Major quibble

As I said on my Nine to Noon media comment the other
week, the Book Council’s new-look quarterly Booknotes
is an impressive improvement on its predecessor: big,
open, handsomely designed (though you have to search
for the picture captions) and reader-friendly, with greater
diversity of content. Well done, Susanna Andrew and team.
The standout piece is a thoroughgoing argument by Paula
Morris for a better way of giving out national book prizes,
but there’s also Owen Marshall on the value of writers’
keeping a journal and more, as they say, much more.

Looking through the autumn edition again, however, I find
I have one major quibble, if a quibble’s allowed to be major:
it’s the tendency (by no means exclusive to Booknotes) to
puff up a writer by itemizing all their awards and honours
or bestowing epithets like ‘widely acclaimed’ or ‘critically
acclaimed’ on their works. Take the biographical footnote
to Marshall’s contribution. In full, it reads:

Owen Marshall has written, or edited, 23 books.
He has received various awards and fellowships
including the Robert Burns Fellowship and the
Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in
Menton, France. His novel, Harlequin Rex, [sic]
won the Montana Book Awards Deutz Medal for
fiction, and was made an ONZM for services to
literature [a unique achievement, I think, for an
inanimate object]. The University of Canterbury
awarded him…

But it’s too boring to go on. This is the kind of stuff lifted
from blurbs and publicists' media releases and, in this case
anyway, it has not even been properly proof-read. It’s
pompous and tedious, and does the writer no favours—
Owen himself, most self-effacing of men, would I’m sure
not wish it to be wheeled out on his behalf. It seems to be
driven by the sheer terror of simply saying that someone
is a writer and these are some of the things they've written
—as if that somehow wasn't enough. As if the awards and
honours are what writing’s really about. Even the
quantification—23 books, count 'em—plays to an
impoverished idea of writing: more, it seems, is better.

If there has to be a footnote—and for someone like Marshall
in a subscriber publication like Booknotes I’m not sure it’s
needed at all—then why not something like this...

Joe Blow has had a couple of novels published
and three more rejected. He sits in a room by
himself most of the time looking at a computer
screen but sometimes goes for walks. He loves
reading and writing but has no skill whatsoever
as a public speaker or literary festival panellist
and, should he ever be awarded a prize, would
prefer to receive it by mail, or, better still, have
it direct-credited to his bank account.

Aux farms, citoyens

Celebrating ‘intellect-intensive’ agriculture Simon Upton
writes in praise of a new approach to meat marketing
pioneered in this country by a company called Rissington
Breedline, whereby scrupulous attention is paid to every
detail of the supply chain from paddock to plate—and in
despair of the ‘image of producers conveyed by Federated
Farmers,’ which, Upton correctly says, went ‘feral’ under
the presidency of Charlie Pedersen and has stayed that
way since Don Nicholson succeeded him. Just when the
farmers' main representative body desperately needed
enlightened leadership it has been led, or rather, misled
by men whose response to the green movement has
essentially been one of self-righteous bluster. Their press
statements, Upton says, again correctly, 'reveal a chip-on-
shoulder, them-and-us antagonism towards life beyond
the farm gate.' In last Saturday's New Zealand Herald, in
a well-written feature by Geoff Cumming, Nicholson
sneeringly referred to 'greenies.' His organization has
also been dismissive of the Green Party's recent paper on
how to cut carbon emissions by 40% on 1990 levels by
2020, a paper in which the party makes a real effort to
reach out to farmers and understand and accommodate
their concerns about the cost of adapting to climate
change. What a missed opportunity to engage in
constructive debate. What we have here, I fear, is a
problem not with 'greenies' but with 'farmies.'

To a rattled man

Since publishing my last blog I’ve caught up with Mark
Sainsbury’s Close Up interview of Keisha Castle-Hughes
about John Key's ‘Stick to acting’ crack. With a complete
lack of umbrage or affectedness she handled herself very
impressively, I thought, putting Key in his place with the
kind of finesse he himself could do with a bit of. Poor
man, she all but said, he has a lot on his plate and may
not always cope as best he could. The Government's
been rattled by the strong support the campaign for
tougher carbon-emission reductions has been getting.
She even offered to sit down with him and help him to
better understand the issue, with which he was clearly
struggling. ‘I don’t envy his position at a time like this,'
concluded Castle-Hughes, who on this consummate
performance could probably stand for election herself
and easily win.

I note that even ace right-wing blogger David Farrar, a
staunch supporter of the current government, calls Key’s
comment a rare misstep, an 'unforced error,' which for
some reason he seems to think makes it less damaging
than a forced one. In fact, free to say whatever he liked
about the issue, in a speech he was delivering in Brisbane,
with no pressure whatsoever, Key chose to say something
patronizing and gratuitously offensive. Let's hope it does
prove to be as rare a misstep as Farrar believes.

Three strikes

Three times over the past three weeks cabinet ministers,
including the Prime Minister, have publicly rebuked
citizens who expressed views uncongenial to the
Government. First, when Chief Justice Sian Elias made
some suggestions for relieving prison overcrowding,
Justice Minister Simon Power bluntly told her to stay out
of politics and concentrate on administering the law.
Then, when two women criticised Social Development
Minister Paula Bennett for cutting a training allowance
designed to help people off the dpb, Bennett released
privileged information about their incomes in a clear
attempt to embarrass them and shut them up. And now
John Key, apparently irked by the celebrity media
campaign to get New Zealand’s carbon emissions
reduced by 40% over the next 10 years, has told one of
the celebrities, actress Keisha Castle-Hughes: ‘Stick to
acting.’ No more calls, please: I think we have a trend
here, and it's running in the opposite direction to free
speech. The message from this government is ‘Shut up
and support us.’ Seems that living in a democracy—
wouldn't you just know it?—doesn’t entitle any old body
to enter into debates of concern to us all. Like, you know,
justice, work, income, the ecology of the planet.

Quite where Simon Power was coming from I don’t know,
as he’s not without a few good ideas for penal reform, but
expecting the country's chief judge not to discuss crime
and justice policy matters in general terms is a mark of
political immaturity. Bennett’s retort was sneaky and
shameful, end of story; and as for Key, where does he get off
making such a patronizing remark? Imagine if Joanna
Lumley, in her (ultimately triumphant) campaign to win
Nepalese Gurkhas the right to settle in Britain, had been
told at the outset by Gordon Brown: 'Stick to acting.'

Sustainarama

I love the way the words 'sustainable' and 'sustainability'
keep morphing into exciting new meanings. The big shift
of course can be seen in the way that 'sustainability'—
which originally meant, and still should mean, 'a state or
situation capable of being sustained indefinitely'—has
come to mean unlimited growth by another name. From
a green point of view, a sustainable economy is one that
stays in a steady state, taking out of the world's resources
no more, or even less, than it puts back. Thanks, however,
to the dark art of greenwash, whereby resource-depleters
seek to put a green sheen on everything they do, creepingly
(and creepily) 'sustainability' in the mouths of big business
means being able to go on doing exactly as you've always
done, whatever the damage. Neat.

But wait, there's more. A few weeks ago I noticed somebody
saying that Christine Rankin's appointment to the Families
Commission might not be 'sustainable,' which excited in me
thoughts of Rankin being recycled or even organically
reconstituted. Now, just today, we have Finance Minister
Bill English saying that taking advantage of the housing
allowance paid to him is 'not a sustainable position.' Oh,
that's good. By giving some of the money back, English not
only does the ethical thing, he does the green thing as well.
Heroically, while saving his ass, he saves the planet too. An
inconvenient truth is recycled into an expedient act. Is this
man New Zealand's Al Gore or what?

Poly put the mettle on

Thanks to a reliable source inside the All Blacks’ camp
this blog can be the first to reveal that the streamlined
polyurethane suits in which the ABs have been secretly
training for months are ready for their first public
outing, so the Springboks, the Wallabies, match officials
and indeed innocent bystanders had better watch out.
Tests show that an All Black forward wearing one of
these suits can get to the breakdown .2 of a second faster
than a player in an old-style strip, and consequently be
penalized for an infringement all the quicker. The time
saved on each of these occasions will of course accumulate
as the game goes on, and prove invaluable in the 79th
minute, when you’re 31-19 down and every extra second
counts. An All Black winger outfitted in the slick new gear
—notable for its reduced wind resistance, acid-free texture
and enhanced thermodynamic traction—can now, when
the ball is passed to him, fumble it a full half-second
earlier than he otherwise would, thus confusing the
opposing tackler long enough to get a quick breather
before the subsequent scrum, their put-in. All Blacks
coach Graham Henry is predicting that several world
records will be broken during the next Tri-Nations match,
including, if it’s wet, the 200m butterfly.

Song sung alone

The birds, the birds. The birds in our back yard. Pdogge
reckons the little lime-coloured ones are waxeyes; ace
birdwatcher Steve Braunias tells me they're probably
greenfinches, or maybe silvereyes. He also advises that
‘right this very week is when the blackbirds sing again.
They go quiet, mute in fact, over winter.’ Extraordinary.
Or rather, so ordinary I never knew it. Now I listen for
that song, and in a world where we are taught to equate
power with money and violence and political control I
remind myself of other, more enduring kinds of power,
the ones we ignore or underestimate or take for granted,
as suggested by Jackson Browne in his song 'Looking
East'—

Power in the insects
Power in the sea
Power in the snow falling silently
Power in the blossom
Power in the stone
Power in the song being sung alone