Muse by Craig Ranapia

EXITS AND ENTRANCES. Christine Cole Catley - journalist, publisher and author -  died on Sunday in her Devonport home after a brief battle with lung cancer, aged 88.  Today, Maurice Gee marks his big eight-zero.

HOPELESSLY PANGLOSSIAN. Never let it be said that Muse is a haven of effete sports-phobes (which it is, but never mind)... The Duckworth Lewis Method's 'Mason on The Boundary' is simply delightful, as only two Irish blokes who made a concept album about cricket can be. (hat-tip Stephen Stratford at Quote Unquote)

HARRY POTTER, DEEPAK CHOPRA AND LOVE POETRY.  I probably shouldn't be surprised that all of the above is rather popular in the library at Paremoremo.  I wonder if some Muse reader would like to donate a copy of Avi Steinberg's Running The Books: The Adventures of An Accidental Prison Librarian

My name is Avi Steinberg, but in the joint, they call me Bookie. The nickname was given to me by Jamar "Fat Kat" Richmond. Fat Kat is, or was, a notorious gangster, occasional pimp, and, as it turns out, exceptionally resourceful librarian. At thirty years old and two bullet wounds, Kat is already a veteran inmate. He's too big — five foot nine, three-hundred-plus pounds — for a proper prison outfit. Instead he is given a nonregulation T-shirt, the only inmate in his unit with a blue T-shirt instead of a tan uniform top. But the heaviness bespeaks solidity, substance, gravitas. The fat guy T-shirt, status. He is my right-hand, though it often seems the other way around.

"Talk to Bookie," he tells inmates who've lined up to see him. "He's the main book man."

The main book man. I like that. I can't help it. For an asthmatic Jewish kid, it's got a nice ring to it. Hired to run Boston's prison library — and serve as the resident creative writing teacher — I am living my (quixotic) dream: a book-slinger with a badge and a streetwise attitude, part bookworm, part badass. This identity has helped me tremendously at cocktail parties.

The linked NPR feature interview with Steinberg is worth a listen, though you might not be encouraging your children to go to library school afterwards.

MAYBE I DESERVE TO BE KISSED.  I can feel a sneaking sympathy with R. Crumb - who withdrew from a rare public appearance in Sydney this week after being called a "sex pervert" by a Murdoch tabloid.  (Crumb explains why here; while the Telegraph pulls a Dixie Chicks and keeps things classy and hypocritical.) We can just console ourselves with this jolly tune from R. Crumb and The Cheap Suit Serenaders.

• YEAH, I LIKED RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. BLOW ME.   I heartily endorse John Scalzi's case for an Oscar for Andy Serkis.

• TELL US WHAT YOU REALLY THINK, PHIL.  "How can I put it? It’s like winning the Pulitzer. If you take it too seriously, you’re an idiot. But if you look at the names of the other poets who have won it, most of them are damn good. Not all of them — I’m not going to name names — but most. My editor was thrilled, and my wife jumped for joy. She hasn’t done that in a while.”  Philip Levine on being named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.  

• WEDDE THE MEMORIOUS IN THE LIBRARY OF BABEL. Closer to home, contrats to Ian Wedde who has just been appointed to a two year term as our own Poet Laureate.  Wedde says he'll " among other things - work on projects dealing with memory."

• BEST #LONDONRIOTS-RELATED TWEET. EVER. Waterstones staff member to me last night: “We’ll probably stay open. If they steal some books, they might actually learn something.” London bookstores mostly escaped major damage which is a very good thing, don't get me wrong, but still kind of depressing.  Still, I don't want to meet a London bookseller in a dark alley.  They sound way hard.

• PARTY AT DAVID'S PLACE! There's a case to be made that Stop Making Sense is the best concert movie ever (though Jonathan Demme's lousy remakes of Charade and The Manchurian Candidate are unforgivable).  But while I love the performance of This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) in the film... 

... this video (directed by Byrne) is just excessively sweet. 

The Auckland Film Festival is over for another year (bar the sold out screenings of 3-D docos Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Pina), and for the first time ever this Festival has been all killer, no filler. (Even the mild disappointments had their compensating virtues.)  

But to start as I don't need to go on, let's get the bitching out of my system as Wellington gathers pace, and Christchurch, Dunedin and Palmerston North fests grow closer.   Because, gentle readers, some festival goers need to learn some fraking basic cinema etiquette.

The Live Cinema screening of Nosferatu was wonderful (and I'll write about it at more length); the Festival, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and F.W. Murnau Stiftung (who supplied the restored print) should be feeling very self-satisfied today.   The mighty Civic is a hard house to fill, but you did it.

The person sitting in front of me, who arrived ten minutes after the start of a session that was already fifteen minutes late starting?  Then, to add insult to injury, got up not once but twice during the film?

Screw you.

I'm really sorry if you had problems finding a park, or you have a infected bladder the size of a toy thimble, but there were hundreds of other people who managed.  And I'm reasonably confident nobody paid $28 to have a stranger's arse shoved in their face not once but twice...

Also, a big sarcastic thanks a bunch to the person whose cellphone rang during a rare silent moment in Space Battleship Yamato - a demented exercise in making Michael Bay look understated by comparison.   I have my doubts that laughter was really the intended effect there.

I know this sounds like vintage white whine (a.k.a. First World Problems): "Oh, some ghastly oink is trespassing on my visual field! Release the hounds! Flutter a lace kerchief in my face!  Bring the smelling salts and my fainting chaise!"

But so's the idea that the rest of the world has to wait because you're too damn cheap to spend $8 dollars to park in the rather large straucture next to the theatre, and somehow expect the seas of equally inconsiderate arses to part when you show up five minutes before kick-off.

Festival management might like to think about this. The Terms and Conditions of Sale on the back of every ticket include this: "Late arrivals may result in non-admittance until a suitable break in the performance." (True, it's called the small print for a reason but it is there.)

I know this condition can be enforced. Ironically enough, because I once spent the first half of an Auckland Philharmonia concert fuming over a mediocre coffee after showing up twenty five minutes late.  Candour forces me to admit that I was an utter dick-bag towards the usher, but after I calmed down, came to see her quite reasonable point that third row center isn't a spot you can unobtrusively slip into.

The NZIFF might also want to think about what it does to their "brand" when their harcore supporters - the kind of cinephile who take time off work to see three or four films a day, every day of the Festival - are walking out of another bloody screening that started ten minutes late to make the next one.

This year the Wellington Film Festival celebrates its 40th anniversary.  Nobody - least of all Bill Gosden and his merry though slightly shattered band - wants to see a return to 1971, when it was easy to catch seven films over seven days at the Paramount.  (More films screened in Wellington, over five venues, on the opening day alone last Friday.)

But the NZIFF shouldn't take patrons loyalty - or patience - for granted.  Who knows - a little tough love up front may well pay off.  And, folks, remember this: Buying a ticket to a movie doesn't make you the star of the show.

• My Listener review of Edward St Aubyn's At Last is now on-line.  While modesty forbids and all that, I liked the book. A lot.

Vladimir Nabokov warned readers of Lolita – in the voice of literature’s most notorious ­paedophile – that you can always depend on a murderer for a fancy prose style. At Last, Edward St Aubyn’s fifth and final novel featuring patrician junkie and survivor of childhood sexual abuse Patrick Melrose, reclaims high literary style from Nabokov’s evasive, self-justifying apologist for rape and allows fellow survivors something more than the clotted psychobabble of the typical misery memoir.

• While I'm still to cross the digital divide and learn to love e-books, this announcement from Gollancz made my geeky heart skip a beat.

Gollancz, the SF and Fantasy imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, announces the launch of the world’s largest digital SFF library, the SF Gateway, which will make thousands of out-of-print titles by classic genre authors available as eBooks.

Building on the remarkable success of Gollancz’s Masterworks series, the SF Gateway will launch this [Northern] Autumn with more than a thousand titles by close to a hundred authors. It will build to 3,000 titles by the end of 2012, and 5,000 or more by 2014. Gollancz’s Digital Publisher Darren Nash, who joined the company in September 2010 to spearhead the project said, “The Masterworks series has been extraordinarily successful in republishing one or two key titles by a wide range of authors, but most of those authors had long careers in which they wrote dozens of novels which had fallen out of print. It seemed to us that eBooks would offer the ideal way to make them available again. This realization was the starting point for the SF Gateway.” Wherever possible, the SF Gateway will offer the complete backlist of the authors included."

Of local interest, Victoria Emeritus Professor of Drama Philip Mann -- who published an impressive and long out of print string of science fiction novels with Gollancz in the 80's and 90's is one of the included authors.  Dick Weir's reading of Master of Paxwax and its sequel The Fall of the Families are repeated occasionally on National Radio - and are available from Replay Radio -- but Pioneers (1986) and Wulfsyarn (1988) are well overdue for rediscovery. 

It's a time-honoured tradition among cultural pundits to bitch about awards and the general lack of sense and sensibility of the boobs who dish them out.  The judges of the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards -- announced last night -- can relax, since they had the exquisite good taste to amply reward the book that edged out Outrageous Fortune and Boy as my cultural highlight of 2010 on Public Address Radio.

Christopher Finlayson, Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage, awarded music historian Chris Bourke the New Zealand Post Book of the Year, for his work Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964.

New Zealand Post Book Awards convenor of judges, Paul Diamond, described the winning work as a magnificent book that achieves what it sets out to do, and reveals a hidden social history. 

'Blue Smoke tells us about ourselves, our music, and the way we take things from overseas and make them our own.'

Bourke, who lives in Wellington, describes Blue Smoke as “a music history before it is a social or cultural history”. 

‘It is a book about music and musicians, many of whom Bourke has interviewed himself, drawing out anecdotes that enrich our understanding of our nation’s cultural development,’ says judge Charmaine Pountney.

Bourke scored a unique hat trick by also scoring the New Zealand Post General Non-fiction Award and the coveted People’s Choice Award.

I described Burke's labour of love as a book whose author's "scholarly but unpretentious love of his subject shines through" and, sorry Chris, but you have written a damn fine work of social and cultural history. Auckland University Press also deserves credit for getting right the things you never really notice - and shouldn't - unless they're done badly, or not at all. Care and attention has been paid to the physical production from a typeface you can read without bleeding through your tear ducts to clean reproductions of the many archival photographs on paper that isn't barely fit to be used as arse-wipe. It's also a pleasure to handle a large format softcover whose spine didn't crack as soon as you opened it.

But wait, as they say in the infomercial game, there's more...   

Congratulations to the other winners:

Fiction Award: The Hut Builder by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin NZ)

Poetry Award: The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls by Kate Camp (Victoria University Press)

Illustrated Non-fiction Award: The Passing World: The Passage of Life: John Hovell and the Art of Kowhaiwhai by Damian Skinner (Rim Books)

The winners of the 2011 New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) Best First Book Awards – announced earlier this year – were also honoured tonight. They are:

NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction: Everything We Hoped For by Pip Adam (Victoria University Press)

NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry:
Dear Sweet Harry by Lynn Jenner (Auckland University Press)

NZSA E.H. McCormick Best First Book Award for Non-Fiction: Whaikōrero: The World of Māori Oratory by Dr. Poia Rewi (Auckland University Press)