What I’m reading #113

Hugh Howey, Wool author, has been spectacularly successful and is a big advocate for self-publishing. This promises to be a lengthy debate, as not everyone in the industry agrees. Well, they would say that at Publishing Perspectives, wouldn’t they. Links there galore. Quote unquote:

Nevertheless, as eyes glaze over and pie-charts turn into metric meringue, it’s possible to wonder whether a debate so heavily focused on unavailable numbers (sales data held secret by the major retailers) is leading us toward author advocacy or into ever deeper arguments about competing suppositions. Sometimes it sounds like this: He said: You’re misinterpreting the estimates! She said: No, you’re mis-estimating the interpretation!

Toby Young proposes a luvvie tax. Well, it makes as much as sense as a Tobin tax. Quote unquote:

I’ve never understood why showbusiness types think their political views should be taken seriously simply by virtue of their fame and fortune. What insight do members of the entertainment industry possess that members of the financial services industry lack? What’s the chain of reasoning here? I’m on telly a lot, therefore I’m wise? You may disagree with the Chancellor’s views about the Financial Transaction Tax, but at least he’s a member of the elected government of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Who elected Bill Nighy to speak for the people of Britain? I mean, apart from Richard Curtis?

Matt Nolan on the Great Supermarket Controversy, initiated by Shane Jones – most relevant Labour MP of the month? – and picked up by the Commerce Commission. Good to hear from an economist on this issue, especially as politicians and journalists never talk about trade-offs. Matt does. Quote unquote:

We feel bad for the wholesaler being bullied by these big companies – understandably! However, if we look at the issue more broadly, their bullying activity may well be reducing the price of some goods and services for the consumer. If we force them to give up their bullying, the consumer then pays a higher price. There are always trade-offs, let’s at least make a slight attempt to remember that – instead of pretending that government ownership will somehow come in and make everything magically better.

Cognitive dissonance alert: I wonder how many people who object to Countdown in Australia giving preference to Australian ingredients and so we should boycott Countdown in New Zealanders (which employs New Zealanders) also argue that in New Zealand we should buy local.

An author interviews his copy-editor. Quote unquote:

Creating style sheets is the secret to catching small errors. I am obsessed with my style sheets. I keep a word list, a character list, a list of places (fictional and real), a chronology, a general style sheet, a list of hyphenated modifiers, and any other list that helps me keep track of everything. I usually fact check as I go, although when I’m pressed for time I make a list of items to look up later, sometimes after I’ve returned the manuscript to the publisher. In those cases, I send a list of corrections that can be added by the production editor to the first pass. (Ha-ha, if someone else wrote this paragraph, I’d query the repeat of “list” — I used it seven times in five sentences.)

Vincent O’Sullivan, Poet Laureate, blogs again. Quote unquote:

One of the luxuries of living in a decent democracy is the liberty to be embarrassed by most contemporary political poetry. […] Mohammed-al-Ajani, a thirty-eight year old Qatari, the father of four children, did not respect the regime that governed him, and that he had no part in choosing. He said so in a poem, a straightforward statement that had none of the subtlety say of Mandelstam's famous poem on Stalin that took him to the camps. In one sense it was the broadest kind of ‘banner poetry’. But he read it aloud, and was sentenced to fifteen years solitary confinement, for conspiring against the state.

Ashleigh Young on the inner voice. Quite unquote:

One of Vygotsky’s theories took shape when he observed children talking to themselves while playing (and I watched my four-year-old niece doing this too, talking to herself with two voices that sounded a lot like Gollum/Smeagol; this was actually quite frightening). Vygotsky proposed that this ‘private speech’ branches out of the dialogue that children have with their parents and caregivers and other kids – but over time, that private speech goes deeper, becomes internalised, to form an inner voice. The outward mutterings turn inwards. As they do so, they become abbreviated, condensed, fragmented. They may not even resemble language at all.

My mother, who will be 89 in a few weeks, says that getting old isn’t for the faint-hearted but the alternative is worse. In the New Yorker, Roger Angell, 93, says:

 “Most of the people my age is dead. You could look it up” was the way Casey Stengel put it. He was seventy-five at the time, and contemporary social scientists might prefer Casey’s line delivered at eighty-five now, for accuracy, but the point remains. We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors, classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. The dead have departed, but gestures and glances and tones of voice of theirs, even scraps of clothing—that pale-yellow Saks scarf—reappear unexpectedly, along with accompanying touches of sweetness or irritation.

On the after-school run earlier this week I stopped at the pedestrian crossing outside the optician's. Miss Nine glanced left and said to Miss Eleven, “See that poster? I would NOT wear THAT lipstick with THOSE glasses.” Fair to say that she doesn’t get her sense of style from her father.

So here are Postmodern Jukebox with Miche Braden on vocals performing Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine”, New Orleans style:

Someone left a cake out in the rain: Taipei edition

In Taipei, young people will queue for an hour and a half in the rain – in Taipei it rains a lot – to get a Krispy Kreme. I have no idea what a Krispy Kreme is but it is obviously disgusting. So why, in this city of great food,  do they queue?

One young person explains: “We like queuing, and this is the latest thing. It is the only store in Taipei – when there are three, we’ll move on to something else.” Ah, the careless rapture of youth.

The Grimethorpe Colliery Band is possibly the best brass band in the world: greatest living composer Harrison Birtwistle has written for them; I bet Ross Harris loves them; you might have seen them in Brassed Off. So here they are  performing Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park”:

John Drinnan: largely irrelevant

John Drinnan, “business writer and media commentator” in the Herald, posted this online today at 1:50pm. It still stands unaltered at 10.30pm:

With the profit focus at TVNZ the Maori unit has been cut of from the rest of the news operation is largely irrelevant to corporate bosses.

I can’t understand why this stuff has to be rushed into, not print, pixels perhaps, without going through the usual process of sub-editing and proofreading. It would take only 30 minutes max. And I can’t understand why something so sub-literate can be allowed to stand visible for our derision for more than eight hours. I bet tomorrow’s print edition gets it right – but it will still have this triumphant concluding sentence:

Now at the start of an election year TVNZ is wallowing in a quagmire of its own making. 

In praise of: Oneroa and Ponsonby Road

The Feb 8-9 edition of the Financial Times has this from Tyler Brûlé, editor-in-chief of Monocle magazine, in a column about “a few inspired businesses spotted on my recent travels”:

Pizza on the beach Those who have always wanted to launch their own food venture but don’t have the capital to secure a lease might want to take a page from the clever Argentines who run a wood-fired pizza truck that pulls up beachside at Oneroa Beach, Waiheke Island, New Zealand. Dragonfired serves an array of pizzas with excellent dough. Not only does the whole operation get around many problems with licensing and assorted overheads, it also has the ability to show up at festivals, follow the sun and, perhaps most importantly, easily scale up if the business properly takes off.
Record store/restaurant One of the best retail businesses I have come across is the little Conch Records enclave in Ponsonby, Auckland. It is a mixture of CDs, vinyl, good coffee and excellent food served in a tiny covered courtyard. Having gradually spread the risk by moving from physical music to excellent food, Conch is a business I’ve always thought should spread around the Pacific Rim and beyond.

Happy birthday, Madama Butterfly

Home Paddock reminds us that today is the 110th anniversary of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which had its first performance at La Scala on 17 February 1904. It wasn’t well received then, but is now one of the ten most performed operas in the world.

When I was a child, television was different from how it is now. As was childhood. One rainy afternoon I was home alone, aged maybe 12, and  Madama Butterfly was on TV. Black and white, obv. It was a black soprano in the title role, so must have been Leontyne Price. Life-changing. A year or so later I heard Tina Turner, and then Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight. It is still all the same to me.  

I can’t find anything on YouTube from that movie but here is Mirella Freni in the title role with Placido Domingo, Christa Ludwig and Karajan conducting.  I prefer Freni with Sinopoli conducting but, hey, internet thieves can’t be choosers.      

What I’m reading #112

Why writers are the worst procrastinators. Quote unquote:

If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good. Before you take to the keys, you are Proust and Oscar Wilde and George Orwell all rolled up into one delicious package. By the time you’re finished, you’re more like one of those 1940’s pulp hacks who strung hundred-page paragraphs together with semicolons because it was too much effort to figure out where the sentence should end.

The new issue of the Listener has an editorial about the book trade and where we buy our books. Quote unquote:

New Zealanders are buying fewer books, and when they do purchase a paperback, glossy art title or e-book, more are using overseas websites. The end of independent bookshops has long been predicted. Are we now in the middle of the end?

Lincoln Gould, CEO of Booksellers NZ, responds. Quote unquote:

Current evidence and trends, especially out of the United States, point to medium and smaller bookshops that focus on meeting the needs of their local communities and customers  are more likely to survive than big chains that have turned themselves into “gift shops”.

Bernard Porter in the Literary Review on Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth about the Nordic Miracle:

Booth starts with Denmark because he lives there – his wife is Danish and their children study at Danish schools. That gives him an insight into the country that doesn't quite extend to the others, which he has merely visited and researched, his views of them perhaps coloured by his experiences of Denmark. (I would have the same problem. I live in Sweden; when I visit the other Nordic countries I see them through Swedish eyes, and behind them British ones.) He is at pains to point out how different they all are, and how scathing each nation is of the others. I can vouch for that. You should hear my partner on the Danes. She’s going to love some of the ammunition provided here. Can it really be true that ‘seven per cent of Danish men have had sex with an animal’? (Not the same one, surely.)

This could be the future: the University of Central Lancashire offers an MA in self-publishing. Quote unquote:

Williams said the self-publishing degree was created because of the intense demand for it, and prospective students are already applying. It will not be a creative writing course, she said, and will focus more on the production and business aspects of writing, through a mix of lectures and workshops with industry experts.

Fair enough, but an MA?

David Thompson on more agonies of the left, this time to do with serving dinner. Seriously, someone at the Guardian writes:

I felt like my wife was offering to perpetuate the very sexist ways that women have and continue to supply invisible and undervalued labour. And I wanted no part in that.

Also:

I'm not sure what my wife and I are supposed to do for each other based on prevailing gender norms and what the outside world expects of us.

I’m sure we all feel his anxiety about prevailing gender norms. I’ll raise it at the school drop-off in the morning with farmers Shane and Tommy, shearer Dean and Kelly the auctioneer.

Joe Hildebrand on Adelaide:

If Sydney is the girl who offers you a one-night stand and Melbourne is the girl you marry, then Adelaide is the special friend with whom you do crosswords on a Sunday afternoon and lazily wonder if maybe you might end up together one day.

Current listening, John Grant’s Queen of Denmark. Gloriously miserable, best gay break-up album I’ve heard. Sample lyric, from “Chicken Bones”:

I got out of bed this morning, noticed that it didn’t have a right side.

The chorus starts:

Some day is just chicken bones,
you'd better fuck off now,
you'd better leave me alone,
cos I'm about to explode
just like a Wonder Bread mom.

Also the chorus of his song “Sigourney Weaver” is to the tune of “Freebird”, so is 50 shades of awesome:

JD Salinger and me in Taipei

Nihao. Am just back from a week in Taipei. Loved it. Can’t write about it here because contracted to elsewhere for money so am not giving it away, not even for you, but here is a photo from my new favourite bookshop, Eslite:

And this was the view from my window at the Home Hotel (totally recommend it) of Taipei 101, which at 509 metres was the tallest building in the world until Dubai built the 828-metre Burj Khalifa:

More to come in the Listener. 

Gong Xi Fa Cai

No blogging for a week as I’m off in the morning to Taiwan for the Taipei International Book Exhibition, the Asia-Pacific equivalent of the Frankfurt Book Fair and the fourth biggest after Frankfurt, London and the one in the US. Sadly, my Mandarin is rusty and my Taiwanese is non-existent. Wish me luck.

I am temporarily to be a journalist for the Listener, if I can remember how to do that, and am also required to send back daily gossip items for PANZ. I knew that those years I spent at Metro on the Felicity Ferret column would pay off eventually.

So here, introduced by Kenny Everett, are Hot Gossip in the early 80s dancing to “Satisfaction” as recorded by the Rolling Stones in 1965. You know it makes sense and it’s all in the best possible taste:

What I’m reading #111

The Economist decided to put a figure-skating Vladimir Putin on the cover of its new issue: “What better way to depict the Russian president’s predilection for self-promotional stunts, of which the winter Olympics in Sochi is merely the most prominent example?”

There was just one little problem: the New Yorker had much the same idea. Quote unquote:

So we considered switching our cover to show Mr Putin engaging in a different winter sport, such as skiing or ice hockey. But without the camp flamboyance of ice-skating, it just wasn't as funny. Moreover, Mr Putin has recently been photographed skiing and playing ice hockey in Sochi, which reduces the scope for satire. Indeed, the Russian diva-in-chief's outlandish antics (driving racing cars, demonstrating judo moves, swimming bare-chested in Siberian rivers, piloting fire-fighting planes, tranquilising tigers, discovering Greek vases underwater) are making it increasingly difficult to create an image of Mr Putin that is obviously satirical. Perhaps that is his aim.

In the London Review of Books, Adam Mars-Jones reviews Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, a literary biography of Philip Roth. Quote unquote:

Portnoy’s Complaint is a book that is somehow protected by its own indefensibility. It’s so obviously going all-out to cause offence that offence seems ruled out as a reaction. (It’s rather satisfying that the most un-PC book imaginable, though written before political correctness was a trend, should have PC as its initials.) 

At the Dim-Post, Danyl McLauchlan reviews Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, and finds it wanting. Quote unquote:

Can a book with several extended sequences so dull they’re essentially unreadable really be a masterpiece, even if some of the other passages are sublime? Or do people who praise it so highly do so partly as an act of signaling to display that they’ve read a very long, very difficult work of literature?

At White Sun of the Desert, my favourite oil-industry-and-hedonism blog, Tim Newman reports that he is learning French. He has to, because he lives in France now. Surprisingly, knowing Russian has helped. Quote unquote:

It’s funny how many French words spill over into not only English (which is well known), and Russian (slightly less well known) but also Welsh.  The French word for church is “eglise”, and in Welsh it’s “eglwys” (pronounced “eg-loise” for my readers who didn’t learn Welsh at school).  I assume the French-speaking Normans introduced the concept of a church to the Welsh, who hitherto were worshipping local rugby players and shagging sheep. 

For anyone tempted to take the Daily Mail seriously as a news source, Jon Danzig offers a thorough fisking of its reporting on the impending flood of Romanian immigrants. It seems the Mail not only made up the numbers, it also made up its interviewees. Quote unquote:

Claim 12: Another, at coach firm Balkan Horn, said: ‘It is very busy, many people want to travel to England, especially with the change in EU rules. But everything is booked up, it’s hard to get there.’

Balkan Horn deny any knowledge of ever talking with the Daily Mail, and say they would never have given such a quote as it wouldn’t have been true; there were seats available on their buses to London, and no increased demand because of the change in EU rules.  In fact, demand for bus journeys to England had gone down.

The recent death of singer/songwriter Pete Seeger has had reverential coverage. Here are two alternative views, one from Stephen Mihm praising his entrepreneurial skills that made him millions, and one from Mick Hartley that questions the whole folkie programme and refers us to a Rian Malan piece alleging plagiarism. Quote unquote:

The Weavers’ appeal was inexplicable to folk purists, who noted that most of their songs had been around forever, in obscure versions by blacks and rednecks who never had hits anywhere.What they failed to grasp was that Seeger and his comrades had managed to filter the stench of poverty and pig shit out of the proletarian music and make it wholesome and fun for Eisenhower-era squares.

Frederic Filloux on French print-media companies, in a 19 January report that possibly has implications for non-French print-media companies, says that “Two weeks ago, with a transaction that reset the value of printed assets to almost nothing, the French market for newsmagazines collapsed for good.” Read on for the financial horror show.  Quote unquote:

The case of Le Nouvel Observateur is the perfect example. This iconic magazine of the French social democrats perfectly fits the picture of a nursing home where residents don’t do much while waiting for the unavoidable end.

Happy new year to all my Chinese readers. My horse-mad daughters are delighted by this year’s animal. But Brian Pigeon has issues:

Back in 2007 I raised the issue that every other animal has its own Chinese year, so why not a pigeon? I brought it up again in 2011 when it was the rabbit’s turn, and still no year. I mean we’re talking rat, ox, pig, rooster, the list goes on. 2014 is, I’ve just discovered, the year of the horse. A fucking horse? Since when has a horse been able to fly using hedges for navigation? Or carried messages for hundreds of miles whilst being shot at by enemy fire? And when was the last time a horse wrote a decent song or some poignant poetry? Thought so.

Fair point. Still, it is the year of the horse, so here is a song about horses. No, not Patti Smith, not America, but Eddie Vedder. The backing band is pretty sloppy but they manage:

 

Sentence of the day #2

Danyl McLauchlan in the comments on his post about Cunliffe’s recent snafu:

And maybe Labour should stop liquidating senior staff whenever they change leaders so they get to retain some institutional knowledge in their party?