When I started this
blog the intention was to put online material from Quote Unquote the magazine (1993-97) because, as Rob O’Neill, a
contributor to the magazine, observed over lunch at Squid Row in December 2008,
“If it’s not online, it doesn’t exist.”
Although he is a Fairfax
journalist, Rob is not always wrong. I realised that all the interviews with
New Zealand authors and other NZ literature-related material that Quote Unquote and its contributors had
spent so much time on would be invisible to today’s students who think that Google
is a research tool. So the next week Quote Unquote the blog was born.
The posts which are not
from the magazine have been just a way of keeping the thing alive until the
next blast from a past issue (and to amuse my friends). The main thing was to
make available whatever was in the archives that might be of use to students
and other interested parties. But I was never sure that schools were using it
the way I had intended. Until late last month.
In one day there were more
than 30 hits from a South Island school – not sure if it’s a single school,
possibly from a content aggregator – on this post from 30 August 2012 of
Kate de Goldi’s interview with Owen Marshall in the November 1993 issue. There
have been other visits to the blog over the years from schools, and private
queries to me from students who had been directed to me by their teachers, but
never such a concentrated burst on one post.
Thirty-plus hits a day since
then and 463 in total so far don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy blogosphere but are a big number at
QUQ. Last week there were dozens more hits from schools on that post, and still
they come. Good. It’s also good to see that students are interested in Owen, Kate
or both. (Owen has a new novel, Carnival
Sky, out on 2 May. Just
saying.)
Other recent visitors to
QUQ have been sent by Google because they were looking for:
1. allen curnow
skeleton great moa
2. shonagh koea
3. judith baragwanath
4. oscar kightley
profile
5. topless strippers
6. guitarist dressed
like zorro
7. 18th century
philosopher chamfort.
The first five search
items are indisputably New Zealand culture. I have no recollection of the sixth
– it is possibly something about Gore or Taihape. The seventh is frankly
French. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
So here is French singer Francoise
Hardy singing “Suzanne” with French musicians and French people in the audience:
3 comments:
Actually, topless strippers are more of an American thing, thanks to various state laws forbidding them to remove their undies. New Zealand strippers tend to be bottomless, too.
So I believe, helenalex. My experience of these establishments is limited, due to lack of interest. In Auckland in the 70s I was taken to one in K Rd by a choreographer, who criticised the young women's moves. In the 90s I was taken to one in O'Connell St by an actress of a certain age, who criticised the young women's deportment. In the 00s I was taken to one in Customs St by two male poets, a male novelist and a male professor, who found nothing to criticise at all.
Last comment - GOLD.
Disclosure - I have never darkened the doors of one of these establishments,
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