Dear diary

Last Thursday I had lunch in Auckland with the lovely Karyn Hay and also Kevin Ireland.

This Thursday I will have lunch in Wellington with the lovely Mary McCallum and also Vincent O’Sullivan.

The day after I will have lunch in Hamilton with the lovely Robyn Malcolm and also Steve Braunias.

It’s a quiet life here in the country but it suits me.

In memory of: Don Silk

A guest post by Graeme Lay about Don Silk, a wonderful man whom many readers will have met or seen at Trader Jack’s in Rarotonga. The cartoon of Don, intended for his as-yet-unpublished second memoir, is by “Kata” (Tim Buchanan) of the Cook Island News.

Don Silk (1928-2012) Author

Don Silk, a legendary South Pacific character, died last week. Originally from Northland, Don spent most of his life on his adopted home, Rarotonga.

In about 1992 Don Silk sent me a manuscript. We had first met in Rarotonga in the late 1980s and when Don found out that I was a writer he said that he’d written something about his life and could I perhaps help him find a publisher for his manuscript? I said I’d try, but I had the usual reservations. The unspoken corollary to the saying “Everyone has a book inside them” is “Yes, and that’s where it should stay.”

But when I read Don’s manuscript I knew immediately that it was a winner. Not only did he have a great story to tell, but he told it superbly. Don was a born storyteller and his account of how he became the Aristotle Onassis of the Cook Islands was warm, funny and hugely entertaining.

Nevertheless initially there were the usual rejections from publishers, most of whom wondered how they could market a book by a first-time author who was based on a remote island in the South Pacific. Don grew despondent at this, but I reassured him. “We just have to persist,” I said. “Many successful books were first declined by publishers.”

So we did persist, and Brian Phillips of Godwit Press accepted Don’s manuscript for publication. It came out in 1994, titled From Kauri Trees to Sunlit Seas: shoestring shipping in the South Pacific. On the cover was a delightful photograph by Glenn Jowitt of one of Silk and Boyd’s little ships being unloaded off Mauke.

Eighteen years later, Don’s memoir is still in print and sells steadily in Rarotonga, in the Bounty bookshop and at Trader Jack’s. It has been reprinted several times. This is a huge tribute to Don’s writing ability and the engaging nature of his memoir. Those publishers who doubted that a book such as Don’s would sell greatly underestimated its author’s crafty marketing ability. The story of how Don offered, then sold, “the very last copy of my book” to hundreds of visitors to Trader Jack’s has become a legend on Rarotonga.

Don’s death greatly saddened me when I learned of it. He was one of the great characters of the South Pacific.

About eight years after his book was published Don sent me another manuscript which he asked me to find a publisher for. It dealt with his years ashore, and particularly his role as harbourmaster of Rarotonga. Like his first memoir, it was engaging, entertaining and very funny. It was also the most defamatory document I had ever read. Every bureaucrat in the Cook Islands who had incurred Don’s righteous wrath was in it, lampooned mercilessly and hilariously. This was the sequel to Kauri Trees, which another Rarotongan character, Ewan Smith, suggested should be titled From Sunburnt Knees to Alzheimer’s Disease.

I knew that no publisher would dare touch this sequel, and told Don so. He was philosophical about this. “Keep the manuscript,” he said, and I have. Perhaps I’ll donate it to the Cook Islands Library for their archives. It should carry the warning, “Contents are guaranteed to offend many people on this island.”

As for From Kauri Tress to Sunlit Seas, I still have my first-edition copy. The inscription reads: “To Graeme. Best wishes from the Friendly Harbourmaster. Without your encouragement I may well have burnt the manuscript. Don Silk.”

Don was buried at sea, off Rarotonga. How fitting. To quote from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Requiem:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea

Don’s death notice in the New Zealand Herald on 5 November introduced him as: “Pioneer truckie, boat builder, yachtie, skipper, South Seas trader, ship builder, stowaway, magnate, Harbour Master, author.”

What I’m reading #85

Chris Bell really likes Sunken Condos, the new album by Donald Fagen. Quote unquote:

It’s an album you experience the way you did in the old days; you want to listen to the whole thing in a single sitting (ideally clutching a lyric sheet), not just odd tracks on shuffle. And, in the silence after it ends, the instinct is to sigh then to play it all over again.

Another great obituary from the Daily Telegraph: Prince Roy of Sealand, who established his own micro-nation on an abandoned fort just outside British territorial waters and declared himself head of state. Quote unquote:

Wounded several times, Bates survived malaria, sandfly fever, frostbite and snakebite. When a German stick grenade exploded, smashing his jaw and showering shrapnel in his face, he was told by an Army surgeon that he would never find a wife as he would be so badly disfigured. But as his wounds healed, Bates met Joan Collins, a former beauty queen from Essex, at a dance, and within three months they had married.

Not that Joan Collins, sadly. Still a great story 

Art theory: could the Rotterdam heistmeister be a Symbolist collector?

Shock and ore: Tim Worstall explains that we will not run out of copper or any other mineral resources because reserves and resources are not at all the same thing. Quote unquote:

reserves of ore are, at any one time, good for only a few decades of use. Because they are a both legal and economic concept and as such we only define as reserves what we’re likely to use in the next few decades. Or rather, only bother to do enough work to declare as reserves what we’re likely to use in the next few decades. Thus every generation does indeed use up the available reserves of minerals.

But that isn’t all there is of course: there’s also the known unknowns. We’ve only bothered to stake out this side of the hill and in a couple of decades we’ll do the same to the other side. We know it’s there, we’ve just not bothered to prove it yet. These are more generally known as resources. They’re there, we know that, we’ve just not gone through the expense of converting them to reserves yet.

Helen Sword on mutant verbs. I call it verbising, she calls it verbifying. She will be right. Quote unquote:

Any noun can be verbed. So can many adjectives: we prettify a room, neaten our desk and brown a piece of meat. As Calvin succinctly explains to Hobbes, “Verbing weirds language.”

Stuff is geographically challenged:

A 23-year-old Tauranga man caught allegedly drink driving told police he was speeding at 136kmh following his friend’s funeral as a mark of respect.

The man was leaving the funeral of Shaun Hogarth when he was stopped by police near the Pyes Pa cemetery about 2.30pm yesterday. [. . . ]

 Hunter said police were in the area because of complaints about boy racer-style cars driving around Mt Maunganui.

Mount Maunganui is on the coast; to get from there to Pyes Pa you cross the harbour bridge, go through Tauranga, past Greerton (where Vanda Symon and I went to school) and head for the Kaimais. It is about half an hour away by car. Boy racers from the Mount are not an issue. Australian sub-editors?  

In Landfall Nicholas Reid takes an austere view of Paul Moon’s New Zealand in the Twentieth Century. Quote unquote:

typically anti-Catholic spin 

A maths test. Go on, you try. I struggled with #14. Embarrassing.

A new blog to me. I’m going to have a go at the banana bread. Also contains Giles Coren’s review of Skyfall which has rather put me off watching the movie.

The Moderately Hungry Maggot by Bill Manhire, illustrated by Mark Harfield. Brilliant. The first page sets the tone:

Outside, under the kitchen window, a hundred eggs lay on a rotten chop.

A note on the inside back cover says, “This parody is for distribution within New Zealand only.” Long-time readers of the blog may recall this from Tane Thomson, which possibly was an inspiration.

Which brings us, once more, to Peter Maxwell Davies. His 1974 piece Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot, about a woman who was a model for Miss Haversham in Great Expectations, is not a lovely listen but is very much worth a listen. This is the original recording with Mary Thomas (soprano) and the Fires of London; this is a concert performance with Jaroslava Maxova singing:

Reasons to be cheerful

Truth has a new editor – Cameron Slater. Watch that space. It won’t be boring.

Lemony Snicket returns.

Home Paddock reminds us that on this day in 1985, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People won the Booker Prize.

A novelist friend emails that the New York agent he met in Frankfurt likes the new novel and will shop it around.

So here are the Captain and Tennille with Smokey Robinson’s imperishable “Shop Around”. Never mind the costumes – Toni Tennille made a few albums of jazz standards that are well worth hunting out. She’s a fine singer and the arrangements and players are amazing.

Cover story of the month

The current issue of Private Eye reports that the October issue of Eureka, the Times’s science magazine, was billed as the Disaster issue and had the coverline “APOCALYPSE”:

Alas, this was true in more senses than one as, in classy News International fasion, staff were told just an hour after they had put the magazine to bed that it was being closed down and this was the last issue.

The main book review in the Eye, whose books pages are consistently excellent, is of Pete Townshend’s memoir Who I Am. Broadly sympathetic to the “self-lacerater”, the reviewer suggests that:

20th century pop reached its apogee in around 1965-1967, when the original beat groups morphed into travelling psychedelic circuses, and began its downward spiral when much less subtle and spontaneous (and much more commercially focused) heavy rock kicked in at the decade’s end. And who were the principal impresarios of this relentless aural assault, in which the song became secondary to the thrash that surrounded it, and rhythm-based melodies (see The Beatles, The Kinks, The Small Faces, etc) gave way to guitar-hero screech? Well, step forward Mr T and convives. No wonder the general impression of life in the rawk fast lane filed by Who I Am is so downbeat. Without ever quite knowing what he was doing, Pete killed the thing he loved, you see, and its ghost haunts him still.

Francis Wheen is 55.

The Listener makes me feel special

Guy Somerset, the Listener’s arts/books editor, emailed today to invite me to contribute nominations for the 100 Best Books of 2012 feature. How flattering. I felt special.

On Facebook this afternoon there was a post from whoever used to do the satirical blog The Pigeon, which I loved but which stopped ages ago, saying that the Pigeon would fly again on Twitter. I have resisted Twitter, never seen the point of it and do not need more distractions, but I had to sign up for the Pigeon.

Within 30 seconds I had a follower, one of my publishers. Within 30 minutes I had another, a complete stranger in the US who is evidently an attractive woman. I felt special.

Then Guy tweeted the invitation to contribute to the Listener’s 100 Best Books of 2012 feature to all his 1142 followers. Suddenly I didn’t feel special.

So here are Radiohead, helpfully subtitled in Spanish:

:

I go to a school concert

For once, not unwillingly – this evening’s performance at St Peter’s School in Cambridge featured my nephew Angus Fraser with his friend Charlie Verberne, both of whom are musically talented. School concerts are usually painful apart from the brief moments when one’s own children are on stage but this was fine – especially Charlie’s band Sunday Best, who were outstanding, as was the ukulele orchestra who played a mash-up of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” with Flight of the Conchords’ “Hiphopopotamus”. 

One band played a sad Billy Joel song I’d never heard before – because it was by Billy Joel – which was introduced as being “about a doomed relationship with Elle Macpherson”. I lost all sympathy with Mr Joel at this point. Many if not most heterosexual men would consider a doomed relationship with Elle Macpherson to be better than a good relationship with a woman who was not Elle Macpherson. That is exactly how shallow we are.

In praise of: Gabrielle Drake

Men of a certain age go all funny about this English actress. A commenter on a David Thompson blogpost about sci-fi fashion reminds us that Ms Drake played Gay Ellis in the 1970 sci-fi TV series UFO and dressed like this:

She was famous enough then to come out to New Zealand to do a Telethon. I can’t remember or find out when, but I do remember her sitting between Hudson and Halls, wearing a low-cut top, and either Hudson or Halls – Halls, I think – leaning over and leering, “Nice tits.” Live TV, what can you do? Does anyone have a clearer memory?

What men of a certain age forget is that she is Nick Drake’s sister and has been the custodian of his work since he died in 1974 aged 26. She has done an exemplary job. So here is Nick Drake with “Cello Song” from his 1969 album Five Leaves Left:

What I’m reading #84

An interview with the violinist Alina Ibragimova, with a clip of her performing Biber – current composer of the week on Concert FM – and another of the entire Mendelssohn concerto, with Philippe Herreweghe conducting the Concertgebouw. It is fantastic. I recommend full-screen mode.

Penguin is suing some of its authors. It’s a wonder this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.

Chad Taylor on high and low technology, and the barbarism of European hotels. 

Stats Chat fillets a Stuff story about the benefits of ginger. The verdict: “not completely misrepresented”. Quote unquote:

So, we have one passing grade on nausea, and a partial pass on aiding digestion.  Two of the links provided absolutely no support for the claims, and the rest were mostly test-tube or rat research that might in the future lead to human research that might support the claims.

Nicholas Reid at Reid’s Reader reviews a new debut novel from VUP – no wait, come back! It is The Invisible Rider by Kirsten McDougall. Nicholas is not a raver, but this is a rave.  

Book sales in New Zealand are respectable by world standards, says Lincoln Gould of Booksellers NZ. That is, they are declining less than elsewhere. Quote unquote:

The Nielsen figures also showed some interesting breakdowns across different genres.  Fiction sales in New Zealand had increased by 11 percent with Australia, the only other country across the positive side of the line, with 3 percent growth. […]

However, it would seem New Zealand loses out to Australia in terms of purchase of erotica as indicated by sales of the Fifty Shades trilogy.  In New Zealand 182,000 copies have been sold or one for every 23 people while in Australia the ratio is one book for each 8.5 persons.

Finally, Ian Rankin. He’s back – and so is Rebus. Ian will talk about his new novel Standing in Another Man’s Grave with Craig Sisterson at the Spencer on Byron, 12 November, 7pm. If you get the chance, don’t miss it – he’s great value. I did one of these events with him about 10 years ago for Whitcoulls: just me interviewing him for a bit, Ian reading from the new novel and then we went out for dinner with about a dozen book-trade babes – booksellers, publishers, PR operatives, the lot. He really is a rock star in this world. We had a great time – he’s terrific company, funny and smart and interested in everything – until I had to go home to my wife and three-month-old. Ian disappeared into the night with the book-trade babes, heading for a bar.

Rhetorical eruptions

A guest post by Steve Whitehouse, a founding friend – a funding friend, in fact – of Quote Unquote the magazine, and occasional satirist.

Rhetorical eruptions set to continue, say geologists

Emergency supplies of opinions are being rushed to New Zealand’s main centres following the violent eruption of Mount McLauchlan in the Hauraki Gulf.

An eyewitness on the RNZN survey ship Hooton reports that “giant flashes of viewpoints are illuminating the night sky on matters ranging from quantum physics to early childhood education and the Arab Spring. We’ve also detected traces of Ryanite in the atmosphere, a sure sign that the event is far from over.”

GNS geologist Gordon McCabe said, “Normally the mountain emits about 10 opinions a month, but in the last 24 hours alone it has issued more than 100 points of view. Some of the recent outbursts have registered as high as 5.2 on the Hickey scale. We’ve seen nothing like this since the Muldoonocene extinction nearly 40 years ago”.

The phenomenon appears to have been triggered by a lahar from Lake Boag which caused clouds of sulphuric steam to rise from fissures along the Edwards fault. This in turn seems to have set off Mount McLauchlan. The resulting swarms of outrage have been detected as far away as the Odger Observatory in Hong Kong.

Plumes of belief have risen into the Mora-sphere and are being carried South, blotting out alternative points of view.

In the Wairarapa, the Perigo River has burst its banks. Residents of the hamlet of Coddington have retreated to higher ground and taken shelter in the picturesque Church of St Ayn where they are refusing any government assistance.

In Wellington, frustrated bloggers and commentators have been aimlessly roaming the streets in a desperate attempt to express themselves. A Kedgley-Farrar two-stage rocket has been fired into the upper atmosphere but with no discernible effect.

Meanwhile, the relief comments being issued by the government to fill the vacuum have come under criticism. “They’re just tired, out-of-date, failed ideas from the neo-liberal 1980s which have been stored in a warehouse in Remuera,” said Josie Trotter of the Aro Street Innumeracy Foundation. “What we need is new, evidence-based policies from the 1930s.”

The only part of the country not to have been closed down by the pall of smug is Dunedin where the Auckland eruption has activated an experimental opinion machine designed by Otago University.

“The Flynn-a-tron, which we have installed on the slopes of Dougal Heights, has turned itself on and we don’t know how to turn it off,” said a university spokesman. “It is apparently working its way through the alphabet. It has so far emitted definitive interpretations of subjects starting with Aristotle and, as of yesterday, it had reached Libyan politics and even the Tennessee Valley Authority.”

Attempts to inject irony into the system by Sir Winston Jones have so far failed.