Posts by Jolisa
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Not to mention, the "No Cruising" sign is now filed in the part of my brain that has Don't Stop Till You Get Enough on permanent ear-worm.
(Anyone else have automatic soundtracks attached to everyday objects, or should I give Oliver Sacks a call?)
-
Oh, wait til you come back down here, Jolisa, and get to pass signs that say "No Cruising Zone begins".
What does that even mean -- I mean, if it doesn't mean what I think it means? No kids on chopper bikes?
-
For Jackie: Witi's eulogy for his mum. That's real writing.
-
I do find his blurt about being at the cutting edge of 'fiction' so using other people's words was not only fine, it was -um - cutting edge, completely & stupidly desperate.
Interestingly, Nicholas Spicer, in his LRB review of Peter Carey's latest book, pegs that author as having done the same thing (see the paragraphs that follow "Carey’s borrowings in Parrot and Olivier in America are intriguing").
Coincidentally, Carey borrows some of the same references that Ihimaera did -- Dickens, the panopticon -- as well as material directly from de Tocqueville on America.
In the end, Spicer gives Carey a pass for artistic reasons -- it certainly helps that he is an exuberantly gifted writer -- and because such patchworkery is consistent with the running themes of Carey's body of work:
What are we to think of this? Well, for a start, it sets one wondering quite how much of Parrot and Olivier in America is derived from other texts – an amusing MA thesis perhaps. And if it turns out that the novel is partly an extravagant patchwork of other people’s writing, why should this matter? Is it faking or making? Forging or forgery? Or is it making through faking – a subtle and playful game of intertextuality from the author of Theft, My Life as a Fake and His Illegal Self? I think your answer to this will depend on the degree of pleasure the novel gives you. I found myself liking Parrot and Olivier in America more and more as I came to know it better, and to recognise its ‘plagiarisms’ as integral to its character.
Spicer wraps up by comparing Carey to that most Australian of birds:
And if we are to think of him as himself a bird, it should not be as a parrot, but as a magpie, and not any old magpie, but as that ultimately virtuoso bird: the Australian magpie, capable of mimicking more than 35 different species of birds as well as dogs and horses, and whose carolling at dawn or dusk in the outback is one of the strangest and most beautiful things in creation. In the words of the narrator of His Illegal Self: ‘The cries of the Australian magpie, like nothing else on earth.’
(To which the only possible reply is "Quardle ardle oodle wardle doodle.")
-
I'm considering it alongside various other suggestions for the much anticipated sequel.
More please, yes! On any subject at all. I would read you on how to make scrambled eggs or pluck hair out of a hairbrush or watch paint dry, frankly.
Plus, you and David are a stellar argument (if any extra was needed) against the budget cuts for community night school, dammit. Where can I sign up for that course you supposedly took together? Will you be team-teaching it? :-)
-
-
Also perhaps relevant to our discussion: Tom Ihimaera Smiler, who was Witi's father, recently passed away at a great age.
-
I hope so too, Hilary. The irony is -- and has been all along -- that Ihimaera took such liberties with the story (not least adding a wife and child and giving him bilingual facility, an extra-textual flirtation with an English woman, and a fantasy physique in, ah, every department) that it wasn't really Hohepa's story any more. Yet Ihimaera persisted with attaching that real name to his main character.
There's nothing wrong with fictionalising historical characters, but I always think it's much more artistically satisfying if those named-characters become secondary elements, seen through the eyes of a fully-realised but fictional historical protagonist. It would have cost Ihimaera nothing to invent a sixth prisoner to be sent to Tasmania alongside Hohepa and his fellows, just as he invented the English couple for Hohepa to interact with.
Of course, that way he wouldn't have had the emotional coda, which is firmly based in (and borrowed from) the recent historical record, and is in some ways both the most affecting part of the book, and the part that most trespasses on other people's lives and work.
And we still have the moral/aesthetic problems of, e.g. borrowing undigested paragraphs of someone else's memoir for one of his character's memories, and telling the story of 6 Feb 1840 ostensibly through the eyes of an untutored Maori youth but in the actual words of a British missionary. As well as the pragmatic issues of all the other chunks of "research" that the egg-beater missed.
You're right, though, Hilary - it's an amazing story. I understand composer Jenny McLeod has been working on an opera libretto for a while now, for a work called Hohepa. It will be intriguing to see what she does with the same historical material, which is undeniably powerfully interesting stuff.
-
When Bill Ralston opined in the last Listener that the earthquake was a sterling lesson in just what a luxury technology is, I knew he hadn't been here.
Or, indeed, anywhere. Here's the actual quote (full article still behind the Listener's stale-wall):
A British survey recently named the top 100 inventions and rated crap like the internet and iPhone ahead of flush toilets and washing machines. It rated hot water way down the list, just ahead of hair straighteners. I suggest we take the morons who drew up this list and drop them into Avonside and see how they get on without electricity, water and sewerage for a while. See if their iPhones can help when the need to go to the dunny, or if the internet is any use when the power is off. They can go google themselves.
To be strictly fair, it's part of a larger I Don't Know How They Do It, Yay Canterbury You Big Heros argument (although it's hard to imagine making any other kind of argument right now). But still: a total French word for a shower-y thing to say. Apart from the fact that one man's useful invention is another woman's luxury/crap and vice versa, he's spectacularly missing the point of pretty much everything about how this particular quake unfolded and how people helped themselves and each other afterwards. As Emma says.
Would be interesting to see if he could figure out how to safely go to the dunny, sans sewerage and in a state of shellshock with a house falling down around him, without using the internet or talking to someone who just has.
(And for the record, I also rate hot water slightly ahead of hair straighteners but some way behind the internet. At least in summer. So WHAT?!)
-
This:
that time when you were a teenager having it off in the back of a ute and it went over a cattle stop.
...is now permanently stored in the same part of my brain that chortles when I see a road sign reading SPEED HUMP.