Posts by Joe Wylie
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This probably isn't ironic, but it's hilarious anyway: "Remember Louis XIV!"
Um, have another look George. He's got the right king if it's guillotines & revolutions he's hinting at.
That's my pedant quota for the year.
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But she's getting ready for motherhood .
"Yulia was born in Volgograd in Russia and immigrated to New Zealand in 2002. She was naturalised in 2005 and said it was at first a shock to come from "a city the size of France to a lot smaller Christchurch"."
Oh dear. At the last count, Volgograd had a slightly smaller population than Auckland.
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Ian Wedde in Symmes Hole used the diaries of James ‘Worser’ Heberley, a 19th century whaler (and the man behind the Worser Bay name). The book's at home but there's an acknowledgements list as long as your arm, from whaling histories to books about Polynesian navigation to a history of McDonalds. Probably as close as NZ lit had got by then -- the mid-80s -- to Pynchon-like fiction.
There's a chapter that contains a skilful pastiche of the kind of helter-skelter stream of consciousness accorded to Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow. If Ihimaera's serious about forging a new kind of fiction he could do a lot worse than check out Symmes Hole - Wedde was way further down the track. Even the opening endorsement, by a Hawaiian academic if I recall correctly, is a cunning (but thoroughly acknowledged) fake. Wedde has a lovely turn of phrase when he's on form - for example, "runny robot shit", when describing a spilt McDonalds' shake. I'm still hoping he'll surface again one day and deliver on Symmes's potential.
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@Deborah I am even further from the Herald's home delivery region than you are, but it certainly seems like a good question to ask. You don't have to be Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money.
Maybe we could just crowdsource this piece of investigative reporting to PA System, and see what turns up ;-)
The MSM don't appear to show much more interest than they did back in 1981, when the now almost forgotten Kiwis Care march drew a vastly bigger crowd to Queen Street on a weekday. Ostensibly a grassroots movement founded by one Tanya Harris, the march was supposed to have been inspired by a vague resentment against creeping union power.
Harris's I'm-just-an-ordinary-kiwi self-effacing persona was probably genuine. The media loved her, and gave her all the mini-celebrity coverage she could handle until she voluntarily left the limelight to marry a helicopter pilot. Her vacant niceness seemed at odds with the protest's divisive theme, and had the effect of utterly defocusing whatever it was supposed to be about.
No-one ever seriously pursued the question of who funded the mass printing of placards and stickers, or why most of the marchers appeared to be paid employees in company time - one confused but happy group were even carrying Bankcard logos as though they were protest banners.
Only months later the Sprinbok tour swept away any collective memory of that odd little phenomenon. Over a quarter-century later, for one who does remember, Colin Craig's mumblefuck effort seems like a weird little afterfart.
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. . . false hopes.
Such as?
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I read this as '15 seconds of lame', which seemed appropriate.
That kind of reminds me - were there any of those crosses with the little
cheat wheels? They usually seem to pop up at these kind of events. -
I once heard Duff attempt to intimidate his Australian interviewer on ABC radio by playing up to the we-were-cannibals savage-Maori stereotype. Duff's interviewer feigned admiration for his toughness, and slyly suggested that, if he lived by such a hard-assed code, he'd have no qualms about being eaten himself.
Duff was momentarily thrown onto the back foot and, to the best of my recollection, replied "Eh? Well, he'd have to be a pretty tough warrior to, uh, partake of my flesh."
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The inclusion of Lee Tamahori by McLeod is just wrong.
Weird innit? Just more of McLeod's prurient fixation with such things.
There's an uncomfortably patronising tone about the piece, as if all creative endeavours by Maori are somehow subsidised by a patronising establishment liberalism. The silly stretched comparison with Alan Duff simply plays into the latter's garbled racism. Why not, say, Patricia Grace? Personally I suspect that it's because there'd be no scandalous angle, and also because McLeod believes that all Maori success in the arts is underwritten by a kind of affirmative action. -
And Peter Carey's . . . Ned Kelly book.
Just subjectively, there are occasional speeches delivered by Carey's characters that struck me at the time of reading True History of the Kelly Gang as rather inadequately masticated slabs of anthropology. For example, Mary Hearn's account of the ritual killing of a horse back in Ireland. The impression was of source material being paraphrased, rather than lived and felt. Little glitches that briefly derailed the willing suspension of credibility.
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@bugger.
A single semester of sulking with scissors should sort me out.