Waikato Times letter of the week #48

From the 14 May edition. Spelling, grammar and punctuation (or lack of it) are all exactly as published.

Running on flat

When the car tyre is flat you take it to the garage and put more air pressure in and in many cars the tyres are unevenly inflated and you feel the car pulling to one side. Now your footwear reacts in a similar way like your car tyre, when you are tired you are in a way running on flat tyres.  You can’t have your footwear inflated but that’s how accidents happen when you are running tired just like a car with a flat tyre in some ways.

The right tyre and the right shoe for the job.

Active footwear for active lifestyles means the shoes that match your lifestyle walking/working or standing still for periods of time.

Overheating – consider that during the summer e.g., over heating of footwear (perspiration) can add to the risk of unnecessary accidents. In sub tropical conditions particularly both feet will produce more than a table spoon of moisture, (perspiration) per hour.)

Footwear plays a insignificant part in almost all daily activities than is commonly appreciated.

Are your shoes running you tired on low and irritable foot pressure?

KEN WELDON

Hamilton  

So here are Phish on Halloween 2010 with Little Feat’s “Sailin’ Shoes”:

1600 pandas in Hongkong

In French, at Fubiz:

L’artiste français Paulo Grangeon, en accord avec la WWF, PMQ et le studio de création allrightsreserved ont proposé la mise en place de 1600 pandas en papier-mâché dans les rues de Hong Kong afin de sensibiliser le public à la perte rapide et tragique de cet animal. Une initiative qui avait déjà été menée dans des villes comme Paris, Rome ou Berlin.

In English, at Artnet:

In fact, the over-the-top cuteness of the embarrassment of pandas (yes, that appears to be the technical term for a group of pandas) is what imbues the piece with such melancholy. As impressive in scope as the work initially appears, Grangeon has only created one statue for every extant panda worldwide. In fact, recent estimates actually peg the panda population at a slightly lower 1,596 bears.

Fubiz says its photos are from Hongkong but – can we rely on a French source? We cannot – most are from Taipei. As is this one, which shows 1600 pandas in front of the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall:

Speaking of Taipei, I have an article in this week’s Listener about the New Zealand publishers at the Taipei International Book Fair a month or three back. It begins:

It’s Friday, another quiet day in Hall 1 at the Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE). According to the digital display at the main entrance, only 4315 people are here – the crowds won’t descend until the weekend. But the publishers are busy enough, showing their books, their frontlists and their backlists, buying and selling rights, renewing contact with old faces and meeting new ones. This February event is Asia’s premier book fair, much more important than Beijing, says Bob Andersen of Wendy Pye’s Sunshine Books. “Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore have all got ...

And there the free preview ends. To read the whole thing, buy a copy or subscribe. The article is circumspect about what went on between publishers and others in the hotel bar but is otherwise, I think, reliable.

I will have an update soon about a New Zealand publisher, cited in the article, selling even more New Zealand books into the Chinese-language market. Globalisation works both ways.

Recipe of the week

A foodie reader emailed to say she likes the blog but there isn’t enough about food on it. So just for her, here is a recipe for peanut butter pavlova with strawberries and cream. It was devised by cookbook author and dessert chef Alice Medrich.

Lauraine Jacobs advises – I am not making this up; I got the recipe from her – using unsweetened peanut butter. Well, yes.

Happy Mothers Day

On literary festivals

Steve Braunias writes in the latest issue of Metro:

Everybody who is anybody in New Zealand literature will be appearing at the May 14-19 Auckland Writers Festival, but I’ve been classified a nobody. Blacklisted, unwanted, eminent non-fiction writer non grata – the festival will just have to stagger along without me. I understand that ticket sales are at an all-time high.

Fortunately I’m always welcome at festivals and various assorted literary events in the provinces, such as Wellington.

I feel Steve’s pain. I, too, have been blacklisted from Auckland this year, for only the second time in the festival’s 14 years. That’s all right – my view of literary festivals is akin  to Noel Coward’s line that “Television is for appearing on, not for looking at.” So, like Steve, I don’t attend literary festivals unless I am speaking.

As I will be later this month at Escape, a literary weekend for the off-year of the Tauranga Arts Festival, a very well-run event with big stars. On Saturday 31 May I will be in conversation for an hour on Saturday with Jo Crabb, author of the food memoir My Two Heavens, and on Sunday 1 June with Dame Fiona Kidman, author of truckloads of books. By way of preparation I have been rereading Fiona’s most recent seven or eight,  and was struck by this passage from her 2009 memoir Beside the Dark Pool, recounting a late-1970s PEN and Writers Guild delegation to the then Prime Minister Robert Muldoon:

His strands of remaining hair were like dark oil slicks on his head, his skin powdery grey. His grin quickly faded as we began our spiel. It was difficult to see why he had agreed to host the delegation as he clearly disliked [Ian] Cross and began to voice contempt for writers in general soon after our arrival. When the subject of advertising was raised, he appeared to inflate himself.

“What’s wrong with advertising?” he shouted. “I like advertising.”

Cross agreed that in terms of revenue it did have a place, but by then Muldoon was riding his own hobby-horse. “I like advertising because I get up and make a cup of tea and stretch my legs during the advertisements.” His finger stabbed the air.

This was hard to counter and besides, the Prime Minister of New Zealand was in full flight, armed guards at each elbow, as his voice rose higher and higher. “Don’t you lot come here telling me what’s good for me!” he yelled. “What this country needs is more exercise and more cups of tea, and how is it going to get that if there aren’t more advertisements on television?”

We will not see his like again. 

Waikato Times sentence of the week

From the front-page lead story in today’s issue:

Social media is abuzz over the mystery of the disappearing ashtrays, after several were stolen from homes in Hamilton, Te Awamutu and Taupo.

Later in the story we read:

Claudelands resident Matthew Johns nearly caught some butt grabbers on his property the other day.

Police say there have been no official reports of stolen ashtrays but they have advised residents to “secure their ashtrays inside, as they would with bikes and shoes”.

So, farewell then, NZ Post Book Awards #2

It’s not often this blog breaks a story and nothing is real until it’s in the MSM but NBR confirms today that NZ Post will end its generous sponsorship of the national book awards – both the children’s and the adults’ – after this year. It’s a $200,000+ deal so impossible to justify for a company in a sunset industry:

The state-owned enterprise, which has been grappling to return its ailing mail business to profit, will give up the naming rights to the book awards at the end of 2014, after sponsoring the adult awards for the last four years, and the children's book prizes since 1996.

Nearly two decades is a very long sponsorship. Can’t complain when it stops. But there is some good news:

Backing for literacy programmes, such as those run by the Howard League, Literacy Aotearoa and Books in Homes will continue.

God knows where Booksellers NZ will find a replacement sponsor for either award. I was a judge for the adult awards five times under three sponsors – Goodman Fielder Wattie in 1993, Montana in 1994 (as convenor),  1999 and 2000 (as convenor) and NZ Post in 2010 (as convenor). I don’t know how/why Wattie became a sponsor, but I do know that the Montana and NZ Post sponsorships were driven by the companies’ then  CEOs, Peter Hubscher and John Allen, who were keen on culture and books especially. Over the years both sets of awards have made a huge contribution.

This is a less sentimental age, and the bottom line rules as never before. I could see a benefit to both Montana and NZ Post in aligning themselves with books – but how many other companies/industries would in 2014? The awards will survive, of course they will, but probably on a smaller scale.

Which is a bugger, frankly, because the bigger-scale awards dinners were always great. I have fond memories of:

1991: the booing, led by Kevin Ireland and enthusiastically joined in by the rest of our table, of the top award to Vol 1 of the NZ Dictionary of Biography. Editor and publisher got the money; the contributors didn’t.

1993: the distinguished novelist who, convinced he would win the big prize, sat beside me and was very chummy before the announcement and after it flounced off  with “Well!” He didn’t speak to me for at least a decade after. Until he wanted something. That’s authors for you.

1994: the distinguished poet who drunkenly propositioned the very proper wife of a judge – a real courtroom judge, not a book awards judge.

1999: poetry award winner Vincent O’Sullivan gracefully gliding across the dance floor with non-fiction winner Heather Nicholson.

2000: me reluctantly introducing the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, an old friend of whom I was protective, to a very pissed publisher who proceeded to set her straight on how she should be running the country.  

2010: the Tuhoe takeover of the event for Judith Binney’s The Encircled Land, and Pip Desmond’s mates coming on stage to sing in celebration of her win for Trust: a true story of women and gangs.  I was stuck on stage behind them and had no idea how long they would take. It must have been terrifying for our outwardly unflappable MC Jennifer Ward-Lealand who had to keep the show running to schedule, but I loved it. Maori as, and especially wonderful in the context of the Langham Hotel and a totally urban Pakeha audience.

Other people will have other memories. I wasn’t present, for example, when academic historian Jamie Belich caused a scene when non-academic historian Michael King won the non-fiction award. Poets, too, have been known to take exception to the ref’s decision.

In whatever form the awards take in 2015 and later, I fervently hope that bad behaviour from authors and publishers will continue. 

What I’m reading #118

If you were wondering which magazine beat Vanity Fair, GQ and New York Magazine in its category in the US National Magazine Awards, it was. . . Modern Farmer, which has published just four issues. Full story here. It looks to be a great magazine and a smart user of the best virtues of hard copy and the internet. My favourite headline is “Jamaican Goat Farmers Threaten Vigilante Justice If Thefts Continue”, just ahead of “Moose Milking in Russia”. And here is a flowchart to help you build the perfect fence.  Seriously, if I was a magazine publisher in NZ I would have a very close look at what Modern Farmer is doing.

Not lost in translation: David Bellos at Asymptote on the brilliance of Barbara Wright’s rendition of one of my favourite books, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Quote unquote:

The work consists of 99 variations, ranging in length from a paragraph to three pages, on the same trivial, futile story of a man who treads on toes in a Paris bus and then some time later gets upbraided for having his overcoat button in the wrong place. The variations play with a range of different literary devices, from rhetorical techniques such as homoteleuton, apocope, and synchysis, to poetical forms (sonnet, haiku, alexandrines), games with language register (pompous, vulgar, bureaucratic), and with languages themselves (Italianisms, sound-translation into English), and to changes in effect (reactionary, apologetic, hesitant). […] It was when she was faced with Queneau’s exercise in hybridized prose—when the object of the exercise was to show French so to speak in bed with Latin, Italian, and English (exercises 70, 81, 83, and 84)—that Barbara followed her own natural and stupendously witty bent. For Queneau’s Anglicism exercise (70), she showed how English can play the same game in a mirror:Un dai vers middai, je tèque le busseis replaced byOne zhour about meedee I pree the ohtobyusse

Staying with the French, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist government’s minister of ecology, sustainable development  and energy, has a more royal than socialist attitude towards her staff. We have all read about her banning other women from displaying cleavage – her party is not big on competition – and requiring staff to stand in her presence. She denies the former but not the latter. Henry Samuel reports that:

When she eats in her private salon, her aides are under strict orders not to use the adjacent corridor as it creates “noise disturbance”. The rule means that access to the canteen is blocked off for ministerial advisors once Miss Royal has entered the salon.

Piketty, Piketty, Piketty. Everyone’s talking about Thomas Piketty and his Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I ploughed through all of Vol 1 of Karl Marx’s Capital for Stage II political philosophy and can’t recommend it, really, for the general reader. I hear a lot from my arts-graduate friends about Piketty’s update but much as I love them, love their work, don’t go changing – they haven’t a clue. I am interested only in what economists have to say. And, boy, do they diverge, as economists do. Matt Nolan gives a comprehensive roundup at TVHE. Here is Paul Krugman. And here is Tyler Cowen:

In perhaps the most revealing line of the book, the 42-year-old Piketty writes that since the age of 25, he has not left Paris, “except for a few brief trips.” Maybe it is that lack of exposure to conditions and politics elsewhere that allows Piketty to write the following words with a straight face: “Before we can learn to efficiently organize public financing equivalent to two-thirds to three-quarters of national income” – which would be the practical effect of his tax plan – “it would be good to improve the organization and operation of the existing public sector.” It would indeed. But Piketty makes such a massive reform project sound like a mere engineering problem, comparable to setting up a public register of vaccinated children or expanding the dog catcher’s office.

And here is the Economist with its own verdict. Quote unquote:

Critics like Mr Cowen and Greg Mankiw, an economist at Harvard University, argue that his recommendations are motivated by ideology more than economics.
Capital does give unduly short shrift to conservative concerns. Mr Piketty glosses over the question of whether attempts to redistribute wealth will weaken growth. He also assumes, rather blithely, that growing inequality leads to instability. Yet that is not always the case: many democracies have managed such challenges without upheaval. Given the masses of data Mr Piketty has assembled, he might profitably have analysed in what circumstances inequality generates conflict. Then again, the success of his book, and the ever-expanding commentary it has provoked, will doubtless inspire others to do so soon. 

And from the Economist’s editorial:

Mr Piketty asserts rather than explains why tempering wealth concentration should be the priority (as opposed to, say, boosting growth). He barely acknowledges any trade-offs or costs to his redistributionist agenda. Most economists, common sense and a lot of French businesspeople would argue that higher taxes on income and wealth put off entrepreneurs and risk taking; he blithely dismisses that. And his to-do list is oddly blinkered in its focus on taxing the rich. He ignores ways to broaden the ownership of capital, from “baby bonds” to government top-ups of private saving accounts. Some capital taxes could sit nicely in a sensible 21st-century policy toolkit (inheritance taxes, in particular), but they are not the only, or even the main, way to ensure broad-based prosperity.Mr Piketty’s focus on soaking the rich smacks of socialist ideology, not scholarship. That may explain why “Capital” is a bestseller. But it is a poor blueprint for action.

For those of us who are mildly interested but will never read the thing, the Spectator provides a handy bluffer’s guide. Quote unquote:

7. ‘One slight problem is that Piketty uses “wealth” and “capital” as interchangeable terms — when of course they are not.’ This shows that, while you applaud Piketty’s argument, you can see its flaws. You’ve obviously read other equally important books.

The nexus of money and music, from genial rock geezer Rick Wakeman:

In 1970 I was up in London looking for session work and Marc Bolan who was a great mate, gave me a session for Get It On. All I had to do was a glissando on the piano. I said to him afterwards, “You could have done that,” and he replied, “Well, you want your rent money don’t you?” Tough times, but when I joined Yes, I went from £18 a week to £50 a week.

The nexus of music and physics: the latest scientific research shows that Miley Cyrus could not, in fact, “come in like a wrecking ball”. Who would have thought? Quote unquote:

David McDonagh, a student at the Centre of Interdisciplinary Science, found that Cyrus would be unable to gather sufficient momentum to have “impacted” on either “love, or the walls of someone’s house”, as the song suggests.McDonagh concludes that Cyrus would need to be travelling at around 316mph to demolish a wall – meaning she would need to be propelled by an outside force.“Based on these findings, it is clear that a human being cannot possess the characteristics of a wrecking ball without sustaining significant injury, and other objects should be sought as an analogy,” he concluded.

So here is Emmylou Harris with “Wrecking Ball”. That’s Daryl Johnson on bass, Brady Blade on drums and Buddy Miller on guitar:

Thomas Keneally and sex

In the 26 April issue of the Spectator, Caroline Moore reviews Thomas Keneally’s new novel Shame and the Captives which is about Japanese PoWs breaking out from a camp in rural New South Wales. Sounds a bit like Vincent O’Sullivan’s play Shuriken about the massacre of Japanese PoWs at a camp in rural Wairarapa. Ms Moore is generally positive about the novel, but then she quotes:  

Within the limits of his everlasting deceit, he answered the unnegotiable kindness of her breasts…

Sometimes I think authors shouldn’t write about sex at all. It would save a lot of embarrassment all round. Manil Suri won the Literary Review’s  Bad Sex in Fiction award for 2013 for this, from his novel The City of Devi:

Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands – only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.

What makes a bestseller?

Max Cryer’s excellent new book Is It True? is #10 on the Booksellers NZ bestseller list for the week ending 26 April – in the International Non-fiction category. Max lives in Auckland and has done so for as long as I can remember. His publisher, Exisle, is based in Waitakere. What’s international about that?

I have grizzled here before about the quirks of these NZ bestseller lists – Nicky Pellegrino lives in Auckland but her novels are counted as International Fiction, because she publishes overseas. Well, yes – but also no.

Another problem with the bestseller lists is that the Nielsen Bookscan data they are based on don’t include sales in Whitcoulls, which is a big chunk of the market, perhaps a quarter. Nor do they include sales to libraries which may, on occasion, be substantial.

Whitcoulls opted out of being included, for unfathomable reasons of their own. So it is not Booksellers NZ’s fault that their bestseller lists don’t give a totally accurate picture of sales. But I can’t understand why Booksellers don’t count Max and Nicky as New Zealand authors. I suspect that if they did, the lists might look a little different some weeks. Well, any time either one of them has a new book out.

Anyway, hooray for Paddy Richardson, in at #10 in the NZ Fiction list this week with her latest novel, Swimming in the Dark. Here is her generous launch speech. Quote unquote:

Swimming in the Dark has been a joy to write. It’s about issues which are very important to me: the way family can be destructive or empowering, the longing for home and the making of home, corruption and the misuse of power and the potential of ordinary people to fight against that and, finally, fear and distrust and the restorative nature of love.

And hooray too for Graeme Lay, whose James Cook’s New World, the second novel in his trilogy about Cook, enters at #8.

Spookily, last July Paddy’s and Graeme’s previous novels were in the Top Ten at the same time, along with Danyl McLauchlan’s Unspeakable Secrets of the Aro Valley. As I boasted then, three novels I’d edited were  not just in the Top Ten but in the Top Five. Less than a year later I have just two in the Top Ten. Obviously losing my touch. Oh well.

So here are Fleetwood Mac in 1969: