Posts by Carol Stewart
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the usual incomprehensible garbage
Speaking of which, WTF is up with Jim Hopkins? There are serious amounts of slander in this column. He doesnt go quite as far as Ian Wishart in slandering NIWA as well, but it's bad enough.
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To a first approximation it is the Big Tobacco people.
Interesting piece here by Jeff Masters on climate change contrarians and the manufactured doubt industry. He doesn't let environmentalists off the hook either.
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I think it's worth pointing out that Lobachevsky was in no way a plagiarist -- Lehrer just like the way "Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was his name!" scanned.
Here's what Wiki has to say, Stephen:
Lehrer chose Lobachevsky mainly because his name was reminiscent of Stanislavsky's, also because during the peak of the Cold War it was fashionable to denigrate anything that had to do with Russia (then the USSR). Lehrer himself made it clear that he intended no malice to the real Lobachevsky—he stated that he used the name for "purely prosodic reasons".
Werner von Braun came off worse ..
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From the incomparableTom Lehrer:
"Plagiarise
Let no-one else's work evade your eyes
Remember why the Good Lord made your eyes
So don't shade your eyes and
Plagiarise, plagiarise, plagiarise" -
Or here's John Updike's six golden rules for book reviewers
These seem just a little self-serving on Updike's part, in that they are concerned with the critic's responsibilities to the writer. Fair enough, but there's also the critic's responsibility to the reader.
Jonathan Raban, who is a fine critic as well as a very versatile and impressive writer, wrote a book on the life of a literary reviewer: For Love and Money. Great read as I remember, and I think he did discuss the question of who the book reviewer is primarily responsible to. -
There does seem to be a feast of historical fiction at the moment, which is a treat. Gemma mentioned Magpie Hall and Craig mentioned Wolf Hall, and I'd like to mention Barbara Kingsolver's new novel The Lacuna, which is top of my bedside table heap. Other than The Poisonwood Bible which included the real-life Patrice Lumumba she hasn't gone in miuch for including real characters so it'll be interesting to see how she handles Kahlo, Rivera and the Trotskys.
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You mean, like Mel's portrait of Jemaine?
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Jolisa and Lucy - thanks for that, you're both quite right.
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There are jolly good reasons to fictionalise your characters as well as their travails.
But there are also some wildly successful novels incorporating historical figures - Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy springs to mind. I thought the way in which she wove in her historical figures - Sassoon, Owens, Robert Graves - was brilliant.
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Stead, love him or loathe him, takes his fiction every bit as seriously as his poetry, critical essays or the two full length books on literary modernism that are the basis of his academic reputation
With you, Craig. I think one of the reasons Mansfield worked so well as a novel - and an ambitious and unusual one at that - was that the author's care and scrupulousness shone through. And rigour.
I'd always thought of Stead as being a forbidding kind of figure, but I went to a reading he did from Mansfield here in Wellington and he was utterly charming and disarming.