Money for writers

Breaking news from Copyright Licensing: applications are now open for a new $25,000 award for writers of non-fiction, including those who write for the education sector.

Applicants must be New Zealand citizens or permanent residents and writers of proven merit, and the resulting work should be likely to be accepted by a publisher. Applications should include:

 an outline of the proposed work, including a chapter outline.

 a statement as to how the proposed work will add to the body of work already published on the subject or to the genre

 if a biography or work relating to Maori, please indicate how the subject of the biography and/or their descendants and/or iwi will be consulted and involved in the research and publication of the book

 the names of referees. This is particularly important for applicants with limited or no history of being published

 expressions of interest from publishers etc. (Up to 4 pages; letters from publishers allowed in addition – up to 2 pages)

 a sample of writing from the proposed work (no less than 5 and not exceeding 10 pages). If a sample of alternative work is offered instead, it must be written in a style that same as that proposed for the project;

 a curriculum vitae with a list of main published works (no more than 3 pages).

Applications must be received by 4 p.m. on Thursday 23 June.  The winner will be announced in September. Full details and application forms etc are here.

Winner for Best First Book of non-fiction at the Ockham NZ Book Awards last night was Melissa Matutina Williams for Panguru and the City. She was a CLNZ Writers Award winner in 2011. Auspicious!

New adventures in punctuation and spelling

On 25 April John Drinnan, the NZ Herald’s former media columnist, started a new blog (which shows how much he knows about media). A horrified journalist friend sent me the link to this item about Hilary Barry. It is a beautiful illustration of why God gave journalists sub-editors.

Hype about Hilary leaving MediaWorks is the backdrop to the crisis that led to the exit of Mark Weldon and is very relevant because her resignation brought maters to a head. No doubt “the mate of the nation” has a story to tell on her reasons for leaving, but so far she has not told. Maybe the juicy bits will come out in a woman’s magazine feature in the future. With limited facts media have pulled out woman’s magazine gush.

Maters to a head. Woman’s magazine. Serious new adventures in spelling there.

Wait, there is more:

But if you look at the viewer numbers, you would conclude that Wendy Petrie is much more “:beloved” than Hilary Barry.

A new adventure in punctuation, that “:beloved”. Perhaps it is an emoticon.

I get the Judy Bailey “Mother of the Nation.” thing. From my memory very kiwi tongue-in cheek kiwi kind of way. (Maybe a readers can tell me who first used the line)

Yes, he wrote and published “very kiwi tongue-in cheek kiwi” and “a readers” and couldn’t be arsed putting a full stop at the end of the next sentence.

I know, I know, fish in a barrel. We also get:

with just one months notice

and

Earlier this week one online entertainment reporter this week put hands on hips and declared ” if you don’t love Hilary Barry its because you have not been paying attention.”

The case for sub-editors rests.

So here are REM in 200, live in Wiesbaden, with “So Fast, So Numb” from their 1996 album New Adventures in Hi-Fi:

Waikato Times letter of the week #65

From the edition of Saturday 7 May. As always, spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato Times. Also contains the saddest word for any follower of the WaikTimes letters page: “Abridged”.

Soil gives life

Amazing nature – we all automatically respect space rockets going to the moon and space travel but what if the same amount of funding and time spent on soil development.

The world is looking for the answer in space to solve the world problems like the planet Mars and Venus to boost world food production among other mineral prospects and military advantages.

While space scientists are developing space travel they may find that soil development is where they should be looking. It’s so easy to understand rockets and space exploration but give little thought to the wonders from the soil we benefit so much from on earth. The world’s scientific wonders are in soil and we should recognise the daily wonders of the very soil that feeds us under all conditions. Soil development is the misunderstood and neglected scientific wonder we have right here on earth.

The world needs soil development – it’s never been studied or researched by the United Nations as the important issue it is. It should be introduced as a major development programme. Make soil development a world research programme before it becomes a world issue. Gardening and growing plants for eating or housing trees means mother nature is hard to equal. Science and nature are both producing wonders.

(Abridged)

Ken Weldon
Hamilton

What I'm reading #134

Whenever I buy a book on New Zealand literature I check to see that it has an index, because otherwise it is useless as a work of reference. This is the mark of a good book.

Next, I check to see that I am in the index. This is the mark of a very good book. Bill Manhire’s Doubtful Sounds and Rachel Barrowman’s Maurice Gee: Life and Work score highly. How, I wondered, would Judith Dell Panny’s Let the Writer Stand: the work of Vincent O’Sullivan fare?

Not too badly, I am happy to report.

It has an index. Good.

I am in it. Very good. 

I turn to page 7 and OMG, Chapter One begins with a quote from me nominating Vincent to become Poet Laureate in 2014:

What astonishes is the sustained vigour, wit, technical facility, emotional range and, increasingly warmth. … We have cerebral poets, amusing poets, inventive poets, political poets, sensitive poets – but no one else who does it all.

 So the first words in the book are mine. Happy to waive royalties.

The other stuff I am reading is the winners of the Ockham Book Awards, the artist formerly known as the Montana Book Awards and more recently the NZ Post Book Awards. I know who the winners are. They don’t. 

This is in preparation for the highlight of this year’s Auckland Writers Festival, me interviewing the four winners on-stage for an hour next week, on Friday the 13th. Given the date, what could possibly go wrong?

An editor writes

Here is something I prepared earlier for the Spinoff. Also contains, thrillingly, a drawing by Steve Braunias.

The intro reads:

One of New Zealand’s best and most illustrious book editors, Stephen Stratford (“I am a polite person, mostly”), vents about having to deal with writers and publishers.

Help I’m a Rock #2

The previous post about Tracey Emin marrying a rock asked, “I wonder how the rock feels about this. Will no one consider the rocks?”

Rocks have feelings too. Maybe not all of them, but some do. Basalt not so much, probably, or granite, but at Amazon a large, Italian, maritime rock named Jamie considers the book How to Avoid Huge Ships (Cornell Maritime Pr/Tidewater Pub., 1993) by John W. Trimmer and gives it 3 out of 5 stars:

Good Advice For Most Readers, But Doesn’t Cover All The Bases

There is one major oversight in this generally well-written book, and that is that it addresses animate readers exclusively. As a large rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the coast of Giglio Island, I have recently been confronted with instances in which avoiding huge ships was of fundamental interest to my personal well-being. However, the methods presented in Capt. Trimmer’s book were none too useful in my efforts to avoid huge ships, as I was recently struck by a very large ship indeed, a cruise vessel called the ‘Costa Concordia’. I think the ship came off slightly worse in the exchange, but the experience was disruptive to my afternoon and rather jarring. In a situation such as this, Capt. Trimmer’s advice would have been immensely beneficial to humans, fish, seabirds, and other animals, but I am none of those things. I’m a big rock. I can’t zig-zag or duck and cover. Rocks don’t do that. I’ve tried. I tried some time ago to scoot over to the left a bit to get some better sunlight, and it took me three thousand years! That’s not fast enough to avoid even the slowest huge ships. It is for precisely this reason that I would advise Capt. Trimmer to augment this edition with a section intended for readers like me—perhaps “How To Avoid Huge Ships If You Are A Rock, Iceberg, Or Coral Reef”. There is an audience out there for this, Capt. Trimmer, and I assure you it would be well worth your time and effort.

Help I’m a Rock

The Art Newspaper reports that “last summer, under an olive tree in her garden in France and wearing her father’s white funeral shroud”, Tracey Emin, professor of drawing at the Royal Academy 2011-13 (above: Trying to Find You 1, 2007), married a rock. Not a rock star, a rock. Quote unquote:

You formed a union with a stone outside your studio in the south of France last summer. What does this mean to you?

It just means that at the moment I am not alone; somewhere on a hill facing the sea, there is a very beautiful ancient stone, and it’s not going anywhere. It will be there, waiting for me.

I wonder how the rock feels about this. Slightly used? Will no one consider the rocks?

So here are Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention with “Help, I’m a Rock” from their 1966 – 50 years ago on 27 June – debut album Freak Out!, the first double album in rock but not the last, oh no:

What I’m reading #133

For the last two weeks I have mostly been reading three novels by JRR Tolkein. You might have heard of them. Kind of a trilogy. As in the recent post about a week spent reading three books by Stephen Fry, this was for work, not for pleasure. I also had to watch the DVDs of Peter Jackson’s movie version of the trilogy. The extended editions.

I expected the Jackson movies to be tedious, but I had completely forgotten how awful the Tolkein novels are. I loved them when I was a teenager , which just goes to show what terrible judgement teenagers have. 

Not quite an interview with, more an observation of, legendary journalist Clare Hollingworth. She did many great things but is best known for reporting live on Germany’s invasion of Poland. She is still with us, aged 104. I had a drink with her once, in the FCC, aka the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. I say “with”. We were seated side by side, were not introduced so did not speak, but I knew exactly who she was. It was thrilling just to be in her presence. Quote unquote:

By then, Clare was back in her Polish hotel in Katowice and saw the first German tanks moving past her window. When she called the British embassy in Warsaw, a diplomat refused to believe her story – so she held the telephone out of her bedroom window so he could hear the sound of German tank tracks.

Brent Underwood shows how to become a #1 Best-Selling Author on Amazon in five minutes. His one secret trick you won’t believe? He took a photo of his foot and published it. Quote unquote:

I decided my foot was worthy of the “Transpersonal” category under psychology books and “Freemasonry & Secret Societies” category under social sciences books. I’ve always wanted to have an affiliation with the Freemasons.

The British composer Peter Maxwell Davies died last week, at 81. A good innings, though 81 does seem young these days. I saw him in the Auckland Town Hall some time in the very late 70s or early 80s conducting the Fires of London in Eight Songs for a Mad King, which featured a man screaming, and Le Jongleur de Notre Dame, which had a juggler. I have spent many evenings in the Auckland Town Hall, but that was the most memorable. Here is a decent obituary from the Guardian. Quote unquote:

In these later years there was no let-up in Maxwell Davies’s productivity. He was one of the most driven and hard-working composers of all time, with an output that easily exceeds the work-lists of Stravinsky and Schoenberg combined. His second opera, The Doctor of Myddfai (1995) was written in six weeks, during which Maxwell Davies worked 16 hours a day, pausing only to sleep or cook a quick bowl of pasta (the love of Italian food he had acquired in his Rome days was his one concession to human frailty). It was premiered by Welsh National Opera the following year.
This amazing productivity is actually an obstacle to the survival of his music. It is hard to know where to start, and plunging in at random may lead to one of the many grey patches in his music, particularly in the later works such as the Strathclyde concertos.

I’ve been playing that opera over the last few days – it’s great fun. And I don’t agree that the concertos are grey, not compared to the sludge of some of the symphonies. But his music is always interesting – as was the composer. Here from 2005 is the best story ever about him, when he was arrested for being in possession of a dead swan. Quote unquote:

He told the BBC: “I didn’t realise the police had also taken some wings from previous swans which were hanging in the shed. I was going to give them to the school because they use them as Gabriel’s wings in the nativity play.
“On Monday morning a police car came whizzing up the lane with a very charming young man and a very beautiful young lady. They didn’t accuse me of killing the swan, they accused me of being in possession illegally of a corpse of a protected species.
“I had to give a statement. I offered them coffee and asked them if they would like to try some swan terrine but I think they were rather horrified. That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

 So here is Kelvin Thomas as King George III in Eight Songs of a Mad King, Salford, 2012. Talk about uneasy listening:

Architectural historians

They can’t all be like this, surely. Here is Nigel Farndale in the Spectator in a piece celebrating the magazine Country Life:

The Queen Mother was once drawing up a list of guests when someone suggested Country Life’s architectural historian, John Cornforth. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘Corners is far too grand for us.’ I don’t know about that, but Cornforth, who died in 2004, was certainly a convivial and flamboyant character who, it was rumoured, had a penchant for experimentation regarding the attire he wore in private. Chatelaines were said to lock their wardrobes when he came to stay, not least because he was ample–figured, and silk gowns tear easily.

I know a few architectural historians and writers, because for a few unhappy years I was editor of Architecture New Zealand, journal of the NZ Institute of Architects. Unhappy because while I was very interested in architecture and counted many architects as friends – two of them asked me to apply for the job – that was a problem for the publisher, who basically hated architects. I was regarded with deep suspicion because I had been to dinner at Patrick Clifford’s, Malcolm Walker came to my wedding, I’d shared an office with Nigel Cook, I knew Marshall Cook, Jane Aimer and other big names in the NZIA, Peter Shaw was a former colleague and so on. And now there is Paul Litterick.

But I don’t know that if any of these people came to stay I would have to lock up my wife’s wardrobe.

So here are Genesis with Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett in the 1970s performing “I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)”:

Books do furnish a room

I have always admired my friend Murray Grimsdale’s decoration of the Leys Institute and Grey Lynn library. The 1722 Klementinum library in Prague lacks the South Pacific element Murray brings to much of his work, but even so it has a certain something:

And:

And:

Our libraries here in Cambridge and Te Awamutu are pretty good. But on balance I have to say that Prague is the winner on the day.