What I’m reading

I have ordered my copy of Letters of Frank Sargeson but haven’t yet received it so am not really reading it. I have had a sneak preview, though, thanks to Graeme Lay who sent me this snippet from a 1944 letter to EP Dawson following a visit to the Tron: 

I’ve come back with a very sore chest. I think this was due to psychological causes – Hamilton – it was dreadful. I enjoyed a few days in Cambridge with my sister, but Hamilton was there all the time, like the Grey Death.

Small-town newspapers are a Very Good Thing. Our local, the Cambridge Edition, is a particularly good thing but some weeks one does sense that the staff have struggled to find enough news. They have never had to struggle as hard as the staff of the Mid Sussex Times, though – on Monday it ran a story on a shop opening a bit late one morning and even sent a photographer to document the occasion. 

After listening to MIT’s Professor Richard Lindzen my old friend Simon Carr has had a rethink about climate change. He knows as much about the science as I do but still it’s a surprise to see this in the Independent.

Space is big. We knew that, but courtesy of Open Parachute here is a vivid visual demonstration of our place in the scheme of things. Footling, basically. Also possibly makes Seti look a bit silly.

Author-publisher relationship of the day

Anthony Horowitz, author of the wildly successful Alex Rider series for children and now The House of Silk for adults which I have bought but not yet read, asks in the Guardian, “Do we still need publishers?”. He says of Orion, his adult publisher:

Relations between us have been strained ever since they published my Sherlock Holmes novel, The Mouse of Slick, with no fewer than 35 proof-reading errors. Their proof-reader tried to kill herself. She shot herself with a gnu.

It’s a terrific piece, serious and curious about how to write in the digital age.

Monitor: Zirk van den Berg

What I’m reading

Oh dear. Abbie Jury, the Waikato Times’s gardening writer, has been alerted by a reader of her blog to another case of plagiarism in a Penguin book. The offender is Sally Cameron, who has form: Jury exposed her Tui NZ Fruit Garden in May 2010, then had a real good go at the revised version published in May 2011. Today Jury turns her attention to Tui NZ Vegetable Garden. Her informant  had a copy of The New Vegetable and Herb Expert by English horticulturist David Hessayon, and wondered whether it and Cameron’s book could by any chance be related:

Not only has Dr D G Hessayon ripped off Sally Cameron’s Tui NZ Vegetable Garden, chapter and verse, but, he also had the temerity to do it four years prior to Sally being published.

Is it OK to lift entire chapters of books if you include a reference to that book at the end? Hope so, ’cos I’m just finishing my book “Great Expectations” with a small reference at the back to Mr C Dickens.

Jury notes:

My informant was working from a more recent copy [. . .] Dr Hessayon actually published his book a good ten years before Sally Cameron produced hers. It took me mere minutes to track down a copy on Trade Me. I think I paid $12 for it plus P&P and it arrived in the mail this week.

And then she lets rip with compare-and-contrast passages from both books. It’s a little unfair to blame the publisher because this vegetable book was published in 2009, before the fruit one, so at the time Cameron had not been outed as a plagiarist. But still... 

The Glasgow-based composer James MacMillan, who abandoned socialism in despair at the anti-Catholicism of the left, writes in despair about anti-English sentiment in Scotland. Money quote:

All I can remember about Ms McAlpine was her whiney Glaswegian accent, de riguer for parish-pump envy-and-grievance politics in these parts, and so beloved by the rest of the country. Not.

On a more cheerful note, Chris Bell reviews the BBC TV series The Trip which stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. I haven’t seen the series but Michael Winterbottom’s film adapted from it is a hoot. Money quote (apart from this from Coogan on the phone: “I can’t really enjoy it. I’m with a short Welsh man who does impressions”):

One of the most telling scenes is almost halfway through the final episode, when Coogan playfully attempts to ford a wide river on stepping stones. It’s almost the happiest we’ve seen him, until Brydon warns him from a bridge overhead, “Don’t run, there’ll be moss.” In a moment of genius that was quite possibly one of the few overt plot points in whatever script Winterbottom was given, Brydon calls down, “You’ve got stuck halfway towards your destination! You’re stuck in a metaphor!”

Sentence of the day

Labor senator Cheryl Kernot on Kevin Rudd:

I expect him to win an Oscar for best actor in a non-supportive role.

The recipe as promised

This is what my wife made the children for their dinner last night, a recipe by Ferran Adria of the celebrated El Bulli restaurant. It was “Recipe of the week” in the 18 February issue of The Week and is from his book The Family Meal (Phaidon). Pretty fancy:

Ferran Adria’s Crisp Omelette

Serves two

6 eggs

70g salted potato crisps (good quality)

4 tsp olive oil

Break the eggs into a bowl and beat with a balloon whisk until very frothy. Add crisps, taking care not to break them, then soak in egg for 1 minute.

Place frying pan over a medium heat, then add 2 tsp oil. Pour the egg mixture into the pan and use a rubber spatula to stir and loosen the edge.

After a minute or so, or when the base has set, cover with a plate. Using oven gloves carefully turn the pan so that the omelette slides onto the plate.

Return the pan to the heat. Add another 2 tsp oil. Slide the omelette into the pan and cook the other side for another 20 sets. (If you don’t want to flip the omelette, put the pan under a hot grill for about a minute.)

Serve.

There you go – you too can make El Bulli at home.

So here is David Lindley with “Woolly Bully” from his great live mini-album, El Rayo-X Live!! The two exclamation marks are thoroughly deserved:

Fine dining

I make the children’s dinner Monday to Friday; my wife does Saturday and Sunday. I like to think I make an effort, but tonight she made for them a dish by Ferran Adria, the guy from El Bulli: many say he’s the greatest chef in the world and that was the best restaurant. I’ll post the recipe tomorrow.

Private Eye’s Francis Wheen says that “amnesia is the handmaiden of hypocrisy”. Well, quite. He begins this piece for the Daily Telegraph:

Every few years, when spring-cleaning my sock drawer, I pull out the sheets of yellowing newsprint that line it and start reading. That’s the next hour written off. Stories that merited no more than a glance at the time suddenly seem preternaturally interesting, as the snoozing characters and incidents leap into vivid life after their long hibernation. Cash for questions! Monica Lewinsky! The Third Way!

There is more, and then there is this:

A week is not only a long time in politics, but also the maximum attention span of much of the public, which is why so many news items burn as brightly but briefly as a firework on November 5. It’s like the life of Solomon Grundy: a crisis looms on Monday; MPs scamper round radio and TV studios making a hullabaloo, which provides Tuesday’s headlines; on Wednesday, the party leaders exchange pointless insults on the subject at Prime Minister’s Questions. By the weekend, after more buck-passing and harrumphing, a new crisis looms. What was the previous week’s fandango about? No one knows or remembers, until they find it in their sock drawer two years later.

How nice to see a journalist putting journalism in its place.

And now, for no particular reason other than that I have been listening to a lot of Texas blues, here is Freddie King in 1966 with “I Loved a Woman”: similar technique to fellow Texan Albert Collins (whom I saw in a bar in New York and was amazing). That’s Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (whom I saw in a bar in Auckland and was amazing) running the band behind him. All I know about King is that he was a big influence on Eric Clapton and after the concert at Western Springs in the 70s he put his hand down my then girlfriend’s front. I never did find out what she was doing backstage.

Kevin Rudd – latest

The headline on Stuff’s latest story on Australian Labor’s implosion is:

Rudd calls for unity in Labor party

So here is Alanis Morisette:

What I’m reading

Those Nigerian scammers scammed right back.

Hate the Oscars? This is for you. Money quote:

It’s four hours of Hollywood gleefully face-fucking itself in front of you, with 15 minutes of Leno jokes interspersed throughout. It’s like a presidential primary season: it’s long and drawn out and expensive, and there’s no one worth rooting for.

More about the law of unintended consequences and penguin-boiler Joseph Hatch, subject of Geoff Chapple’s play. Money quote:

Why don’t they just introduce foxes to deal with the rabbits? What could possibly go wrong?

Whitney Houston: the greatest singer of all time or the Toyota Corolla of pop? Money quote:

Let’s admit that, if we’re honest, greatest singers of all time tend not to approach songs with all the empathy of an articulated lorry approaching a hedgehog.

The Australian reports that:

Labor’s leadership rift has plunged the party into its worst crisis in decades, with the showdown between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard exploding into open warfare that has split the cabinet and left the government mired in distrust and personal animosity.

So no change there. The story is headlined “ALP burns its own house down as cabinet splits”. Which brings us to Talking Heads in joyous funky form in the Jonathan Demme concert movie Stop Making Sense, featuring (starring, if you ask me) Bernie Worrell:

Kevin Rudd: what people think I do

Did I mention that I love Aussie politics? This is from the National Times:

The wizards of Oz

I love Aussie politics – it’s my favourite spectator bloodsport. The SMH had an excellent live feed from the Gillard press conference this morning; the Australian has astonishingly detailed reporting, regularly updated on the website. As it’s a Murdoch publication most of the best stuff is behind a paywall – but fortunately there is a promotion running at the moment whereby you can have a month’s access for free. Brilliant timing.

The photo above shows Kevin Rudd leaving his Washington hotel to fly home for the contest. I wonder how many people he is waving to. Possibly none, for at that Washington press conference:

His audience was a handful of TV cameramen and a couple of reporters, but he looked around as if he was addressing the United Nations. [. . .]

He would take no questions, he said, leaving the room. “I have much, much to do.”

 Peter Smith writes on Quadrant’s website:

Apparently it is okay to put Australia’s foreign relations in the hands of a man held in such disrepute. What harm can he do? So what if he calls the Chinese “rat fuckers”; presumably they can’t understand English.

How do you follow leaders who you believe are deranged and psychotic? Well why not throw in one who combines a unique level of incompetence with an aversion to telling the truth. And there you have it; a Labor Party incapable of electing to leadership someone of sanity and integrity. Maybe it is because they have no-one? The “Mad Monk” looks pretty sound and centred compared with the lot the Labor Party has given us.

None of this would matter if they were running a Labor Party branch somewhere out in suburbia. They are running the country and seem determinedly bent on wreaking havoc; not deliberately, of course, but out of sheer unbalanced bloody-minded incompetence.

 He would say that, wouldn’t he – Quadrant is conservative. But he is not alone. Political scientist Peter Chen of Sydney University calls a plague on both their houses:

“Rudd can’t win over his own party and Gillard can’t win over the public. The pair could have been a great team but regardless of who wins this spill, neither can win the next election.”

Mr Rudd was an egoist with a massive sense of grievance, said Dr Chen, an expert on the former prime minister’s political history.

“If you look at his speech this morning, it was the most egocentric speech I’ve ever seen,” he said. “[He was saying] only he can save the Labor party, only he can save Australia. Anybody looking at that who is wavering would think ‘This guy hasn’t changed at all’.”

The Gillard government had been more effective at getting things done than the Rudd government, but they were terrible at communicating their achievements to the public, Dr Chen said.

“So they are both screwed.”

Which brings us to George Frideric Handel, whose 327th birthday it is today and of whom Beethoven said: “Handel is the greatest composer who ever lived. I would bare my head and kneel at his grave.”

Here is the late great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in Handel’s oratorio Theodora, which was first performed on 16 March 1750. This is the 1996 Glyndebourne production, with Dawn Upshaw and David Daniels, and William Christie conducting. The aria is “As with rosy steps the morn” and the recitative preceding it begins:

Ah! Whither should we fly, or fly from whom?

Which is what a lot of Australians must be thinking.