New Zealand at Frankfurt

Emails from publishing/author/industry friends there say it’s all good, Facebook messages from authors not so much, but you know how authors are. 

Catriona Ferguson from the Book Council blogs here. Publishers Association is on Facebook here. Guy Somerset blogs here, Philip Temple here. There are PANZ newsletters but I can’t see how to link to them – anyone interested, just ask and I’ll forward.   

The return of rockin’ Damien Wilkins

Yes, IIML’s Damien Wilkins has written a bunch of new songs, strapped on his Strat and recorded a new album with the Close Readers. The first, Group Hug, came out in March last year and received rave reviews. Here’s one.

The new album is called New Spirit. This is the title track and it’s a cracker:

More info here.  Also you can download it for free. Go on, you know you want to.

In France they kiss on Main Street

—They order, said I, this matter better in France.—

That is the famous opening paragraph of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, published in 1768. As Virginia Woolf said of its great predecessor Tristram Shandy, it takes “liberties with grammar and syntax and sense and propriety”. She might have added, “and punctuation”. Here are the last two paragraphs (I have proofread this twice: it is what he wrote and what OUP published in 1965):

—But the fille de chamber hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet, and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanc’d so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me—

So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre’s

Wonderful. The book starts in the middle of a scene and ends in the middle of another one, with no full stop. As Woolf said, in it “We are as close to life as we can be.” This was first published 244 years ago, and still reads as modern and funny.

I once worked with a writer friend on his new comic novel which had an unreliable narrator, and for the voice to ring true it was important that the grammar and syntax be loose. Took us a couple of months. The publisher sent it to an old-school editor who missed the point by a country mile so strapped the manuscript into the Procrustean bed of conventional usage and “corrected” every flaw we had deliberately inserted. And thereby killed the narrator’s voice, the comedy and the novel. Sometimes being right is wrong.

Where was I, as Sterne might say? Ah yes, how they order matters better in France. Farming, not so much, but most other things – especially politicians’ private lives. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Francois Hollande “shared” his mistress Valerie Trierweiler with a minister from Nicolas Sarkozy’s government in a Jules et Jim-style relationship, a new biography on France’s first lady claims.

La Frondeuse (The Troublemaker), says Ms Trierweiler, 47, had an affair with Patrick Devedjian, 68, a former economics minister, in the early 2000s, but that the Socialist Mr Hollande, 58, muscled in when the right-winger failed to commit himself further to the relationship.

There followed a period “a bit like Jules et Jim”, said the co-author Christophe Jakubyszyn, a close friend of the first lady, referring to the 1962 Francois Truffaut film in which Jeanne Moreau is in a love triangle with two men and all three live in the same house.

“Patrick Devedjian hesitated so much that Valerie Trierweiler allowed herself to be courted by a second man of another political persuasion: Francois Hollande,” he said.

“Little by little, the relationship with Hollande took precedence over the other, notably after an ultimatum in 2003 which Devedjian failed to respect. But he suffered a lot from the break-up. It was a bit like Jules et Jim. Both men still have a lot of respect for each other,” he said.

It gets better:

All three had other partners at the time.

Formidable! But wait, there’s more:

In another extract of La Frondeuse, out today, Ms Trierweiler is cited as claiming she was “chatted up” by Mr Sarkozy “while he was holding his ex-wife’s Cecila’s hand” at an Elysee garden party in the same period.

“You are so beautiful,” he is said to have whispered to Ms Trierweiler, then a political journalist. She responded with a “withering look”.

Clearly annoyed at the rebuff, he is said to have told other journalists: “Who does she think she is? Am I not good enough for her?”

Come on, Wellington and Canberra – lift your game.

And here is Doris Day – still with us at 88 – with “Sentimental Journey”:

What we are reading

On my wife’s bedside table:

A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks

Ancient Light by John Banville

The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright.

On my bedside table:

a bunch of magazines

The Living Daylights by Ian Fleming.

I’m glad there is one literary person in the house.

In praise of: Frank Auerbach

Via Paul Litterick, this terrific interview in the FT with my favourite living English painter. He is 81 and has a show of new work on next week in London. Quote unquote:

“I’ve never been moved by a real landscape as I have by paintings of landscape. It’s because every moment is transmitted by human will that we identify ourselves with it. In a painting you re-experience what the painter experienced, one brushstroke over another, it’s like a perpetuum mobile. A photograph is just pixels.”

I have three late-1970s paintings by James Ross that look a bit like Auerbachs: a small self-portrait; a small portrait of his wife, Gretchen Albrecht; and a massive landscape 1.2m square that weighs a ton. The paint in all three is up to a centimetre thick in places. I love them to bits, and remember clearly the impact the portraits had on me when I saw them in a show at Peter McLeavey’s in 1979 – they had the same impact on me as the first McCahon, Hotere and Hanly shows I saw when I discovered NZ art as a student. I have never dared ask James if Auerbach was an influence. Wystan Curnow writes well about some later work here; the most recent work I can find online is here, from a show in Wellington in July this year.

The best source of information on Auerbach is – quelle surprise – Robert Hughes. His monograph Frank Auerbach (Thames & Hudson, 1990) is brilliant, one of the great art books, up there with Richardson on Picasso and Spurling on Matisse. The paperback is now $US280 on Amazon and the hardback is $US345. I’m glad I bought it when I did. 

Do not try this at home

Photo by  Michael Rougier for Life magazine in the 1970s. Many more here at Retronaut.

If the woman in the photos looks familiar that’s because she is. It’s Tippi Hedren, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Marnie. The photo above shows her daughter Melanie Griffith (yes, that Melanie Griffith), her house and her lion. The writer of the Life article recalls the occasion here (scroll down to near the bottom of the page to the section headed “A lion comes calling”). There is a good recent, i.e. last month, interview with Hedren here talking about what a monster Hitchcock could be.

Daisy the cow

For readers interested in the case of the young cow mentioned here the other day, the original PhD thesis is online. It is titled RNAi-mediated Reduction of a Major Ruminant Specific Milk Allergen Using a Transgenic Mouse Model and is by Md Anower Jabed (about whom I know nothing other than that he is married with a child and is a Muslim).

It’s not about Daisy but about the research that led to her creation, and it’s really interesting: there’s a lot about milking mice, which is not something I had given much thought to before. There’s also a lot about why making milk with less BLG protein is worth a try. The tables and appendices are hard-core science that is way beyond me (“Appendix 7:  Restriction digestion of pGL 164 and TOPO-oBLG constructs”, anyone?) but the main text is admirably clear. I wonder if Claire Bleakley will find time to read it.

Some questions for CK Stead

An email arrives from the BBC. Distance looks our way! It reads:

C.K. Stead is on the BBC World Book Club on Friday 19th October, and will be talking about his novel My Name was Judas. We need questions to be emailed from outside Britain and if you’re in the UK we need guests to be part of the audience at 11:30am at Broadcasting House, London W1 – please find the invitation attached.

New Zealand’s greatest living writer CK Stead gives a clever, teasing, revisionist account of the life and death of Jesus.

If you would like to come along and put a question to CK Stead about My Name was Judas or to send in your question for him please email us at worldbookclub@bbc.co.uk.

The BBC World Book Club is a unique radio programme that brings readers from around the world together with their favourite writers.

If you’d prefer not to receive these alerts, please reply with ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject box.

With thanks,

BBC World Book Club

What a great promotional opportunity. Fantastic for any writer. But I can’t contribute to it – if I have any questions for CK, I just ask him. But others might like to send suggestions.

What I’m reading #82

Karl du Fresne talks sense about Twitter and politics.

Masha Gessen gets a phone call from Vladimir Putin and then an invitation to meet him in the Kremlin. It doesn’t go well.

Ron Brownson of the Auckland City Art Gallery on Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent four days in Auckland in 1893. Ron thinks RLS looked like “a Scots dandy”. He has two portraits by John Singer Sargent to make his case, and refers approvingly to this Quote Unquote article on RLS by Graeme Lay. 

David Hepworth, formerly of the Word, on what it’s like to close a magazine. I’ve been involved in three similar deaths – Cue, Quote Unquote and IT Brief – and it’s pretty shitty, frankly. But Hepworth tells it well and is worth reading on the future of both print and e-media. Quote unquote:

We had to close the Word in July. It had run for nine years. We liked to say this was as long as the Beatles. We'd told the team that they would look back on their time on the magazine with affection and pride, not least because there probably weren’t going to be any other magazines like it. The day of the brave independent company backing its hunch and asking the public to pay on the newsstand seems to be gone.

All that remained was to announce it to the readers, advertisers and other interested parties. That process told me more about why we had to close it than anything else could have done, underlining what a porous world this has become and how magazines can no longer operate as they once did.

On the other hand, the Oldie is still with us.

Sam Leith reviews Peter Ackroyd’s The History of England, volume 2: The Tudors in the Spectator. Quote unquote:

Ackroyd’s eye for detail, and relish for the sanguinary excesses of the age (he never stints to let you know how many strokes of the axe it took to lop off a given head) fills even the most familiar stories with interest. When heretics were burned, for instance, kindly friends would tie little bags of gunpowder round their necks, “but on occasions they made too small an explosion and only increased the suffering”. Each faggot of wood you contributed to the fire got you 40 days off purgatory, so responsible parents would get their children to bring along kindling.

Finally, Daisy the cow is in the news: “The country’s largest crown research institute AgResearch said it had bred the first cow in the world to produce high-protein milk with greatly reduced amounts of a protein believed to be the leading cause of milk allergies in children.” The abstract of the paper published this morning in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is here. The Q&A factsheet from AgResearch is here. The possibility – and that’s all it is at this stage – that one day children allergic to normal milk may be able to drink it in this form is good news, you may think. Not so fast: 

GE Free New Zealand president Claire Bleakley said cows without the protein BLG was a “frightening development not a breakthrough”.

“This is a depraved macabre experiment that is the worst type of animal cruelty.”

Bafflingly, TVNZ reports that:

Researchers now want to breed Daisy with a normal cow to see what sort of cow and milk results.

Good luck with that.

Richard Ingrams’ commonplace book

Richard Ingrams, editor of the Oldie, former editor of Private Eye and so a hero to journalists everywhere of a certain age, has published Quips & Quotes: a journalist’s commonplace book. In its 22 September issue, the Spectator has some samples.

GK Chesterton:

Madmen are always serious – they go mad from lack of humour.

Alice Thomas Ellis. I met her – she was and is one of my favourite writers– and then Michael Gifkins swept her off to dinner. I was so jealous:

There is no reciprocity. Men love women – women love children – children love hamsters.

AJP Taylor:

Northern people in every country like to think of themselves as more honest and straightforward than those further south.

Sounds a northern hemisphere thing. Try arguing that in the South Island: light Brian Turner and stand well back.