Posts by Geoff Lealand
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On accessing music: I can't make that first step towards music downloads--legal or illegal. iTunes doesn't seem to have much of interest and I have some sort of moral block on illegal downloading. Is that quaint, or something?
So, I continue to buy CDs (the new Al Green and Death Cab for Cutie most recently), preferably from independent local outlets (eg SmokeCDs). Then I transfer them to my iPod/dock system and store the CD away, with only occasional outings on my stereo. Is that crazy economics, or what?
I do feel that someone has to keep these local outlets going, and presumably else must be buying as well as me.
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The documentary was "Reluctant Revolutionary: David Lange" and screened on TV ONE in 2004. I have a copy if anyone is desperate to see it.
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I would think that Russell read the long excerpt in yesterday's SST. It would seem enough to make some kind of judgement.
I wouldn't want to go buy the book. It just encourages them. -
A bit like calling David Irving a 'historian', when he and Bassett and Wishart are writers of fantasy (not that history is all 'just the facts. m'am'!)
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What is with these Labour Men of Yesteryear (John Terris is another one), when they turn into raging neanderthals, full of bitterness and imagined slights.
Another book to shelve under 'Fiction--Fantasy', along with Ian Wishart's latest?
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An interesting interview with Helen Sutch on Nine to Noon this morning (I am home marking essays, with the radio wittering in the background!). She rightly pointed that her mother Shirley Smith was a key support for Sutch at the time. She was also a damn good and socially-committed lawyer.
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Paul: thanks. No offence taken! I will join you in the wholesale damning of this evil trio. A horse and two donkeys?
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Don't damn us all, for Clydesdale (a work horse?) is the kind of faux academic who gives the rest of us a bad name. My last experience of peer reviewing involved six 'blind' appraisals. extensive rewrites, rejection--then another round of peer reviewing for the journal that did publish it.
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You would think that Ron, being such a bald little coot, might want to cover up his own noggin. Is this a case of hair envy?
It is interesting that sweats with hoods are commonplace garb on American campuses--even in Utah.
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Maybe it was another occasion but I recall that Michael King was funded to write a history of the University of Waikato, which unfortunately didn't get finished. He wouldn't have had much in the way of teaching.
Shep asks about academic publication. We haven't yet got to the 'publish or perish' state of the US yet and, as far as I discern, the only impact a low publication output has is on individual, annual bids for promotion. We have been through two rounds of PBRF and despite topping the Media & Journalism category twice, my Dept has seen no real financial or staffing benefits. I also know many teachers who publish in the 'spare' time eg my friend Sandra Chesterman at St. Cuthberts, who recently wrote a large book on the nude in New Zealand art. Other teachers wriote text-books or study guides.
The problem is that tertiary institutions continue to place the sole-authored book at the top of the canon, despite the fact that book publishing can no longer keep up with the dramatically changed flow of information creation and distribution. I wrote a chapter for a collection to be published by Manchester UP FOUR years ago and I am still waiting for it appear! Much less cred is given to newer forms of writing eg on-line journals, blogs etc.
I realise that peer reviewing (double-blind, and so on) is still sacred in academic publication but it is also very slow, and can occasionally conceal forms of academic censorship.
In the end, I will contend that most teachers work harder than most academics.