Posts by Rob Hosking
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This is a thoughtful take on it, from across the ditch, from author and blogger and killer of flatmates with felafels John Birmingham: http://www.cheeseburgergothic.com/archives/2212
I suspect his conclusion is right:
The sort of high volume disposable fiction which is their stock in trade, will migrate almost entirely into electronic form over the next 10 years. Their other income streams, recorded music and video are already drying up. It doesn’t mean the end of the printed book. It just means printed books will be a much smaller segment of the market, and eventually much more of an elite item purchase.
Can't think of when I last went in to Whitcoulls...oh yes, sparkly papery things for my daughter's birthday last April.
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If NZ men are high on the Vas count, does anyone have a reason beyond irreligousity?
Would be curious to hear theoriesPure pragmatism?
Logical extension of the number eight fencing wire thing?
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Ok but when I'm shopping with my wife and standing outside the changing rooms...
Erggh.
Having a catheter moment.
If there is a Hell, for me it will involve shopping, and clothing stores, and the whole long suffering sigh of changing rooms. For eternity.
At least Sisyphus got a workout.
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Confessionals are much better when wimmins are involved.
Ah. Another area where the Catholic Church got things wrong, then. Although I think I've established from the comments here that anyone following the Churches' teachings on contraception has missed a trick.
For natural contraception, you just have to repeat 'catheter catheter catheter' until the urges sort of shrivel and die.
Haven't had the big V but have had the colonoscopy and although it didn't exactly leave me wanting to order seconds it wasn't as bad as I'd expected.
The main event of note - and this is something I partly remember and partly pieced together afterwards from my wife told me - was not being introduced to the bloke who performed the surgery.
This annoyed me at the time, apparently. What I do remember is having the nurse bung the needle in the back of the left hand, the anaeshtestist saying gidday and who he was and shoving in the magic stuff.
Then having my shoulder being shaken and thinking 'ah, this will be the specialist' but it was the nurse saying she was just going to roll me off the table and into the wheelchair.
Remember being vaguely incredulous that the whole thing was done.
But apparently I was complaining loudly as I was pushed down the corridor that if the bloke was going to shove a cable up my freckle the least he could do was introduce himself first.
The nurse must have told the Doc because when he did his post-op rounds he came in, paused at the door with the hint of a grin on his face, and then came in saying 'I'm Dr Groom, I gather we haven't properly been introduced.'
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I'm not a coffee snob - my main criteria is 'I want liquid jumper-leads and I want it now!' but I have to say my first exposure to Starbucks (in New York, off Broadway, in 1996) had me going 'Plah!' after the first sip.
I gave the place a second go on a road trip back home (Palmerston North, around 2000) and didn't finish either the coffee or the stodgy muffin I bought in a burst of optimism.
Nice chairs though. Comfortable. With padding and all.
One other Wellington coffee snob story - just after moving here in 1995 I went into Neo on Willis St and said 'Just a latte' thanks,' and the then-owner drew himself up to his full height and said with great mock dignity 'We don't do just lattes.'
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Looking forward to regular-ish reviews delivered in your inimitable style.
I can forgive the whole “princess” thing because as a five year old the coolest thing about Leia was right from the beginning she didn’t exactly act “princessly”.
And didn't do jury service, it seems.
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"This is where we really go when we die - into the hearts of those who loved us."
- a writer whose work I don't normally like -
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Busytown: She loves you, YA, YA, YA!, in reply to Jolisa,
Totally agree much of the best writing today is in YA category. I think one reason is most literary fiction is scared of ‘too much emotion.’ It’s all so ironic and self-referential not only do the basics of story get lost, but the basics of emotionally connecting to a story go west as well.
Thought of this thread at 3am when I picked up Graham Swift's Making An Elephant and read this in the introduction:
After well over three decades of being a writer of fiction, I still believe that fiction-storytelling-is a magical thing. Why else do we still talk about being under a story's 'spell'? However we may analyse or try to explain it, the power of a good story is a primitive, irreducible mystery that answers to some need deep in human nature.
I think it's salutary for even the most modern writer to recognize this-that you are, as it were, dealing with something beyond you, with a force you can never outguess. Once you make a complete and exclusive equation between what you consciously put in and the effect that will emerge (and, time and time again, it's very hard to avoid doing this), you will have lost something. Your writing may be competent, but it will be diminished.
For writer and reader, fiction should always have that flicker of the magical,
...and forgive me while I interrupt Swift here, but I love that phrase 'flicker of the magical'... right, back to Swift...
.. but it also does something that's completely the opposite. Repeatedly, fiction tries to embrace, to capture, to confront-often grimly and unflinchingly-the real. This is one of its supreme functions too: to bring us down to earth. No better vehicle for this descending journey has been found than the novel.
Indeed, from Don Quixote to Madame Bovary and onwards, fiction has been centrally concerned with the demolition of magic and dreams; with the way in which our airy notions come up against the hard facts or downright banality of experience.
This is entirely healthy: fiction as a corrective to our evasions of an uncompromisingly concrete world. But the remarkable thing about fiction is that it can perform the two apparently contradictory tasks at the same time. It can be both magical and realistic. When we read Don Quixote or Madame Bovary we don't feel coerced into bathos, we feel a thrill.
Back in the 1980s, when my first novels were published, a literary term had for some while been enjoying a vogue: 'magical realism'. I admit that when I wrote Waterland I even thought I was being a bit of a magical realist myself. The term has now long passed its sell-by date, and was fairly bogus in the first place.
It seemed to encapsulate perfectly that twofold and paradoxical nature of fiction; but if that were so, it was really saying nothing new or revelatory and, in practice, it reeked of a rather programmatic specialism.
It owed a lot to some then-popular Latin American writing in which surreal or supernatural events might be 'realistically' injected into the naturalistic tissue of a novel, or real events might acquire a magical flavour.
Writers had been doing this sort of thing for centuries, but 'magical realism' implied that by the mixing in of such fantastical stuff, some much-needed magic could be put back into fiction. As if it had ever gone.
The real magic (if that expression is legitimate) of fiction goes much deeper than a few sprinklings of hocus-pocus, but we know when it's there and we feel its tingle in the spine. There can even be something magical about the perfectly judged and timed revelation on the page of an unanswerable truth we already inwardly acknowledge.
In good fiction, without any trickery, truth and magic aren't incompatible at all.
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Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to Tom Semmens,
I am just saying we need to be cautious about judgment on every participant – good or bad – until we understand what caused this disaster.
Tom: Personally I'm going with 'innocent until proved guilty'. Apart from anything else, for reasons of common decency.
Craig: Cheers and thanks for the Larkin poem.
Sacha: ditto your five-word sentence.
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Hard News: Where nature may win, in reply to Scott A,
It was mentioned at the tail end of the press conferences at the mine and whoever was speaking (car radio fading in and out at the time) appeared under the impression John Key had mentioned the matter in Parliament and refuted the claims made.
In fact Key brought the matter up at his post-Cabinet press conference. I gather the original questions were made by Australian journalists at the Pike River site.