Quote Unquote letter of the month

The 62nd in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the October 1995 issue, and is a letter to the editor from Barbara Else. 

NOT UNIVERSAL

I feel I should point out an error in your last issue. In the notes on contributors you said that my novel The Warrior Queen “was published recently to universal acclaim”. This is not so. The reviewer in the Otago Daily Times said he found the book “rather chilling” and thought I had not seen the full implications of what I had written. I hope another subscriber has already pointed this out to you.

Barbara Else

Wellington

Today is Gypsy Day

Via AgRecovery:

1 June has become known as Gypsy Day for hundreds of farmers and sharemilkers as dairy farms change ownership, and families move their households, equipment and cattle to new properties.

It is a huge upheaval for rural families, schools and communities. The roads around Cambridge are clogged, obviously. So here is Anita O’Day with “Gypsy in My Soul”:

George Monbiot on sheep

‘I have an unhealthy obsession with sheep,’ he admits. ‘It occupies many of my waking hours and haunts my dreams. I hate them.’

His new book, Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding, sounds good even so. What he means by rewilding is not preserving or controlling ecosystems but leaving them alone, letting the animals and plants sort things out themselves. As Spectator reviewer Sam Leith puts it:

He dreams of letting forest re-establish itself where dismal ‘conservationists’ insist on maintaining the desert of heather-and-scrub that centuries of overgrazing have left us. He wants to see beavers plashing in our rivers, ospreys, wolves and (ideally) elephant wandering the Welsh hills and the Scottish highlands, if not the South Downs. He offers well-explained and meticulously evidenced reasons why rewilding large parts of the country could be both economically and ecologically advantageous. But he makes no bones about the deep reason he’s in favour: which is that it would be amazingly cool.

A week is a long time in publishing

Martin Taylor writes in eReport:

It’s been a bad week for New Zealand publishing.  On Tuesday, Pearson Education announced the imminent closure of its New Zealand office. The global publishing giant is restructuring to focus on ‘core’ and ‘emerging’ markets, and New Zealand is neither. And yesterday, Harper Collins joined the exit, announcing its plan to move most of its New Zealand operations, including editorial, to Australia.

That’s a slight overstatement about Pearson: what they said was that they were “entering into a consultation period to determine how they run their business in New Zealand” and that this “may result in the closure of their office”. But yes, all gloomy news. Typically, though, Martin is upbeat:

Our major publishers grew by buying up successful local publishers and winning most of the top talent, so there’s only a tiny independent industry left. There’s now a chance for a renaissance, led by independent publishers — and by new ventures formed from the break-up of global publishers as they exit. Expect to see pieces sold to local management and investors, or picked over by staff to form new start-ups.

How auspicious for Renée Lang of Renaissance Publishing. And as for authors:

One of the first places we need to look is our own authors, especially the top talent that sells thousands rather than hundreds of books. With few exceptions, most of them publish with the multinational imprints, leaving very lean pickings for independents. But quality authors are the cashflow lifeblood of any publishing business.

The time is right for our best authors to consider the role they can play in supporting a renaissance of local publishing. I’m not advocating a wholesale exit from multinational publishers. That would be bad for everyone, and bad for the industry. But there’s plenty of room for new titles and some digital rights to help rebuild an independent local industry.

He ends with a message that could almost be intended for the NZ Society of Authors:

Finally, it’s important that New Zealand continues to be a place where global publishers will want to do business. We certainly need to work hard supporting ventures that are rooted here, even tipping the balance in their favour as we struggle to rebuild. But in doing this, we shouldn’t create an environment hostile to offshore suppliers.

What I’m reading #99

Why you should buy a Lotto ticket, even if you are mathy enough to know how pitiful the odds are. According to current quantum mechanics thinking, you will win, possibly many times over. Just not on this planet. (Via Tim Worstall.)

How to publish poetry?

This just in from 7News in Oz:

The Bland Shire in central western New South Wales is considering putting its fame as a dreary destination to good use by associating itself with other negatively named towns.

The local tourism committee is in the early stages of investigating sister city relationships with Dull in Scotland and Boring in the United States. […]

Bland Shire already has one sister city - the seaside town of Whitby in England.

However Councillor Lord says the relationship has not generated a lot of interest over the past decade.

Fancy that. Perhaps they could twin with Palmerston North.

Geographic nominative determinism in the Shetlands. Quote unquote:

A remarkable number of places have monosyllabic names. It’s as if we’ve stumbled on the Pompeii of toponymy. We witness how people practised their name-giving skills, learning to vocalise before they could improvise. You can almost hear them scraping their throats as they point to specific locations, baptising them Woo, Too, Bu, Ha, How and Pow. A second set of monosyllabic place names is already more complex, self-aware. The key one is Yell, summarising what went before. A few seem bent on defining primary places, Ur-locations: Fleck, Nest, Junk, Loot, Grid, Gear, Wart. But what about Snap, or Sung? Maybe these are a third, even more evolved set of monosyllabics, one-word poems that transcend the places they denote.

Maxine Alterio’s wonderful novel Lives We Leave Behind, about New Zealand nurses in World War I but also so much more, is being published in France and this is the cover:

Unusually for international publication this is, apart from the French text, the same as the New Zealand cover. I was going to review the novel here but it went straight into the top 10 bestseller list and stayed there for months so it didn’t need me. Do read it if you haven’t already — it is a wonderful evocation of the time and places, and every bit as good as her unforgettable 2007 debut novel Ribbons of Grace, still the best novel about transvestism among Chinese goldminers in Arrowtown.

Thomas Jones on rules for writing (via Josh Easby): good advice on metaphors and some very amusing comments. Set the comments to Oldest First to read the best ones, about elephants in Samoa.

Keith Richards (via Brent Parlane) gives a masterclass on how to be tight and loose – this YouTube clip gives his rhythm guitar part for “Can You Hear Me Knocking?” from Sticky Fingers in splendid isolation, followed by Mick Taylor’s solo, likewise solo. Charlie Watts is all very well but listening to Keith isolated you can hear exactly why the Stones sound like the Stones:

Tweet of the week

This comes from Chris Keall who rejoices in the title “Technology Editor/Head of Digital, NBR”:

First fire of the year. Suddenly print media seems relevant again.

Oh Donna

Donna Chisholm, Metro’s editor at large (least flattering job title ever), has won a libel case taken against her, or at least had it dismissed, which amounts to the same thing.

When I was at Metro I had to defend a libel suit taken by someone who objected to a joke I wrote and who hadn’t noticed it until Alister Taylor, bless him,  pointed it out. Being sued for a million dollars does concentrate the mind, and took a month of lawyering. We caved in; with Donna, righteousness prevailed.

Donna doesn’t get enough credit. She was a major force at the Auckland Star and later the Sunday Star-Times and devised and ran the SST’s short-story competition, which brought many new writers to national attention. I don’t really know how Metro and North  & South work these days, but Donna seems to be half of both of them.  

So here are 10CC:

NZ authors rock out

Chad Taylor Swift

Hamish Keith Urban

James George Jones

Raewyn Alexander O’Neal

Alan Duff McKagan

David Elliot Smith

Gaelyn Gordon Lightfoot

Patricia Grace Slick

Stacy Gregg Allman

AK Grant Hart

Bernadette Hall & Oates

Mac Jackson Browne

Sherryl Jordan Luck

Sheridan Keith Flint

Michael King Tubby

John A Lee Brilleaux

Bored now. You get the idea. Off you go. 

Happy birthday, Richard Wagner

Yes, 200 years ago today the great opera composer Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig. The Concert Programme has done him proud this and last week. I’ve had the entire Ring cycle on all week, drowning out the rinse cycle of my children’s laundry. So here is Dick Wagner, the great guitarist for Lou Reed (Rock ’n’ Roll Animal) and Alice Cooper:

  

And “Sweet Jane” from that live album, with Wagner and Steve Hunter, a duo made in – well, not heaven, but somewhere guitar-friendly:

Mark Amery on Otis Mace

The 61st in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the November 1995 issue.

I used to perform at some of the same venues as Otis – one being (I think) the Performance Café in Symonds Street, where you could see terrible poets but also Lindsay Marks and Don McGlashan in the wonderful Eric Glandy Memorial Big Band. Otis was a revelation – the shy guy I’d met as Richard Lello a few times at a mutual friend’s was transformed once on-stage. I say stage, it was just a small area clear of drunks and stoners. But he was electric. Still is. And I still love his song “Pumpkins Are Actually Rocks”.

The intro read:

That’s not the strangest song you’ll hear from Otis Mace, Guitar Ace. Some of them are much weirder. Mark Amery talks to a man who writes about vampires, a job he had burning books for a library, and building a Kenworth truck out of matches.

PUMPKINS ARE ACTUALLY ROCKS

New Zealand has its own troubadours, singer-song­writers who seem to have been around forever and turn up out of the blue almost anywhere. They are cult heroes, never chart-toppers, just honest storytellers with their own skewball take on life, who have gathered friends in every pocket of the country.

Otis Mace is one such small-time hero. His seriously warped view of the ordinary things in life has been on offer in any number of bars, cafes, pubs and clubs since punk rock gave him a guitar in the late 70s. A cultural fringe dweller, Mace has collaborated with the likes of poets David Eggleton and Richard Von Sturmer, combining music with storytelling, theatre and art.

A chap with a touch of Elvis Costello to his features (“I’ve had to learn some Costello covers,” he says, “because in pubs people see short guy, glasses, and go, yes”) he totes a guitar and songbook with titles like “Telephone Sex” and “Pumpkins Are Actually Rocks”. This year sees the release of Mace’s first full-length album, a compilation of new material and old favourites titled, with a heavy dose of irony, Quick (Jayrem JAY 344).

Otis Mace the Guitar Ace is above all things a writer, able to hang a few chords onto a story about any conceivable subject. .”It’s good to get away from love songs,” he says. “It’s good to pick some really abstract quality and then in­clude some of that in a song. I really like the idea of having meaningful words in songs, that’s where the attraction lies.

“As well as a songwriter I’m a bit of a poet in that I try and make the lyrics stand up on their own. In some recent shows I’ve been setting a little cheesy keyboard going in the background and just reading through some of my songs. It’s just a different approach to delivery.”

Mace has more recently been enjoying incor­porating improvisation into his writing. In 1992 he joined Arthur Baysting. for a songwriting tour of universities, demonstrating a “do-it-yourself” technique where, over an hour, the audience helped write a song. ..

“It’s good to take a break from playing things you know to playing things you don’t. It gets the audience involved. You ask them for an idea for a song, a title. It’s a good improvisational technique. You spit out the first thing that comes into your head and use the title in the chorus and make a few improvised chords on the guitar.”

He has kept one improvised song in his song­book — about sheep necrophilia. “It just turned out so funny, so bizarre and bad taste that I had to keep it in my repertoire. Musically it’s not up to much, but it always gets a good response.

“Well, when I say always, not with too straight a crowd, it being a delicate New Zea­land topic.”

Mace gives us short stories in cartoon form — a date in Auckland involving a concert by Townes Van Zandt and an unmarked policecar (“She Makes Me Feel Better Than Townes Van Zandt”), a man who builds a Kenworth rig out of matchsticks (“Ten-Four”) or his response to Pynchon’ s Gravity’s Rainbow (“Screaming”).

One of the weirdest things he has written about is a library. “One time, years ago, I had a job in the School Services Library that was mindnumbingly boring, Part of my job was de­stroying books that were deemed un-PC. It just seemed so weird, destroying class sets of books to be mulched up and then the money given to charities, rather than maintaining the books so anyone could use them. So I wrote a song about that called ‘Bibliotech’. That’s a punk jazz type of thing with a biting surrealist protest lyric to it.”

Mace has a story behind every story, the sources as weird as the finished product. His subjects are often culled from the kitsch cultural junk left over from the first TV generation. Gothic horror is one of his more unusual themes. “That was an avenue of songwriting I followed for a while, really enjoying some of the aspects of Z-grade horror movies which I guess are the popularised versions of scary legends from our past histories. The Night Of The Living Liver’, for example, is a gothic semi-comical semi-hor­rific romp through a very dark sinister area.”

One of the most distinctive things about his writing is the dark kooky sense of humour which is performed with an odd deadpan delivery. “I think the possibilities in song are so under-util­ised in mass entertainment that I like to think of myself as a humorist writer, or at least that m bringing a different angle to the idea of the popular song. The public appreciates it — they are fond of the tongue-in-cheek, the offbeat, the skew-whiff, the strange and peculiar.

“These days music is being intensely catego­rised, divided up into rigidly divided categories for the purposes of marketing. So I like to cross boundaries and get away from that. To produce something that may on first listen sound like a perfectly normal country and western track but, when you listen to it more carefully, there’s a lot of irony. It’s not satirising or taking the piss out of it, it’s just adding a new dimension.”

If Otis Mace is ever to score on the hit parade it will probably be with Quick’s anthem, “Effort, Money And Time”. Written in collaboration at the beginning of his musical career with Richard Von Sturmer, it’s a catchy, infectious, repetitive pop song (“It saves you effort, money and time/effort, money and time/ It’s so easy/makes you happy...”).

“There’s the whole tradition of songwriting that goes right back. Writing a catchy melody, having a good chord structure, simple ideas in the verses, a chorus and a melodic difference as a bridge. That’s the tradition and there are rules there which can be deliberately flaunted.”

Like any good writer, Otis Mace knows the rules and then breaks them. And like many good writers he doesn’t necessarily make a lot of money out of doing it.

As he says hesitantly, not normally one given to making grand statements, “I think you have to follow your path and remain loyal to your own muse. Something like that. I guess.”