Ian Wishart sentence of the day

From this report on Stuff about his book telling Macsyna King’s side of the Kahui twins case:

She did not trust journalists but wanted to tell her story, he said.

So that settles the question whether Wishart considers himself a journalist.

Fancy a shag?

Photo by Glen Webber

I bet Albert the Albatross does. Amid all the fuss about Happy Feet, the Emperor Penguin who “who took a wrong turn and ended up on a New Zealand beach”, the Spectator (25 June issue) reminds us of the plight of Albert “who arrived in the Firth of Forth in 1967 and has spent 40 years trying to mate with gannets. The nearest female albatross is in the South Atlantic.” The Firth of Forth is in Scotland. The South Atlantic isn’t.

Happily, Happy Feet has survived his or her (Stuff is coy about the bird’s gender and, frankly, who among us would be confident about sexing a penguin? It’s hard enough with young people these days) operations to remove sand from his or her innards.

Possibly the best bit of the story is that Happy Feet needs a permit to return home. Yes, even an emperor penguin needs paperwork. He or she is just like a penguin in bondage. So here is Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in Stockholm on 21 August 1973 performing “Penguin in Bondage”:

The band was George Duke on keyboards, Ralph Humphrey on drums, Ruth Underwood on percussion (tragically we can only glimpse her), Jean-Luc Ponty on violin, Tom Fowler on bass, Bruce Fowler on trombone and Ian Underwood (beardy guy on the left: there would have been no Hots Rats without him) on sax. 

Once, when I was a small boy, in 1960 or so, I escaped my parents, big sister and cousins and ran down the beach at Papamoa and found a dead penguin. I buried it in the sand. I suppose it was a harbinger of global warming or something. Or of Happy Feet.

Denis Edwards on Jeffrey Archer

The 33rd in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the August 1996 issue. I have a guilty feeling that it might have been me who prompted Denis to ask the £10 million question. That’s one good thing about being an editor: getting people braver than oneself to ask the hard ones. I still think that Archer told Lügenspiele.

The intro read:

In the blue corner: Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, better known as Jeffrey Archer, squillionaire author of bestsellers like Kane And Abel and now The Fourth Estate. Facing him, Denis Edwards, bracing himself to ask the £10 million question, “Who writes your books, Jeff?”

PEER PRESSURE

Interviewing overseas authors and hoping the interview will produce real insights tends to be a waste of time. Any writer successful enough to have publishers – who are notori­ously stingy – paying to fly them around the world will have many hours of
meeting the press behind them. This means they arrive equipped with a stock of “good for all seasons” quotes. Should those fail to fend off probes, they can always switch back to the book, and the safety of talking about the agony of the creative process and world-wide trends in their particular genre.

It’s usually enough to keep awkward issues safely distant until the publicist eases into the interview, murmuring and looking at her watch. “Her” because they are inevitably female and usually extraordinarily attractive. They are signalling that it’s time the journalist gathered up the tape recorder and notebook, shook hands all round and cleared off so the next interview can begin.

The reporter is left to trudge away with just the press-kit material and a few well-washed quotes with which to fill the space between the ads, under the headline and around the photo. All too often that means glumly rewriting the press kit, with its party line of this being a wonderful book and the author a fine and talented human being. What’s missing is the interesting material, the unexplored dimensions of the writer – as in, what are they really like?

This time was different. Jeffrey Archer put it all on display, but not straight away. It all began with the standard author-tour patter, carefully controlled and cheerful.

Archer was effusive and exuded an air of mischievous roguery, full of the “how far can we push things and still get away with it?” panache which once let the Oxford-Cambridge crowd colonise half the world. This was in the suites at Auckland’s Sheraton Towers hotel, where he was getting his shoulder in behind his latest, The Fourth Estate, which he describes as a “novelography” of Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell’s political and financial brawls.

The odds are the book won’t need much pushing. Archer is a success. His 10 books have sold 100 million copies. HarperCollins is confident of his ability to score again, to the point of printing a massive 300,000 copies just for the UK, New Zealand and Australian markets alone.

Archer’s sales have left him with the sort of wealth to make stories like this one credible: “Do you earn £10,000?” he was asked, when applying for a small credit facility – and he is reputed to have replied, “Some days I do, and some days I don’t.”

Behind life as a bestseller is his career in public life, one he holds near and dear and which saw him rise to the inner circles of the Conservative Party, and which led directly to his well-publicised courtroom fights: libel cases, suing newspapers after allegations about his sex life and his investment strategy.

He learned when and how to dodge the bullets, and when to fight back. All this has earned him a seat in the House of Lords as Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, “the only seaside peer on which Danny La Rue has not yet performed”, according to Ned Sherrin. There is also a thoroughly deserved reputation for being tough, even knifingly vicious, with interviewers – his Kim Hill interview is a local broadcasting legend (see Kim Hill, Bookseller, December 1994, and accompanying letter).

With all that lurking in his character, it was just a question of tine before the range of Archer personalities was revealed – the Writer of integrity, the faux bonhomie of the Politician, and the Killer with a fine sense for the jugular.

The moment is a quarter of an hour into the interview and is triggered by a mild query about the often-aired allegation that Archer is given to contracting out the hard graft of the book writing to hired hands.

“Who said that?” The cheery amiability has gone, replaced with the fast hard tones of the man who fought with Hill.

“I heard it first on the BBC World Service, and they were quoting someone else, so it isn’t exactly fresh, but the story is in play. Is there anything in it?”

“No there isn’t!” he snaps. Then the sides of his personality spin past. The Writer is pointing out, reasonably enough, that the contracting-out idea is plain stupid. “Why would you take £250,000 to write my book, which might make me £10 million? If you could do it, surely you’d do it for yourself? Isn’t that the answer to that question?”

It is. At the same time his voice deepens and strengthens. The Politician has taken over. He has moved physically close, taking over the space between us. Even though he is shorter and less physically strong, he has become the dominant force in the interaction.

He has approached from the side. Front-on is too aggressive and too primal, guaranteed to spark anger and defensiveness. Archer the Politician would not want either of those in the game. They are too difficult to control.

He is snapping his fingers and saying he has kept all 19 drafts of The Fourth Estate. If anyone goes public with an allegation that he hired a writer, he would “sue the same day, and I got half a million from the Daily Star in a libel action, and I would take those drafts as evidence into court with me”.

By now he is right alongside me, urgent and tense, commanding and dangerous. In a perfect world, journalistic training would click in and it would become a battle as I dug in, to fight and persist. Alas, I didn’t. Archer’s mix of personas – Writer, Politician and then Threatening Litigant – struck so quickly and so skilfully that it was impossible to resist giving him what he wanted, shifting the conversation onto less controversial ground.

When he has what he wants, he completes the rout with a reward, instantly re-warming the atmosphere with a purring bonhomie that flows out to every corner of the room.

Archer writes by hand. “Don’t like word proces­sors. Hate them. Wouldn’t have one. You can keep them.” When it’s time to begin a book – he writes one every two years, in a ratio of two novels to a collection of short stories – he sticks to a regime of rising at five and scratching away with a felt-tipped pen from six until eight, from 10 to noon, from two to four and from six to eight. Start and finish times at each session are controlled by an egg-timer.

He credits his early years in track and field with giving him the resources to accept and maintain that disciplined regime: “When I stopped as a runner I never thought the discipline and the competitive sense, the internal one, would be of any use again. But it has turned out to be one of the things which has made me a successful writer.”

He isn’t one to lock himself away in any old rat-ridden garret. When the Muse summons him Archer takes her, himself, his wife Mary, a typist and a cook to a villa overlooking the Mediterranean on an island off Spain. He also takes 60 or so felt-tipped pens, paper and the egg-timer.

Six weeks later he has a first draft, which will be worked over and over again, until he has been through those 19 drafts and can hand the final version over to the publisher.

He has never had a publisher ringing up asking if the book will be on time or whether he needs any help. “I don’t need it. They know I am driven and that I will keep going until the book is finished. They also know I am fanatical about quality, because there are authors out there who have had hits and whose work fell off, and they can’t get published now. If there is a fear that is it, that I won’t be able to deliver the goods, that the readers will sense I am losing my touch and they’ll stop buying. When that happens you’re finished, and it doesn’t matter how many successes you have had.”

That writing career, with its books, money, film deals and power – and driving sense of insecurity – began in a strange way. It was a form of exorcism and therapy, one he used to distract himself from impending ruin. “I was in the House of Commons, after being on the Greater London Council. I love public life and I was determined to stay in it. Money has never been an issue with me. I always knew I could make money, so that wasn’t the driving force. Public life is.”

He had invested heavily in a Canadian company which folded and saw three of its principals jailed for fraud. Archer was left with debts of over $NZ1 million, and came within hours of being bankrupted, which would have ended any question of staying in politics. “There is this great myth,” he says, “that I started writing to make money and pay off my creditors. That’s ridiculous. No one can do that. No one. God knows I couldn’t. The manuscript was turned down by 17 publishers! I have met a lot of people who are writing their books. All of them are doing it to get published, certainly not in anticipation of making millions.

“I started writing as a way of keeping myself working. That’s the truth of it. I did have an advantage in my being a raconteur and a storyteller, which made up for my not having, and still not having, the slightest idea of dramatic structure. I work one line at a tine, without knowing what is going to be in the next paragraph, and reach the end of the page without knowing what is going to be in the next chapter. That way I can keep the reader guessing too, because if I had worked it out beforehand I would instinctively have put something in at the start, perhaps even one sentence, which would let a reader say ‘Ha, I knew what was going to happen!’ You can’t have that if you want to keep people coming back.”

When Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less finally connected it was a hit, selling all over the world, and being aired on both BBC radio and television. The third book, Kane And Abel, was the one which set him up for life. The Coronet edition alone sold 3.2 million copies, with the film rights going for $US2.3 million. “That was the end of the debts,” he says. “It made me a millionaire overnight, all from writing.”

Archer is famed for being an assiduous promoter of his books, down to stopping cars on country roads so he can dash into a shop and browbeat the bookseller into moving the Archer stock into the window display. “Nothing wrong with that at all. I love it. I want to be read. It’s what I do. I would get thoroughly bored sitting in the Bahamas all year drinking pina coladas. I would get bored after one week!”

His selling extends to his being a legendary hand at a book signing. When he gets a following wind behind him, he can do 500 in an hour. At that rate, a valuable Jeffrey Archer first edition will be one without his signature in it.

Persuasively written

Academic quote of the week, from Alexander Vasudevan, a lecturer in “cultural and historical geography” in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. He blogs:

[. . . ] we are left in a general state of obstructed agency (see Sianne Ngai’s  fantastic Ugly Feelings) and have become increasingly tethered to a form  of sociality shaped by a congerie of negative affects (fear, paranoia,  anxiety, envy).  As Lauren Berlant has persuasively written, it is the  supine affective charge of aspirational normativity with its  increasingly  “recessive” and “underperformative” modes of being that have come to  characterize our current age of austerity.  

I hope to have more to say about the assembling and composition of alternative subjectivites in a future post.

Can’t wait for that one.

Monitor: David Thompson

Feeding children

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the more effort one puts into preparing dinner for one’s children, the more likely they are to say “Yuck.” And because I make every dinner for them from scratch, five nights a week, I am almost used to it.

Last night I txtd my wife who was in Oz, “Making elaborate dinner for [Seven] and [Nine]. Already cross at their rejection, due in 15 min.”

 
She thought I was joking. Like hell I was. And guess what. . .

What I’m reading

Honest, there will be more original Quote Unquote material soon, possibly Maurice Gee-related –  I’m just waiting on a friend. Specifically, a photographer who says she will send a high-quality usable image rather than me scanning as usual from the magazine. In the meantime:

As ever the best stuff about Christchurch is on Stuff, for example this, but Philip Mathews is essential viewing. Here is his latest.

Question: How many hours a day should a musician practice?

Answer: Heaps, but only if you’re doing it right.

Possibly the funniest Allypost ever. Seriously. Her mini-playlet about the New Zealand Battle Tractor is super-mega-uber-brilliant.

Danyl at Dim-Post is back to being satirical. Yay. I don’t have a kuri in this race (apart from siding with Ngaiterangi vs Ngapuhi because I am from Tauranga and let’s not pretend we don’t all have long memories) but Danyl nails what needs to be nailed.

David Lynch’s hair in art, the Hokusai especially.

A nice brief piece from Mick Hartley about the late great James Carr with a YouTube clip of “You Got My Mind Messed Up” – if you are at all interested in soul music, click on through. This is the real deal.

Paul Litterick is excited about some recent writing by buildings. I am not so sure. Beware what you wish for, etc. Here is Ry Cooder in 1974 with “If Walls Could Talk”. Thank god they can’t. The band is Jim Keltner on drums; Milt Holland on percussion; Russ Titelman on bass; Bobby King, Cliff Givens and Gene Mumford on vocals. Rhythm section heaven. Black-guy vocal section heaven. And, because this is Ry Cooder, guitar heaven  

Something for the weekend

Stuff quotes from Cameron Slater aka WhaleOil:

“I have decided to withld the vast bulk of matel that I found, because I absolutely agree that as the law stands, everyy New Zealanr should be free to conibute to politl pares witht fear of their name being made public,” he said.

Possibly Fairfax’s Australian subs are being ironic or subversive or something, but this is not what Mr Oil actually said. His blog text was this:

I have decided to withhold the vast bulk of material that I found, because I absolutely agree that as the law stands,  everyday New Zealanders should be free to contribute to political parties without fear of their name being made public.

Can’t the Stuff people even do a simple cut and paste? Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V – it’s not hard. I did it for free just now, so why can’t they do it when they’re paid to? (UPDATE: They have fixed it now.)

The admirably acerbic David Thomson rips into a Guardian piece claiming that all pop music is cowed and moribund because there aren’t enough grants to go around. This is from England so it is all to do with class. Thompson rather sticks it to Jarvis Cocker. Billy Bragg gets his in the comments which, as always, are worth reading.

It’s official: my brother-in-law is insane.

A book I’d like to read: Sexually, I’m More of a Switzerland by David Rose is a collection of personal ads from the London Review of Books. One example: 

The finest mind in the academic world conceived this ad, but it was his secretary who took two and a half hours out of her day to collate his angst-ridden ramblings, phone the LRB and pay for it with her own money.  He’s basically looking for an affair with a twenty-something idiot tart who needs good grades.  I’m looking for a better job, a decent pension package, and a man to 50 who’s great in bed and doesn’t make condescending comments about every damn book I read.  Man, 57.  Or his secretary, 43.

Christchurch sentence of the day

Doesn’t say it all, but says a lot. From Marc Greenhill’s report on Stuff:

In Burwood, one Brooker Ave resident, who was too upset to speak, was trying to clean silt out of his lounge from the 1pm quake when the second one struck.

What I’m reading

Paul Litterick at the Fundy Post on taniwhas, Queer the Night and “heterosexual and cissexist norms”. I have no idea what the latter are and can’t be bothered googling them but Paul’s account is very entertaining. Money par:

Anyway, as things turned out, everyone but the trolls had a good time at Queer the Night, while the iwi rushed in to assure everyone that the taniwha was a metaphor, thus saving the trolls the discomfort and contortions of attacking pakeha media for mocking indigenous beliefs which the trolls themselves could not possibly hold, whilst at the same time trying to remember where the macrons go. But tomorrow is another day, with new opportunities to be offended on Internet.

Ally Mullord has some more wieners of the week. Sad US congressman Anthony Weiner was a gift, wasn’t he, but she has found some more. Money par:

Escalator Huffers. This is my name for people who charge up escalators as though they’re climbing Mt Everest and, because it is often difficult to overtake on an escalator, reach the step behind you and stand there huffing angrily because you’re not plowing up the escalator like you’re a bison in heat and there is an attractive lady bison standing at the top fluttering her bison eyelashes at you.

A really nice story about Bob Dylan being really nice in 1969. I know, we are all Bobbed out with him turning 70 and all, but this is – how can I say? – really nice. Plus, if you click on the link you are stealing from Rupert Murdoch. So you will.

Laughy Kate transcribes a brief conversation overheard in her office. NSFW. Money line is #4 but I couldn’t possibly quote it here.

Tim Worstall on the bollocks that is talked about the economic damage caused by internet piracy. The post is brief but the comments are substantial. Money par:

Do not, ever, believe the numbers you are given for the costs of copyright breaches. They’re all, sadly, lies.

Even deeper embarrassment

Stuff reports on Whale Oil’s threatened release of material identifying donors to the Labour Party:

There was deep embarrassment within Labour Party circles this morning over the breach, which could prove compromising to some of its donors, particularly any public servants or others in sensitive positions who have supported Labour’s “stop asset sales” and other campaigns.

However there was even deeper embarrassment within the VRWC, when Mr Oil outed Cactus Kate as one of the donors. She admits to her shame  here and, believe it or not, proposes donating even more.