What I’m reading

LaughyKate has a better ringtone than I do. 

David Thompson on the left-wing physics of, and I am not making this up, passive over-eating.

Martin Amis says that Philip Larkin isn’t a poet’s poet, he’s a novelist’s poet. Warning: may contain Andrew Marvell and Northrop Frye.

Jane Rogers – do read her, she’s great – on why novelists need publishers, no matter how tiny.

Bill Manhire on cream torpedoes. Not as rude as it sounds.

Francis Wheen, who owes me lunch at the Coach and Horses, reviews Charlie Campbell’s Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People for the Literary Review and begins:

Who could resist a book with such a subtitle? ‘I can see why they’ve asked you to review it,’ my other half said. She is a saintly figure who seldom if ever apportions blame, whereas my instinct when misfortune befalls me – lost socks, slipped discs, curdled mayonnaise – is to ask which blithering idiot was responsible, since it certainly wasn’t me.

Denis Welch, biographer of Helen Clark, considers Labour’s current leader and begins:

The nation’s eyes were on the Southern Ocean today when Labour leader Phil Goff was given back his freedom and released into the sea.

Thousands of New Zealanders have taken this plucky little chap to their hearts since he was found stranded at the top of the Labour Party.

Bewildered and lost, he kept making flapping motions that—scientists say—were a desperate attempt to get people’s attention.

Finally, I found this yesterday while working  on a website for the Frank Sargeson Trust. It is Perfectly Frank: the life of a New Zealand Writer, a 1998 TV documentary written and directed by Bruce Sheridan and produced by William Grieve and Bruce Morrison. The whole thing is about an hour long and it is fantastic. This is the first of five segments, about eight minutes long: