tothe upper-middle-class with slightly progressive leanings who wanted to buywork of their time,’ said my anonymous London-based collector. ‘Now it is ofinterest to a status-quo-leaning, conservative group of high-net-worthindividuals. It makes contemporary art a whole lot less interesting.’

It can’t happen here:

In praise of: Lockwood Smith

2012-02-09T18:14:00.000+13:00

This clip of Winston Peters (via WhaleOil) attempting to ask a question in the House has been edited, but I thinkfrom the expression on the Speaker’s face we can trust that the clip is notentirely unfair:

Report on experience

2012-02-09T18:00:00.002+13:00

To Tauranga on Sunday, to take my motherout for lunch. We usually go to The Bridge, a restaurant over the bridge by themarina. I was told it has a new owner – PhilJudd. Wonderful. I could imagine Phil wandering about the floor, playinghis mandolin and crooning old Split Enz songs. But I had been misinformed – thenew owner is PhilRudd, the drummer in AC/DC, who has lived in Tauranga for the last 28years.

The Bayof Plenty Times enthuses:“Tauranga joins London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles for being a town youwill fly to just to eat.”

Rudd says:

“I love Tauranga because it’s got everythingyou need within reach. I can go out on my launch, moor it, have a shower, drivehome and my hair is still wet. I can drive back out to the hangar to take myhelicopter to run the Lambo on the track. The sun shines. The people hereaccept you. People are not over-awed by success. I like that, it’s cool here. Idon’t know anywhere else in the world like that. [. . .]

“The most important thing for me is thatthe restaurant feels right. It doesn't have a music theme but a music smell.”

To me, “a music smell” means beer-soaked carpet andresidual nicotine the morning after a gig loading up the gear – fortunatelyPhil’s Place, for that is the new name, does not smell like that at all. Apartfrom the terrible name, it is rather good. The food and serviceare fine, you can see the harbour, the Mount and the city. I always findthat Tauranga is improved by a bit of distance.

Friday night at the opera

2012-02-03T20:09:00.001+13:00

Handel’s 1724 opera Giulio Cesare is about the affair between the Roman general JuliusCaesar and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. The Glyndebourne production of 2006was directed by David McVicar; the conductor was William Christie; the castincluded Sarah Connolly as Caesar, Angelika Kirchschlager as Sesto and PatriciaBardon as Cornelia. Impossible to imagine a better line-up.

As if that wasn’t enough, the Cleopatra wasDanielle de Niese. Here she is performing the aria “V’adoro, pupille”. At abouta minute in, Cleopatra emerges from the rolled-up carpet and starts singingand, frankly, shimmying at Caesar:

The lyrics translate as:

I adore you, o eyes, the darts of love,

Your sparks sweetly pierce my breast.

My mournful heart beseeches your pity,

Since it ceaselessly calls you its dearlybeloved.

This performance may not be what Handel had inmind in 1724 but it had me and the children riveted this afternoon as wewatched the DVD. “She’s pretty,” said Seven. “Yes,” agreed her friend Eight. “Theshow’s not over till the slim lady dances,” I said.

Bring in the elephants

2012-02-02T17:47:00.000+13:00

DavidBowman, professor of environmental change biology at the University of Tasmania, saysthat:

thegiant African gamba grass, introduced as food for livestock in the 1930s,wreaks havoc on the landscape and provides dangerous fuel for wildfires acrossnorthern and central Australia.

“Australiahas a deeply troubled ecology and current land management approaches arefailing.”

His solution? Bring in elephants and rhinoceroses:

“I’mtalking about using elephants as a machine or ecological tool to manage thisgrass,” he said in an interview for the Guardian,acknowledging that his proposal is radical and has major risks associated withit.

Possiblyso. The introduced cane toads weren’t a great success unless you’re a canetoad, and some Aborigines might say that the introduced English and Irishweren’t a great success either, for much the same reason. Onthe other hand, Ricky Spencer, senior lecturer with the Native and Pest Animalunit at the University of Western Sydney, says that introducing elephants wouldpose significant problems:

Ifwe did go down the road of introducing elephants to Australia, we had betterdevelop the technology to clone sabre-tooth tigers to eventually control theelephants.

Howcool would that be?

Monitor: Tim Blair

Stephen Hawking, Arthur C. Clarke and women

2012-02-02T13:41:00.000+13:00

In its 7 January issue NewScientist interviewed physicist Stephen Hawking on the occasion of his 70th birthday. He talked aboutblack holes, supersymmetric particles, M-theory and suchlike. Here is the finalquestion and his answer:

What do you think most about during the day?

Women. They are a completemystery.

So here is the excellent Neil Hannon, whotrades as the Divine Comedy,on the same topic in “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World” from the album Victory for the Comic Muse. Samplelyrics:

Do you remember that old TV show
ArthurC. Clarke’s Mysterious World?
Well if ITV make a new series
They ought to come take a look at my girl [.. .]

She’s a mass of contradictions
A pick’n’mix of strange convictions
It can be a source of friction
But there are worse afflictions
Love doesn’t make distinctions.

Now to make matters worse she claims theuniverse
Is expanding like a balloon
But baby if it’s meant to be infinite
Then where is it expanding to?

A good question. The way Michael Moorcock tells it, ArthurC. Clarke found women a bit of a mystery too.

Happy birthday, Oxford English Dictionary

2012-02-01T16:16:00.000+13:00

The first volume of the first edition waspublished on 1February 1884 under the title A NewEnglish Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the MaterialsCollected by The Philological Society.

So here are the Bee Gees in 1971 with“Words”:

Monitor: HomePaddock

Dinner

2012-01-31T21:43:00.000+13:00

Today is Tuesday. This crayfish was caught onMonday morning off Tairua by our neighbourwho a year ago reckoned that he’d got his fishing costs down to “about $1000 akilo”.

He had been diving on Sunday and seen hisbiggest cray ever but didn’t manage to snare it. Happily for us, yesterday hegot some smaller ones – including this one which weighs 800g and measures, asyou can see, about 10 inches or 25cm.

It was cooked last night by his wife. Shebrought it over this afternoon as a thank-you for my minding their letterboxand garden (i.e. nicking their vegetables) over the long weekend. And now, ifyou’ll excuse me, I shall go and eat it.

So here is Robert Cray:

There goes the morning

2012-01-31T10:28:00.000+13:00

A parcel arrives, by airmail, all the wayfrom England. I tear open the wrapping to reveal a magnificent hardback book, Inside Private Eye: the first 50 yearsby Adam Macqueen, signedby him as well as by the Eye’slong-serving not-quite-founding editor, Richard Ingrams, and his successor, current editor Ian Hislop.It is arranged in A-Z format as a scrapbook with many photos and cartoonsalongside witty accounts of all the magazine’s contributors over the yearsas well as their targets, libel cases and other causes for celebration. It isdesigned for dipping into, and it is brilliant.

Under B, for example, we get “BLUNT,Anthony, extremely displeased to be outed as spy”; under O, “OFFENSIVE, Most,items published in Private Eye”;under R, “REGRETS, Few had by Eds”.

I am pleased to see Arkell v Pressdramcovered in full, as it was an inspiration to us at Metro in the late 80s. This was the case of alleged libel where the Eye’s reply to a letter from Arkell’s solicitorended:

We note that Mr Arkell’s attitude todamages will be governed by the nature of our reply and would therefore begrateful if you could inform us what his attitude to damages would be, were heto learn that the nature of our reply is as follows: fuck off.

Yours etc.

So far – I really must get back to writing myown book – this is my favourite:

WIKIPEDIA,Rules of, changed thanks to Eye

In 2008, “Street of Shame” carried a storyabout the collaborative and notoriously inaccurate online encyclopaedia siteWikipedia, to which a saboteur had added various made-up details about aCypriot football team (“a small but loyal group of fans are lovingly called ‘theZany Ones’ – they like to wear hats made from discarded shoes”) only to findthem reproduced in a match report in the DailyMirror when the team played Manchester City.

The Eyenoted that “brilliantly, by the rules of Wikipedia – which relies on ‘verifiability– whether readers are able to check that material added has already beenpublished by a reliable third party source’ such as ‘mainstream newspapers’ – thisis now officially true”.

Within a week, after a solemn exchange ofemails between Wikipedia administrators and the Eye hack who wrote the story (me) the website’s guidelines had beenamended. “To avoid this indirect self-referencing, editors should ensure thatmaterial from news organisations is not the only existing source outside ofWikipedia.”

This put an end to Wikipedia relying onnewspapers for facts. It has certainly not stopped newspapers from relying onWikipedia for facts.

What I’m reading

2012-01-30T16:45:00.000+13:00

Surrender by DonnaMalane. Liking it.

Mitt Romney’stax return explained in comment #17. Two words: corporate tax.

Signs.

Stop meltingmy Prius.

“Eco-friendly labels are becoming moreubiquitous, but they may be misleading.” Youdon’t say.

Matt Nolan praises labourmarket globalisation.

Robust reporting: Tainui news for Waikato readers (viaMaui Street).

Home Paddock talkssense about the sale of the Crafar farms, which Cactus Kate rightly refersto as the Westpacfarms.

In the February issue of Word(February issue, not online: they’re not silly) English folksinger JuneTabor reveals that thanks to Dan Lepard’s 2004 book The Handmade Loaf she is a champion breadmaker:

I once won Best Homebaked Loaf at theLudlow Food Festival!

Here she is with guitarist Martin Simpson performingRichard Thompson’s “Strange Affair”:

Show me the money

2012-01-28T12:00:00.002+13:00

The Heraldinterviews (not online; page B15 in the Arts section) Anthony McCartenabout his new novel, In the Absence ofHeroes:

Best-known for co-writing the 1987 hitstage play Ladies’ Night with StephenStratford, McCarten directed his first film, Via Satellite, in 1999, the same year that his debut novel, Spinners, was published.

I’m still waiting for my royalties.

UPDATE:
Onlinenow.

How to write a book

2012-01-27T20:00:00.001+13:00

This is how I do it. Iam not sure which are the most important elements: the research material on allthat A4 paper; the CDs of major interviews; the hard copies of what has beenpreviously published on the topic; the brightly coloured versions of Post-Itnotes; the classic yellow Post-It notes; theglass of water; the glass of wine; or the stack ofcookbooks in the distance.

Atleast I don’t have to make stuff up. Glad I’m not a novelist:

Of meat, cancer, adultery and statistics

2012-01-27T13:34:00.001+13:00

More confirmation ofthe StratfordTheory of Numbers from the BBC which reports:

A link between eatingprocessed meat, such as bacon or sausages, and pancreatic cancer has beensuggested by researchers in Sweden.

They said eating anextra 50g of processed meat, approximately one sausage, every day wouldincrease a person's risk by 19%.

Pancreatic cancer isvery nasty but the lifetime risk for men is one in 77 or 1.3%. So for theone-a-day sausage-eating community the risk would seem to be 19% more than that, or 1.5%.Hmm. If you ate just one or two sausages a week it might be 1.35%. Change oflifestyle indicated? No, me either.

Recent reading includedPanicon a Plate: how society developed an eating disorder by Rob Lyons(Societas, 2011). In the chapter “A smorgasbord ofpanics”, Lyons debunks the “five a day” fruit and veg policy – a UK professorof food policy (I am not making this up) explains that five was chosen because“it was considered a nice round sum” – then discusses the suggested linkbetween meat-eating and cancer (here is a condensedversion) and points out the flimsiness of the evidence:

The studies in question suggest that thepeople who eat the most processed and red meat have an increased risk ofsomewhere between 15 per cent and 45 per cent. But given the crude nature ofthese studies – often based on a questionnaire of a whole variety of differenteating and other personal habits in the first week of the study followed bychecks on disease status some years later – there is room for all sorts ofconfounding factors to creep in. Are the kinds of people who eat a lot of processedmeat different in other ways, too, like being poorer?

That’s why the US National Cancer Institutedeclared in 1994 that “in epidemiological research, [increases in risk of lessthan 100 per cent] are considered small and are usually difficult to interpret.Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or the effects ofconfounding factors that are sometimes not evident”. In other words, if aparticular factor does not at least double the risk of a particular disease orcondition occurring, treat that result with a pinch of salt. The link betweenlung cancer and active smoking, for example, is unambiguous, with increases inrisk more in the order of 2000 per cent, not 15 per cent. In suchcircumstances, correlation seems a good indication of causation. The red/processedmeat link to cancer is nothing like as strong.

That figure of a 100%increase in risk being the threshold for concern is worth remembering. Speakingof statistical bollocks, the good Oil linked to a superb demolition of that spectacularlystupid story in the NZ Herald based on a press release from aninfidelity website – that’s right, you can go online to find someone with whomyou can cheat on your spouse/partner. It was headlined “Infidelity: it’s aright-wing, meat-eaters’ thing” and claimed that “If your partner supportsNational, has a PC, drinks Coke, eats meat, has a tattoo, smokes and is aChristian, be warned – they could be a cheater.”

Over at the excellent StatsChat,statistician Thomas Lumley pulls this apart under the title “Unfaithfulto the data, too”:

The proportion ofNational supporters in the election was 47%, among website members it’s 33%, soNational supporters are substantially less likely to be members of the websitethan supporters of other parties. The proportion identifying as Christian amongwebsite members is very similar to the proportion in the 2006 census. 79% ofwebsite users are on PC (vs Mac). Again that’s a lower proportion of PCs thanin the population of NZ computers (the Heraldsaid 10% were Macs in July 2010, and for Aus+NZ combined, IDC now says 15%) butone explanation is that Macs have more of the home market than the businessmarket. More members drinking Coke vs Pepsiis also not surprising — I couldn’t find population figures, but Coke dominatesthe NZ cola market.

The story doesn’t say,but we can also be pretty confident that the website members are more likely tobe Pakeha than Maori, more likely to be accountants than statisticians, andmore likely to have a pet cat than a pet camel.

Cactus Kate has boldlygone where I wouldn’t and checked the cheaters’website out. To no one’s surprise whatshe found a) was repulsive and b) confirms that New Zealanders have but one degree of separation.

So here is Dean Martin (because he was amember of the Rat Pack) with Hank Williams’s “Your Cheating Heart”:

Brand New Zealand

2012-01-26T19:46:00.000+13:00

My dear wife – especiallydear just now because she has taken the children off to theManawatu and Wairarapa for the next few days so that I can write a book, or atleast get a good start on it as it is due in two weeks – passed on this from Straight Furrow (not online): the ownersof a Gisborne lifestyle block sell their organic avocados and mandarins at thelocal farmers’ market under the label “Quite Tasty”.

“Quite Tasty”. Hasthere ever been a more quintessentially understated New Zealandy brand name?

Speaking of farmers’markets, we were in Auckland last weekend so checked out the Grey Lynn version whichis down Richmond Road from a café called JAFA and in a hall (unlike our local whichis up the road from a café called Rata and outdoors in a park with trees). Therewas a chap there selling OverThe Moon cheese from Putaruru: it is excellent cheese but hardly local whichI thought was the whole point of farmers’ markets. Still, the Grey Lynn Community Centre is a verynice hall which is why I published it in ArchitectureNZ when I was editor a year or 12 ago.

Sentence of the day

2012-01-26T18:55:00.001+13:00

“I’m in the professionthat feels with empathy and compassion and intuition.”

GeoffreyRush, Aussie of the Year. Self-regarding, moi?

Happy birthday, Neil Diamond

2012-01-24T19:42:00.000+13:00

Neil Diamond was bornon 24 January 1941. He wrote the Monkees’ “I’ma Believer”, Lulu’s “The Boat that IRow” and Deep Purple’s “KentuckyWoman”. Respect. He did all right as a solo artist too. Legend has it that (insertincredible percentage of your choice, starting at 80) of New Zealand homes hada copy of his 1972 live album Hot AugustNight. Here he is performing “I Am, I Said” in 1971.

Sample lyric:

“I am,” I said

To no one there

And no one heard at all

Not even the chair

And here he isperforming “Holly Holy”, maybe the best Jewish gospel song ever before LeonardCohen got the idea:

Monitor: Home Paddock

Correction of the week

2012-01-24T13:39:00.000+13:00

From the Economist, 21January issue, page 82:

Clarification In our review of “Julian Assange: TheUnauthorised Autobiography” (“Leaker’s Leak”, October 1st 2011), we said thatSwedish prosecutors wished to question Mr Assange “in two cases of rape”. Infact, Mr Assange is accused of one offence of rape, two offences of sexualmolestation and one offence of unlawful coercion. We are happy to make thisclear.

Happy? They sound ecstatic.

Accordingto the Guardian, in its first weekthe book sold 644 copies in the UK. Canongate, its publisher, had paid Assange anadvance of £412,000.

Nina Nola on Yvonne du Fresne

2012-01-23T12:32:00.001+13:00

The 45th in this occasional series ofreprints from Quote Unquote themagazine is from the October 1996 issue: the portrait is by Jo Heller. Theintro read:

Nina Nola talks to bicultural novelist Yvonne duFresne about alternative notions of “home”.

ADELICIOUS LANDSCAPE

I sat in the cable car on a piercinglybright Wellington winter morning with my dossier on Yvonne du Fresne clutchedbetween sweaty palms: will I remember which side of her family is Danish, whichFrench Huguenot? Will I confuse her novels? How does a Dalmatian New Zealanddoctoral researcher encounter a writer like du Fresne, whose prose creates sucha pervasive sense of Scandinavia?

As I step out of the car, notes and camerabundled under one arm, I see a figure making uncertainly toward me. I amsurprised to see du Fresne – it has to be her, peering at me over large,red-framed sunglasses – looking so un-Danish in a white sweatshirt, blue skirtand slip-ons. She could have been any European New Zealander out on a Sundaywalk around the rose gardens, sprightly and, I was surprised to note, rathersmall.

Her short fair hair blew wildly as wewalked to her car and then she smiled, her eyes crinkled up and slanted likealmonds, as the eyes of Danes have a habit of doing when they are happy (I hadlearned this from her fiction), and yes, here was more of the Dane I hadexpected to meet.

Driving over the hills from Kelburn wedescended into an increasingly barren, wild landscape. Yvonne was disappointednot to find the resident geese waiting to welcome me to her Makara, but a fewcorners ahead there they were, sunning themselves on the banks of the stream.

Suddenly all echoes of Hans Andersondisintegrated into the spilling-out mouth of the sea that gaped at the coast offorbidding Makara Beach. We turned up the last driveway to Yvonne’s beachhouse, perched on the hill, just as I had always imagined it. I could seethrough the glass doors that the simple cottage was small and cosy, full ofhygge (comfort, warmth, food and welcome – everything a Danish home shouldoffer a visitor). Geraniums in pots crowded around the entrance, and afine-nosed collie was barking excitedly. She was called “Lalla” in Motherland – though she is Olivia bypedigree – and Lalla she remained throughout our afternoon.

We walked through the cottage to Yvonne’sstudio, divan lining the back wall, a comfortable writing chair facing the sea.The cover mock-up of Yvonne’s latest novel lay in front of me, a bold play of arich yellow field, blue sky, a windmill idling in the distance with the title Motherland suspended across the terrain.The image spoke of Denmark, but the title poses the question: which country isthe homeland of Astrid, a New Zealand-born woman about to turn 50 and fall inlove with a Danish journalist with whom she experiences the country and cultureof her parents?

It is based on the author’s experience oftrying not to be different in conformist New Zealand, and it made me wonder howthe pen that produced the Astrid stories in the immensely popular Farvel and its follow-up The Growing of Astrid Westergaard coulddevelop the portraits of the two or three intolerant New Zealanders, among themany who embrace cultural diversity, in Astrid’s adult world.

A pair of malevolent characters, inflashback, molest little Astrid as she proudly, and innocently, wears Danishnational costume. The bright and flamboyant clothes are a marker of culturaldifference, and incite violence in these men, much as the homespun jumpercovered with bidibids and smelling of shearing sheds, worn by Bill at theDanish education conference, humorously invites the reader’s recognition ofwhat New Zealand culture stands for in the popular imagination. To Astrid, thejumper is home – or one of them, at least.

Du Fresne started writing stories basedlargely on English models, butt captivated Robin Dudding, then editor of Islands, with stories that were tobecome part of the Farvel and The Growing collections. Commissionedfor radio, each story was written in the weekends, after du Fresne had finishedher school work. Their success encouraged her to harness her Danish voice anddevelop her portraits of growing up in the Manawatu in the 30s and 40s.

With confidence and acclaim, she feltimpelled to address the other side of her heritage, her paternal FrenchHuguenot side. The Book Of Ester and Frederique explore the lives of theheroines of the titles, contemporary Ester Capelier, and 19th-centuryFrederique D’Albret who, with the remnants of her family, flees Catholicpersecution in Europe and hides on the Manawatu plains. Both novels, like theshort stories, are set in the Manawatu, with an intertwining of imported andMaori spirituality, but centre on a European past.

This affinity of the Danes with Maoris hasirked reviewers, who are uncomfortable with what they see as du Fresne’stoo-easy affiliation of European coloniser with the colonised. Du Fresne’sexplanation that the Danes are very sensitive to aboriginal people isparticularly relevant to the fellow-feeling developed through her charactersAstrid, Ester and Frederique, and Maoris, towards the land. She felt an echo ofthis intense, respectful and symbiotic relationship on her visit to Denmarkwhile on a writing scholarship: “I felt really a part of the landscape. Thiscountryside was where my families, and my larger ‘national’ family lived andworked. My past was all around me, skin and bone and spirit.”

This recognition of what it is to be a Danepunctuates Motherland with acute andsometimes poignant observations. Astrid is surrounded by people who look andbehave as she does, and at last she’s one of a large group; she even realisesthere is a peculiarly Danish type of hair and a way of wearing it, as she seesherself reassuringly mirrored in Danish women.

The puzzle of Astrid’s life in New Zealandis also completed as she fits into the mould of her lover Kristian. Bone tobone the couple lock into a seemingly perfect physical match, while their wordsplay in and out of a weave of English and Danish: “My cheekbones and chin. Hisown mouth: lower lip full, at rest; upper lip thin and mobile all the better tospeak Danish. Fading blond hair with the same grey patches as mine and the samecowlick and thinness. I knew exactly how he walked, ate, moved his hands,curled up in sleep. I was him and he was me. After such a long absence it gaveme a light-headed feeling and huge relief. My mind couldn’t grasp how thepattern of our shared genes had formed again and again over one hundred andfive years, twelve thousand miles apart, and not changed.”

Throughout Du Fresne’s fiction there isacknowledgement of other pasts, of alternative notions of “home” that challengethe Eurocentric norm of Pakeha New Zealand. Only the Dalmatian New ZealanderAmelia Batistich before her has written of the contemporary impact of twocultures outside the Maori/Pakeha dynamic. Like Batistich, du Fresne pushes thelimits of what a New Zealander writes.

With her sixth book, du Fresne’s prose isas sparse and potent as ever. Her distinctive style shines – as do her eyeswhen I hand her the gift I have brought. The delight with which she savoursunwrapping the bottle of lavender that I had helped my grandfather harvest inCroatia, and the way she enjoys the aroma that escapes, reminds me of my ownthrill at every word on a du Fresne page. I am reminded also of Maurice Gee’scomment on her writing: “Everything is tasted, heard, seen, smelt. Many writersoperate on about one sense, your landscape is absolutely delicious.” Q

AREADER’S GUIDE TO YVONNE DU FRESNE

Farveland Other Stories (VUP, 1980)

Du Fresne’s reputation was firmlyestablished by this first book (the title translates as “Farewell”), which BillManhire’s introduction likens to a tapestry, with her language a needle“flashing in and out of linen”.

This is an obvious place to start to get toknow Astrid, her family and the community she describes from the outside as anobserver beside her Far, Mor and Bedstemoder, and from the inside as aschoolchild trying desperately to be a good member of the British Empire.

Astrid is a spy setting out to discover theworld for herself, and the new world for her family. Stories such as “TheMessengers” underscore the collection with a sense of the vital importance ofthe first-generation children: Astrid must “find the message” of the new landfor herself and her people so that they may escape the migrant’s fate ofdrifting psychically anchorless.

“The Looters” is a popular favourite as ithumorously parades the ability of Astrid’s family to mimic the English, boththe language and the culture, around them.

The stories are all brief, simplyconstructed, and linked for the original Radio New Zealand broadcast format.This lends them continuity and promotes a picture of a community and Astrid’svital place within it.

TheBook Of Ester (1982, out of print)

Astrid makes way for Ester Capelier, Danishbecomes Danish-French Huguenot and the wholesome symbiosis of childhood in theManawatu disintegrates into a widow’s sense of not belonging in New Zealand anymore. The elements are simple enough, but du Fresne’s alternative mythmaking iscomplex and potent.

Her strongest work to date on the ethnictheme, Ester comes with a preface linking du Fresne’s previously exploredDanish heritage with the stories of the French Huguenot: “They were stilltrying to fit in with the Danes, let alone the New Zealanders!”

An introduction helps to make sense ofexiled Calvinist Protestants escaping persecution across Europe, and journeyingthrough Ester’s grieving mind. Only by reconciling herself to the plight of herancestors, and a 17th-century namesake in particular, can present-day Esterpick up the pieces of her shattered life.

This book has been called the classic studyof working through grief, but you don’t have to be bereaved to relish theintricate web of alternative mythmaking at which du Fresne excels.

TheGrowing of Astrid Westergaard and Other Stories(1985, out of print)

This book returns to Astrid and her family,friends Cherry Taylor and Anna Friis, and continues the semi-autobiographicalstorytelling of Farvel. Astrid’sexuberance is as infectious as ever, her wide-eyed appreciation of her Danishheritage and endless thirst for experience undaunted by restrictive schooling.

This collection is divided into threesections: 11 stories exploring Astrid’s negotiation of her position as aschoolgirl between the wars in the Danish farming community of the Manawatu;three final bleak tales of adult women disappointed and despondent, bereft ofthe comfort family provides childhood, adding a darker note to the world ofAstrid’s perpetual optimism; and a single bridging story which gives thecollection its title.

This account of Astrid’s “growing” marks apivotal step in the child’s perception of her place as a Danish New Zealander.Equipped with a multicultural sensitivity, Astrid is able to embrace “ourcountry”. The growing of Astrid Westergaard has indeed begun.

Frederique(Penguin, 1987)

Don’t be put off by the cover! Do read thenovels chronologically: even if Frederique D’Albret hails from the last century,she is introduced in Ester’s readings on the Reformation and so seems familiar.This book is hard to get into, but the richness of myth and memory make thetext increasingly rewarding as you read on, even if you don’t buy into theapparently supernatural mystery of psychic links central to the plot.

The romantic ending is a total surprise,but that is probably giving away too much – this poetic, evocatively texturedhistorical fiction legitimises other threads of myths to be woven into thestory of colonial New Zealand. Not a costume drama, more a testament to themigrant experience.

TheBear From the North (Women’s Press, 1989)

No new stories, but a British publishingcoup for du Fresne. The subtitle “Tales From A New Zealand Childhood” is atelling addition, introducing the Danish perspective to an internationalconcept of what it is to be a New Zealander.

UPDATE:

Yvonne du Fresne’scousin Karl du Fresne blogged recently his fine article about her and the importance of knowing one’sfamily history, first published in the NelsonMail and Manawatu Standard on 4January, 2012.

Productivity

2012-01-20T14:00:00.001+13:00

For their dining music lastnight daughters Seven and Nine requested, not for the first time, “Cities” bythe Moody Blues. It’s not one of the band’s greatest hits, merely the B-side tothe hit single “Nights in White Satin” which was released on 10 November 1967.I have always liked the song but am baffled as to why the children do. Theyhave even invented their own gestures to accompany the lines “Up above, allaround, in the sky, underground, this is what I have found” – you can imagine.

Looking through thebooklet of the Moody Blues box-set TimeTraveller, I was struck by the band’s work rate:

Days of Future Passed, November 1967.

In Search of the Lost Chord, July 1968.

On the Threshold of a Dream, April 1969.

To Our Children’s Children’s Children, November 1969.

A Question of Balance, August 1970.

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, July 1971.

There were more to comebut those are the albums their reputation rests on – six adventurous and wildlysuccessful albums in a shade under four years. At the time, the advances in style from albumto album were astonishing, especially the first three. Compare and contrast thework rate and musical development with today’s slackers. These guys were working.

To get an idea of howfar they had come, here is the first incarnation of the band when they were a hotteenage rocking combo serving up standard UK R&B. Singer/guitarist DennyLaine went on to work with Paul McCartney in Wings. Here they are with “I’ll GoCrazy” from 1966:

This is Mike Pindersinging his “Really Haven’t Got the Time”, a May 1967 B-side. It is possiblythe most sexist song ever before “Free Bird”. Still great, though. Pinder wenton to be the spiritual one in the band – by July 1968 on ISotLC he was chanting “Om”, and he eventually moved to Californiato make dismal New Age music. What a long strange trip it’s been:

Happy birthday, Cary Grant

2012-01-18T22:43:00.000+13:00

Born as Archibald Leachon 18 January 1904 in England, died as Cary Grant on 29 November 1986 inAmerica. He shared a housewith Randolph Scott and married five times (DyanCannon was #4) so was perhaps the George Clooney of hisgeneration.

Here he is in one of myfavourite films, His Girl Friday(1940) with Rosalind Russell (the director was Howard Hawks,script by Charles Lederer from the play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur). The overlappingdialogue predates Robert Altmanby a few years. Sample quote:

“You had to marry me and spoil everything.”

Denis Edwards on writing for the movies

2012-01-15T18:10:00.000+13:00

The 44th in this occasional series ofreprints from Quote Unquote themagazine is from the March 1997 issue. The intro read:

You could write something along the linesof Die Hard, Terminator or Waterworld.But if you want your movie to be made, think low-budget. One location, twoactors, no children, no pets. Your script adviser: Denis Edwards.

TRULY MADLY CHEAPLY

Sitting down to write your film script andhoping it will sweep you from Grey Lynn or the Aro Valley to a life of havingto decide whether or not you want to get out of your Malibu pool? Then it’sworth making a start on learning the rules for writing a low-budget featurefilm, because unless you happen to be Peter Jackson, the chances are you won’tbe writing anything else.

There is nothing wrong or sinful orembarrassing about this. Low-budget films can be massive successes. Once Were Warriors, Truly Madly Deeply, StrictlyBallroom, Sex, Lies and Videotapesand Dead Man Walking were all low- orcomparatively low-budget films. All of them made a lot of money, with thelatter two winning at Cannes or on Oscar night.

What they had in common was that they wereabout people and their relationships. Not a massive “boom boom” action sequenceor a “blow them away” set of special effects in any of them.

That left the burden falling on thewriters’ talent and knowledge of the craft, the Hero’s Journey, the three-actstructure, dramatic throughlines and, above all, an understanding of people andthe ways they interact.

DeadMan Walking is a textbook example of low-budgetfilm writing. It has only a few locations, and only one big outdoors scene,going into the woods for the rape/ murder scene. Outside that is a series ofincreasingly tense and gripping interactions between the characters.

It would be interesting to see whichlingers in a filmgoer’s memory, that moment of terrible quiet when SusanSarandon began her siege on Sean Penn’s last layer of denial, or the biggestaction sequence ever filmed. Bet on the former.

To thrill and excite an audience, or evenget the movie made, on a minuscule budget, means both knowing and applying therules.

GeneralRules

1. Drama is better than comedy. Drama isslightly more bullet-proof against miscasting, unimaginative directors, dullphotography, or even less than brilliant writing. Because expectations arehigher – that we will be made to laugh – comedy is much more exposed.

2. Contemporary drama is better than aperiod piece. It is easier to get the details right, and it can be done withoutall those animals. See #10 below.

3. Limit the number of lead players. Dailyplayers are much cheaper. Less is more.

4. One location beats two, or three or 10locations. Less is more.

5. Exteriors are better than interiors.They save on lighting. Actually this one tends to apply to places like India orSouthern California, where they know they are going to have reliable light. So,in New Zealand’s unpredictable climate, interior is probably the way to go.

6. If there’s going to be locationshooting, choose locations to suit cameras rather than sound. Sound can bedubbed in later.

7. Scenes with no talking are better thanscenes with a lot of dialogue. Less is more.

8. Talking about a bank robbery is muchbetter than staging a bank robbery. Quentin Tarantino did it in Reservoir Dogs. Less is more.

9. Two principals are always better thanthree. Having three means having to move the camera around too much, adding toshooting time. Shooting time is money. Less is more.

10. Adults are always preferable tochildren, who are preferable, but only just, to animals.

11. If there’s a place to really go overthe top and to hell with everything, it is in story ideas. This is the oneplace where more is better.

Just in case anyone happened to miss thecore point in all this – less really, really is more.

TheProducer’s Questions

The producer is the person who takes themost meetings, scares up the money, hires the people and says “no” a lot, oftenon a cellphone.

Producers have rules of their own fordeciding whether a script begins moving from the pile on their desk todevelopment, shooting and finally decisions as to whether it even getsreleased.

1. Do I like the characters and the storyin the script (because I’m going to be stuck with it for a long time)?

2. Are the writer, director and actors upto the work?

3. Can the writer do rewrites, or quicklyretarget the movie? That happened with OnceWere Warriors, when the focus of the story was shifted from the husband tothe wife.

4. Is this a project which could be gotgoing quickly if money suddenly came available? Implication: writers shouldn’teven think of setting a low-budget movie in another country.

TheDirector’s Questions

This is the person who moves the actorsaround and generally has a vision as to how the movie will be when he or shesays “cut” for the final time. Directors tend to get most credit when the filmis a hit, and but will generously allow the writer a place in the limelight ifthe film fails.

1. Will there be time for rehearsals to tryto get everyone involved thoroughly, understanding how they fit into the story,preventing delays and confusion while actors struggle with their motivation andat the same time 35 crew stand around waiting for something to happen?

2. Has a good part of the budget been setaside for the exciting and visual stuff?

3. Do I like the story enough to be dealingwith things going wrong on the set and the constant reminders about budgets andthe need to get everything done to a precise timetable?

4. Will the writer be able to step inquickly and help out if a rewrite is needed?

TheGreat Truth All Writers Should Understand

Writers rewrite. The need for this isfinally over when the film appears on the screen in a commercial cinema.

TheDifference Between Film and Television

Time was when television was indoors andmovies were outdoors. Television, with its hi-tech gear, has caught up. Themost obvious distinction nowadays is length. Movies have got a lot, lot longer,to the point where it is rare to get out of one without going through thetwo-hour barrier.

WarningSigns for Writers

1. “You are OK about an occasional tweakingof a scene here and there, aren’t you?” 2. “You have a lot to gain by gettingyour name on the credits of a movie, don’t you?” This is freely translated as“You are ready to crawl over broken glass to get a career break and we know it.This means we can get away without paying you very much and we don’t have togive you profit participation and can ensure you a slow death by rewrite.”

3. “You are the really creative personhere. Just write whatever you feel flowing out. Don’t you worry yourself aboutthe budget. We’ll sort all that out later. What we want is for you to get itall down on paper, and not to deny us any riches.”

Writers hearing this have just heard theintroduction to that feared oration, the Producer’s Speech of Wounded Reproach.It is a variation on this: “Oh dear, dear. We [meaning the writer workingalone] will have to do a lot of work. All those locations are going to have togo. So are all those vehicles, child actors, horses and five of the sevenleads.

“Let’s start thinking about those specialeffects. Oh, and that old mansion in the Hokianga? I’m afraid it’s gone. We’repulling everything back to Mt Roskill. I’ve done a contra on a house there. Andwe’ve only got 18 days’ shooting instead of 31, so we might have to have alittle look at a couple of those story threads.

“But hey, the basics of the script aregreat.”

TheWriter’s Survival Kit

1. Be such a good writer that no one woulddream of changing a word of your script. The money for the Cracker series was raised on the quality of Jimmy McGovern’sscripts, and they were shot as is. In the US, Elaine May, Robert Towne and WilliamGoldman are kept on $100,000-a-week retainers to bandage wounded scripts and toensure their employers get first look at any original material they mightchoose to write. New Zealand writers seldom need to trouble themselves withhow they would feel about being in the McGovern, May, Towne, Goldman situation.

2. Understand that the writing of a filmscript is less art than the preparation of a blueprint for an industrialprocess. Blueprints get changed. Your script will be changed. It is better foryour psychological well-being if you get control of the process by,figuratively speaking, dropping your trousers and assuming the position beforesomeone else does it for you. Putting it another way, be prepared to dorewrites.

3. Make sure you are part of the processright from the beginning, and if possible stay in the loop.

The latter, the writer being part of thecollaborative effort, is the key to success in low-budget film scripts. Thereisn’t the time or the money to explore alternatives. One producer describes hisjob as making sure that everyone is working on the same picture. This avoidshaving one person viewing the material as a comedy while another sees it ashaving considerable potential for a remake of Silence of the Lambs.

This has happened. So has success, fame andmoney. Good luck.

Thanksto Michael Brindley and his “Writing The Low-Budget Feature” workshop, the NewZealand Writers Guild and Jonathan Dowling of Zee Films.

What I’m reading

2012-01-14T14:57:00.000+13:00

The title of KevinIreland’s latest book must be ironic: by my count Dreamy Days & Nothing Done (published this month by SteeleRoberts) is his 19th collection of poems and there have also been six novels, twomemoirs and a collection of short stories.

It is a happy book. As PaulSimon nearly sang, he is still writing crazy love poems after all these years.

So here are Ray Charlesand Van Morrison:

A.K. Grant on jokes

2012-01-13T11:39:00.000+13:00

The 43rd in this occasional series ofreprints from Quote Unquote themagazine is from the November 1996 issue: A.K Grant reviews The Penguin Book of New Zealand Jokes,edited by John Barnett and Lesley Kaiser. [Disclaimer: in 1998 I compiled/wroteThe JAFA Joke Book, in 2000 The NZ Sports Joke Book, and in 2002 The New Penguin Joke Book and The Puffin New Zealand Joke Book, allfor Penguin. It’s harder than it looks.]

John Barnett and Lesley Kaiser “initiate”books and undertake “projects”. Their associate, Brian Schaab (“Shabby”) hasbeen in the police for 28 years, apparently collecting jokes during that time(not while on duty, I trust), enjoys sport and lives in Napier with his wifeJude. Nothing to complain about there. But the book itself should beinvestigated under the Commerce and Fair Trading Acts.

Most of the jokes included are “a catchment”.There is nothing to relate them to New Zealand apart from the fact that theyhave at some time or other been told here. At page 12 of their lengthy andextremely boring introduction, Barnett and Kaiser ask themselves, “What doesthis book say about New Zealand?” The answer is, almost nothing, because mostof the jokes are international: the only New Zealand aspect to them is thatthey have been included in a book misleadingly entitled The Penguin Book Of New Zealand Jokes. A more accurate title wouldhave been The New Zealand Book Of JokesAssembled For Penguin.

Barnett and Kaiser, in their humour-free,risibility-challenged introduction, make some odd claims. They say, at page 16,“Jokes have particularly flourished in the 20th century, the years since theSecond World War having seen their ascendancy”. This would have come as news tothe wits associated with the New Yorkerin the 20s and 30s or, for that matter, to the Earl of Rochester or Lord Byron.

They say at page 19 that “Jokes are mainlytold by men”. This would come as news to the large numbers of women who makeexcellent jokes about their partners’ inadequacies as lovers.

On page 18 we are told, “Jokes exist withinan oral culture, and, though we can present them, as herein, in written form,they’re reliant for success upon delivery, upon the teller of the joke. That isto say, a joke is not just content, but content that’s given life by telling. ..”

Now if that is true, and it would certainlyseem to apply to much of the material included in this work, then what is thepoint of writing these jokes down at all, since without the mitigating andalleviating enhancement of the teller’s personality and style the joke appears,on the printed page, flat, lifeless, often obscene and, worst of all, unfunny?No doubt Penguin will point to vast sales of this book as proof that there is amarket for works of this kind. Nevertheless the statement just quoted seemsequivalent to a claim in a preface to a cookbook that most of the recipesaren’t very tasty. Which may be correct, but it seems a bit odd to point itout.

More psychobabble on page 20: “There is anelement of liberation in the associated physical release of telling a joke thatalso applies to the hearing of it, that also applies to the sharing of it.” Ihave given this statement considerable thought, but I still can’t work out whatit means. It seems to imply that telling a joke is a bit like having anejaculation. If that is what the authors mean, they should say so.

If all they mean is that it is fun to tella joke and fun to listen to one, then they should say that. Particularly asthere are all kinds of reasons other than for physical release why jokes aretold: to make yourself seem interesting, to fill an awkward gap in aconversation, to make sense of the universe.

And how about this for serious impenetrability:“In jokes the contradictions and tensions of our time and place are deconstructedas they are acknowledged, at the same time as our view of the social word isdestabilised, the seriousness of this enterprise being undermined by thelaughter that’s produced.”

Anybody who can write a sentence like thatwouldn’t recognise a joke if it was rolled very thinly and shoved up theirnose. Jokes are innocent, airy little things. They don’t deserve to be jumpedup and down on with hobnailed boots like that.

Actually I withdraw that last remark. The bestline I ever read about jokes came from a sacked BBC scriptwriter: “Jokes areevil, nasty and subversive. That’s why people like them.” That’s all that needsto be said about jokes.

The end of civilisation

2012-01-12T19:32:00.000+13:00

Waterstone’s is droppingits apostrophe. Truly,these are the end times.

The UK bookshop chain isowned by the Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut, who boughtit from HMV (of which he owns 6%) for £53 million in May last year. At thetime, the Daily Telegraph reportedthat he “has strong links to the Kremlin”. Fancy that.

Hounding Pippa Middleton

2012-01-12T17:53:00.000+13:00

The headline on Stufftoday:

Pippa hounded by photographers

The story:

The picture editor of Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper says he sees up to400 photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge’s sister, Pippa Middleton, crosshis desk every day.

Paul Silva says the younger sister of the former Kate Middleton typically haseight or nine photographers camped outside her door and estimated that theyproduce between “300 to 400 pictures” of her daily.

Silva was answering questions at the Leveson Inquiry, a judge-led investigationinto the ethics of Britain’s media.

The inquiry was set up in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal centred onRupert Murdoch’s News of the Worldand has heard from celebrities who say they were hounded by paparazzi.

Silva said that he saw no need to constantly run photographs of PippaMiddleton.

The illustrations:
Two photographs of Pippa Middleton in case we have forgotten what she looks like– a close-up of her smiling wearing a denim jacket and sunglasses, and along-shot from the rear of her at the royal wedding.

The comments from readers:

So far, 17 out of 23 are about her bottomand/or general hotness. Precisely two get Mr Silva’s point.

An ethical tree

2012-01-11T19:57:00.000+13:00

The Guardian has a feature on Christmaspresents called Whatdid Santa bring?, interviewing eight mothers and their children about the bigday in. Here is mother Matilda Lee:

Being ethical informsmy whole worldview. I’m an editor at the Ecologist, I’ve written abook on ethical fashion, we have homemade decorations, buy an ethical tree,eat locally sourced, organic food. When the children were little, it was easyto buy them green gifts, but now Dimitri’s six, it’s more difficult. He watchesTV, he sees adverts, all his friends talk about what they’re getting forChristmas. He wants stuff.

This year, as well as astocking full of arts and crafts and a satsuma, and an adopted snow leopardfrom WWF, I’m afraid he got a Nintendo DS. I am troubled by how it was made, bywhom, and what’s going to happen to it when, inevitably, he finds ituninteresting. Also, I worry about the impact it’ll have on him. We get himoutside as much as possible, and the last thing he needs is something to keephim inside focused on a screen.

We’re in the years whenour kids are into the idea of presents under the tree. When Dimitri’s older,I’d like to buy him a day out for Christmas. There’s a place near us that doescooking classes – he’d love that. If we lived in a like-minded community whereeveryone bought ethically, it would be perfect, but, for now, I don’t think itwould be healthy for him to be very different from his peers.

Monitor: RodLiddle

Sentence of the day

2012-01-11T12:23:00.000+13:00

In the 31 Decemberissue of the Spectator, David Crane reviewsLisbon: war in the shadows of the City ofLight, 1939-1945 by Neill Lochery, and describes the wartime atmosphere ofPortugal’s capital under the dictator Salazar:

It is a city obsessed withfears that never materialise, with kidnaps that never happen and plots thatcome to nothing; a city of Allied and Axis spies and their informers, feedingon false information in an endless and largely futile cycle of bribery,blackmail, rumour and counter-rumour: a city, in short, so morally bankruptthat even the Duke and Duchess of Windsor do not seem out of place.

What we did on our holidays

2012-01-10T18:23:00.002+13:00

Eat. Read. Friends.Drink. Walk. Horses. Piggery.Where we stayed there were quail, tuis, pheasants, yellowheads,gannets, oystercatchers and a bunch of other things with wings.

Seen on State Highway 1between Wellsford and Te Hana: a stationwagon on the side of the road with alarge sign advertising FRIED BREĀD. That is the best macron ever.

Tutukaka was lovely asalways –we had a great view over the harbour – but every day I said, Stephen Sondheimishly, “And where are the dolphins? There ought to bedolphins. Well, maybe next year.”

So here is Fred Neil in1966 singing “Dolphins”. What a song, and what a voice:

One night we went tohave dinner with our friends Lindsay and Linda who live on Mount Tiger, therebyproviding a moderately terrifying drive home on a long and winding road in therain and dark. So here is Eno in 1974 with “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy”:

Welike Northland, but it’s good to be home.

Do not adjust your set

2012-01-10T08:27:00.000+13:00

Back from holiday – normalservice resumes shortly.

What I’m reading, final edition for 2011

2011-12-30T22:36:00.000+13:00

Christopher Hitchens iseverywhere now that he’s dead. Quite rightly there have been many tributes but thebest brief one I have seen – pleasingly in the Daily Telegraph – is by his friend Francis Wheen, deputy editor of Private Eye. Money quote:

Who else could claim tohave enjoyed (or, more accurately, endured) the hospitality of both AgathaChristie and Abu Nidal, or been a friend of both Gore Vidal and Paul Wolfowitz,or read poetry to Jorge Luis Borges and sheltered Salman Rushdie from theayatollah’s assassins?

An obituaryfor the great philosopher Michael Dummett. The Brits do these things so well.

A yearin mobile-phone photos from Christchurch journalist Philip Matthews.

Why vegeterians have moreblood on their hands than meat-eaters do.

MacDoctor has a go atthe anti-obesity campaigners and the proposed tax on sugar. He is a doctor and adiabetic, so knows quite a bit about this.

If you have everwondered what two mimicoctopuses shagging would look like, wonder no longer. The species wasdiscovered in 1998 and this loved-up couple were filmed in Indonesia inNovember 2011. Can you tell who is on top?:

And now for something really disgusting: deep-friedbutter. Money quote:

Described as a “heartattack on a plate”, the chefs at The Fiddler's Elbow in Edinburgh serve thesticky treat with Irn Bru ice cream and coulis.

Never mind the misrelatedparticiple: if you have ever had Scotland’s other national drink you will begagging at the idea of Irn Bru ice cream.

Anita McNaught on Oscar Kightley and David Fane

2011-12-29T18:28:00.002+13:00

The 42nd in this occasional series ofreprints from Quote Unquote themagazine is from the November 1996 issue. Anita McNaught was our Aucklandtheatre reviewer from late 1995: here she is on the Watershed production of A Frigate Bird Sings by OscarKightley and DavidFane.

ISLAND QUEENS

“I’m sick of having to perform, and saysomething smart or vicious, but if that’s what they want, that’s what I’ll givethem, because they don’t deserve to see the real me.” The confessional outburstcomes from an unlikely quarter in a play full of quiet truths. Drag queenShaninqua is the familiar face of Polynesian cross-dressing. Meeting all ourexpectations, from her provocative clothing to her acerbic tongue, she holds arein of sexual terror in the small, B-grade nightspot she claims as her own.She and her sidekick Deja Vu abuse, tease, tickle and thump the punters. Theyare the Ultravixens.

But this is not a play about drag –thankfully. It is a play about identity. Oscar Kightley and David Fane havereached beyond the stereotypes, and written a play from the inside. For allthose who felt that silly, voyeuristic efforts like Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert were an insult to the intelligenceof queens, transgenders and their ilk (not to mention the odd unambiguouscinema-goer), this is, at last, a subtle, beautifully observed study of one ofthe most precious and intriguing gifts of Polynesian culture – the third sex.

There is no equivalent for the wordfa’afafine in English: any translation cages the butterfly. It is not “gay”,not “homo” – these are western concepts, alien to Polynesia. It is not“transvestite” nor transsexual, which are clinical descriptions redolent ofdeviance. “Effeminate” implies weakness and a sort of impotence inappropriateto these deliciously sexual creatures. “Drag” is again a western construct. Theonly word that does them justice is “queen” – because there is theself-consciousness of the Chosen in their bearing.

A breed of boys who won’t be boys, but whosee no need to be girls either, they inhabit a world in-between. These are nopathetic misfits saving their bar tips to pay for a sex change in Sydney. Onthe contrary, they lay claim to both a schlong and a slip.

Traditionally, life in the Islands does notforce them into any performances of sexual parody. They float free. They act asgo-betweens for young men and women separated by religion, taboo and shyness.They are friends to the women, educators and civilisers of the men.

They are the mischief-makers, clowns,performers, treasured and celebrated as some of the best dancers and singers.They are respected teachers, the backbone of the hospitality business and, lessobviously, include some leading bureaucrats and government officials. Islandsociety could not function without them.

But when they shift out of their culture,out of their context, it all falls to pieces. We make no space for them here.Relocated, their own culture acquires a sense of embarrassment and oftendisowns them. The church disapproves.

The fa’afafine’s island freedoms begin tolook dubiously amoral in an urban New Zealand setting. And like so many otheraspects of Polynesian life, the fa’afafine have been colonised by western gayculture, drag and prostitution. But instead of giving them strength and allies,it’s just a new (culturally subversive) norm to conform to. Their formerlycelebrated duality is overlooked, forgotten, lost in the crush.

This modern metamorphosis is one of thestress fractures through Island society. “Everybody has roles in our culture,”observes young fa’afafine Vili. That certainty is his greatest source ofcomfort, especially now the family has been uprooted to New Zealand – but it isto become his torment.

Vili has an innate sense of what it meansto be fa’afafine, but not yet how this fits into his new home. His mother hasdied, and it is only natural for him to take over as the “female” head of thehousehold, caring for his grieving, alcoholic father and athletic youngerbrother. He is valued, as long as he doesn’t test the unspoken limits hisfather has set. When he tries on one of his mother’s old frocks, the cracksstart to show. Vili’s assets become his liabilities.

Kightley and Fane then set the two worldson a collision course. Enter Hugh, captain of the rugby team that Vili’sbrother Sione plays for. Hugh is a kid from New Plymouth, and just as confusedas Vili. He overlooks the inconvenience of Vili’s gender, and sees only thewoman that Vili wants to be. He knows little about Samoan culture, andunderstands less. Face value, after a few beers, is enough.

This could be totally implausible, but acombination of the writing and Geoff Dolan’s performance as an archetypal Kiwibloke make it happen. Meanwhile, Vili is in search of role models, as well aslove. He needs other fa’afafine; he finds two drag queens: “Most men see us assideshow freaks. Queens of the Pacific! ...They’re only being nice to us becausewe’re like some exotic bar decoration... They wouldn’t serve us if we wereordinary Samoans.” They are hardened, cynical and corrupted. Vili is fragileand innocent beside them, but drawn inescapably into their world. He makes theunderstandable mistake of thinking he is one of them. He learns from theirindependence, but drinks too deep.

Iaheto Ah Hi has the gentle understatedVili and his loss of innocence pitched just right. Director Nathaniel Lees hascoaxed what seems like the optimal performance out of each cast member. Everyrole had the potential to become a caricature. It is a tribute to him, in part,that none of them do – they are all recognisable, tangible, believable.

The staging is bold too, but lesssuccessful. Under the feet of the cast are the golden sands of their Samoanhome. The only props are rocks. This works well for some of the moreritualistic and allegorical scenes, but without any other help from thestaging, there’s too much miming in the everyday drama. The cast have built uptheir characters well, but a certain amount of clumsy make-do impedes them.

The play is physical and energetic, fromthe muscular well-oiled bodies of the men at the start to the naked dissolutionof the queens. Tenderness and violence are never separated by much. Frigate Bird goes on to explore thebonds and dynamics of brotherly love. Sione respects and cares deeply for hisolder, girlish brother Vili, supports him against his father’s intolerance andconformity. Samoan masculinity is not threatened by the fa’afafine; rather, itis set advantageously against it. But Sione, transplanted into New Zealand, isalso slowly corrupted by the influences around him, the compensatory machismoof rugby culture. As Vili sets about testing the limits of his family’saffection, the brothers split into the two least admirable aspects of theirfather, his drunkenness and his intransigence.

What do you do when you find that you nolonger have a place in the society you live in, that an accident of birth hasmade you an outcast? They have their feminine power, but both within andoutside Frigate Bird the fa’afafineare at the bottom of the heap, powerless and dependent.

They have only a loose alliance with thegay community, survive as mere figures of fun in the straight world, are oftentoo outrageous and controversial to make it in the workforce. They are notspecifically recognised in the Human Rights Acts which confer protection fromdiscrimination. And they are Polynesian. This is partly why so many end up ashabitues of K Road. It’s about survival. And yet these people have a mysticalheritage, a respected, almost ceremonial role in their island homes. They havea need to be valued, to be taken seriously.

Kightley and Fane go beyond the simplepathos to explore the real fears of these special, vulnerable people. Theirs isa culture where from birth to death you are rarely alone: the houses have nowalls, each building packed with siblings, extended families, life isstructured around familiar obligations – privacy is an unfamiliar state. So tobe cast out, to be without a family, to be alone in the world, is for thesepeople a kind of hell. Loneliness holds the greatest terror of all.

Kightley and Fane have written a classic ofNew Zealand theatre. The Edinburgh Festival talent scouts extended an immediateinvitation this year when the play premiered in Wellington. It should fascinatethem up in the North. It will open a few eyes down this way too.

UPDATE

AnitaMcNaught is currently based in London and Istanbul as a rovingcorrespondent for Al Jazeera English.

Country matters

2011-12-28T17:22:00.000+13:00

There is a new-born donkey at the end of thenext road. The mother is called Lucy even though she is a jenny. And I learnthat there are two emus in the paddock behind, which brings to umpteen thetotal of species I have noticed in that road: dairy cows, Highland cattle, sheep, pigs,donkeys, Shetland ponies, alpacas, horses, ducks, chickens and pheasants.

There were goats but they died of old age. This afternoon Ihad a long conversation with their owner, who turned her quarter-acre front yard wherethey used to live into a vegetable garden and had people queuing up to buy hernew potatoes for Christmas. She wondered whether certified seed potatoes werenecessary every year – I say no but then I am not growing semi-commercially –and which varieties are best at this time of year. We moved on to lettuces andcourgettes, and whether it was better to water the maize patch late at night or earlyin the morning. The latter, we decided.

Elizabeth Knox on Marilyn Duckworth

2011-12-27T12:57:00.000+13:00

The 41st in this occasional series ofreprints from Quote Unquote themagazine is from the August 1993 issue. The portrait is by John McDermott.The intro read:

MarilynDuckworth is one of our most important writers, yet her new novel Seeing Red has not been included in theTop 20 of the Women’s Book Festival. It deals with an embarrassing subject inWomen’s Suffrage Year – female violence. Here she talks to ElizabethKnox about the background to her writing and the many traps and suddentwists that imperil her characters.

SOCKING IT TO THEM

We get down to it in the study at the frontof the imposing, two-storey brick house Marilyn Duckworth shares with herhusband John Batstone. I’m on the couch with my back to the street, where shelikes to work, with the good light and all the distractions of traffic behindher. Marilyn sits beside her laptop, which is crowded to the edge of the deskby earlier, defunct computers and an old television. We both have our taperecorders.

Marilyn wants to listen to the interviewand vet any errors or unwise confidences – a trick of politicians, sheexplains. Her tape recorder wheedles away throughout the interview, recordingits own feedback so that, in the end, she can’t bear to listen to it.

So much for precautions. In a Duckworthnovel this would be a significant detail of the plot, one of those bits ofmisfired planning that can determine the lives of her characters.

She was born in New Zealand but removed toEngland as a three-year-old at the beginning of World War II. “War broke outwhen we were on the boat. I was aware of the war, but much more of a measlesepidemic. The ship was divided by a rope. That was much more significant. Iremember being so hot with measles that I took off all my clothes and lay onthe lino floor.”

Her father, psychologist John Adcock, whohad gone ahead, sent a cable to his wife Irene, telling them all to get off theship at Cape Town and return home. England was too dangerous. But the radiooperator was talking to his girlfriend and missed a few cables, including thisone.

During the war, Marilyn and her oldersister Fleur spent longish periods separated from one or both parents. “We werewith relatives in Leicestershire, then to Wiltshire. I feel I’ve lived lots oflives and several childhoods and instantly adapted. Take accents – in WiltshireI lived with a Welsh family and when I came back to my family no one couldunderstand what I was saying, My mother couldn’t. I said ‘Aye’ not ‘Yes’. ThenI went straight to Cockney. I remember an argument about whether it was allright to say ‘isn’t’. I thought you had to say ‘ain’t’ or you were upyourself.”

With all these moves Fleur and Marilyn werethrown upon each other’s company. I ask her about their “imaginary game”.Apparently she and her sister corresponded with someone “doing a thesis onthese things”: the Bronte sisters; A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble; the Adcocksisters.

“We called it Dreamland. It was set in aboarding school. I always wanted to go to boarding school. The classes werenamed after birds – English birds of course – robins, cuckoos, starlings. Therewere wicked teachers who we lampooned. And friends – because we shifted a lotit was useful having these friends who were fixed. We went for escapades.

“I would always be most interested on goingto the Enchanted Forest, and doing very fairy-story things. Then Fleur, beingolder than me, dragged in the idea of going to the Land of Happy Meetings,where you met boyfriends. We got there by hooking our way through the treeswith long walking-sticks, like monkeys.”

Sometime during these years – the gamespanned the Adcocks’ “massive shift” back to New Zealand when Marilyn was 11 –both sisters began to write. Marilyn planned and began writing her first novel A Gap In The Spectrum when pregnant withher first child (after a very youthful marriage). There was an interval of overfive months when the manuscript went seamail to London and the publisherslooked it over. After it was accepted there was another year till publication.Marilyn was 23 and a mother of two.

“Early success felt fantastic. I’d alwayspromised myself I’d get a novel published, but promising yourself and actuallyfinding it come true! It certainly made me feel a different sort of person.”

But since her publisher was on the otherside of the world there were no book launches and publishers’ lunches. “Ialready knew some local poets but the novelists came later – though I knew IanCross.” Duckworth frowns. “I remember Ian came around one night, we were havinga drink, he and my then husband Harry Duckworth, and Ian said to me that thereason I wrote was because I was unfulfilled as a person. This upset me – wouldhe have said that if I were a man? I’d written two novels by then, the firstwas out and the second was on its way.”

Duckworth’s third novel was produced indifficult circumstances. She had a Literary Fund scholarship, so felt bound todeliver. “I spent three months in Auckland writing

ABarbarous Tongue. I got a job in the London LendingLibrary and wrote at night. I found it was the only way I could do it. Mymother-in-law moved in and minded the kids. I could manage to write a novelwhile I had a fulltime job – but with the children at home I couldn’t. I felttorn two ways. In Auckland I felt guilty and missed the kids. There were timeswhen I’d ring up Wellington in the middle of the night – I had a key to theshop, I’d let myself in and sob down the phone.”

The fourth novel before the gap inMarilyn’s career (from 1969’s Over TheFence Is Out to 1984’s DisorderlyConduct) she wrote by swapping her children with those of an artist friendso that both women secured one free day a week to work. “It was a really hardway to do it and I don’t know how I could do it now. Well, no, I suppose Ibecame used to disciplining myself in that way.”

Duckworth’s use of “freetime” has beenfurther complicated since she developed narcolepsy in her 20s. If she didn’tget a good 11 hours’ sleep each night she would quite literally fall asleep onher feet, without warning, anywhere and any time.

Duckworth is now one of our establishedwriters, a position that entails various duties. She was one of the judges ofthe 1992 New Zealand Book Awards, and didn’t feel entirely comfortable with theexperience. “I hated the responsibility of judging other writers. But acting asa judge in competitions is part of the business of being a writer – like thisinterview and getting up on panels – which is totally against a writer’spersonality often.

“The reason I started being a writer was Iwanted to do something on my own, and not have to fit in with others. I hatedgroup activities at school. Like reading in groups, I’d get terribly nervousand start to cough, so that just as it was getting to my turn everyone wouldstart coughing.”

SeeingRed is Duckworth’s 11th novel, a pithy book, set incontemporary Wellington. It concerns two sisters: Isla, “La Stupenda”, alesbian, botanical gardener who nurses a very personal but hurtful secret; andVivienne, a divorced mother made redundant from her job by shonky financialdealings. And, in significantly symmetrical contrast to the sisters, there isan English couple, dubbed “the Burberries” after their coats – and also becausethey are cloaked, in a way, and uncannily alike.

“I wanted an alien couple, locked into afrozen existence, who could affect both sisters. Jake and Jennet needed to beforeign to the sisters; that’s why I brought them from England, from adifferent, a European, culture – also so there would be no witnesses to theirearly lives.”

I point out that the author is a kind ofwitness, as there is a small section early on in the book in which a child,later identifiable as Jennet, refuses to swallow a worm tablet and renouncesGod. Marilyn says she wanted that section to have a mythical feel to it.

“Jennet sees herself as something of awitch, she wants power. Life became so intolerable when she was little that shewants to be wicked. She’s abused and becomes a abuser.”

A different note enters Duckworth’s voice.“You know Seeing Red hasn’t made iton to the Women’s Book Festival Top 20. It’s been suggested – not too seriously– that women’s violence isn’t an appropriate topic for Suffrage Year. I seewomen’s anger as very much a feminist issue. If you start not talking about it,then you’re creeping back to that silence that women have laboured under foryears.”

It is clear that Marilyn Duckworth doesn’tthink much of permissible politics and forbidden points of view. She is not,however, a “political” novelist; or someone who, like Margaret Drabble, writes“novels of ideas”. In Duckworth’s novels politics become a detail of privatelife. Disorderly Conduct (jointwinner of the New Zealand Book Awards in 1985) is set during the 1981 SpringbokTour; Message From Harpo has as itsbackdrop public wrangling over the Homosexual Law Reform Bill of 1985; othernovels are concerned with the “spirit of the age”. Duckworth says she isinterested in how the ideas people have determine how they treat each other.

“When I bring in politics I’m never tryingto portray what is going on in the world, just what’s going on in thesepeople’s lives. I hope I also get across an attitude.”

Sometimes she has been accused of havingcharacters who are passive – specifically her women characters; the men, she istold, are unreliable bastards. “I’m interested in human weakness – notpassivity, it can be the opposite. I do have women characters who are put-upon,clumsy rather than weak. Of course there are different ways of being active andwhat I’m writing about is surviving.

“I write about traps. Quite often the trapis love, but not just romantic love; it can be siblings – it is in Seeing Red – or children and parents.It’s not all about ‘marriage’. Too many people come out and say I writedisparagingly about marriage.”

I suggest that perhaps what these reviewersare responding to is the way in which her characters often see themselves asordinary; that I think her fiction is about the oddity in ordinary people andthe odd lives that overtake people who expect things to be more ordinary. “Yes,I like to twist things slightly, set up expectations then shatter them. When Isay I’m interested in human weakness, I want it to be seen that it’s equalacross the genders. That’s why I did PullingFaces through a man’s eyes. He was the one who felt put upon and who wastrying to get it right.

“And the title of Message From Harpo – the telegram Harpo sent in fact read ‘Nomessage’. When I’m writing I can’t have an audience in my head. If there was anaudience how could you possibly write without being self-conscious andposturing?

“So far as style goes I don’t believe inbeing distracting. I want people to puzzle a bit but I want a surface that’snegotiable – where everything is accessible yet underneath this, subtlevibrations are going on. I think the important thing is for people to readwhat’s there and feel that even if it’s bizarre it’s somehow inevitable.”

Finally, I ask whether she has everconsidered writing an autobiography – those by Frame, Shadbolt and Edmond havemade these highly visible in the national literature. “No, not really. I havea fantastic story to tell, but it’s full of unpublishable material. There aretoo many people involved.”

“Too many young ones for you to outlivethem?”

“Yes. The only thing that would lead me towrite one would be if someone else was going to write a version that” – shelaughs – “conflicts with mine. I’m very concerned about truth – my version ofthe truth.”

Don’t torment the frog

2011-12-23T17:00:00.001+13:00

The previous post, PhyllisGant on Ronald Hugh Morrieson, was this blog’s 999th. The first, on 9December 2008, was a celebration of US composer Elliott Carter’s 100thbirthday. The 988th on 11 December 2011 was a celebration of his 103rd.

But the intention ofthe blog was to put online material from what Jolisa Gracewood on PublicAddress last year generouslycalled “the defunct – but dead funky – literary mag Quote Unquote”. The magazine ran for 44 issues from June 1993 toMarch 1997, and when my friend Rob O’Neill observed that these days “if it’snot online it doesn’t exist”, I thought – yes. For most people, if you can’tGoogle it, it might as well never have existed. So I have been posting materialthat may still be of interest. There are interviews with New Zealand andoverseas authors, articles by New Zealand writers on everything from motorbikesto dogs, reminiscences of writers and artists, a bunch of stuff.

Because I don’t havethe original Word files any more, I have to reconstruct each piece beforeposting – it takes about half an hour per original page so a major story cantake two or three hours, which is why there have been only 40 so far. Plus Ialways ask the writer’s permission – photographers and illustrators too – whichtakes even more time. (Coming soon: Elizabeth Knox on Marilyn Duckworth! And,if I can find her and get her approval, Anita McNaught on Oscar Kightley andDavid Fane!)

When you run a blog youcan see where readers come from and it makes it all worthwhile to see how manypeople around the world have read Iain Sharp on James K Baxter, Kevin Irelandon Frank Sargeson, Nigel Cox on Maurice Gee, Barbara Else on Annie Proulx, TimWilson on Sam Hunt, Carroll du Chateau on Alan Duff, Michael King and LouiseCallan on Robin Morrison, Peter Bland on Bill Manhire and so on.

In between bloggingcontent from the magazine, I put up other stuff just to keep the thing alive –whatever interests me and may entertain friends and others (henceall the music), plus the occasional comment on NZ literary matters.

So this is the 1000thpost. What to do? How to mark the occasion? Thanks to David Thompson,that’s easy– with a video of a frog:

Phyllis Gant on Ronald Hugh Morrieson

2011-12-23T08:37:00.000+13:00

The 40th in this occasional series ofreprints from Quote Unquote themagazine is from the November 1996 issue.

The intro read:

Phyllis Gant recalls her night with Ronald HughMorrieson.

BRIEF ENCOUNTER
There’d be no partying for me. I went to myroom in the newly-built student hostel with a monumental migraine. After tryingto doze off I was suddenly alert: “There’s a man outside my window,” and toldmyself not to be silly. Then, in the glow from an outside light, a handappeared, clutching the sill. There was a low moaning. The hand fell away.

I slammed the window shut. Below it I couldsee a figure on all fours. Terrified, I watched it crawl away, pulled thecurtains together and, trembling, got back into bed, my head throbbing.

Presently there was a rattling at thewindow: he was trying to get in. “Go away!” I yelled, panic-stricken. “Somedrunk, can’t find his room.” After a few minutes I peered out. He was sidlingalong the wall and away.

All was quiet; the migraine was settlingdown to something like bearable, and I slept – to be awaked by the sound of amale voice crying, “Help me! Oh, someone please help me!”

I looked out the window but could seenothing. The cries and moans continued. They seemed to be some little distanceaway and I decided there must be someone nearer to whoever it was than I, oneof the men. He would go.

“Oh please! Someone help me! Please helpme!”

I leapt out of bed in my long winceynightie, not stopping to put on a dressing gown or slippers, and ran outside.

It took some minutes to find him. “Whereare you?” I called. “Where are you?”

It was dark in the quad and the ground hadbeen rotary-hoed. Shivering with cold and fright, I stumbled on the damp,sticky lumps of earth, my feet frozen.

There was a shape on the ground: I didn’tbelieve it, it was only a shadow. At that moment my ankle was gripped hard andI almost fell. I had met Ronald Hugh Morrieson.

It was only the second time Morrieson hadbeen away from Hawera, the occasion, the writers’ conference held at MasseyUniversity in August 1973.

He stood out, with his paper-white moonface and his loose overcoat; someone said he had just come out of hospital,straight from hospital and onto the train to the conference. Fellow writerspointed him out: “That’s Morrieson.” It was said that he had written a numberof important novels, but no one in New Zealand would publish them. There wastalk of one, possibly two, being published in paperback in Australia.

He was a man of mystery, a man alone. Whenhe got to his feet at one of the sessions, what he had to say confirmed thesuffering his appearance suggested.

A brisk, older woman, German-Jewish I wouldguess from her features and accent, took issue with his criticism of hiscountry, along with his remarks about his own depression and despondency. “Youdo not know how lucky you are to live in this beautiful land!” she cried.“Depressed? What have you to be depressed about? Everybody should be just sohappy! No one in New Zealand need be depressed!”

Morrieson said not a word, simply looked ather, incredulous, from his depths.

Thereafter this lady took him in hand,pursuing him relentlessly and plumping down beside him at mealtimes,interminably extolling the beauty and bounty of our wonderful land, cajolinghim into conversation, self-justification, and a resigned, even tolerantacceptance of her dubious comfort. It wasn’t easy for anyone else to get a lookin; I’d like to meet him, I thought, but I can’t compete with that.

Now I called for help. The man wasfloundering in mud. All was quiet, the rooms dark. I tried to prise his fingersloose. “I’ll fall if you grip me like that,” I said, reasonably.

Taking him by the hand and trying to draghim to his feet was beyond my strength. I got my hands under his arms andsomehow got him precariously upright. We proceeded, he leaning heavily on me,to cross that no-man’s land to a concrete path.

I was going at the knees and back; I had tohave help. As we reached a lit area, two male students, tittering, passed by.

“Help me, please help me,” I said. We musthave looked a comedy turn there on the path in the middle of the night, amiddle-aged woman in a bedraggled nightie and bare, mud-caked feet, and whatappeared to be a paralytic drunk covered in mud.

“Oh please don’t go,” I said. “I really doneed help – this man is ill.”

With that they came back and between them,no trouble for two strong blokes, got Morrieson up to his room, undressed, andinto bed.

Morrieson went back to Hawera next morning,leaving a message of thanks for “the kind lady”.

It would be nice if I could recall thethings Morrieson said. Maybe it was here that he observed he “hoped he wasn’tgoing to be one of those poor buggers who become famous after their deaths”; Idon’t know.

He did speak bitterly of the rejection ofhis work in his own country, of the anguish of keeping on writing in a climateof indifference and a state of isolation.

And he has proved to be “one of those poorbuggers” after all.

UPDATE

Phyllis Gant, author of the novels Islands (1973) and The Fifth Season (1976), died in April 2010, aged 87.

Fisking North & South: the final episode

2011-12-22T18:55:00.000+13:00

Furtherto six previous posts – most recently thisone which links to all the others – fisking North & South’s ridiculous claim that “most New Zealand fictionsells a mere 300 copies” and“most New Zealand novels struggle for recognition and sales” because thebook-buying public is not interested in our literary fiction, here is NielsenBookData’s list of NZfiction bestsellers for 2011:

1. The Conductor, Sarah Quigley

2. The Larnachs, Owen Marshall

3. Hand Me Down World, Lloyd Jones

4. The Hut Builder, Laurence Fearnley

5. The Parihaka Woman, Witi Ihimaera

6. Mr Pip, Lloyd Jones

7. As the Earth Turns Silver, Alison Wong

8. Hokitika Town, Charlotte Randall

9. The 10pm Question, Kate de Goldi

10. La Rochelle’s Road, Tanya Moir

Back in August I had the sales figures for the fiction bestsellers to July. That list isalmost exactly the same, except now Witi Ihimaera’s The Parihaka Question replaces Hamish Clayton’s brilliant Wulf:

1. Hand Me Down World, Lloyd Jones 1955

2. The Conductor, Sarah Quigley 1617

3. As the Earth Turns Silver, Alison Wong 960

4. Hokitika Town, Charlotte Randall 839

5. The Larnachs, Owen Marshall 807

6. Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones 807

7. La Rochelle’s Road, Tanya Moir 804

8. Wulf, Hamish Clayton 681

9. The Hut Builder, Laurence Fearnley 675

10. The 10pm Question, Kate de Goldi 669

I noted then that:

Mister Pipwas published in 2006, The 10pm Questionin 2008, As the Earth Turns Silver in2009, Hand Me Down World and The Hut Builder in 2010. They have allprobably sold a few copies before. Truckloads, in some cases. The Hut Builder will inevitably sellloads more in the next six months because it won the fiction prize in thisyear’s NZ Post Book Awards.

Of the 2011 novels, Hokitika Town was published in February,La Rochelle’s Road in April, The Conductor in May, The Larnachs in June and The Parihaka Woman in October. Whichmeans that The Conductor and The Parihaka Woman must have soldastoundingly well in the last seven and three months respectively.

The point of the North & South article seemed to bethat we don’t buy New Zealand literary fiction – but on this list of 2011fiction bestsellers (which doesn’t include the Christmas rush) nine of the 10are literary. I’d be very happy to see more genre titles up therebut still it is nice to see that we do, in fact, buy New Zealand literaryfiction. Case closed.

Janet Tyler on Duncan Sarkies

2011-12-22T16:51:00.001+13:00

The 39th in this occasional series ofreprints from Quote Unquote themagazine is from the October 1996 issue.

The intro read:

Duncan Sarkies has come a long way from hisearly triumph on Spot On. Just don’tcall him quirky. and don’t ever call him a playwright. “Theatre is a hideousword,” he tells Janet Tyler.

IF THE LABEL FITS

“If you could call us the generation thathates being given a label, then we are that generation.” Duncan Sarkies’ elfinface cracks open into an ingenuous laugh. “Generation X – the generation thathates being given a label,” he says again. “Yes, we’re a paradoxicalgeneration.”

Although Sarkies claims to barely beingable to struggle his way through a book (an indelible mark of the TVgeneration), you couldn’t accuse him of lacking commitment. Highly cynical yes,apathetic no. At twenty-six, he has written five plays, or rather five heconsiders worth crediting to his name: LovePuke, Ceramic Camel, Snooze, Blue Vein and Saving Grace.In 1994 he won the Bruce Mason Playwright Award. He performed in this year’sAuckland Comedy Festival and Edinburgh Festival. In conjunction with threeother playwrights, brought together by producer Pat Cox, he is writing afeature-film script which has already managed to break through the first roundof film funding.

Oh, and when he was 14 he won the Spot On scriptwriting competition.“Yeah, hideous thing. I cringe now. There was one called April 1st – bit of tomfoolery at school on April Fools Day. Andthey did make it. It haunts me. I lock it away.”

SpotOn competitions aside, there are few worries forSarkies that he’ll be one of those never to rise beyond the mediocre – an issuewhich used to concern him in the past as he hammered away through Dunedinwinters of discontent. He makes an analogy with his learning to play the guitarat school: learning with extraordinary speed, getting all the notes down withprodigious aptitude, and well, for want of a better phrase, everything looking brightand rosy. For a time. A regrettably brief time. To this day he can’t do barchords.

“And I’d always had that with my writing. Ihad that potential and I was always worried that I couldn’t push that stepfurther, that I’d just get stuck at that point, that I’d always be a brightstarter with nothing coming through. But hopefully that’s not happening. Ithink I’m getting better and better at what I’m doing.”

From a “vaguely” middle-working-classbackground, Sarkies finds it absurd that he should be able to make a livingsimply out of selling his ideas. (Not of course that he is making a living outof doing it, but, yeah, sometime soon, very soon...) “I mean,” he says, “whowants to listen? I desperately want to say these ideas but, I don’t know, I findmyself making excuses for doing what I do all the time. I used to say if Ireally wanted to go out and help the world I should be doing this and this andthis, and working here and working there, but then I think, there are a lot ofbank tellers out there and it’s not like they’re doing any more than I am.They’re not doing any less than I ameither.” He pauses. “Or, that’s debatable, but you know.”

He also finds himself dodging the “What doyou do?” question old school friends seem determined to ask. “I never say I’m aplaywright, because that’s a hideous word. And I never say I’m into theatre,because theatre – that’s also a hideous word. You can’t help it whenever yousay the word ‘theatre’, it reeks of pretension and you can’t get away from it.So I say I do plays and stuff, which sounds like, ‘oh yeah’.”

Sarkies’ plays have similar quirky (usedwith subversively sarcastic intent) narratives. Love Puke is about the trials and tribulations of eight youngpeople in and out of romance, with “Is love a bodily function?” its premise anda lot of “toilet stuff’ in there to contrast directly against the high ideal oflove; Snooze is about a man who fallsin love with his alarm clock; Blue Vein(written with Ted Brophy) has a man who becomes addicted to cheese; and Saving Grace is about a man calledGerald, who meets a woman called Grace at Social Welfare, and over the courseof time they discover in each other strength and power – and yes, things gohaywire.

“The first time someone called me quirky,”says Sarkies, “I thought it was great – but then, now that it’s written all thetime. I guess quirky just means off-centre, and I guess I am off-centre, so Isuppose I shouldn’t resent the fact of being quirky.” His tone remainsunconvinced.

As unconvinced as he is by the “comedy”label often attached to his work: “When you use the term comedy, it sounds likethe primary function of comedy pieces is to make people laugh.” But Sarkiesdoesn’t write with the aim of being funny; he writes about things that interesthim. It’s just that those things have an unnerving tendency to come out funny.

As with most artists, Sarkies would likehis work to appeal to everyone - but not at the expense of writing somethinginteresting, “to put it bluntly”. He believes he has the capability of creatinga well-written play that cajoles people into laughing and crying in all theright places, a play that’s cleverly written and well-structured, and with allthe loose ends tied up in the end... “But, I don’t know, I’ve seen it before,I’ve seen it too many times before, and I’d rather risk offending people. I’drather come in uninvited and leave a mess.” On reflection, he reckons his workis pretty much universally liked, at least by the under-30 age group.

It’s from the under-30s that Sarkies’ influencescome – especially local comedians Sugar and Spice, Radar and Jo Randerson.These comedians, like Sarkies, enjoy taking ideas to their extreme. And thoughIonesco’s absurdist Rhinoceros holdsinfluential sway, the television serial TheYoung Ones, which threw anarchy in the pot and subtlety out the window, canclaim as much, if not more, credit.

“We all loved it, because it was gross andit was stupid. The Young Ones isprobably more influential than a lot of us realise. I think sometimes it’s to dowith being sick of calling art Art. Art can be such a highbrow/lowbrow thing.

“Maybe that’s a difference in ourgeneration. We like the thought of declassifying, of meshing together differingstyles. All we’re really doing is reflecting the world we live in. It’s anunfortunate thing, but there’s a gross Americanisation, the role of advertisinghas increased... All these things have changed us, so when we reflect the worldwe know back onto the stage, suddenly it looks different, because it isdifferent, because we’re different –and that all fits back into the Generation X thing, I’m sure.

“God,” he hesitates with an edge of comicabhorrence, “I’m beginning to sound like a champion of the Generation X.” Yeah,but only if the label fits.

UPDATE

There is more recentinformation on Duncan Sarkies here, from the1999 movie Scarfies to two episodesof Flight of the Conchords to the2008 novel Two Little Boys.

Lab test

2011-12-22T11:41:00.000+13:00

Charles Moore writes inthe Christmas double issue of the Spectator:

Last week, I mentionedthat our American friends theFrums came to stay and we all debated the euro. David and Danielle werealso very kind to our labrador Dido, and advanced the interesting theory thatthe paws of all Labradors smell of popcorn. Being English, I affected not toknow what popcorn smells like, but the Frums are, in fact, right. Consultationwith canine experts suggests that this property is unique to the breed. No oneknows why.

It is several years since Ihad a labrador on hand so I cannot test this immediately but the next time Isee one and I am sure that no one is looking, I shall sniff its paws.

Mary McIntyre and chemtrails

2011-12-21T12:58:00.000+13:00

Further to my postabout Danyl at the Dim-Post getting all satirical about Shelley Bridgeman’s Herald column on the vastinternational chemtrail conspiracy and his invitation to readers to submitparodies of NZ novels rewritten in Bridgeman’s style, I received the aboveimage the other day. It was a Christmas card from my friend Mary McIntyre whopainted this, Celebrating One Tree Hill (69 x 49 cm), earlier this year.

Spooky or what? I senta copy of the image to Danyl who replied that the painting would make anexcellent prize for his competition. If there is a philanthropist out there whowould care to stump up the necessary, the painting is available for purchasefrom her dealer, Whitespace.

There are more images byMary at the gallery’s website, including Skylarking(38 x 48 cm), also from 2011. Either one would do, really:

(Hereis Keith Stewart’s 1996 essay on Mary for Quote Unquote, and here is me last year.)

What I’m reading

2011-12-20T20:47:00.000+13:00

Robert McCrum lists “Fifty things I’ve learned about the literary life”. It’s good. Three sample entries:

20. Literary fiction is like sci-fi. It’s agenre.

23. Two writers, alone in a room, will talkabout royalties not art.

47. Any new book longer than 500 pages is astupefying act of self-importance.

Poeglesare a new concept to me, a mash-up of Google search results on a specific termas as a poem:

Whatever you think of Google as a tool,constructing a poegle re-imagines the search engine as a digital Ouija board,offering chance, surprises, and maybe even a little mysticism.

This grass sledgeis the perfect present for a child whose parents have too much money. When Iwas a kid sliding down Mount Maunganui, cardboard worked. This costs £349.Luxury!

The English poet Christopher Logue diedrecently. He is most famous for his rendering of Homer’s Iliad which he did despite knowing no Greek. Interesting choice fora pacifist. He was a frequent contributor to Private Eye, too. Here is his poem “London Airport”:

Lastnight in London Airport

Isaw a wooden bin

labelled UNWANTED LITERATURE

ISTO BE PLACED HEREIN.

So Iwrote a poem

andpopped it in.

More pasta people here.

Happy Hanukkah!

Monitors: Helen Heath, Phil Parker, David Thompson.

Poetry in Metro

2011-12-18T23:34:00.000+13:00

The December 2011 issue of Metro magazine has a poem by IanWedde, the new poet laureate, whom the magazine commissioned to mark thecentenary of the Auckland Town Hall this month. A nice idea. The poem begins:

In 1965 it was Charlie Mingus in the Auckland Town Hall...

A few lines later, he:

struck a chord that might have tameshiwaried

a pile of glass bricks

and left the stage for a hat change…

Later that night, the narrator is in StStephens Ave, Parnell, and speaks to the legendary jazz bassist, who lifts hishat before replying.

This is odd, because as far as I can tellCharles Mingus never played in New Zealand – he certainly didn’t in 1965because according to Gene Santoro’s excellent biography Myself When I Am Real: the life and music of Charles Mingus hedidn’t leave the US at all that year.

On the other hand, the legendary jazzpianist Thelonious Monk – who was known for his hats – did play here in 1965. I know this because I saw him perform at theTauranga Girls’ College hall, the poor bastard, and I know that after theAuckland concert he was in Parnell because my friend Bernard Brown was at aparty in St George’s Bay Rd, the lucky bastard, where Monk played Debussy andalso duets with a local concert pianist – David Galbraith, I think. There were,Bernard says, “jazz cigarettes” in the room. Fancy that.

Still, the Auckland Town Hall concert inJanuary 1976 which features in the poem’s second half, did happen. I was thereand it was great because it was Frank Zappa and he played a lot of guitar and, as always, he had areally good drummer: this time it was Terry Bozzio. You can hear what the bandsounded like on the double-CD FZ:OZ recorded inSydney on the same tour. It features Norman Gunston on harmonica, as a resultof this interview Gunston did withZappa.

YouTube has more Gunston for younger viewers:I am sure that Sacha Baron-Cohen would acknowledge that Ali G/Borat didn’t comeout of nowhere. Where the hell Gunston came from is anybody’s guess. Some sortof Paul Holmes/Paul Henry timewarp thing?

Newt Gingrich, Lazarus v.2012

2011-12-14T23:40:00.000+13:00

F. Scott Fitzgeraldwrote in The Last Tycoon that thereare no second acts in American lives. Serialadulterer, former Speaker of the House and current aspirant Republicanpresidential candidate Newt Gingrich iscurrently having a good go at disproving this theory. As a reminder of how MrGingrich was regarded last time around, here is Ike Willis with “Eye of Newt” fromhis 1998 album Dirty Pictures. Samplelyric:

When that crazyRepublican

came a’ barrellin’ downthe political chute

How could we ever know?When will he ever go?

We're a nation underthe Eye of Newt.

Why is he so very,bible-thumpin’ reactionary?

Square of head andsquare of chin

All he wants is aperfect world,

for American boy andgirl

Just as long as theylook like him

Fun fact: Willis playedguitar and sang with Frank Zappa for many years and was a member of his 1988band, as heard on the double CD set TheBest Band You Never Heard in Your Life. Which means that Willis can playguitar in 17/8 and sing a reggae version of “Stairway to Heaven”, though frommemory not necessarily at the same time.

Here is Zappa himselfon the subject of newts. This clip from his movie 200Motels, possibly one of the worst movies ever made, starts with thedance sequence “The Lad Searches The Night For His Newts” before we get “TheGirl Wants To Fix Him Some Broth” (which contains the line “Some nice soup,with small dogs in it”), “Little Green Scratchy Sweaters and Corduroy Ponce”,“A Nun Suit Painted On Some Old Boxes”, “Dental Hygiene Dilemma” and “Does ThisKind Of Life Look Interesting To You”. Warning: contains Keith Moon dressd as anun. The soprano is PhyllisBryn-Julson who made a memorable recording of Pierre Boulez’s Pli Selon Pli and performed with him andthe Ensemble Contemporain in a wonderful performance of Boulez and Birtwistleat the Wellington Arts Festival in 1988.

I love the soundtrack tothis but accept that I am in a vanishingly small minority. However, Theodore Bikel (who was in the movies The African Queen and My Fair Lady and starred in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway for,like, forever) is undeniably great in it, especially in the closing song wherehe sings the timeless lyric, “Lord, have mercy on the people in England, forthe terrible food these people must eat.”Alsoon YouTube.

What I’m reading

2011-12-13T20:49:00.002+13:00

The GPS of my dreams would be voiced by Fenella Feilding or JenniferEhle who played Elizabeth Bennet opposite Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy in the BBCPride and Prejudice and is thesexy-posh voice at the start of thisgreat Divine Comedy song, “To Die a Virgin”:

Just guessing, for chicks Alan Rickman wouldn’tbe a bad alternative.

The NewZealand Herald is not a newspaperthat often surprises its readers, but thissurprised me:

When my daughter was a baby and apreschooler, I tried hard to get my head around the subject of child car-seats. Slowly but surely I discovered what was legally required, what was recommended and what was simply best practice. I did research, identified the experts, asked the difficult questions, took notes and felt grateful that, as a journalist, these procedures were almost second nature to me. I recall tracking down Plunket’s Dunedin-based national coordinator to quiz her about whether front-facing child car-seats could go in the front seat of a car. (They could but only if the backseat was occupied or there wasn't a backseat – and as long as there were no operational airbags.) And I remember thinking what a minefield it all was and wondering how parents who were non-journalists fared in getting all the information they needed.

Yes, Shelley Bridgeman, or TheChemtrail Kid as we call her around here, is a journalist.

DavidThompson alerts us to this report in the Washington Square News:

Occupy Wall Street will be taking over theclassroom next semester. The Department of Social and Cultural Analysis hasannounced that it will be offering a course on the movement this spring.

The course will explore the history andpolitics of debt and take a deeper look at the economic crisis the movement isprotesting. It will be taught by SCA profesor Lisa Duggan.

“Occupy Wall Street has done us all theservice of illuminating [the fact] that the economy operates within theframework of political, social and cultural conflicts, and not outside them,”she said. [. . .]

CAS junior Vijay Mirchandani said he thinksthe class will educate people who haven't been following the movement thus far.

“The fact that the economy and Wall Streetare increasingly a part of everyday life is all the more reason for people toknow about it,” he said.

Have to love that “increasingly”.

Peter Bearman, professor of sociology atColumbia University, also expressed enthusiasm about the new course.

“OWS as a topic of study offers prismaticopportunities to consider the changing shape of inequality in our society andthe dynamic processes of repertoire change in social movements globally, fromthe picket line to the sit-in, to the consideration of life coursetrajectories, among other themes central to the sociological apprehension ofthe modern context,” he said.

First commenter out of the box asks:

Will Prof Duggan be teachingstudents about not wasting money they don’t have on worthless courses thatleave them in debt with no hope of a job?

Craig Sisterton goes on a nationwideNZ crime spree.

The DailyTelegraph does good obituaries and thisis a classic. The intro reads:

Peter Lunn, who has died aged 97, captainedthe British skiing team at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen;later, as a gentleman spy in the early Cold War years, he pioneered the idea ofdigging tunnels under Soviet-controlled zones to facilitate telephone tapping.

Lunn was MI6 section chief in Viennaimmediately after the war, at the time of The Third Man, and in Berlinin the mid-50s:

He went on to serve as head of station inBonn, and during the 1960s in Beirut, where he enjoyed skiing at The Cedars, aresort where, as he recalled, discipline in the lift queues improveddramatically after an attendant shot dead the two worst queue jumpers.

“Discipline” brings us, inevitably, to KingCrimson and their 1980s gamelanperiod:

And for guitar saddos, here is a lonely guyshowing how to play Robert Fripp’s part (that’s him above). It sounds repetitive but thoseshifting accents… I blame Steve Reich.

Various performative modes foreclosed upon

2011-12-12T18:07:00.001+13:00

“Woke up this morning, got the oldremediation/ deferral of performance blues again.”

Carrie Millerin the Australian edition (3 December) of the Spectator presents a primespecimen of artwankfrom an unidentified exhibition of contemporary art, presumably in Sydney whereshe lives:

Performance functions as the absent-presence/ present-absence withinthis group exhibition. Three broad strands of performance/artwork relationshipemerge in a cacophony of object and image forms and traces, indicatingsomething of the manner in which live action haunts so much of otherwiseapparently distinct contemporary practice. In one sense the exhibition might besaid to be predicated upon the remediation/ deferral of performance (or action)in image form. In another way, it foregrounds the manifestation/trace/sublimation of live action presented in the form of inanimate objects.Then again, in select moments of “liveness” it presents the artist at workthrough performance, manifesting in-situ, through time otherwise apparentlycontradictory impulses towards disappearance and recuperation of performance asboth experience and category. Works throughout the exhibition apparently orimplicitly claim a lineage in the history of performance, whether in acts ofhomage or simply as a strategic model. Simultaneously they demonstrate areinvestment of the performative within object making. Various performative modesare both staged and foreclosed upon: gesture, action, ritual, exploration orjourney, labour, theatre, comedy [. . .]

Speaking of inanimate objects, here areGodley & Creme in 1979 with “I Pity Inanimate Objects” from the album Freeze Frame. I bet Flight of theConchords are fans:

UPDATE
PaulLitterick, ace detective, has identified the above quote as the work of curator Blair French who puttogether the exhibition “Nothing LikePerformance” for Artspacein Woolloomooloo. The exhibition runs until 22 December so, if you are in Sydney,you will be able to see Paul Donald:

undertake live work daily, 11am-5pm, fromthe opening of the exhibition until the completion of his work. He will simply– or perhaps not so simply – attempt to build a bridge across the gallerywithout formal plans or advance engineering. The structure will extend piece bypiece, always with the risk of collapse, of failure, with every new action.

I know the feeling.

Mobile number of the day

2011-12-12T15:31:00.001+13:00

022 419 4304 (which = 2²² howcool is that).

And it does = 2²². Howcool is it that she knew that?

Happy 103rd birthday, Elliott Carter

2011-12-11T19:15:00.001+13:00

Amazing but true: the great Americancomposer Elliott Carteris still with us and today turns 103. He is still active: not only is he outand about, but he is stillcomposing. Last Thursday he attendedthe premiere of five of his recent works, all but one written in thelast 10 years. As Anthony Tommasini comments in the New York Times:

Never in the history of music has a majorcomposer still been producing significant pieces at such an age. Verdi waspushing 80 when he finished his final masterpiece, “Falstaff.” Stravinskycompleted his last major piece, “Requiem Canticles,” at 84.

Here is Damien Thompson in the Daily Telegraph reviewing the worldpremiere of Carter’s Conversationsfor piano, percussion and chamber orchestra this June:

No doubt about it: at the age of 102,Carter – interviewed in the video above – is really getting into his stride.

The video is part of a four-part interviewmade in 2008 when the composer turned 100. It’s great – he talks about how whenhe and his wife moved into their apartment e.e. cummings lived aroundthe corner and MarianneMoore was just down the street. Here is part of his Symphony of Three Orchestras from 1976:

It has been a goodweek for elderly composers: Henri Dutilleux,96 next month, has won theKravis Prize, which comes with $US200,000 and a commission to compose apiece for the New York Philharmonic. He isn’t going to write one but insteadwill share the money with three other composers, whom the orchestra will choosewith his advice and who will each write a work in his honour. It’s a shame wewon’t get a new Dutilleux but the first composer selected is Peter Eötvös, who is a goodthing. In 1993 he wrote a piece for solo percussion titled Psalm 151, in memoriam Frank Zappa. Ifyou don’t believe me, you can listen to a snippet of it here.

In praise of: The Literary Review

2011-12-09T20:10:00.001+13:00

In the September issue of the LiteraryReview (the issue currently available here in New Zealand) JoanSmith considers Robert Levine’s FreeRide: How the internet is destroying the culture business and how the culturebusiness can fight back. The Businesweek review of the book is here,hereis the Guardian and hereis the New York Times. See what I didthere? Illustrated the book’s theme, that people on the internet steal content.

The book sounds like a good, thoughtfuldiscussion of the issues. Near the end of her review Smith writes that Levineis:

right to argue for a “content tax” –effectively collectively licensing – that would allow media companies tocollect revenue in a system modelled on one that allows music companies tocollect for radio play.

She would say that, wouldn’t she: she is onthe board of ALCS,the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society which is the UK equivalent of NewZealand’s CLL, Copyright LicensingLimited (disclosure: I am on its board) which does the same job of licensingthe use of copyright works. Digitisation is a huge issue for all such rightsorganisations – it was relatively easy to manage photocopying in schools andlibraries but e-books open up a whole new Pandora’s box of digital worms.

Smith continues:

But I’d have liked to have seen him addressone of the most peculiar effects of the Internet, which has been to suspend themoral obligations that consiumers observe in their offline behaviour. I’m notaware of instances where shoppers who insist on “free content” via the Internetput the same principle into practice in Tesco’s, clearing the shelves andrefusing to pay on the way out. Why some people feel it’s OK to expectsomething for nothing when they consume online, but not in shops, is afascinating area for research.

Seems clear enough to me: people feelanonymous online, just as looters do in a riot. Which is why people who wouldnever steal from a bookshop will happily download from Pirate Bay.

On the next page JohnSweeney (“There are three rules in journalism. First, find a crocodile.Two, poke it in the eye with a stick. Three, stand back and report what happensnext”) reviews DarkMarket: Cyberthieves,cybercops and you by Misha Glenny, which is about the hackers who stealcredit-card data, and along the way shows that England is just as two-degreesof separation as New Zealand is:

The Nigerian, Adewale Taiwo, got four yearsbut served less than two. He was threatened with confiscation proceedings forhis ill-gotten gains of some £350,000. At the hearings the prosecutor mislaid akey file, and the judge, Graham Robinson – he pinched my girlfriend one billionyears ago, but that’s another story – got fed up and declared the amountswindled to be just £53,000. Taiwo preferred to spend a further year in prison rather than hand over thecash, but the prison authorities let him out anyway to deport him back toNigeria.

The magazine unfailingly reviews unpredictablyinteresting books and matches them with predictably interesting reviewers. Itis, imho, best in class.

Bad sex

2011-12-08T22:48:00.001+13:00

Is there such a thing? My hunch is thatmost men would say no and most women would say yes. As does the LiteraryReview. In 1993 the then editor, my hero Auberon Waugh, establishedthe Bad Sex award to highlight – and discourage – the “crude, tasteless, andoften perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description incontemporary novels”.

The nominees were always novelists untilTony Blair was nominated for his 2010 autobiography, A Journey, for this passage:

On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed thatlove Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was ananimal following my instinct .

Ladies and gentlemen, this year’s winner:

David Guterson, the novelist who rewrote the Oedipus myth as if it was set inthe 20th century, has been given the dubious honour of being awarded the annualBad Sex prize.

Guterson, the American novelist most famous for his best-selling Snow Falling on Cedars, was given theaccolade for his fifth book Ed King,a modern reworking of the Greek legend.

Judges were said to be impressed by his over-reliance on terms such as “familyjewels”, “back door” and “front parlour” during a sex scene between mother andson.

They said the terms made him the clear winner.

His award was announced at the In & Out Club in London by Carry On star BarbaraWindsor.

The chemtrail conspiracy

2011-12-08T17:36:00.000+13:00

Shelley Bridgeman wrote thisin the New Zealand Herald, anallegedly serious newspaper, and Danyl McLauchlan wrote thisat the Dim-Post, an occasionally satirical blog, in response. I think he is ourbest satirist since AKGrant.

It’s a competition – enter it! I’m not going to because Matt Nippert and Andrew Geddis already have andare much funnier than I could ever be, but do have a look – many of the entriesare outstanding.

UPDATE

Danyl writes:

I’ve closed off comments on the Shelleywrites the classics thread, because Keri Hulme has agreed to judge theentries and declare a winner. Winning criteria, date and time of theannouncement and prize for best entry will all be subject to the merciless whimsof Keri Hulme.

Metallica, forex dealers

2011-12-07T17:09:00.001+13:00

Neil Shah in the Wall Street Journal reports:

Duff McKagan, the former bassist ofGuns N’ Roses, once unwittingly spent $40,000 on expensive suits in Italybecause he didn’trealize how much his purchases—then in Italian lira—wereworth in dollars. The lanky musician now sings a more sober tune: After takingbusiness courses at Seattle University, he started writing about finance forPlayboy ("Duffonomics") and—most recently—launched a wealth-managementfirm for rockers: Meridian Rock Capital Management LP. Millionaire musicians,the 47-year-old told fans at New York City's Strand bookstore in October, arean “underserviced” community.

And then, as always, there is Metallica:

After the 2008 global financial crisis, rock bands and their managers arepaying closer attention to obscure concerns like currency rates and economictrends when inking contracts with foreign concert promoters. Eight monthsbefore Metallica takes the stage in Germany, [manager Cliff] Burnstein decideswhether the band should be paid in dollars, euros or a combination of the two.If exchange rates swing in a way that hurts Metallica’s earnings, he buysderivative financial instruments to lock in a preferred rate. Sometimes ticketprices are hiked to compensate for possible currency-related losses, though Mr.Burnstein shuns this strategy.

“Nobody is looking to make aforeign-exchange trade to make money, but you don’t want to be a loser,” thescraggly bearded manager said.

Speaking of scragglybearded comedians, here is Bill Bailey with his version ofMetallica’s “Enter Sandman”:

Monitor: Penny Wise

Plagiarism and B.S. Johnson

2011-12-06T22:26:00.001+13:00

There is plagiarismand there is plagiarism. Q.R. Markham’s debut crime novel Assassin of Secrets received some great reviews. Here is aselection of them at Amazon:

“Brainy and enticing ... a narrative hallof mirrors in which nothing and no one are as they seem and emotion is aperilous thing to have ... A dazzling, deftly controlled debut that movesthrough familiar territory with wry sophistication.” (Kirkus (starred review) )

“Quirky, entertaining ... fine writingkeeps the enterprise firmly on track, and the obvious Ian Fleming influencejust adds to the appeal.” (PublishersWeekly (starred review) )

“Hardcore, old school spy fiction for ageneration raised on ass-kicking Bourne flicks. Q.R. Markham’s thrilling debutis just like his spy hero: ambitious and audacious. More, please.” (DuaneSwierczynski, Edgar-nominated author of SeverancePackage and Fun & Games)

“A fantastic, gleeful, chrome-plated-slickdebut of a novel. In Jonathan Chase, Markham has created the perfectcliche-shattering super spy while honoring the progenitors. Dangerously sharp,and genuinely fun—and very, very, very smart. I want more books like this. Iwant more books from the mind of Mr. Markham!” (Greg Rucka, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Run and Queen & Country)

But then Markham was nicked, for nicking. Assassin of Secrets is not just a crimenovel, it’s a criminal novel. He stole it. As the great crime writer Lawrence Block, astar of the 1999 Auckland Writers’ Festival, comments at Amazon:

There are plenty of good sentences in thisbook, but they’re all the work of other writers. The author must be seriouslydisturbed; he quite deliberately stole everything in the book.

The plagiarist behind the nom-de-plume,Quentin Rowan, confesses here.He is a recovered alcoholic and drug addict:

Over that same time period, I’ve fought amostly losing battle with plagiarism. [. . .] I struggled with plagiarism in the same wayothers struggle with smoking, sex addiction, food addiction, and gambling.

God yes, Don’t we writers all struggledaily with our addiction to plagiarism. Not.

I was taking words that I wished were minefrom writers that I loved.

Flattery will get you nowhere.

But the key quote for me is this:

I was 20 years old, and trying to write ashort story for the first or second time when I came upon a paragraph I likedfrom a short story by B.S. Johnson called “What did you say the Name of thePlace was?” It was so easy to do, as easy as picking up a drink, if you thinkabout it. The lifted paragraph perfectly fit my narrative. And it temporarilyassuaged the awful feeling I had in my head that I was no good as a writer. Inretrospect, maybe that’s when I transferred my obsession from drinking anddrugs to plagiarism. My addiction didn’t disappear; it simply morphed intosomething else.

I am impressed that he started out stealingfrom the English novelist B.S. Johnsonwho was a big deal in the 60s and early 70s but is completely obscure now.Johnson came to regard fictionas lying: at the end of his second novel, Albert Angelo, he stops the action and writes:

fuck all this lying look what I’m reallytrying to write about is writing not all this stuff about architecture tryingto say something about writing my writing I’m my hero though what a useless appellationmy first character then I’m trying to say something about me through him albertan architect when what’s the point in covering up… I’m trying to say somethingnot tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truthabout me about my experience about my truth about my truth to reality aboutsitting here writing looking out across Claremont Square trying to saysomething about the writing and nothing being an answer to the loneliness tothe lack of loving

Regular readers will be sick of me bangingon about the GreatBook Robbery of 1998 but I did have most of Johnson’s books, though sadly Icouldn’t afford The Unfortunates,whose 27 chapters one could shuffle and read in any order. Albert Angelo had holes cut into the pages so you could see whatwas coming.

Johnson killed himself in November 1973,aged 40. Who knows what else was going on in his life, but he did seem to havewritten himself into a corner and perhaps could see no escape.

Still, what Quentin Rowan did somehow fitswith Johnson’s view of fiction, that “telling stories is telling lies”. I think thatboth Johnson and Rowan are/were wrong in an undergraduate way, but if Johnsonwere still with us maybe he would be amused by Rowan’s application of histheory.

Johnson came up with one of the best booktitles ever, Aren’t You Rather Young tobe Writing Your Memoirs?, and seems to have been as interested in film ashe was in fiction. Fat Man on a Beach,his last film, is on YouTube and here.No true Johnson fan would watch the five clips in the order given. So here isPart Four:

For fans, David Quantick has done asterling job in uploadingnot only those but also this:Johnson’s TV short You’re Human Like the Rest of Them.

Which leads us to the Pernice Brothers and their song “B.S.Johnson:

We are all shoes

2011-12-04T18:23:00.001+13:00

Mick Hartley, keen collector of curatorialcuriosities, or what Paul Litterick at the Fundy Post calls “artwank”, reportsfrom the show Gesamtkunstwetrk: New Art from Germany at London’s SaatchiGallery. One piece by Josephine Meckseper, says, is “one of those displaycarousels you get in shoe shops”. It certainly hasa lot of shoes on it. The catalogue says:

Josephine Meckseper makes collages andinstallations that reconstruct the worlds of contemporary advertising andfashion in the context of the gallery, as a way of critiquing the politicalimplications of the iconography of consumer culture. [. . .]

Meckseper’s politically engaged workshighlight ongoing problems of corporate corruption, status anxiety, socialprivilege and representations of women. They are also a chilling reminder ofthe excesses and distortions of capitalism, which has created a world in which,she would argue, there is no separation between materialism and politicalideology: we are what we buy.

Hartley comments: “We are all shoes! Yes,of course, it’s obvious once it’s been pointed out.”

Speaking of Paul Litterick, here he leapsto the defence of Deborah Hill Cone whose recent piecein the Herald about the quality ofNew Zealand’s universities attracted the ire of one commenter called JD, whoclaimed, preposterously, “My Waikato Management School degree is on the worldstage.”

Barely literate, under-informed andover-opinionated, JD is a shining example of the modern managerial class. Armedwith a degree in Doing Things, trained but not educated, JD doubtless will gofar – probably in a BMW. Whether JD will make any sense is another matter.

Speaking of things preposterous, the Sunday Star-Times today reviewed MaxCryer’s new book Preposterous Proverbsand quoted approvingly Max’s comments on “all that glisters is not gold”.Funny, I thought, didn’t Shakespeare write that? I looked it up in my Project Gutenberg Word file of thecomplete Shakespeare: Ctrl-F, type in “glisters” and there it is in The Merchant of Venice, Act II Scenevii:

PRINCE OF MOROCCO. O hell! what have we here?
A carrion Death, within whose empty eye
There is a written scroll! I'll read the writing.
“All that glisters is not gold,
Often have you heard that told;
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold.
Gilded tombs do worms infold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,
Your answer had not been inscroll’d.
Fare you well, your suit is cold.”
Cold indeed, and labour lost,
Then farewell, heat, and welcome, frost.
Portia, adieu! I have too griev'd a heart
To take a tedious leave; thus losers part.
Exit with his train. Flourish of cornets

I like the flourish of cornets. But I hadthought that a proverb was anonymous folk wisdom. Can a phrase written by anidentifiable individual really count? Maybe so. Does anyone know?

XKCD,which describes itself as “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language”,has some new items in its online store in time for Christmas. Among itsofferings, “For the topology enthusiasts out there, an accurately labeledcoffee mug”:

and this shirt(I can’t copy theimages but this link shows it):

The Self-Descriptive Shirt, loosely basedon comic #688, has on it a set of charts andgraphs precisely describing itself. On the front is a white pie chart showingwhat fraction of the shirt's area is white, and on the back are a series ofblack and white charts and figures describing in more detail the size andlocation of black and white areas of the shirt.

Since the graphs are describing their owncontent, it had to be designed to avoid any contradictions, and since a changeto any one graph alters all the others, it took a lot of careful measurementand fine-tuning to precisely calibrate the size of each chart element, and the designwas adjusted for each size of shirt to ensure accuracy.

They say ittook ages to get it accurate, and it will be. These guys are seriously mathy.

Speaking of seriously mathy, now we allknow what to get BK Drinkwater for Christmas. (Can’t link to his blog which isdefunct, but regulars will know who I mean. )

And speaking of topology, this from Abstruse Goose:

Honestly, you wait ages for a topology jokeand then along come two at once.

Distance looks our way

2011-12-03T20:01:00.001+13:00

In the December issue of Word magazine, regular contributor Fraser Lewry writes:

Last month I relocated my desk to theSouthern Hemisphere to examine the Rugby World Cup at close quarters. Distraction was provided by ChrisBourke’s multiple award-winning book BlueSmoke: the Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964, which led meto the delightful swing of Pixie Williams, whose 1949 hit gave the book itstitle.

Of more recent vintage is Tiny Ruins’ exquisitedebut album Some Were Meant for the Sea,which is decidedly post-Joanna Newsom but somewhat less squeaky. [. . .]

I’ve been dipping into First Catch Your Weka, a history of NZ cooking, and devoured LloydJones’ The Book of Fame, a fabulouslypoetic novel about the 1905 All Blacks tour, when they lost only to Wales. The2011 bunch remained undefeated, but shredded my nerves in the process.

Chris is convenor of the judgingpanel for the 2012 NZ Post Book Awards, a job I did in 2010 and our mutualfriend – it’s a cabal! – Paul Diamonddid in 2011. It’s bloody hard work and Chris will be as brilliant at it as Paulwas.
Anyway it’s good to see Blue Smoke being publicised in the UK to a music-friendly audienceof literate people. Which brings us to DistanceLooks Our Way: the Effects of Remoteness on New Zealand, the seven WinterLectures given at the University of Auckland in the second term of 1960.

Thiswas the second series of lectures: I don’t know if the first lot werepublished. The book was edited by Keith Sinclair and published for theuniversity in 1961 by the hugelyinfluential Paul’sBook Arcade. Contributors included “Mr R. M. Chapman, Mr C. K. Stead, Mr E.H. McCormick and Mr P. Tomory”. Glancing through it now, the writers’ concernsseem as distant now as England still is – but it must have been a wonderfulbook when it appeared 50 years ago.

Lady Garden

2011-12-02T21:05:00.001+13:00

Quentin Letts, parliamentary sketch-writerfor the Daily Mail, writesin the Diary column of the Spectator’s26 November issue:

An embarrassed cough from the features deskof the Daily Mail as they ask: ‘This government whip in the Lords youmention in your column — are you sure about her name?’ The whip in question isSue Garden, a Liberal Democrat. ‘What about her?’ I say. It is explained to me,gently, that ‘lady garden’ is a euphemism. My copy is duly altered to read‘Baroness Garden of Frognall’. Poor love. To be both a Lib Dem and a synonymfor pubes. That’s hard.

In that week’s Australian edition of the weekly– which is even better than the English one because you can read more aboutAustralian politics and culture than you can in a month’s worth of any NZnewspaper – Karl du Fresne asks“What’s John Key’s secret?” Smiling, apparently.

The past is a foreign country

2011-12-02T13:11:00.000+13:00

In 1988 the Maori activist and trade unionist Syd Jackson, who died in 2007, travelled to Libya. This caused a fuss at the time. He was accused of being a terrorist and there were calls for him to be tried for treason.

Here are some extracts from his 6200-word account of what he saw, “My Libya”, published in the December 1988 issue of Metro. Syd was a columnist there at the time and I was his editor: he wasn’t totally reliable about deadlines but otherwise he was always a pleasure to deal with. I don’t think he’d mind me republishing this as an historical curio.

It was 10am when our taxi pulled up outside the international terminal at Sydney Airport. [. . .] Australian journalists are far more aggressive than their New Zealand counterparts. They are extremely belligerent in their interrogation – or at least they were of these two suspected Maori terrorists. [. . .] We told them that we were going to Libya to give support to the indigenous people of Australia in this important year of their struggle. As it was the 200th year since Australia had been invaded by criminals, and since the Aboriginals had chosen to use the white celebrations to focus international attention upon their plight, we would support their struggle in any way we could. [. . .]

We said we would be seeking recognition from Libya that Maoris were an independent nation and that we would also be discussing both trade and loan questions with the appropriate people in Libya. [. . .]

The most striking feature of Libya is its egalitarianism. I saw none of the extremes of wealth which are characteristic of many other societies that have freed themselves from the yoke of imperialism. Similarly, there were none of the vulgar displays of ostentation which is now such a feature of our yuppie society. There were no slums, no shanty towns, no beggars, no miserable poverty. I saw no evidence of a privileged class being waltzed around the country in chauffeur-driven Mercedes or LTDs. [. . .]

Housing is generally free, with the majority of the population living in the Libyan equivalent of our state houses. If a family wishes to build a house, interest-free loans are readily available from the state, usually on a 25-year term. Housing costs take up about 25 per cent of most incomes. Since most Libyans live in extended family groups, there is normally more than one income coming into the house and more than enough money to spend. [. . .]

Other working conditions are far superior to this country. There is unlimited paid sick leave, subject to “legal excuse”, that is, the production of medical certificates. Accident victims receive full pay on the same basis. Free transport to work is the norm, free meals are provided, genuine equal pay exists and other benefits are in place that workers in Libya enjoy and which their counterparts in this country can only dream about. [. . .]

Workers retire at 60 and receive their full salary until they die. If a man dies, widows are entitled to the equivalent of their full salary until their children are able to support them.

Education is genuinely free, with students being educated in both English and Arabic. French was also compulsory until recently. The universities, which are based on the British model, have three times the number of students that we have with the same population. Tuition, books, accommodation and meals are free and students receive a generous living allowance in addition. We were told that the majority of academic staff and students are women. [. . .]

The 1969 revolution in Libya set in place programmes to ensure that everyone would share the benefits of the country’s wealth. There has been a major redistribution of wealth and a large investment in agricultural and industrial development. Important restrictions were placed on capitalism, and Jamahiriya (Land of the Masses) was established. While they call it a socialist country, Libyans to whom we spoke were particularly proud of the fact that they have not simply aped the communist model or copied the Western model of so-called representative democracy. It is, they say, their answer to their problems derived from their history, their culture, their religion and their values. [. . .]

In Tripoli, most of the private businesses operating involve weaving, carpet production, jewellery manufacture, handcrafts and textiles. Much of the work was exquisite. Prices were reasonable and we were pleased to be able to buy in the people’s markets mostly direct from the people who had made the products. It was good to know that their return was higher than it would have been under our system of mark-ups imposed by a succession of middle men.

The people’s supermarkets are big, state-owned department stores which operate on the same basis. The producer gets the fullest return and the consumer gets the lowest possible price. Some disruptions to supply are obvious in foreign goods, again the result of the US-organised trade embargo. But they are well stocked in the basic requirements of everyday life and there was certainly no scarcity of food. [. . .]

Libya suffers from huge under-employment. Industry suffers from this labour shortage, but the lack of skilled labour is even more critical. It is estimated that half the workforce in the steel works will be migrant labour. All the major construction projects are built by foreign firms using predominantly foreign workers.

The drastic shortage of workers is immediately obvious to the visitor Public tidiness, particularly on the roadside, is nonexistent. “Dead” cars are just pushed off the road by their owners and left. Rubbish bags are thrown from cars all over the countryside and left to decay. Many buildings seem to be in need of refurbishing, but without the workers such tasks cannot be done. To help overcome this problem, Arab and African workers are allowed full access into the country and have all the rights of Libyan citizenship.

The lack of skilled workers is, of course, a problem Libya shares with other countries which have been liberated from their colonial oppressors for only a short time. The neglect of education and other services under colonialism is a common feature of Third World nations. In 1968, there were only 178 Libyan teachers in training. To overcome that problem the Libyan government has spent huge amounts building schools and campuses and providing generous allowances to students. [. . .]

Libya suffers a brain drain like most other countries because of the emphasis it is having to place on scientific training. Politically, problems will undoubtedly result too as the new, younger technocrats are confronted with practical problems, the resolution of which they may seek non-ideological solutions to. [. . .]

The Libyan people I spoke to considered they had as much if not more freedom than other countries they had visited. They might miss some of the accoutrements of the West because of the cultural traditions of their country, but they considered these to be unimportant compared to the role they could play in rebuilding their society after thousands of years of colonial rule.

But they commented that they had a greater freedom to go anywhere they liked in their own country than we have in the West where doors open or close on the basis of wealth, privilege or position. No such impediments exist in Libya.

Moreover, they could point to a singular absence of violent crime, which made them feel much safer in Libya than in the West. The streets are safe.

Perhaps the equation of full employment, an absence of poverty, good health care and education combined with their religious and cultural beliefs provides a model for us to examine when we are looking at ways to deal with crime. At a time when we have one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the world and are busily building more prisons on Maori land, we should note that in Libya they have started tearing them down. If we could overcome our paranoia about Libya, we might find in that society the answers to some of our social ills. [. . .]

We also talked to as many people as possible about the position Gadaffi holds in Libyan society and, in particular, discussed with them the statements made by opponents to our trip, that Libya was a military dictatorship.

In those discussions, and in other forums, the first thing which struck us was the affection, almost adoration, people we met had for Gadaffi. They sang liberation songs about him. They quoted from his writings and his speeches and accord him a special place in their hearts. I don’t suggest that this feeling is universal, but it was widespread. He is accorded that special status because, firstly, he liberated the country from the Americans and the British, and because, secondly, he has helped build a fair and just society.

Libyans point to the fact that Gadaffi holds no executive position. He does not lead the country on a day-to-day basis. He is a member of the Revolutionary Committee which has an important propaganda role, but can only make recommendations to the People’s Congress. [. . .]

We visited Colonel Gadaffi’s former residence [. . .] It was an unpretentious four-bedroom house crowded among other Arab-style city dwellings. Its furnishings were comfortable, but far from extravagant. He is seen as being of and for the people, and his life style is consistent with that view. [. . .]

In our discussions, the Libyan people stated from the beginning a willingness to negotiate with the Maori people as equals. Since 1840 we have never been able to negotiate with the white oppressors in our own country from a position of equality, and this was a remarkable and refreshing starting point.

It was, therefore, easy for us to reach agreement on the matters we wished to raise. A Maori delegation will visit Libya in 12 months’ time. There will be further discussions on the issues which we raised. Recognition of Aotearoa as an independent Maori nation is a possibility. Trade between Libya and Maori organisations, loans, boycott of trade with white New Zealand and the development of reciprocal cultural links will be explored.

We do not pretend that finality in these negotiations will be reached quickly We are aware that New Zealand’s colonial government is trying covertly to increase trade with Libya and to subvert Maori initiatives in Libya, while at the same time denigrating that country as a terrorist regime. That kind of hypocrisy is typical of this government’s foreign policy. [. . .]

At hui which we have attended since our return, we have told our people of our trip. We shall continue to do so, and with their support we shall be arranging for other Maoris to visit the land of the Jamahiriya

English food

2011-12-01T17:45:00.000+13:00

It’s mostly nasty but we do have to give them credit for the sandwich in all its infinite variety. For example, this tasty but sadly not gluten-free item, the toast sandwich.

Just as sadly, it has all got political now. Caroline Crampton in the Guardian objects to Prime Minister David Cameron on sandwich-related grounds:

“Leftwing” is a phrase that many in the political sphere have long been comfortable with [. . . But now] David Cameron has launched a full frontal attack on it. It’s a long-established rhetorical device that using three adjectives in a row will create a cumulative effect. By sandwiching “leftwing” between “irresponsible” and “weak” and placing it in close proximity to “union-sponsored”, he’s transforming it from a simple adjective into a loaded insult.

Monitor: Tim Blair.

Obituary of the week

2011-11-30T22:27:00.000+13:00

From, as it happens, The Week, the 26 November edition, on English actress Dulcie Gray:

The diabolist Aleister Crowley became an ardent fan, once writing to invite her to be sacrificed as a virgin in a dawn rite at Stonehenge. Gray declined on the grounds that she wasn’t an early riser.

Totally natural

2011-11-28T22:32:00.001+13:00

On this morning’s walk I took a new route, away from the cows and horses and bravely into the suburbs. I passed a house with a large sign outside offering a service I had never heard of: ionic foot detox.

So I looked it up. Apparently ionic foot detox will deal with, among other things, joint pain, arthritis, chronic fatigue, foggy brain, poor concentration and parasites. Fantastic. It can fix my feet and my head and also get rid of the cat.

Also, even though it uses electricity to ionise water, it is totally natural.

So here is the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kent Nagano performing Frank Zappa’s “Bogus Pomp”:

Election update #6, final edition

2011-11-25T19:27:00.005+13:00

To the village this morning to see Prime Minister John Key and local MP Louise Upston in action. About a hundred people showed up, not quite half of them media. Bonus: Steven Joyce was there too, taking photos. Can the Nats not afford a professional photographer? I wanted to ask Louise why they bothered with this stopover since everyone in Cambridge votes National anyway, but I guess it was on the way from Taupo to Auckland and would have been light relief after Tokoroa. No cups of tea as far as I could see, though my friend Rachael did a good job of promoting her cupcake business Bite Me – she even got Patrick Gower to interview her, but sadly the clip did not make the 6pm news.

Enough election coverage already. The Spectator has a regular Diary column with contributors ranging from Barry Humphries to Joan Collins to… well, check this one out from the 19 November issue:

London now has a new semi-permanent protest, an anti-bank tent village outside St Paul’s Cathedral, to match the anti-war tents across the road from the Houses of Parliament. It’s one of the incongruities of contemporary London: policemen carrying submachine guns on one side of the street; people breaking the law with impunity on the other. Still, the protestors don't seem to be impeding worshippers on their way to evensong, even those dressed like bankers.

There has been some progress over the past year. Twelve months ago, you had to register to use the bikes installed by London Mayor Boris Johnson. Now, a credit card is enough to give you the extra mobility they provide. Riding a “Boris bike” from the Brompton Oratory to my hotel, I felt I was keeping alive Orwell’s vision of the England of old maids cycling to their parish church.

Who is this benign observer of Occupy St Paul’s who is happy to keep alive Orwell’s vision? None other than Australia’s Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott.

Staying with Oz, here is Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle on occasional contributor Clive James:

If you did a blindfold test on a random passage from Jane Austen you could tell straight away it was written by a woman from Georgian England, and you could almost certainly name the author. It is the same with Clive James. His writing comes across immediately as the work of an Australian of our time. Yet it is also distinctively his own. Despite living most of his adult life in England, he has kept his Australian accent in both speech and prose. His two essays for Quadrant this year, on poet James McAuley and artist Margaret Olley, dwell on their Australian tone of voice. Clive knows this topic well since he has long been master of the art.

His tone of voice comes from the 1950s state high school system — not from the teachers but the other boys, mostly from battler families. The prevailing ethos was egalitarianism, though not the chip on the shoulder kind. At the time, you admired people of obvious ability — Clive has written memorably about rugby league centre Reg Gasnier — but you developed a sharp eye for poseurs, self-promoters, time servers and salesmen, and had fun sending them up and putting them down. These were the essential skills for literary criticism and Clive made the most of them when he went to London. They still serve him well today.

Indeed, he gets better as he gets older. In August, when I asked him to write about Margaret Olley, I received a great piece of 2500 words just three days later, composed under chemotherapy and sent from his bed in a Cambridge hospital. What a trouper!

That James piece on Olley is here.

My old late friend Andrew Mason has been fittingly memorialised, if that is the word, by the Whitireia publishing course’s Andrew Mason Prize for Most Promising Editor. The winner of the inaugural prize is Kylie Sutcliffe.

In the current NZ fiction bestseller list, eight of the top 10 are literary fiction and some of them have been up there for weeks if not months. Probably sold more than 300 copies. Just saying.

Another list, this time Rolling Stone’s 100 greatest guitarists. Lists appeal to boys, but it’s a dumb concept because music is not a competition – and how can they put Jeff Beck at only #5 and Ry Cooder at only #31? Richard Thompson at #69 and John Lennon at #55? Etc. No Roy Buchanan, Amos Garrett, Cornell Dupree or Danny Gatton. No one from jazz. But many of the comments are good because they are by other guitarists rather than journalists – Andy Summers on Pete Townshend is an ear-opener.

Prince is rated at #33: the entry cites his wonderful solo on “Purple Rain” and mentions this version of George Harrison’s dirgy “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” which electrifies it. I love the way he grins while doing it – he so knows he is fantastic. He manages to channel Albert Collins (#56) and Robbie Robertson (#59) at the same time and showboat shamelessly throughout. Glorious.

Don’t forget to vote.

UPDATE

Meant to say re Steven Joyce acting as some stranger’s photographer that I couldn’t imagine this happening in the US, the UK, France, Germany – any country where politicians take themselves seriously. Australia, for sure. Ireland, maybe. But where else?

Graph of the day

2011-11-24T14:28:00.000+13:00

Monitor: Phil Parker

I’ve been reading

2011-11-23T18:09:00.001+13:00

From The Poke.

Everyone else is writing a crime novel so why shouldn’t Paul Litterick? Parental advisory: may contain phenomenology.

Matt Nolan on that “top 1%” concept with actual NZ-relevant stats.

When River Phoenix died in 1993 my friend James said, “That is so tragic. Now he will never get to sleep with me.” At last I know how he felt. Molly Ball in the Atlantic advises that the Hermanator has been terminated so now I will never get to use the word “hermaneutics” in a sentence. Same thing, really.

A story about the demise of Borders and how indie booksellers in Nashville are benefiting. Vultures!

Karl du Fresne on political journalists. Money quote:

When Garner announces “This issue isn’t going away”, under the guise of making an objective statement about the political controversy du jour (such as the Café Urban furore), he does so with the certainty of a man who will make damned sure it doesn’t go away.

A good local stats blog new to me here. It looks to be in the spirit of the Stratford Theory of Numbers and well worth checking in with regularly. Especially if you are a journalist.

Entertaining smackdown of this Labour press release by David Farrar. Well, he would, wouldn’t he, but the numbers tell the story.

A fantastic competition from Booksellers NZ. Free books. All you have to do is take a photo. I’m going to.

The Financial Times emails:

What does Chris Patten think of Deng Xiaoping, or Stephen Fry of Lady Gaga? Why is Istanbul the FT readers’ favourite city? What do Bear Grylls and Gary Shteyngart dream of doing on holiday. And where can you have lunch with Angelina Jolie, Roger Waters or a Shaolin abbot?

FT Life & Arts is the place to find out. A brilliantly edited mix of features, reviews and interviews updated every weekend, featuring the FT’s finest writers, it brings together the best in arts criticism, book reviews and photography.

Regular columnists include award-winning names such as Gillian Tett, Susie Boyt and Simon Kuper, as well as the extraordinary advice of Agony Uncle Sir David Tang

Talk about a mixed message. David Tang is a delightful fellow – he was at my friend Clara’s 40th in Shek O (at the second house down here) – but I have no interest in Lady Gaga and (SHOUTS!) do not wish ever to hear any more of Stephen Fry. And lunch with Roger Waters does not appeal: talk about monsters of rock. If ever I saw him in the street I’d run like hell.

Cue the Waters-less incarnation of Pink Floyd. It’s not one of their better songs but at least they had a decent bass player in Guy Pratt (whose memoir My Bass and Other Animals is very funny):

Oh yes, there is a referendum on Saturday about our voting system. Official information here.

Election update #5

2011-11-23T16:41:00.003+13:00

Best blog comment of the week is from Lance at Kiwiblog on a Farrarpost (it has an excellent graph of NZ’s trade deficit with China and the effect of the 2008 NZ-China free-trade agreement) about how the Greens and Winston First are against imports from China:

The Greens and Winston should tell all their followers that a vote for them is a vote to shut down the Warehouse.

I suspect they will conveniently leave that bit out.

Waikato Times letter of the week

2011-11-23T10:36:00.001+13:00

From the 22 November edition of the Waikato Times, a letter in response to previous expressions of concern from dingbats, I mean readers, about the danger of radiation from smart meters:

Simple remedy

To John Cook, of Orewa, and Noel Gregory, of Hamilton, and other concerned readers, there is a very easy and simple remedy for radiation that Smart Meters transmit.

One hundred per cent pure therapeutic essential oils overcome and restore damaged body cells, without any side effects. These substances have the ingredients with no chemicals. Any substance with chemical is a toxin to our bodies. Very few substances meet a 100 per cent pure grade. So radiation is not the only toxin being swallowed!

DON FROMMHERZ

Hamilton

There is another school of thought on this topic, called science, which knows quite a bit about electromagnetic fields and radiation. And about smart meters too.

I wonder, if Mr Frommherz believes that “any substance with chemical is a toxin”, where he stands on the dihydrogen monoxide issue. It’s a bigger danger than sodium chloride, apparently.

Nights in the Garden of Stephen

2011-11-22T20:05:00.000+13:00

At the weekend my wife, who does the non-food gardening, removed a couple of blobs of teucrium by the entrance to our house and inserted a couple of young maples. This process revealed – ta-DAH! – a couple of fine upstanding reeds.

We have named the one on the right AH Reed and the one on the left AW Reed.

That’s me in the spotlight

2011-11-22T13:22:00.000+13:00

Since my 1970s debut in the national media, fully frontal naked in Marcia Russell’s great Thursday magazine, I have appeared in the Listener, Metro, the Herald and other newspapers, not to mention the Samoa Observer. For a few heady years I was a regular on national TV’s Good Morning and 5.30 with Jude. In England I have contributed to the Spectator, Private Eye and the Economist. I have been photographed by Jane Ussher and, for a magazine cover, by Bruce Connew. Heady stuff. And yet, and yet...

I was not satisfied. I felt a failure. The Great Prize of New Zealand Media Fame always eluded me.

Until now.

Yes, at last I have made it into Little Treasures. The reporter and photographer were unaccountably more interested in my wife and our children, Seven and Nine, but still, I’ll take the points on offer.

The election in Cambridge, wildlife edition

2011-11-21T13:25:00.001+13:00

Not only has a frog called Sarkozy taken up residence in our garden but also for some weeks now a duck has been occupying the agapanthus at the entrance to Seven and Nine’s rural primary school – the same school that Cactus Kate attended.

It is Cactus’s birthday today, so in her honour we have named the duck Trevor.

The election in Epsom, ESL edition

2011-11-21T13:03:00.000+13:00

From the Herald:

”It’s made me totally disenfranchised as a voter,” said Susan, 61. “I’ll vote for Goldsmith because we want to get Act out.”

Get that woman a dictionary.

Scariest author photo ever?

2011-11-20T13:40:00.000+13:00

I own a signed copy of Caves in the Hills by A.I.H. Paterson (now known as Alistair Paterson) which was published by the Pegasus Press in 1965. It was his debut poetry collection but, confusingly, the title page says:

Selected Poems by
A. I. H. Paterson

Usually a Selected Poems consists of selections made from a number of books published over a decade or more. Still, the past is a foreign country: perhaps they did things differently in Christchurch in 1965. Incidentally, the book is a hardback. Lift your game, VUP, AUP and Steele Roberts.

Here is the first stanza of the poem “Guns”:

Guns hold a fascination deeper far
Than the collector finds in stamps, in fine
Bold marquetry, in prints and epitaphs —
Flints and barrels, locks with furniture
Ennobled by a dead engraver’s art,
Portraying ills that lead alone can cure,
Lend to the faintest heart a touch of steel.

Which may explain the author photo above, of the author cradling an antique pistol and wearing an inscrutable expression that could be wry or could be threatening. Perhaps it could be both, as if he were channelling Michael Caine.

Whatever, it is the scariest author photo I have ever seen. I showed it to Karyn Hay (whose own debut poetry collection will be published next year) and she suggested that I run a caption contest. Her entry is:

“So, what did you think of the poems?”

That is possibly the winner right there but other entries would be welcome. Not sure what the prize is yet, but isn’t entering and doing your best what it’s all about?

The joy of tweets

2011-11-18T19:43:00.002+13:00

Cactus Kate says:

All politicians should be made to tweet and I relish the chance we will get if Andrew Williams is elected an MP for NZ First and a techie introduces him to tweeting.

Oh yes.

What I’m reading

2011-11-16T21:27:00.001+13:00

Mick Hartley is one of my favourite bloggers because he is a great source for sourced information on Sudan, North Korea, Arab anti-semitism, photography and artwank. But sometimes he comes up with something completely different, like the strange story of the Falkland Islands’ warrah.

Speaking of artwank, as Paul Litterick often does, here he is on best form on that very subject.

Here is Matt Nolan on capital gains tax and the minimum wage. Call me old-fashioned but on topics such as this I do like to hear from economists rather than newspaper columnists.

New Zealand’s “best-known and loved writers add their support to keeping MMP”. Bully for them. Could we please have next Shearers for STV, Farmers for FPP, Plumbers for PV and Stay-at-Home Mothers for SM. I have friends who are shearers, farmers, plumbers and stay-at-home mothers, and I value their opinion every bit as much as I do those of my friends who are writers.

Some people think that Fenella Fielding has the sexiest English voice ever. Oh yes. Here is some evidence.

David Thompson rounds up reportage and comment on the Occupy movement. He comes down on the side of Mayor Bloomberg and others opposed to “round-the-clock drumming, unprovoked abuse and shitting in the streets”.

The Sunday Star-Times business section reported (not online) on 13 November that:

New Zealand’s average internet connection speed in the second quarter of 2011 was 3.8Mbits per second.

The good news is that has multiplied 90 times over the past 40 years.

I am just old enough to remember 1971 and the terribly slow internet speeds we had then in the dying days of the Beatles. But Computerworld alleges that the first email from New Zealand was sent in 1983, and at InternetNZ we read that “New Zealand’s first link to the Internet was established” in 1989. Whatever. It was still way slower in 1971.

Lou Reed is doing to his catalogue what Bob Dylan is doing to his. The horror, the horror. One can hardly blame his backing band, Metallica.

Every author knows not to respond to a reviewer but this guy did. Hilarity ensues. Not really, but it’s a good illustration of the wisdom of silence.

How to name your first novel. Mine was called Safe Sex. Seemed a good concept at the time.

Election update #3: tweet of the day

2011-11-15T15:10:00.000+13:00

This is in response to the Greens activists putting stickers on National billboards:

#votenz will someone deface Labour’s billboards by putting their leader on them?

Monitor: Kiwiblog.

Election update #2: tea ceremony in Epsom

2011-11-11T16:13:00.001+13:00

Stuff reports, as does the Herald, that this afternoon John Key and John Banks stopped for a cup of tea together. So unexpected, as you can see in this picture of cameras, microphones, notepads and two bashful politicians:

If, heaven forbid, I met John Banks between now and election day I would say to him:

“You can run, but you can’t Hide.”

I wonder if either Banks or Key remembers the rather more famous cup of tea had by David Lange in 1988, and where it got him. And how long will it be before someone makes the “Tea Party” connection? Honestly, sub-editors today…

Election update

2011-11-10T19:40:00.000+13:00

A comment at Dim-Post about voting strategies in Epsom:

I live in Epsom, and I’m leftish, so I’m voting for Banks.

Rationale: this election’s gone already, and the best bet for 2014 is that Key’s second term is derailed by a nasty fight on the right. Brash (definitely) and Banks (less so) aren’t going to Parliament to support soggy sops to swing voters and the Maori Party. Let’s get them on the telly every night for three years, bickering about the Nats and each other, starting with Banks’ leadership coup (“Breaking news … it’s a tie, one vote each!”).

Save ACT! The friend of my enemy who becomes the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Or something.

Where I live it is very soothing because everyone – apart from the two teachers who live in the next valley – votes National so there is no need to discuss politics. Ever.

In other news, cats that look like Cunliffe. Four cheers for social media.

Three school friends and I heckled Keith Holyoake in the Tauranga Town Hall in 1969 – one of us had a cassette of Country Joe and the Fish’s Vietnam-war chant: “Gimme an F, Gimme a U, Gimme a C, Gimme a K”, which he played LOUD when appropriate. This is shaping up to be the most entertaining election since.

Danish fun fact of the day

2011-11-10T16:14:00.000+13:00

Denmark’s population is around 5.5 million. Its journalists’ union has 15,000 members.

I can’t provide a checkable source for this but it’s what the chair of the Danish journalists’ union told me a week or so ago. He wasn’t joking or exaggerating because, frankly, he was Danish. Seems a high journalist-to-civilian ratio, doesn’t it. I wonder if their media is better or worse than ours. Anyone know?

Ribbit

2011-11-09T20:50:00.001+13:00

We have a new neighbour. This morning, walking around the estate, we noticed that someone had moved in. A squatter:

I like frogs. I like how they look, how they sound. I also like their legs with a little garlic, a little butter…. (Click on the pic to see the frog up close, plus the wasp nest which I have to try to remove wihout upsetting the frog.)

We have named this one “Sarkozy”. But maybe this tiny frog is not a male. She could be a female. In which case, I hope she is not a frog princess. Take it away, Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy:

Entertainment option of the week

2011-11-06T18:52:00.000+13:00

The Economist dubs Branson, Missouri “No-Sin City”:

It calls itself the live-music capital of the world. To match its theatre-to-resident ratio, New York would need 41,000 theatres. Avant-gardists will find little to applaud, but if you have ever wanted to board a 700-seat showboat to see a violinist in a sequined leotard hang upside down to play “Stairway to Heaven” and then right herself to thank America’s troops while belting out “My Country ’Tis of Thee”, then Branson is for you.

Haven’t we all, deep down, had a life-long desire to see a violinist in a sequined leotard hang upside down to play “Stairway to Heaven” and then right herself to thank America’s troops while belting out “My Country ’Tis of Thee”? I haven’t, as it happens, but I do now.

So here are Dwight Yoakam and K.D. Lang performing Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman’s “Sin City” in 1989:

What I’m reading

2011-11-02T21:03:00.000+13:00

Very interesting piece from Booksellers NZ about the production of Rugby World Cup books the morning after. HarperCollins, Penguin and Hachette all got books to print on the Monday or (very early) Tuesday morning after the game. On Monday:

Hachette’s first editorial team members hit their desks at 5.30am, at Penguin, some were in as early as 5am; at HarperCollins it was a 6.30am start.

HarperCollins had the great Bill Honeybone in charge, so the book will be excellent; Hachette’s writer was Phil Gifford, so the book will be excellent. Penguin had the official RWC contract and the photos were by Andrew Cornaga so the book will be excellent. Hachette went on sale on Wednesday 26 October, Penguin on Thursday 27 October and HarperCollins on Saturday 29 October. An outstanding effort all round, especially when you consider that this all happened just days after the Frankfurt Book Fair so some of the people in charge would have been massively jet-lagged.

The Brits do obits better than anyone. You want evidence? Try this: the Daily Telegraph on William Donaldson, who was clearly an unsatisfactory person but god he was funny. My copies of Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, The Henry Root Letters, Henry Root’s World of Knowledge and Is This Allowed? were all stolen in the Great Book Robbery of 1998. If ever you see a book by him, grab it. Two quotes from the obit give the flavour:

The following years were a blur of starlets and minor celebrities, including the American singer Carly Simon, whom Donaldson jilted when she was preparing to come to Britain to marry him.

In 2011 terms, that is like jilting Scarlett Johansson. And then this:

Donaldson/Root’s torment of his victims was often lovingly prolonged and Donaldson readily accepted there was something unpleasant and dishonourable about the whole operation. It was claimed that one of his more redeeming features was that while he hated pomposity and hypocrisy in others, he disliked himself even more.

Paul Litterick writes about a recent experience at Artspace:

They were Canadian. They made videos. They questioned the values of the art world while trying their hardest to make as much money as possible from it. They were really Eighties. [. . . ]

But visiting curators are expected to bring artists from overseas and they are expected to find stuff which is “challenging.” They don’t. They find stuff which fits the same old paradigm of international curatorial practice. This is why our contemporary art spaces are like airport lounges: everything is sort of the same, wherever you go. It is never quite the same, but neither is it very different. It features videos and concepts and performances, all stuff which was done by the end of the ‘60s. The people who come to see this stuff are the MFAs and PhDs who live on K Road. Nobody else cares.

Finally, this Ode to Wellington from Andrew Sullivan via Cactus Kate.

Last night on Facebook

2011-11-01T20:37:00.000+13:00

Private Eye’s Francis Wheen, author of many good books including a biography of Karl Marx and How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, wrote yesterday on Facebook:

Time for my annual self-salutation: “Hello, Wheen.”

Halloween reading

2011-10-31T21:43:00.001+13:00

Darragh McManus in the Guardian has chosen a list of books for Halloween, claiming that:

one of the best ways to spend 31 October is by curling up with a creepy book, in a room lit by candles, with stiff drink and loaded revolver close at hand. Just in case.

He has chosen books that :

are eerie, horrifying or disturbing in unusual and different ways.

The list is:

Manual by Daren King

The Return of the Player by Michael Tolkin

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino

High-Rise by JG Ballard

The Body Artist by Don DeLillo

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

The Vanished Man by Jeffery Deaver

Shirker by Chad Taylor

McManus says of Shirker:

Set in New Zealand, this tale of one man cheating death is one of the best crime novels I’ve ever read. Beautiful artful prose, a great, twisting noir story, and a seriously spooky, sexy atmosphere. You’ll feel all sorts of chills running along your spine.

I am not familiar with the work of King and Tolkin but clearly with the other authors whose work I am familiar with – Greene, Ballard, Atwood, Calvino, DeLillo and Deaver – Chad is in very, very good company.

One night in Bangkok

2011-10-21T19:50:00.000+13:00

Tomorrow I fly to Bangkok for a night and a day. Brilliant timing, as ever.

I was so looking forward to lunch and dinner there. Perhaps the devastating floods will divert us to Kuala Lumpur, which would be fine as I love Malaysian food almost as much as I love Thai, but with my luck it will be Seoul.

Then it’s on to Zurich and Slovenia for four days of meetings and speeches, and loads of hearty dishes of meat, cabbage, and potatoes. Ljubljana, the capital city, has a population of 270,000 which is somewhere between Hamilton and Wellington, and it has three orchestras. A river runs through it, and 66 bridges cross the river. Here in Cambridge we have two bridges and no orchestra. Hamilton has six bridges and no orchestra.

The one bright spot is that there is a late-night place in Ljubjlana that sells horse burgers. I have eaten crocodile and kangaroo – I have even cooked kangaroo – but I have never eaten horse. Not yet, anyway.

So, no blogging for a week. Until then, here is something for the weekend from the Divine Comedy:

Tim Wilson on sports writing

2011-10-20T20:52:00.003+13:00

The 38th in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is again from the August 1993 issue. The illustrations are by Chris Mousdale. I’ve had to reconfigure the text design slightly for clarity but the content is the same as the print version.

The intro read:

Sports writing in New Zealand causes a very similar reaction to sport itself – discuss it seriously and the fur may fly. A national disgrace, says one. Not really all that scruffy, another thinks. Doesn’t exist at all, according to someone else. With a little more effort and independence of thought, it’s agreed that our sports writers could do better. But, wondered Tim Wilson, could they do any worse? And if so, would anyone notice?

PLAYING THE HAM, NOT THE BALL

Over two weeks I scanned the sports pages of 20 New Zealand daily newspapers, from the reed-slim Oamaru Mail to the lumbering New Zealand Herald. I discovered games of two halves; games in which a win was a win. I witnessed huge men making big kicks; pitches invaded by articulated lorries and minis; disasters of biblical proportion. I heard the snap of tendons and the scream of metaphors being treated, well, unsportingly. Thumbs black with newsprint, I returned clutching five clippings that I thought weren’t especially good.

Actually, I thought some of them stank. But because I didn’t want to go out on a limb I obscured the writer’s names and organs, and sent the clippings to people who might. All is now revealed, gentle reader, as our judges discuss sports writing in general, and give their picks on the florid, the bad and the lazy.

1. Heart-stopping victory for talented Massey

Massey wrote, in letters of gold, one of their proudest results on their battle flag when they defeated Takapuna, 18-14, in the North Harbour club rugby championship on Saturday, keeping Massey as the only unbeaten side in the competition. They also wrote, in letters jittery enough to suggest approaching cardiac arrest, another chapter or two in their own special book – “How to Play Heart-in-the-Mouth Rugby” with the subtitle “Winning Footy in the Valium Valley”.

D.J. Cameron, New Zealand Herald, 14 June.

Lloyd Jones: “Death by metaphoric strangulation.”

Wellington writer Lloyd Jones is a gadfly. According to him no sports writing is done in New Zealand. Besides the occasional profile in magazines, sports reporting is what we get. Most of it is pretty good, he says, but all of it misses the point: “Treating the game on its own turns it into an abstraction. That’s crazy. Obviously sport has the capacity to move the population but you never hear about that. There’s no sense of excitement or what’s at stake. Is anything at stake?”

At stake, perhaps, is the job of every hack in the country. But isn’t part of sport’s appeal its abstraction, that it is something idealised like, say, ballet with a winner? He disagrees.

“You couldn’t really say that ballet has tentacles reaching right through every section of society the way sport does. Sport actually organises society. It’s a Victorian or Edwardian idea that the rules of the sports field teach you the rules of life. . . teamwork, how to slot in, language. Look at sporting language: ‘level playing fields’, ‘playing the man and not the ball’. They’re examples of how sport is bigger than what happens at the park.”

But don’t the writers write to the level of the fans? “Sports fans here are pretty well informed. I think they would appreciate a greater sense of journey being brought to describing sports events. They don’t start at two o’clock at kick-off. They start days beforehand.”

2. Waitakere too classy for Ngaruawahia

Soccer was both a winner and a loser at Centennial Park, Ngaruawahia, yesterday. Competition favourite Waitakere City bundled DB Draught Ngaruawahia out of the Chatham Cup with a classy 5-0 win. But to the irritation of Waitakere officials, their vintage showing was all but snubbed in the Ngaruawahia clubrooms afterwards, as delayed telecast of the rugby league test took centre stage.

Bruce Holloway, Waikato Times, 21 June.

Phil Gifford: “Soccer the winner and the loser? It’s a classic, two cliches for the price of one.”

“I guess I’ve been running a sort of a campaign, which Lloyd has now joined, of trying to write seriously about sport, which doesn’t mean pretentiously or in any wanky way, but just to write well about sport,” Roger Robinson muses. Once he worked as an athletics reporter for the Christchurch Star. Now he lectures students at Victoria University on the subject of English. Speaking to him, I feel the years fall away. I am being taught. “Obviously there have been some decent sports writers. Alex Veysey has been very good, and people like Roy Williams have always been very able journalists. Where we’ve been short is feature pieces and books. Do you know my book?”

Er, no.

“It’s a book on running called Heroes and Sparrows. That’s been well received, as I hoped it would be, in a whole range of reader groups, right through from just sports people through to literary people. And that was the whole idea, to write something which wasn’t just sports reporting but had a philosophical and especially literary dimension to it.”

Robinson describes a cultural dislocation: local writers glaring down their biros at sport. “They are anti-snobbish about everything else; but the one thing they’ve just dumped on and sneered at is sport.”

3. The view from the embankment

It was a game of two halves – both were full of errors and boring, but the second had a nice touch at the end. Saturday’s first test between the British Lions and the All Blacks at Lancaster Park was lifeless. The only thing which made the game absorbing – but still not exciting – was the closeness of the scores. Ironically, a skydiving display before the game gave every indication that the goal kickers would struggle. It’s now history that 33 of the 38 points scored were from penalty goals. Two of the skydivers made it on to the field while a third landed in the dead ball area after coming perilously close to decapitating several spectators.

Angus Morrison, Southland Times, 14 June.

Brian Turner: “An empty piece.”

Secure proper writers, then, and you will have sports writing proper? Phil Gifford isn’t so sure. “You know Lloyd’s book?” he asks.

This time I do. Jones edited a selection of his kind of sports writing, Into The Field Of Play – how successfully depends on whom you talk to. “Without being specific,” offers Gifford, “there was some stuff in there that I found to be incredibly turgid and extremely boring.”

One opinion holds that those who really knew sport (through participation, for example) produced tauter, better pieces than the wheezing literati. Only those who play may know. True enough, perhaps, in the case of Jones’ book, but it’s a notion with nasty implications. Had Sophocles, for example, adopted it while writing Oedipus Rex, how well would he have treated his Mum and Dad?

The spin is vaguely similar when Gifford dismisses critics of sports reportage. That bad writing comes from the newspapers is an idea common among people who don’t write for newspapers. “When you’re working for newspapers there’s obviously not the time to perfect style. You’ve got to get the bloody story in.”

He’s right. Jones and Robinson have worked on newspapers. Neither disparages them. Gifford toiled at the Auckland Star and the Herald for 15 years. All three men have written for magazines such as Metro, North & South and the Listener, and enjoyed the luxury of increased time and space.

4. Tawhai turns up trumps

As I watched Horouta come from 9-0 down to beat a side tipped to be among the front runners, I couldn’t help thinking of a car event between an articulated truck and a bunch of souped-up minis. The truck (Ngatapa) had power and height up front and a lively back division, capable of causing concern. Unfortunately for the Green and White supporters, their side played as though they were running on reserve and without a driver.

John Hill, Gisborne Herald, 21 June.

Brian Turner: “It’s gloriously full of . . . Well, we’ve got supergas and comprehensive displays, revelling in and all the rest of it. Anyway, there was quite a bit of information there.”

Brian Turner, poet, sometime sports writer and one-time national hockey rep, is not as tolerant as Gifford. The apology that tight deadlines cause sloppy copy makes him impatient. “Those same constraints surely apply to the larger papers overseas. In the States and Britain, for instance, you can read any section of the paper and get high-quality comments, nice phrasing and sentence construction. There has been some improvement in the sports area over here, but not nearly enough.”

Turner says what he thinks. He wishes sports journalists would too. Perhaps journalists are cowardly. Well, clubs, administrators and codes can also be prickly. The Herald came very close to being banned from the dressing rooms of the national league side during the Australian tour. Their crime? Not saying nice things about the lads. In the end the paper wasn’t banned. Coverage grew more, shall we say, sensitive. “Superkiwis Turn on a Stunner”, the Herald enthused after the first test draw.

As you might expect from a hockey player and cyclist, Turner grumbles about ditheistic coverage: rugby in winter, cricket in summer. Often the style is just as unremitting. “The language is littered with allusions to war and combat. You’re less likely to find a comment on grace or poise or the aesthetics of something. You’re also less likely to find human emotions other than the extreme ones. I get pissed off with continual talk of pride. Pride, power and glory. There’s no range of comment. There’s not enough irony, not enough cynicism, not enough humour and not enough pathos.”

5. Muscled minnows

When the North Harbour Rugby Union was born the knockers on the southern shores of the Auckland Harbour Bridge predicted the first division clubs, North Shore, Takapuna, Northcote and East Coast Bays, would thrive.

The minnows, it was said . . . would, in the face of cricket score losses, slowly curl up and die. The small fry, however, were made of stern stuff. Pride, giant-sized hearts and club spirit were winning ingredients. Now, into the ninth season of Harbour rugby, the one-time minnows, developed into fully fledged man-eaters, are respected by all.

J.A. Gasparich, New Zealand Herald, 19 June.

Lloyd Jones: “The problem with a metaphor like this is that once you step into it, you’ve got to step into it up to your neck.”

Now to pick the prize specimen of lousy sports writing. The result? Not exactly a knockout. Robinson asked to be excused – he was going overseas. Jones and Turner hold similar views on how sport should be written about, yet both selected different’ pieces. “Muscled Minnows” turned Turner’s stomach, while Jones found that D.J. Cameron’s Herald piece on “Heart-stopping Massey” caused his own heart to miss a beat.

Both agreed that Waikato Times writer Bruce Holloway’s tale in which soccer was the winner and the loser had merit. “It tells a bit of a story,” Turner said, while Jones enjoyed the “self-conscious use of cliche” at the beginning.

Gifford spoiled everything. He didn’t believe that particular cliche was self-conscious, nor did he believe the collection of extracts was especially execrable, merely mediocre. Top three for him were the first three. The remaining two didn’t strike him either way.

Winning teams, as the cliche goes, are those which put the most points on the board. Accordingly, we made a decision based on points. The envelope, please.

How apt that the winning worst piece included references to writing; writing on battle flags, writing chapters, writing autobiographies, writing arias for rugby operas. D.J. Cameron of the New Zealand Herald, take a bow.

This is unfortunate, because Cameron has written some fine pieces on cricket. The moral then? Even the best can have a very bad day indeed.

Herald heading of the week

2011-10-20T18:46:00.000+13:00

Giant corrugated cock up for auction

How the sub-editors must have chortled. But it is good to see a cock called a cock not a rooster, which is a dainty American version invented to avoid possibly unsettling imagery, like their “tidbit” for “titbit”.

In other cock/rooster news, this.

Sentence of the day

2011-10-20T16:06:00.000+13:00

The Pyongyang Times reports on a recent visit by Kim Jong Il to to the renovated Tudan Duck Farm:

That day he enjoyed an art performance given by the members of the art squad of the Pyongyang Poultry Guidance Bureau in the newly-built house of culture of the farm.

We can only guess.

Monitor: Mick Hartley

Harrison Birtwistle

2011-10-19T18:16:00.001+13:00

The greatest living composer accepts the Gramophone award for best contemporary album of 2010, Night’s Black Bird. It is fantastic (you can download it here) and Birtwistle is typically blunt (he’s from Lancashire) in what he says about the relative importance of composer and performer:

In other contemporary classical news, Concert FM is replaying its series on Wellington composer Ross Harris on Tuesday nights. I’ve been a fan since I first heard his music in the 70s, and I’ve been privileged to hear some not-yet-released recordings of his latest compositions, some of them settings of lyrics by Vincent O’Sullivan. It’s all magnificent music – don’t miss it.

Quote Unquote

I have a problem with the Listener

Ace of bass

What I’m reading

In praise of: Lockwood Smith

Report on experience

Friday night at the opera

Bring in the elephants

Stephen Hawking, Arthur C. Clarke and women

Happy birthday, Oxford English Dictionary

Dinner

There goes the morning

What I’m reading

Show me the money

How to write a book

Of meat, cancer, adultery and statistics

Brand New Zealand

Sentence of the day

Recommended reading

Happy birthday, Neil Diamond

Correction of the week

Nina Nola on Yvonne du Fresne

Productivity

Happy birthday, Cary Grant

Denis Edwards on writing for the movies

What I’m reading

A.K. Grant on jokes

The end of civilisation

Hounding Pippa Middleton

An ethical tree

Sentence of the day

What we did on our holidays

Do not adjust your set

What I’m reading, final edition for 2011

Anita McNaught on Oscar Kightley and David Fane

Country matters

Elizabeth Knox on Marilyn Duckworth

Don’t torment the frog

Phyllis Gant on Ronald Hugh Morrieson

Fisking North & South: the final episode

Janet Tyler on Duncan Sarkies

Lab test

Mary McIntyre and chemtrails

What I’m reading

Poetry in Metro

Newt Gingrich, Lazarus v.2012

What I’m reading

Various performative modes foreclosed upon

Mobile number of the day

Happy 103rd birthday, Elliott Carter

In praise of: The Literary Review

Bad sex

The chemtrail conspiracy

Metallica, forex dealers

Plagiarism and B.S. Johnson

We are all shoes

Distance looks our way

Lady Garden

The past is a foreign country

English food

Obituary of the week

Totally natural

Election update #6, final edition

Graph of the day

I’ve been reading

Election update #5

Waikato Times letter of the week

Nights in the Garden of Stephen

That’s me in the spotlight

The election in Cambridge, wildlife edition

The election in Epsom, ESL edition

Scariest author photo ever?

The joy of tweets

What I’m reading

Election update #3: tweet of the day

Election update #2: tea ceremony in Epsom

Election update

Danish fun fact of the day

Ribbit

Entertainment option of the week