What I’m reading #131

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani enthuses that:

Garth Risk Hallberg’s “City on Fire” is a big, stunning first novel and an amazing virtual reality machine, whisking us back to New York City in the 1970s […] Despite being overstuffed, it’s a novel of head-snapping ambition and heart-stopping power — a novel that attests to its young author’s boundless and unflagging talents.

At The Awl, Carmen Petaccio lists “The 50 Most Unacceptable Sentence in City on Fire, in order”, starting with:

50: “Just then, a horripilating Scaramouche appeared at her elbow.”
49. “Detonations crash in from nearby like the walls she’s a void at the center of.”
48. “Every time a truck passed the frayed ends of the wine’s wicker sleeve trembled like the needles of some exquisite seismometer.”

You see where we’re heading? Towards:

44. “She seemed to want to retract any extension of herself, to become a move-less white egg.”

Yes, that is only #44. The full list is here. The top 20 are quite something, but the top 10 are really special.

Have you ever heard Virginia Woolf? Now, thanks to the Paris Review,  you can. Here are seven minutes and 39 seconds of her talking about “Craftmanship”:

To my ears, she sounds like Brian Sewell. If I may quote Quote Unquote:

Brian Sewell is an English art critic of a certain age and a certain disposition. My painter friends will be horrified by my confession that I have always enjoyed his writing. I did know that he spoke in the most affected accent ever, one that makes the Queen sound common, but had no means of sharing this. Until now. Don’t miss the second page. Click fast enough on different links and you get a wonderful sequence that makes as much sense as most contemporary art criticism. Try his “Liverpool” and “Hungarian art”. Then “White eunuch” and “Sliced cucumber”, in that order. 

After reading the recent biography by Jonathan Bates, CK Stead considers Ted Hughes and, among other things, his infidelities:

And when Bate, seeming to follow hints from Hughes, suggests ‘his infidelity to others was a form of fidelity to [Plath]’, I felt there was something shabby either about the poet, or his biographer, or perhaps both. Not that sexual fidelity is a necessary moral principle; but to make it a principle observed by non observance seems devious in the extreme.

My father was an RAF navigator/bomb-aimer. After the war he achieved many things but, like his friend Les Munro of the Dambusters raid, for some reason he never got around to writing romance novels. Happily, that gap in the market for romance novels by former Lancaster bomber aircrew has been filled by Bill Spence, who has recently published his 25th novel as Jessica Blair. Quote unquote: 

“After the war there wasn’t much call for a bomb-aimer. I spent a while with the RAF after the war, and never really got into teaching. I was bitten by the writing bug.”

After publishing short stories and articles for newspapers and magazines, Bill released his first book in 1959. Dark Hell was a war novel which drew on his experiences. He chose one of his middle names for his byline of Duncan Spence, and began a writing career that has seen him adopt many different guises.

“After the first novel, I really wanted to get into Westerns,” he says. “I wrote under the names Jim Bowden, Floyd Rogers and Kirk Ford, and did 30-odd Westerns.”

So, after the war novel came 30 Westerns and then 25 romance novels. That’s 56 novels in 57 years. Makes the rest of us look pretty silly.

Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times explains how journalists should respond to advertisers, in this case Hewlett Packard, who are “disappointed” with a story and threaten to withdraw their advertising. This happened at Metro in the 1980s. Air New Zealand was annoyed by a big story and cancelled all advertising for – I can’t remember, maybe two years. This was a big deal because it was a small magazine dependent on advertising but we had Warwick Roger as an editor and the owners weren’t a multinational but were brave locals so the attitude was: “Get fucked.”

Kellaway’s first response was mild. She reconsidered, and sent a politely blistering (how English!) follow-up. Quote unquote:

You say the FT management should think about “unacceptable biases” and its relationship with its advertisers. My piece was not biased and I fear you misunderstand our business model. It is my editors’ steadfast refusal to consider the impact of stories on advertisers that makes us the decent newspaper we are.

Camille Paglia – she’s back! – on Hillary Clinton and Gloria Steinem after the New Hampshire vote:

Despite emergency efforts by Gloria Steinem, the crafty dowager empress of feminism, to push a faltering Hillary over the finish line, Sanders overwhelmingly won women’s votes in every category except senior citizens. Last week, when she told TV host Bill Maher that young women supporting the Sanders campaign are just in it to meet boys, Steinem managed not only to insult the intelligence and idealism of the young but to vaporize every lesbian Sanders fan into a spectral non-person.

Steinem’s polished humanitarian mask had slipped, revealing the mummified fascist within. I’m sure that my delight was shared by other dissident feminists everywhere. Never before has the general public, here or abroad, more clearly seen the arrogance and amoral manipulativeness of the power elite who hijacked and stunted second-wave feminism.

We may get to evaluate Ms Steinem for ourselves later this year if the rumours are true that she will visit New Zealand and speak.

So here is Gloria Gaynor with rollerskates:

Book advertisement of the month

From the February 2016 issue of the Literary Review, a full-page ad, page 7, facing the Contributors* list on page 6, which is a hi-visibility spot:

I think if it was my ₤2940 I would have included a direct link to the Amazon page where one could buy the Kindle book, but what do I know?

That missing link is here: it tells us nothing about the author but does reveal what the book is about:

Is Chris the founder of a new religion, the reviver of an old religion or is he stark, staring bonkers. Find out as the sun worshipper stumbles his way through a maze of religious, classical and literary allusions that are finely woven into the tapestry of the book.

 Well, good luck with that. It worked for Dan Brown.

Elsewhere in this issue John Adamson of Cambridge University reviews The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History by Peter H Wilson; historian Andrew Roberts reviews Churchill and Ireland by Paul Bew; medical and social history author Wendy Moore reviews When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi; and Keith Miller of the Daily Telegraph reviews The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. That’s just what’s online. They aren’t mad – they don’t give it all away.

Possibly my favourite in this issue is the review by Michael Burleigh, “CEO of the City political risk consultants Sea Change Partners” of The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S Abraham. Quote unquote:

Environmentalists often deplore the physical and human damage caused by promiscuous mining. Yet their desire for more green vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines is precisely what is driving increased mining of rare metals, which are used in permanent magnets that drive the motors and lithium batteries that store the energy.

*The Contributors list is not usually a hi-visibility page for a magazine, but with the Literary Review I always look at who the writers are because they are so good: many are academics of whom one has never heard, and/but write beautifully. As do the novelists, historians, biographers and the rest. Possibly the best-written magazine in the world.

Waikato Times letter of the week #63

From the edition of Wednesday 10 February. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times.

Show some leadership

Prime Minister John Key needs to establish some form of management over his minders. His leadership has hit a snag centred on Waitangi. Waitangi is known for much civil disquiet with much exposure of matters of serious concern to Maori. This year is not very different from other years and there are many concerns Maori need addressing. Mr Key would have served New Zealand better if he had focused his address on matters that are progressing that will aid Maori and the nation. The signing of the TPP agreement would have been more appropriate had it been kept secret and signed in some more secret location. Perhaps in Hawaii were the Union Jack is safely part of the state flag.

Barry Ashby
Raglan

This little piggy went to market

Before social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and whatever the young people use, authors had to promote themselves in other ways. I have no data on the success of this one:

The caption reads:

The Author in Fancy Dress as a Side of Bacon, designed by himself, which took the First Prize of Forty Guineas at the Covent Garden Fancy Dress Ball, April 1894

If I were a carpenter

I suppose this is the future of publishing: crowdsourcing. How depressing. The NZ Book Council’s Booknotes Unbound reports:

This Mother’s Day New Zealanders are being invited to become a part of Penguin Classics history.
Penguin Random House has been supporting mums around the world for more than 80 years, from pregnancy advice and bedtime stories, to homework help and ‘mum time’ escapism.
This year, New Zealanders are invited to become a part of Penguin Classics history, by having their messages to their mums published and immortalised in a heartfelt collection, titled Thanks Mum: A Kiwi Celebration.
Written by the New Zealand public for New Zealand mums, this limited edition book will be the ultimate thank you to Kiwi mums nationwide.
For the chance to have your message published, visit thanksmum.co.nz to submit your entry online.
Successful entries will be hand-picked and those published will receive a copy of Thanks Mum, to gift in time for Mother’s Day, 8 May 2016.
Submissions close 29th February 2016.

I hope it does well for them, but if I were an editor I would insert a comma into that title. On the other hand, if I were a carpenter like my friend Dean I would have a steady, well-paying job and be booked up a year in advance.

So here is Robert Plant in 1993 with Tim Hardin’s song “If I Were a Carpenter”, a hit for Bobby Darin in 1966, the Four Tops in 1968 and, on the country charts, Johnny Cash and June Carter in 1970 (on YouTube, live in Sweden, here):

Waikato Times letter of the week #62

From the edition of Monday 2 February. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times.

Donald Trump

Has Donald trumped Donald Trump? His backing by Sarah Palin must put a huge amount of faith in the statement written on all their paper money notes.

Donald has not as yet claimed he can walk on water.

Except somewhere in Alaska when water is frozen. There will be no need or use for another Ark if he becomes president.

Barry Ashby

Raglan

Waikato Times letter of the week #61

From the edition of Thursday 28 January. This seems a very Waikato letter, and has perhaps the best-ever heading of any letter to the Waikato Times. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed. 

Hamilton is no Madrid

I was kind of revolted to find that it now costs an average of $200 a week to rent a one-bedroom concrete block flat in a block of concrete block flats in Hamilton.

You could live in Madrid – or Athens, if you felt like slumming it – for less.

Perhaps I’m the one at fault, but I can’t see how Hamilton stacks up quite so magnificently next to either of them.

But, apparently, it does.

At a rental cost equivalent to 40kg of milk solids a week, the property farmers must be doing something right.

Moo.

Katherine Delaney

Hamilton  

What I’m reading #130

My theory of magazines is that they live and die, rise and fall, on the quality of their columnists. The NZ Listener has Jane Clifton, Diana Wichtel and Bill Ralston; Quote Unquote had Bill Manhire,

Kevin Ireland, Stephanie Johnson and Nigel Cox. Currently, the Spectator has the best columnists of any weekly: Jeremy Clarke, Rod Liddle, Tanya Gold, Martin van der Weyer, Deborah Ross, Rory Sutherland and a bunch of others. I would read it for any one of them. Writers like this are why one keeps reading a magazine. The columnists are the spine, the structure; the cover story is the cladding.

I came across this book, pictured above, My Week: the secret diaries of almost everyone (The Robson Press, 2013) by Spectator columnist Hugo Rifkind. It is very funny. He started writing these pieces for The Times in 2006. Totally random – honest – sample:

Barack Obama 10 November 2012:
MONDAY
Today is a portentous day. For today is the day that may be the day before the day that America decides, on a fine autumn day, that there may be another day when the man who stands before you today as…
“Honey?” says Michelle.” You’re kinda raving again .”

Wouldn’t it be good if a New Zealand satirist could develop this idea from 2006?

More on the singular they, as discussed here previously, also here and here. I first heard it on The Archers, on the wireless some time in the 1960s, when a character was trying to avoid specifying the sex of the person she was talking about, and I thought: “That’s useful.” What else matters other than usefulness? The American Dialect Society chose it for 2015’s Word of the Year, for a different reason. Well, a different usefulness reason. Quote unquote:

While editors have increasingly moved to accepting singular they when used in a generic fashion, voters in the Word of the Year proceedings singled out its newer usage as an identifier for someone who may identify as “non-binary” in gender terms.
“In the past year, new expressions of gender identity have generated a deal of discussion, and singular they has become a particularly significant element of that conversation,” Zimmer said. “While many novel gender-neutral pronouns have been proposed, they has the advantage of already being part of the language.”

If you have been following the strange case of the Hollywood actor Sean Penn interviewing the Mexican psychopath El Chapo, aka Shorty, aka Joaquin Guzman Loera, here’s how Hugo Rifkind described one of them in 2012:

He’s a spoon-faced humourless self-loathing pseudo-socialist twit, sure, but he’s not a moron.

This by Gerard McBurney is the best piece on the late Pierre Boulez I’ve seen – love his music, saw him conduct the Ensemble Contermporain in Wellington in 1988 (Birtwistle, Boulez and Donatoni, from memory) but had no idea he was so funny. Quote unquote:

I was escorting him to a restaurant. The rest of the company had moved swiftly, but he was walking slowly, tired after rehearsal. Someone had told me on no account to mention Messiaen. So I did, and he immediately laughed, stopped and looked at me like a schoolboy preparing a whoopee cushion for a grownup.
“Ah, Messiaen, he is for me a big problem … [dramatic pause] The religion … [another pause, shrugged shoulders, and louder] The birds … [louder still, hands raised and in tones of pantomimic horror] Aand … my God … the ORGAN!” There was no doubt which of these three shockers was the worst.
I said I’d been inspired by his performances of Messiaen in London. He looked at me sideways. “Yes, there are some pieces of his I will do. But Turangalîla ... Never! For me this piece is … you know … a kind of Bernini of the suburbs!”

Matthew Sweet in Intelligent Life on the Abba Museum in Stockholm and their one song in the past-modal perfect tense. Quote unquote:

The sceptical eye might dismiss it as the unlovely detritus of Europop – a subterranean fire-trap of hen-night kitsch. But this would be to underestimate the semiotic thickness of ABBA’s art – and trust me, you really wouldn’t want to do that. The artefacts on display evoke, sometimes painfully, the band’s personal and artistic trajectory: the vanishing grins, the collapsing marriages, the tour-bus melancholia, their progress towards that bleak and clear-eyed final album, “The Visitors” – their Winterreise. It’s true that ABBA lyrics sometimes exhibit errors familiar to EFL teachers around the world (“since many years I haven’t seen a rifle in your hand,” says the narrator of “Fernando”) but who else could have produced a song like their last recorded work, “The Day Before You Came” – an account of joy measured in the minutiae of depression, and possibly the only pop song ever written in the past-modal perfect tense? (“I’m sure I had my dinner watching something on TV,” reflects Agnetha. “There’s not, I think, a single episode of ‘Dallas’ that I didn’t see.”)

So here are Abba with perhaps their saddest song, sung by Agnetha, their farewell:

NZ Listener letter of the month #1

There have been no Waikato Times letters of the month for a while, because the paper hasn’t  published any over the holidays: normal service will resume shortly. So while we’re all waiting, here is one from the 23 January issue of the Listener:

Celebrating End to Tariffs

The Listener wonders why New Zealanders are not dancing in the streets at the World Trade Organisation’s announced removal of food-export barriers (Editorial, January 16). There are many reasons. […]

Economist Milton Keynes pointed out that exporting means giving up assets of real value in exchange for unreliable money, so should be limited by sensible domestic economies. […]

Gavin Maclean

(Cullerlie, Gisborne)

So here is a concert from Milton Keynes: two hours of Metallica in 1993, kicking off with “Creeping Death”.

Corbyn, Tchaikovsky and Hello Sailor

I wish I still had my poster of Hello Sailor in, I think, 1975 or 1976, playing a benefit for Gay Lib in Auckland University’s cafeteria. It was a great gig: the poster featured a louche young gentleman in a lounge chair wearing a dressing gown and wielding a cigarette holder, beneath the legend “Relax With a Fag”. This behaviour was illegal in New Zealand then and for another 10 years until, thanks to Labour MP Fran Wildse advocacy, 1986’s Homosexual Reform Act. It is because of things like this that those of us who despair of today’s party wish Labour well but…

From the Economist’s Bagehot column of 2 January on England’s Labour Party:

Mr Corbyn’s leadership should force his moderate MPs to take on a reality that even Mr Blair ducked: Labour has always been two parties, one social democratic and the other anti-capitalist. Over the years it has muddled through, as concessions, feints and tactical battles have postponed a decisive confrontation. No longer: as Mr Corbyn bears down on the moderates, they will have to decide whether to push back, concede the party to him or quit—en masse, not in a dribble, as did their predecessors in 1981 when Labour last swung left—and form a new party.

Yes. One wishes Labour well, but…

Above we see, via Composers Doing Normal Shit, the composer Peter Tchaikovsky relaxing with a fag. I wonder if, by any chance, he could be related to Jeremy Corbyn, below:

So here are Hello Sailor at the Whiskey A Go Go in c1979 with “Blue Lady”. I had no idea this was on YouTube until reading pp 175-6 of Dave McArtney’s memoir Gutter Black. The band sound pretty much as they did at the Globe Tavern in Auckland the year before, i.e. awesome: