Posts by Joe Wylie
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From today's Herald:
Asked why Penguin had not picked up the plagiarism during its own publishing processes - using expert advice - she said that for fiction it would be very tough for anybody, unless they were intimate with the author's previous works.
"For us to do that for every title would cost us a lot of money to run through [computer] plagiarism programmes."
Until Penguin grow a few hairs on the backs of their necks, presumably.
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Yanks have always been into pseudo-royalty because they dont have their own . . .
So they improvise.
Anyway, aren't most royalty pseuds?
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I'll raise you a Ray Kroc and say "The customer is always right." Which appears to be something that has been forgotten in the corporate skyscraper dwellings of big media.
Sometime around the mid-90s the shareholder supplanted the customer. It was nice while it lasted.
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Pynchon certainly knows how to write a historical novel . . .
V features an orrery - a model of the solar system, complete with Pluto - in a scene set in 1922. Other than that, yeah, plus you get occasional lashings of deliberately anachronistic steampunk.
Pynchon appears to have been plagiarised to some extent by the dodgy Carlos Castaneda. There's an account in one of the Don Juan books of the art of lucid dreaming that's a little too close to an episode from the much earlier V. While the Castaneda version is presented as dead-serious shamanism, Pynchon's tale features the lucid dreamer unscrewing his navel with a significant screwdriver, and waking to find his ass has dropped off.
Any belly-laughs in The Trowenna Sea?
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Am I the only one who hears the phrase 'historic fiction' and thinks of the lovechild of Bryce Courtenay and Jeffrey Archer?
I'm a little surprised that it's taken this long for Courtenay's name to pop up :)
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Pynchon has been known to make extremely elaborate use of others' work, but in a genuinely imaginative way. Eg the North Africa bits in V apparently owe a lot to an old Baedeker he'd picked up;
Pynchon's been perfectly up front about his creative lifting. In his comments in the short story collection Slow Learner he refers to 'the old Baedeker trick", when discussing the place and period versimilitude of 'Under the Rose', much of which later became incorporated into V. He even exhorts others to do the same. Interestingly enough, the notoriously reclusive Pynchon is much more open about his creative processes than Ihimaera has lately shown himself to be.
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Neil Young at Western Springs sometime in the 80s. Some smartass decided that he sounded like a busker during a slow number and threw a coin, hitting him on the head. Young threatened to stop the show if the stunt was repeated.
Of course he didn't sound like a busker. It's just that there's a certain species that try to mimic Neil Young, and for some reason they always sound crap. When busking was legalised in Auckland in the late 70s a particularly vile one took up residence outside the big Woolies in Queen Street. Working upstairs across the road was rendered hideous by the doleful "My, my, quack, quack" drifting up from the street. More Foghorn Leghorn than Neil Young.
Eventually he took to seating himself as he played on the coin-operated kiddie stagecoach in Woolies' entrance. An enterprising young chap snuck out of the store and fed a coin to the stagecoach. The sudden heaving and bucking put a quick stop to the godawful din, and the aggrieved dork stormed into Woolies seeking vengeance.
Wouldn't it be spooky if the offending coin was the same one that hit Neil Young on the head years later.
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I think that fatuous exercise was an easy way out for the Arts Centre to say they were promoting public 'art' (as per their charter)
Including the living is downright weird. While I don't know much about the suitability of most of the deceased, including the late Bill Sutton is like Disney World appropriating Picasso.
and gawd forbid there was a fire at the Arts Centre - after they took out the fire escapes and put sprinklers throughout the place, the water damage would be horrendous I think...
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And I actually think the design of la Urlich's "Safety In Numbers" was worthy of that award.
And by way of credit where credit's due, it was Polly Walker & Debbie Watson who were that year's worthy winners.
Up until 1982 - the year that Simon Grigg received Outstanding Contribution to Music - the award was known as Sleeve Design of the Year. Maybe it was the creeping rise of the CD that made things ambiguous. Whatever, I'm reliably informed that an NZ Music Industry shock absorber is not to be sneezed at.
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You're very generous Mark, thanks.
It was, of course, a hell of a long time ago, but back then if there was one band worth pulling out all the stops to do a video for it was Toy Love. By the time the thing went to air the months of slog for little reward in Australia had taken their toll on all the band members. Chris had found the Love of His Life, and had new priorities that he was keen to pursue.
Toy Love's Oz and NZ record companies, who'd each agreed to pay 50% of the cost of making the clip, were due to hand over their desperately needed cheques. Without a band to promote they could easily have decided to renege. I'd just like to say that Chris in particular was hell of a good about keeping the news of the band's demise quiet until I'd got paid.
While I've seen him do the occasional truly appalling thing - for example the time he outraged poor Carol Tippet by putting one of her enormous technicolor jelly slices into his mouth before regurgitating it whole and quivering onto the palm of his hand - I've never forgotten how good he* was about that.
*Not to forget Paul, Jane, Mike, & Alec - and Terry Hogan. Fun times back in the mesozoic.