What I’m reading #90

A moving interview with Peter Bland in Mount Eden’s free monthly mag The Garden, on the occasion of his forthcoming Collected Poems 1956-2011. How amazing that an older poet could be on a magazine cover and have six pages inside devoted to him. Great photos, too. The magazine is not online but you can download the PDF here.

Chris Bourke on the late Dave Brubeck’s “Maori Blues”.

The composer Jonathan Harvey has died. His music is lovely, refined – he was the nearest to an English Boulez, only kinder, gentler and a lot more Buddhist. The Guardian obit is here. There are good samples on YouTube.

What publishers want. The Aussies, anyway, but probably it’s much the same here.

Having sex in a library – Nadia Cho recommends the religion section. As always, the commenters at David Thompson’s blog are as funny and snarky as he is. Quote unquote: 

When you hear them, get round there with your mobile and film them. Put it straight on YouTube. Then we’ll see just how transgressive they really are.

Cactus Kate queries Metro’s award of #1 Aucklander We Love to Wendyl Nissen, the citation of which ends “Wendyl is the Aunt Daisy of our times.” I’m sure they meant well but what those of us of a certain age remember about Aunt Daisy is hearing her one morning on the wireless saying what a lovely morning it was in Wellington: “The sun is shining right up my back passage.”

Speaking of Wellington, Denis Welch has been awarded the Creative NZ Randell Cottage writer in residence fellowship. He is working on a biography of Norman Kirk – a great project and surprising that no one thought of it before. I was on the panel that selected him – it was a close-run thing as there were many other fine writers and projects. I had to declare an interest: “I used to work with him. But even so…”

The latest issue of the Author, the NZ Society of Author’s magazine, has a six-page section on the Frankfurt Book Fair and how successful NZSA’s stand was. Good to hear – but normally one thanks one’s sponsors. Creative NZ requires it; the Sargeson Trust has always been punctilious about acknowledging Buddle Findlay. But there is no mention anywhere in the Author that Copyright Licensing NZ kicked in $10,000 to enable NZSA’s attendance plus the cost of designing the stand. So NZSA members will have no idea that all this was made possible by CLNZ. If I was one of the CLNZ directors who voted to grant NZSA that $10,000 I’d be miffed that the grant was not acknowledged. Oh that’s right – I am.

Finally, a Venn diagram many of us can relate to: