Posts by Charles Mabbett
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Who would have thought? George W Bush is misunderstood, under appreciated and ahead of his time.
As for Garageland vs Phoenix Foundation. No contest. It's the Phoenix Foundation and pray they play Forty Years!
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Good stuff out of Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, Graham. I enjoyed the pix and blogging. Nice to see you had a longhouse experience in Sarawak. They are fascinating structures.
Brunei is an unusual country - a soporific place but with an interesting melange of influences, not least the huge quantities of oil revenue washing around. There also used to be a contingent of British Army Gurkhas there on a permanent basis. One can also get that oil country experience by gazing out to sea after dark at the city of brightly lit oil rigs.
Is the Borneo Bulletin still the newspaper of choice?
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The confusion over Eden Park is only one aspect of the huge job that looms in ensuring that the 2011 World Cup in New Zealand is a success.
As Brian Gaynor pointed out in his column in the Weekend Herald, there's is little demonstrable reason to have confidence in the NZRU and other parties in getting things right, particularly on the issue of business competence.
He illustrates his misgivings by pointing out that an official website for the 2011 Rugby World Cup has yet to be established.
Gaynor contrasts this with the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi and the 2012 London Olympic Games which both have extensive websites. The 2012 European football championship to be jointly hosted by Poland and Ukraine already have a website.
And more damningly, he points out that the NZRU has almost no mention of the 2011 tournament on its website.
So I thought I'd check it out.
If you go to www.allblacks.com and www.nzrugby.co.nz and Google search the 2011 rugby world cup, what Gaynor says is essentially correct.
Maybe the grey heads at NZRU aren't the most interweb savvy people around but you would think their communications team would know the value of staking an early presence on the net especially for an event that will be as significant as this one to the country?
It is scandalous - not a massively critical one at this early stage but hardly confidence inspiring from a marketing point of view.
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The Nobel Prize for Literature is worth ten million Swedish kronor (about $US1.5 million) and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is worth $US10,000.
The Booker is worth Stg50,000.
But the Nobel Prize is for a body of work so while lucrative, certainly a lot more work.
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There's even the Franz Kafka Prize which is based in the Czech Republic. You probably have to have been on an Amnesty International watch list to be considered.
But I notice Philip Roth and Haruki Murakami are past winners so obviously not a prerequisite.
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There's a fascinating list of literary awards from around the world in all kinds of languages at this link:
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With regards alternative literary awards to the Booker, there's the Pulitzer Prize for Literature which was won this year by Cormac McCarthy (the Border trilogy guy) with The Road.
And the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Doris Lessing.
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The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, also known in short as the Booker Prize, is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of either the Commonwealth of Nations or the Republic of Ireland. (Wikipedia)
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One of my issues with Mr Pip was that the girl hero Matilda comes across in her narrator's voice as younger than the 14 years of age she is meant to be. I am also a little critical of how dispassionate she seems as she relates the events she is witness to. But this is quite possibly a characteristic of someone who has survived atrocities. And in some places, the writing seems to be trying too hard. Having said that there's lots to praise about Mr Pip including how much it has made me appreciate Great Expectations. Also the circular nature of narrative arc is very clever and in the end it is very moving.
As for Neil Gaiman, you can find some of his stuff in the Graphic Novels section of the Wellington Public Library. Worth checking out.
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Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics are quite brilliant!