Crowd-sourcing Frank Sargeson

The audience for this will be vanishingly small but yesterday I mentioned the website about Frank Sargeson and the Sargeson Trust I have been working on, off and on and off, for ages and hope to take public next week. This is it, in draft form. It’s unedited, and hasn’t had any new content this year, but if anyone is interested in Frank and his works I’d appreciate any constructive comments. I’ve had some great ones from Chad Taylor, who was a Sargeson fellow – I would love to get any more from anyone. The eventual address will be www.sargeson.net.

Report on experience: NZ Post book awards 2012

To Auckland yesterday for a meeting with an author I’m editing, a long lunch with writer friends followed by a martini with my favourite big-time bookseller upstairs at DeBretts, and then I was a guest of the Listener at the NZ Post Book Awards event which was a great success and ended at 1:30 a.m. 

Among the highlights of the evening: meeting novelist Hamish Clayton, author of the brilliant Wulf; meeting poet Dinah Hawken, author of the wonderful The Leaf-Ride; kissing Jennifer Ward-Lealand; catching up with old friends – all the usual benefits of attending the awards and not having performance anxiety. But the very best bits were when:

1. Te Reo advisor Paora Tibble presented Chris Winitana with the Maori Language Award for his book Toku Reo, Toku Ohooho: My Language, My Inspiration and spoke for 10 minutes or more in Maori. No concession given. Excellent.

2. Sam Elworthy of AUP introduced Michael Cullen, there representing NZ Post, as “the horrible Michael Cullen”. Well, that’s what it sounded like at our table.

3. Things were winding down and the more convivial among us decided to repair to the hotel where the out-of-towners were staying to continue discussions in the bar. We all got more and more amusing and attractive as the night wore on. 

Full details of the winners with judges’ comments are here, but in brief:

Book of the year

New Zealand’s Native Trees by John Dawson and Rob Lucas (Craig Potton Publishing)

Fiction

Rangatira by Paula Morris (Penguin)

Poetry

Shift by Rhian Gallagher (AUP)

General non-fiction

Tupaia: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Polynesian Navigator by Joan Druett (Random House)

Illustrated non-fiction

New Zealand’s Native Trees by John Dawson and Rob Lucas (Craig Potton Publishing)

Maori language

Toku Reo, Toku Ohooho : My Language, My Inspiration by Chris  Winitana (Huia)

People’s choice

From Under the Overcoat by Sue Orr (Random House)

Both Sue Orr and Paula Morris have held the Buddle Findlay Sargeson fellowship. When I get the Frank Sargeson website, which I’ve been working on for more than a year (embarrassingly), online to the public next week, this will be the Sargeson Trust’s first boast for 2012.

I am the walrus

Hear him sing, hear him roar, even hear him whistle – but can he dance?:

Danny Gawlowski reports in the Seattle Times:

Everyday is a smorgasbord of 100 pounds of fish including mackerel, herring, surf clams and squid for E.T. the walrus, who is one of the star attractions at the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium. The downside of his diet is, well, squid-breath. E.T. came to Point Defiance in Tacoma after Prudhoe Bay oil workers in 1982 found him as a starving orphan pup and gave him his movie star name because of the resemblance. Raised at the zoo, he now weighs about 3,500 pounds and just marked his 30th birthday. Here, staff biologist Amanda Shaffer feeds E.T.

Monitor: David Thompson via Arbroath

Hedonism and Alban Berg

The children are in bed and my wife is at her book club so I can do what I want. Stratocaster abuse, drugs, hookers – you name it. So, hedonist that I am, I have an opera CD playing in the background while I do a bit more editing of a manuscript for a Major International Publisher. 

And this is the opera. The clip is a bit dodgy, copyright-wise, because it seems to be the entire opera, Lulu by Alban Berg, which is the same as my CD-set, starring Teresa Stratas as Lulu, Yvonne Minton as Grafin Geschwitz, Robert Tear as various chaps and the whole thing conducted by Pierre Boulez. I had no idea that this fantastic performance was available on DVD and I am sure that I will buy a legal copy of it eventually:

Happy birthday, Karl Popper

The great philosopher of science was born in Vienna on 28 July 1902 and died in London on 17 September 1994.

He taught philosophy at Canterbury University from 1937 to 1945 and while there wrote The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), which was as influential in political thought as his other books were in philosophy. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935) is not an easy read, but I have done it. Conjectures and Refutations (1963) may be a better place to start. Pretty much everyone since in his field has had to deal with Popper and his brilliant concept of falsifiability. Stanford University’s bio is here.

I was taught philosophy of science at Auckland University by Popper’s student and critic Paul Feyerabend. We had no idea how lucky we were: not only did he know Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and other heavyweights who dominated the field, but he had also known Bertolt Brecht and, OMG, Ludwig Wittgenstein and probably most of the Vienna Circle. Degrees of separation…

So here are Ultravox with “Vienna”:

What I’m reading #72

Nick Cohen on the racism of the respectable, expanding on this report from the BBC. Money quote:

Britain made female genital mutilation a criminal offence in the 1980s. Later we said it was illegal for parents to take their children abroad for the ‘procedure’. Yet although thousands of British girls are the victims of wounding with intent, the CPS has not instigated one prosecution, let alone secured a conviction.

It is a harrowing read – the description of how FGM is practised is horrific.  

Matt Nolan complains that Rob Hosking goes too far.

Facebook cruelty.

A guide to the music of Pierre Boulez.

A.D. Miller, author of Snowdrops, talks about London novels, some of them by Martin Amis.

The madness of my brother-in-law.

What would a mole of moles look like?

In the July Uncut Dr John (not online) remembers Jimi Hendrix this way:

I liked him. I first knew Jimi when he was playing in Little Richard’s band. Jimi was real special to the guitar like John Coltrane was to the saxophone. Certain people will take an instrument further, and will open the door for people to go through and go different directions.

He wasn’t an easy person to know – I got to know him more because girls that sang back-up for me made vests and clothes for him. When he was loose, he got looser. I worried about him because one day we were playing a gig in Quebec, and the promoter had run off with all the money. Jimi came offstage, and his ears and his nose was bleeding. He’d been kneeling in front of his amplifier – it’s not a good sign. I told him something about it – but I don’t even know if he could hear me.

So here is Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsys live at the Fillmore on New Year’s Eve 1970 with “Who Knows”:

You can hear the whole album here.

Margaret Mahy i.m.

Two lovely tributes from Jolisa Gracewood at Public Address and Elizabeth Knox at her blog. John Dix says that Margaret’s story  “The Procession” inspired Blerta’s 1972 song “Dance Around the World”. So here it is:

What I’m reading #71

Seven reasons not to do work for free.

Kitty Wells, i.m.

This TLS review of Peter Clarke’s Mr Churchill’s Profession (the title is a play on the title of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession, which is about prostitution) reminds one that Winston Churchill was a freelance journalist, and a very successful one. At 24 he was one of the highest-paid in the world. Money quote:

Clarke has thoroughly scrutinized Churchill’s personal finances by way of his correspondence, his bank account, his tax returns and even his predictably impressive wine merchant’s bills (running annually at “about three times the earnings of a male manual worker at the time”).

Second money quote, from Evelyn Waugh on Churchill’s Marlborough, a biography of his ancestor:

“I was everywhere outraged by his partisanship & naïve assumption of superior virtue”, Waugh ruthlessly replied to Randolph. “It is a shifty barrister’s case not a work of literature.”

More on Finnegans Wake, last mentioned here in April and this will be the last time this year, promise: but this is by Michael Chabon in the New York Review of Books. He is wonderful about Ulysses which:

struck me, most of all, as a book of life; every sentence, even those that laid bare the doubt, despair, shame, or vanity of its characters, seemed to have been calibrated to assert, in keeping with the project of the work as a whole, the singularity and worth of even the most humdrum and throwaway of human days. I had just begun it when news came of the death, from cancer, of my best friend’s teenage daughter, and over the week that followed I found myself reaching gratefully into the book’s pages, tucking my cold hands into its pockets for comfort and warmth. It was a lighted house in a dark night.

When I reached the last page I immediately turned to the first to read it all over again, and then I made my way back through the stories, the first novel, the poems, unwilling to relinquish the company of Joyce. I read the letters and the Ellmann biography, and checked out the lone play, Exiles, even though I hate reading plays almost as much as I hate listening to recitations of other people’s dreams.

After that there was nothing for it: the bottle must, at last, be unstoppered, the safety perimeter breached.

What he means is, he read Finnegans Wake. And he is wonderful about that. Money quote, which is just as true of Ulysses:

Read aloud—ah! read aloud—it was fun, headlong fun, as you shot the rhetorical rapids in a spinning, swamped whitewater raft.

It is a brilliant piece and even if you have no interest in the Wake, or in Michael Chabon, it’s worth a look.

Word of the day: sprunting. Let’s hear it from Mark Forsyth in the Daily Telegraph with the latest lexicographical news:

Some of the words you find in old dialect dictionaries make you want to build a time machine and head straight off. Given the choice, I would emigrate to 19th-century Roxburgh, where they had a single word – sprunt – meaning to run after girls among the haystacks after dark. The idea of a place where that activity was so common that they needed a one-syllable word for it makes me feel that I was born too late.

Monitors: Chris Slane, Steve Whitehouse

Golfing for Jesus

In the 14 July issue the Economist reports on religious consumerism:

Last year sales of religious books in America grew by 8% in a declining industry.

Three years ago Fehmida Shah set up Smart Ark, a London-based online firm that sells Islamic books, toys and gifts, mainly for children. “HSBC [a bank] was doing Islamic bonds and religious books were selling well, so I thought why not tap into the niche but growing market?” she says. Customers from Britain to Singapore have bought her products. They include a pricier Fairtrade range that includes stickers of mosques around the world and a book on why Muslims should recycle.

It’s a big market for both faiths, with 2.2 billion Christians and 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide. Unsurprisingly, Christians have a wider choice but most goods are aimed at evangelicals:

Specialist retailers in America sell “Smile, Jesus loves you!” blankets and nail files emblazoned with “Woman of God”. Swanson Christian Products of Tennessee sells golf balls alluding to scriptural texts and devotional sayings, such as: “I once was lost but now I’m found!”

Don’t believe it? Have a look at the online store, where you can find Christian towels, Christian T-shirts, Christian whatever you want and yes, inspirational Christian golf balls.

They come boxed in sets of three: “Golf balls are great for sharing your faith on the golf course, and for Pastor Appreciation.” 

Poetry porn

Well, honestly, what else would you call this line from Henry Newbolt’s “He Fell Among Thieves”?:

He felt her trembling speed and the thrash of her screw

The preceding line has “ploughing the foam”. Phwoar, etc. This is from a review in the Spectator by Juliet Townsend of The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj  by Anne de Courcy which explains:

The Fishing Fleet originated in the days of the East India Company, when carefully selected potential wives would be sent out for the Company’s employees, those who failed to find a match being sent home under the rather unkind title of ‘returned empties’.

Vile. Sounds like a sheep farmer’s expression. A few pages later, Cressida Connolly reviews her godfather’ latest, Stephen Spender: New Selected Journals 1939-1995, and quotes:

To be totally honest now, I should ask whether Auden was not a bit envious of me because I had a large penis.

One looks forward to the published journals of male New Zealand poets.

Which brings us to EL James’s hypermegabestselling erotic novel 50 Shades of Grey. I haven’t read it either and nor has Paul Thomas which didn’t stop him from expressing a view about it in the Herald. Joshua Drummond skimmed it in a bookshop and expressed his view in the Waikato Times. On principle I didn’t read Paul, who would have been amusing, and skimmed Joshua, who was amusing. UK novelist Andrew O’Hagan did read the novel and this is his review. Money quote:

To say the woman in this book is submissive won’t cover it. She likes to compare herself to the heroine of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which is nice. But Tess has the whole of Victorian hypocrisy to contend with while Anastasia just has to worry – between delicious ‘humiliations’ – whether she’s got the right music on her iPod.

One unintended consequence  of the novel’s success is a surge of interest in the music of the great Tudor composer Thomas Tallis, whose magnificent 40-part motet Spem in Alium went to #7 in the UK classical chart thanks to a mention in the novel. So here are the Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips:

And here are the just as wonderful but different Winchester Cathedral Choir under David Hill: