Typos and puns and fans

Over the last week or so I've been reading a kids' fantasy, The Midnight Glass, by D T Vaughn. It has a great climax, and a couple of neat surprises towards the end. Other people might have seen what was coming, but I didn't, so they were very pleasing when they arrived.

Unfortunately there are some typos and missing words in the book. It seems as if other people who've read it weren't perturbed by this, but having a kind of proofreader's eye, those sorts of things stick out like a sore thumb. They don't take away from the story, but just catch you up as you're reading along.

The irony is that my wife said to me last night while reading my book, The Disenchanted Wizard: 'there's a word missing here.' It was an of, but she picked it up, in spite of the fact that I've been through the book with a (plainly not effective enough) fine tooth comb, and so has my co-author. And to cap it all, my son informed me today that when his son enthusiastically read the book in the last couple of weeks he commented afterwards, 'There was an and missing at one point.' Oh, dear...

Anyway, on a more positive note, a friend of mine was here tonight and said she'd bought all three of the books in the series, after at first having had some trouble finding the most recent one on iTunes. Whatever the problem was, she'd obviously overcome it, and her son - a voracious reader - had already finished Grimhilda! and loved it, especially the humour; was into The Mumbersons, and keenly anticipating reading The Disenchanted Wizard. He even pointed out to his mother how 'clever' the title of this last one was...did she get it, did she see how it was a play on words, etc?  I think he's my greatest fan....!

He's talking about using the three titles for a book report for school, which has to be about a New Zealand author. Wow, I'm really into the big time now...!

But something else he said really made me laugh. Those who know the book, Grimhilda!, will know what a sticky end that lady comes to. This young fellow's comment to his mother was 'She should have been taken into custardy.' If you don't get that, my advice is to go and buy a copy and read it. You'll see how delightfully in tune with the book his comment was.

Music in my books...Not

I was just thinking how curious it is that there's hardly any mention of music in my four published books: the two most recent ones: The Disenchanted Wizard and The Blood Secret don't even mention the subject; there's one brief mention of it in Grimhilda!, and three passing ones in Diary of a Prostate Wimp. This is surprising to me, now, because music is as much a part of my life as writing. I've played piano for more than sixty years, and been involved in a lot of amateur shows as well as accompanying soloists in competitions and concerts. I was even a professional musician for a couple of years.

The old journal from the 90s that I'm typing onto the computer, however, has lots of references to the music work I was doing at the time, sometimes quite long sections, as when I was describing a trip to Wellington with the St Kilda Brass Band, where I not only accompanied some of the soloists in the solo competitions, but also played a percussion instrument in the full band's competitions.

Plainly, in the next book I write - if there is one - I'll have to be include music a good deal more, to make up for the lack of it elsewhere in my writing.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

I'm more of a old-school pianist, and play classics and popular music from the earlier part of the 20th century in preference to more recent stuff. (So I don't have much interest in bass guitars at musiciansfriend.com.) But one of the teachers I play for about once a month has introduced me to more recent popular music, from shows I'd never heard of until I came to play a piece from them (such as Matilda). My education is sadly lacking in knowing what shows are current on the big stages these days, or what movies appeal to kids so much that they have to sing the songs from them. (Moana and Frozen, for example.)

Anyway, it's good to learn new things, and to contend with the trickier rhythms in these 21st century songs. Talking of new things, I'm working hard to learn how to play the vocal score of a new opera that's going to be performed here in Dunedin, in July. It's called War Hero, with music composed by John Drummond, who's written a number of short and full-length operas, several of which have been performed here, and even had their premieres here. This will be the premiere of War Hero as well.

It has an all male cast, which is probably not surprising, since it's set in the First World War, and it deals with the well-known pacifist, Archibald Baxter, and the virtual torture he went through because of his beliefs. I think it'll be a powerful piece on stage. The music isn't too difficult, now that I'm getting the harmonic world into my head. But it doesn't take concentration!

2nd review of Disenchanted Wizard

In yesterday's post, I mentioned a riot in Castle St, in 1990. I should have also mentioned, being a writer, that I used this fact in a novel I wrote but never finished. In the novel the narrator and his son found themselves trapped in Dunedin's main street, with students smashing windows of shops and generally vandalising. The narrator and his son go into a nearby jeweller's shop. The jeweller locks the door behind them, afraid of the vandals. He lets them out the back door, where coincidentally they met the narrator's wife, from whom he was now separated, and who, for some reason I can no longer recall, didn't recognise them. I'll have to go back and see why!

That's what happens to novels when you aren't working on them. You forget the details. I've just had a review of The Disenchanted Wizard sent to me by a friend and in it she quotes a line from the book. I looked at it and thought, I don't remember writing that! But of course I had, though in the context of the book it's possibly a little less wise than it seems in the review!

Anyway, for those who don't want to go to the trouble of checking out the review on Amazon, here it is:
Here's a great quote from this book: "Libraries are always safe. Unless you read the books." And - having just read this exciting and action-packed fantasy - I can add, "And unless you end up trapped inside a magic map!" Della and her cousin Harold see strange things on the antique map, but when they show Della's father he turns white and rushes out of the house. Della and Harold follow him and become involved in a nightmarish plot to take over the minds of the city's residents. A succession of dangerous pursuits and escapes ends with an awesome finale at the local football stadium. A suspenseful read for fantasy fans aged about 9 to 12. 

The review was written by Lorraine Orman. She's the author of a number of books herself, mostly in the young adult range - some of which I read a number of years ago. I can't remember how we came to know each other, but we had quite a bit of contact at one point by mail and later email. We met up once, in Auckland, over on the North Shore, and we've loosely stayed in touch since then. She's a member of a writers' group on Facebook that I belong to as well. 

Bob Jones and a riot in Castle St

I'm currently putting onto computer the typed journal I wrote back in the early 90s. It's fascinating stuff, covering the complications of family relationships, the beginning of our journey with our current church, now called Dunedin City Baptist, discovering people who would become long-term friends; my successes and failures with writing - a number of small-scale articles getting published, and the work I was doing on a young adult's novel; and the highs and lows of running a Christian bookshop.

Every so often there's also a bit of news beyond these circles. For example, on the 16th April, 1990, I wrote:

The students are well and truly in the news today: a drunken riot in the Castle St area, with 1500 involved in some form or other; a garage collapsing under the weight of about twenty student spectators; furniture being dragged out into the street to be set alight; and further through the paper, we have Bob Jones in his column berating some engineering student in Auckland for writing [that] the study of the humanities was a waste of time because it was non-productive. Jones gives him a real going-over, saying that it's the humanity students who learn to think, compared to the engineering, legal, commerce and so on students who shouldn't even be at University at all, but in separate tertiary institutions, since they are only learning how to use facts. Quite an interesting piece of writing from his lordship, who usually manages to come up with some commonsense dressed as nonsense! Often what he has to say would be fine if he wasn't so bumptious with it. For once, his subject is allowed to speak and Mr Jones is kept in the background. 

A little explanation is required for those who don't live in Dunedin. Our University campus is relatively self-contained over several large blocks, and many students live within those blocks or on their borders. Castle St, over the last few decades, has become one of the more notorious areas for such events as I'm describing here. Couch-burning, which has always seemed to me to be a pretty clueless occupation given the toxic fumes many couches give off, is still done, though it's been

After the balcony collapse - courtesy of Radio NZ

frowned upon severely by police and Proctor alike. Riots are less common, I think, though not large gatherings of students. And in the last couple of years a balcony outside a flat collapsed (harming those underneath more than those on it) when too many students stood on it at once. 

But the other interesting thing about this is that the University itself is tightening up on the Humanities Departments by cutting back on staff, and reducing them in size. Naturally there's been a considerable outcry, but to little avail. Obviously whoever is in charge of such actions thinks along the lines of the Auckland student mentioned: the humanities don't 'contribute' therefore they should be demolished. 

Bob Jones seldom made friends because of his bumptious attitude to a great number of things, and people - in fact I'd already mentioned him in the journal because of this. But here, for once, he makes a solid point, at least as far as the humanities are concerned. These are the areas where people learn to think. That's not to say there are no thinkers in the other departments (the lawyers might be most offended at his statement) but in general these other departments take known facts and work with them, developing from there. The Humanities go beyond this, study what's been written before, what's been thought about before, learn how to think about these things, and then can apply their thinking to other situations. That's a very rough view of what they do. But their value, though not always obvious in profit and loss terms, is of value in looking at how society thinks and trying to get it to think clearly and honestly and wisely. 

Luthier

I'd never heard of the word, luthier, until I went looking for something about Greg Bennett and acoustic guitars. Apparently Greg Bennett is a luthier, which means he designs and makes stringed instruments - in his case, generally guitars. 

The word luthier is obviously related to the word lute, and lutanist and so on, but it has a kind of lisp sound about it, as though someone was trying to say the name Lucia. 

Okay, that was totally irrelevant, and I shouldn't make fun of anyone who has a lisp. However, the word lisp has a long history, going back before the year 1100 at least, and connects the Middle English words, whlispen or lispen, to the Old English word āwlyspian, and is like the Dutch word, lisp and the German word lispeln. There you go, didn't know you were going to get a lesson on the origin of words. 

You can find out more about Greg Bennett guitars here: 

http://www.guitarcenter.com/Greg-Bennett-Design-Samick/Acoustic-Guitars.gc

I assume the man in the picture is Greg Bennett, and not just some model smiling and holding a Greg Bennett guitar...

Typing up the past

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Back in 1989 I began to keep a journal on my computer. It wasn't the first journal or diary I'd kept, by any means - another (handwritten) one was produced alongside it most days, but that was more focused on my spiritual life, and how it was going.

But this 1989 journal was different in the sense that not only was it being written on the computer, I was printing it out as I went. Which was just as well, as the computer I was using, an Amiga 500, didn't keep much information itself; you had to back-up everything onto disks. A tedious process, but essential; a story I wrote, and thought had potential, got lost when it wasn't backed-up. (In every other respect, the Amiga was great.)

The back-up disks survived long after the Amiga had been sold on when we got a new computer, but of course they were no good without the Amiga system. Fortunately, as I said, I'd printed the journal out, regularly, and by the time it came to an end (I went onto a different system on a computer that backed up stuff of its own accord) there were seven volumes of it, the first alone amounting to 120 pages printed out on an old dot-matrix printer, with about 700 words per page.

Feeling some concern at only having one printed copy of the journal, I spent some of my hard-earned cash one day and got the whole thing copied by a local printer I knew through my work. Now I had two copies, but what to do with the second one? Where to store it for safety? I considered a safebox of some sort, but didn't have the finances at that point to keep on paying for the storage. I asked our friendly family lawyer, but that didn't work out either; it wasn't the sort of thing they did. (At least not without payment.) In the end I gave the second copy to my son, so that at least both copies weren't in the same house.

Now, having recently finished the book I've been writing over the last couple of years - The Disenchanted Wizard - I decided it was time to do something I've been intending to do for some time: type up the printed copy of the journal onto my current computer, where it'll automatically be backed-up onto the Cloud. And that's what I've been doing for the last two or three weeks: I'm currently up to page 70 of the first volume, making pretty good progress, and discovering all sorts of stories and events within the family that I'd forgotten about.

There's a lot about writing in there, too. In 1988 I began a writing course by correspondence, and when the journal opened I was coming towards the end of the course and making some progress with the writing: getting articles published, a short story read on the radio, and another short story for kids printed by the School Journal. 

I had a thought a couple of nights ago that I could use the writing sections of the journal in another book, and started some preparatory work towards that. Time will tell whether that eventuates. After all, who needs another book on writing?

50 Books All Kids Probably Won't Read Before 12.

There's no doubt, that without lists, many magazines and even newspapers would struggle to keep their readers interested. Yes, people read the news, and articles, but put the 'Ten Best' or '50 something you should do before you something else' at the top of a piece, and it will almost guarantee that it'll get read.
But I have a feeling that what turns up on these lists makes the items self-perpetuating. Let me give you an example of what I mean. I've just come across a list 50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're Twelve. To begin with, there are some 'magic' words in this title: 'all,' 'should,' 'before'. All relatively innocuous words, common words. But look at the effect they have here. Our attention is immediately grabbed by them. If all kids need to do this, then my kids need to do it. And they need to do it before they're twelve! Wow!
But look at the list. You'll find a great many of the titles on other lists of children's books. Not only are these books already well-known, but every time they get on a list like this they become more well-known. We have to remember this is one person's opinion, and they probably put the list together one day off the top of their head.
Remembering that this is a list for children not yet aged twelve, so look at some of the titles. The Hobbit sits next to Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing (by the wonderful Judy Blume). I am Matala and Revolution is Not a Dinner Party are only a few books apart. Both pretty earnest sounding titles, and seemingly there to broaden the child's social consciousness. I don't think I even had one of these until I was in my mid-twenties.
The Diary of Anne Frank is also there, a book that I'd think was a bit too adult in many ways for even a 12-year-old - unless it's an abridged version. And then The Fellowship of the Ring. Man, I've read this twice, and the second time I found it harder going than the first. This title is followed by The Hunger Games. Crikey, that's a very strange book, with its strong focus on killing innocent people, and its concerns seem a bit beyond even mature 12-year-olds. At the end of the list, To Kill a Mockingbird, which, while it's a great story, is also very longwinded. It certainly has children as the central characters, but it's not truly a kids' book, even though thousands of American schoolchildren have found it on their reading lists.
I've just had a look at another list, 50 New Zealand Books Every Kid Should Read by Age 12. This is quite a mixed bag, and even though I've grown up in NZ, and so have my children, many of these books are unfamiliar to me. The compilers don't claim any authority on this list, which is good, and as it should be. At the end of the day, children are all different and their reading levels will vary enormously, as will their emotional experiences in terms of reading particular books.
I think, personally, that we should follow the Alan Jacobs' approach and read on whim. That's certainly what I did as a child, and continue to do as a nearly-seventy-two-year-old. Claiming that there's any definitive list is probably more of a media approach than a real one.

By the way, you can find some discussion - from a NZ online newspaper - on the first list I've mentioned above, including some reservations about some of the choices.

And a second BTW: I don't see any of my books on these lists. That surely must be an oversight...

First review of The Disenchanted Wizard

Beatrice Hale has sent me a review of my most recent ebook, The Disenchanted Wizard. She's really enthusiastic about it. This is an abridged version of the review. 

This is a beauty of a story! It’s a hugely intriguing adventure story of discovery where people are ‘folded’ and put in The Map, and have all sorts of adventures trying to get out of the map. It’s a story of the goodies and the baddies, and of course the goodies win, eventually.

What did I like? The fantasy, obviously, of The Map and the wizardry which came with it. The pace was lively, dialogue was great, characters good and clear, and what got me most was the detail in the descriptions of the events:  the Antiquarian Bookshop, the ‘folding’ experience, the books coming off the shelves, the wolves scrabbling and howling, scrambling and scrabbling up the chimney with ‘shapes’ hurtling round, the wolf biting into a box, and the final chapters of the soccer match with the pin-up hero Xanadu Whitworth (what a name!) being revealed as a good wizard and on the right side, as pin-ups ought to be.

Favourite bits?  I loved the words: ‘Vertical and horizontal dimensions/to both of these you pay attention.’ Fun! And think of ‘Fold In, Spiral Out’ -  a picturesque view of movement.

The story for me was on different levels. Beneath the fantasy origami stuff of being folded up into small paper shapes and ‘put into the map,’ imprisonment, baddies and goodies, is a story of children learning to think their way through a situation, to look for solutions, to try things out, and to keep on trying.

Just suspend your reality, move into the next world – and ENJOY!

The book is on sale at various ebook outlets. Here are some of them: 

KINDLE:  http://tinyurl.com/jnrt9cx 

SMASHWORDS: http://tinyurl.com/zbl8n9t  

ITUNES: http://tinyurl.com/zx4gmfc 

KOBO: http://tinyurl.com/hazqcy3

B&N: http://tinyurl.com/jd4h7wr

Fauda

We've been watching a series called Fauda (Chaos) on Netflix over the last week or so. Very intense and often extremely suspenseful.
It concerns the ongoing war between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In this case the focus is mostly on a crack group of soldiers set up to infiltrate the Palestinians and undermine their terrorist attacks. All the soldiers in this group speak Arabic like natives and can pass for Arabs. Their main target is a terrorist who was supposed to be dead - in fact the main character of the series had understood that he'd killed him a couple of years before. But the terrorist is alive and well, and is almost killed (again) early in the piece, only just escaping once again. In the process, however, a wedding is disrupted (the terrorist's younger brother is the groom) by the soldiers (in disguise as the waiters providing the sweetmeats) and tragedy occurs. From then on it's a question of who will win: the soldiers, who want to rid the country of the terrorist, or the terrorist, who is planning a massive attack on the Israelis.
Because the series is made by Israelis, we're rooting for them even though they don't necessarily come across as full of integrity at every point. They're not out for revenge, they just want to keep their country free of a terrorist who they thought they'd already finished off. The Palestinian side is well-presented even though it's hard to empathise fully with them because their cause isn't just revenge, it's outright slaughter. But they come across as human beings, caught up in a seemingly timeless war between two peoples, in which they are basically carrying on a fight that has gone on for centuries in one form or another.
There are a host of characters, several of whom don't survive the crossfires for various reasons. There are some wonderful big set-pieces, and scenes of considerable anguish (from both parties to the war). The Palestinians (many of them played by Israelis - though the terrorist himself is actually a Palestinian actor) tend to present a kind of thinking that is so imbued with hatred that it's hard to empathise fully with them. On the other hand, the behaviour of the Israelis isn't always the best, and there is some laxity in the sexual department between some of the main characters. This didn't seem necessary to the plot, for me, but since a second series is being made, perhaps these elements affect what is yet to come.

Third book in my fantasy series for children

The Disenchanted Wizard - number three in the Grimhilderness series - is now available in ebook format. You can order it from Kindle and a variety of other outlets online: see the list at the end of this post.

The Disenchanted Wizard has had a long, long gestation. Check out innumerable posts on my blog in which I go from joy to despair to frustration to tearing-out-hair, and so on. Some of the delay has been due to other work getting in the way; some of it to procrastination (though not much); some of it to disagreements about the book with my editor-cum-co-writer; some of it has been the fact that large chunks of it have been rewritten. And in some cases rewritten again. As my co-whatever-she-is has said regularly, You can do better.

I won't go again into the considerable changes that have occurred during the course of this book. Suffice to say that only the main characters survived the gruelling process: Della, the 12-year-old at the heart of the story, and her father, Archie; Harold, her younger and sometimes smarter cousin; the curious Mr Crinch - who spent much of the process being an ambivalent character, one we weren't quite sure about: was he was on Della's side or not? You'll have to read the book to find out.

And then there was the wizard himself, originally known only as the Dog (at one time, The Moorish Dog, in fact), but later more often known by his real name, Evan Hoyle. In the very early stages he was Grimhilda's rogue brother. That idea went west. The other character who managed to survive the purges was Xanadu Whitworth, a name that popped into my head before the first draft was written, and which appealed to me so much it stuck. His name sounded so much like that of a footballer's, to me, that that's what he became.*

Anyway, here's the synopsis as it appears online, just to give you an idea of the story:

Della's enthusiasm for soccer, and for the famous player, Xanadu Whitworth, is knocked sideways when her younger cousin, Harold, brings his latest map to show her. The map has strange drawings on it, and within minutes she and her cousin are shocked at what happens with one of them. Worse, when Della's father sees the map, he plainly recognises it from his past, and goes into a panic. Shortly afterwards he rushes out of the house to find someone who can help. But who is this person who can help, and what exactly can they do?

Before the evening is out, Della and Harold˗˗accompanied by the puzzling Mr Crinch˗˗will be thrust not only into a different world, but into a series of terrifying situations. They will have to face the wizard, Evan Hoyle, once known by the nickname, The Dog, and must stop him not only from attacking Xanadu's soccer team, but from taking over the city.

KINDLE:  http://tinyurl.com/jnrt9cx 

SMASHWORDS: http://tinyurl.com/zbl8n9t  

ITUNES: http://tinyurl.com/zx4gmfc 

KOBO: http://tinyurl.com/hazqcy3

B&N: http://tinyurl.com/jd4h7wr

*To see what might have happened to some of the characters who didn't make the cut, check out this the flash fiction story I wrote on the subject, back in 2015. You'll find it on this page: just search by my name, Crowl. 

Amp me up, baby

I've written about amps before, usually with tongue considerably in cheek. My relationship with amps has usually been through our church, where for a while the size of the amplifiers seemed to increase every few weeks. Which just made things louder rather than more subtle.

When we did the New Zealand opera, A Christmas Carol, about three months ago, the four keyboard players and the conductor, tore their combined hair out on a number of occasions during the later stage of the rehearsals in the theatre, because it seemed no one was actually in charge of sound (a surprising omission) and yet we had sound to deal with. Keyboards don't sound good without amplifiers, as you'll know.

Thankfully, our assistant stage manager used her wide-ranging brain to bring the amplifier that we did have in-house under control. Initially it seemed as if all the sound from the keyboards was blasting its way around the orchestral pit. But gradually we worked out how to get some control, some subtlety and the audience heard a great sound, and those on stage heard more than enough to be able to sing along with.

All of which to introduce Bugera Amps, a kind of amp I'm not familiar with, but which are apparently available in all shapes and sizes, to suit all sorts of musical ears. (And probably a few unmusical ones.) The little stay-at-home-put-my-grand-composition-on-the-computer type to the I'm-playing-the-biggest-gig-I've-ever-played-so-this-amp-better-do-the-job type. Good old Bugera!

Art movies

 I dipped into Pauline Kael's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang again recently, and came across the following quote in her review of Ingmar Bergman's film, Persona: 

It may be that an open puzzle movie like this one, which affects some people very profoundly, permits them to project into it so much of themselves that what they think the movie is about has very little to do with what happens on the screen. This kind of projection ˗ which we used to think of as the precritical responsiveness of the mass audience ˗ is now common in the educated audience. People can be heard saying that they ‘didn’t worry about whether it was good or bad,’ they ‘just let it happen to them.’ And if the educated audience is now coming around to the larger audience’s way of seeing movies, I would suggest that they are also being sold in the same way as the larger audience, that advertising and the appearance of critical consensus it gives to certain movies are what lead people to ‘let’ certain prestigious movies ‘happen to them,’ just as the larger audience lets an oversized musical spoof like Thoroughly Modern Millie happen to them. The idea is that ‘art’ should be experienced, not criticised. There seems to be little sense that critical faculties are involved in experience, and that if they are not involved, advertising determines what is accepted as art.

If what I understand Kael to be saying is correct, it means that much of what is claimed to be 'art' in movies, as in 'art house movies', is merely movies that are 'sold' that way. These movies can be obscure, strange, full of peculiar and unrelated incidents, sometimes badly filmed, and often have next to nothing in the way of a story. There was a great trend for these sorts of movies back in the sixties: Bergman brought the Swedish approach, Fellini and Antonioni the Italian one, and there were a bunch of awful French movies that made virtually no sense at all, such as those by Jean-Luc Godard. They were the 'new wave.' 

Some of these directors were masters of cinema-making, but not of story, and they brought oddball movies to the screen that were more about mood and emotion and possibility - or the lack of it. Great actors appeared in them, and sometimes must have wondered what on earth they were supposed to be acting. Certainly audiences must have often wondered what they were watching, but in the mood of the times it was considered trendy to make a great noise about these films often more because of who they were made by than for any other good reason. Viewing Bergman today, you can still get the impression of a great mind at work, though increasingly the films seem to be distant from us. Unlike many films that have endured, they lack the means to affect us emotionally. Watching Fellini's 'masterpiece', La Dolce Vita, we get to the point where we wonder if it's ever going to end, even though a lot of what goes on is very watchable. But there doesn't seem to be anything to really grasp in it, and this became increasingly the case with his movies. Antonioni's films always seemed to be saying something you couldn't hear. Godard's movies were strange radical things in their day, full of unexpected violence, yet even then they seemed to have no heart (Fellini at least had a heart), and Bergman's films can come across as cold (though in some of his earlier movies we can empathise with the characters more readily). 

Were these films great or were they sold to us as great? I think the moviemakers themselves were great artists, but they tackled things from a strange mental viewpoint. 

Simple names

Remember the days when a musical instrument had a single name (or at most two, like the spuriously-named, French Horn)? Yes, some of the names might be odd, like a Serpent or the Theremin, or the Aquaggaswack (yup - see the picture on the right), but they were easily remembered. (Well, maybe Aquaggaswack isn't easy to remember, or spell.)

But now we have instruments and add-ons to instruments that come with names like the Eventide h9 Harmonizer Guitar multi-effects pedal. Looking at that name I'm not even sure where to start in terms of deciding which is the most important element. Sure, 'Eventide' is obviously some kind of brand name, so - with all due respects to the makers - you could cut that out. The 'h9' is presumably some kind of class of pedal, and I guess that's kind of important. Relatively. What the 'Harmonizer' aspect is I'm not sure; I suppose it's the electronic part that makes sure everything else works together. Or not.

The 'Guitar' - well that's easy, except that most likely it's an electric guitar of some kind, so it's not quite as straightforward as the Aquaggaswack. 'Multi-effects' makes me quake. We have a young feller at church who uses a few 'effects' on his guitar. One of them sounds mostly like static. Not so pleasant when you're trying to sing over it, though I guess it has its place. Somewhere. Maybe on a rock band stage, in performance, when you can wear earplugs.

And finally 'pedal.' Well, we all know what that is: it's a word that covers a multitude of appliances, mostly worked with the foot. Three of them in some cars, two in others. One on grandma's sewing machine, two on a harmonium (and jolly hard work they are, too).

Which brings me back to my point. It's taken three paragraphs to explain a single instrument, or a single instrument's add-on. I guess we could just call it an 'h9' and be done with it, but it's not quite as interesting as a 'bikelophone' or a Didjibodhrán.

La La Land

Probably a few spoilers here, so don't read this if you haven't seen the movie.

I see La La Land has won a bunch of awards in the Golden Globes: Best Actor and Actress, Best Musical (not hard, since there are barely any others around), Best Director, Best Original Score (interesting category to win, I'd have thought), and finally, Best Screenplay. O...kay. Plainly La La Land pleased the people who nominate and vote for the Golden Globes, and it's pleased a lot of other people too, but...

It starts off brilliantly with a one take (or at least, so it seems) dance sequence set on the freeway, the drivers of cars marooned in a traffic jam taking part in a hugely exciting dance amongst the cars (and on top of them and over them). It’s so extraordinarily well choreographed and timed that you feel set up for a really good musical. Curiously it has very little to do with the rest of the story.

Not long after that a quartet of women who share the same flat, including the heroine, Mia, (Emma Stone), have an equally well filmed song and dance around their apartment, the camera following through the doors and openings without a hitch. And then there was also an exuberant party dance in which guys threw themselves into a swimming pool - filmed partly from under the water. 

But after that, and as soon as Ryan Gosling appears, things begin to get gloomy. Even though Gosling plays the piano superbly in the film, and actually dances pretty well and sort of manages to sing, he lacks the charisma that made the great movie song and dance men come alive on screen. The story requires him to be a fairly cheerless fellow, and Gosling is admirably suited for this. His dream hasn’t taken off and so he’s got a snitch at the world ˗ until he falls in love with Mia, who’s also got a dream of making it big-time as an actress. In spite of dance duo sequences and an incredibly beautiful vision of Los Angeles, the film gradually becomes more and more downbeat, until it turns out that the dreams each one has will destroy their relationship. Five years later, he’s got the jazz club he always wanted and she’s a big movie star, and has married someone else. And has a child. What? The hero and heroine don’t end up with each other ˗ in a musical? Nooe, not in this one. 

As if to fulfil our expectations in part, at the end, while Mia is watching Gosling (whose character's name barely gets mentioned enough during the film to be memorable) playing the little haunting tune in his club that is kind of a theme song (although in spite of all his fuss about jazz, it’s not a jazz piece), she imagines what would have happened if he’d done one thing differently on the night they met in the restaurant where he was hating playing the setlist of songs. 

As a kind of audience tease, in the trailer this imagined scene is the one we see, where instead of rudely pushing past her because he’s angry that he’s just been fired, he stops and kisses her. If the audience has seen the trailer, their expectation (as mine was) is to see him stop and kiss her when this first happens; instead we get the scene in which he ignores her. 

They have met a couple of times before this, if I remember rightly: once at the very end of the opening dance, when again he’s rude. And this is part of the problem: he’s not actually that likeable a character, even though he does set her on the road to stardom in the end. In doing so, of course, he loses her.

It’s a bit of an oddball story: starting with such high expectations of joy, and becoming more downbeat ever after. Once the romantic stuff starts, everything slows down, and the film seemed to me to be too long for its own good. Plainly I’m alone in this because all the reviews I’ve read think it’s fabulous from whoa to go, and have no criticisms, virtually.

I know that musicals haven’t always been upbeat with happy endings, on both stage and screen, but here the mood changes so considerably that it just doesn’t quite come off. It’s a bit like Carousal, where there’s such joy in the first half and such sorrow in the second. But there the thing is at least balanced better. And it ends in hope. 

There's no hope in La La Land. Once the characters have set themselves on the path they've chosen, their relationship falls by the wayside - in spite of them saying they'll never forget each other. 

Emma Stone is terrific throughout. In fact she holds the movie together. She gets to sing a few times, dances a few times, and has a soliloquy type piece near the end, which is another kind of dream sequence. She does this very well, for someone who plainly isn't a trained singer. Gosling shows that he's worked exceptionally hard to make it look as though he's a superb pianist. When he's playing jazz and such, in the movie, he comes across very well. Unfortunately there are two scenes where he's supposed to be hating what he's doing - it's beneath his talent. The boredom and sourness undercut the value of the scenes somehow, and it becomes a bit of a mystery as to why Mia would fall for the guy. He has a big chip on his shoulder (a scene in which his sister appears and berates him, early in the piece, reinforces this), and wants the world only on his terms. In the end, is he actually happy? He's got the club he always wanted, he's got great musos around him. Obviously it's still not enough. 

I'd had high expectations of the movie. And felt really enthusiastic about it while watching the first half hour. But gradually something goes awry. In spite of all its awards and accolades, I think it's not quite the movie people are seeing. Maybe it's more the movie people want to see, because musicals and movies are so much a part of each other. Let's hope the director/writer, Damien Chazelle, makes another musical, one that really does send you out of the theatre dancing (as someone claimed, rather improbably, that this one does!)

Detectives and their superiors

We watched the first episode (of two) in the new Maigret series last night. Suffice to say that Rowan Atkinson proved yet again that his long-standing relationship with Mr Bean, or Blackadder doesn't mean that he can't play someone completely different and in a totally different key. He was just wonderful.

But that's not what I wanted to write about. What I would love to see is a police thriller in which the main detective isn't constantly berated by his superior for not being quick enough in solving the crime, and/or spending too much of the department's money and therefore likely to find his funding cut off at a moment's notice - because up above the superior is another superior fussing about something similar.

Not only does it bring a cliche effect to each police thriller you see, it gets harder and harder for the actor blessed with the role of the superior to make anything fresh of it. I'm not sure who the well-known actor in Maigret was who was landed with this particular role; he chose to take the repressed, struggling, man-in-the-middle approach to the part, unlike another recent British series Paranoid in which the three main detectives are continually berated by an almost frenetic superior, played by Neil Stuke, who plainly felt that the lines he was given were so pointless and minimal that he'd go all out.

It would be interesting - if not so dramatic - to see an encouraging superior just once in a while, or one who didn't turn out to be more corrupt than the criminals, or one who didn't close down the investigation before it started, and so on.

Suppose, for a change, the detective in charge of the case worried about the resources and the funding and the fact that it was taking a long time to get a result - while the superior sat upstairs eating biscuits and drinking coffee and saying to the detective: Don't worry, old boy, it'll all come out in the wash. Just wait for the last episode!

Memorizing music

I don't seem to have written about a book I discovered last year called By Heart: the art of memorizing music, by Paul Cienniwa. (Memorizing the spelling of his name is a bit of an achievement in itself!)

This has been the most helpful book I've come across in a long time, in terms not only of memorising music but also of memorising text such as poems and sections of Scripture, something I've done for a long time.

I've memorised music in the past - a long time ago, in fact - but nothing ever seemed to stick for long. With the help of this book, I've been able not only to memorise several pieces (none of them long, but that's not the point; you need to start somewhere), but also retain them. Yes, you have to do a bit of revising when you come back to them after a month or three, but you have to do this with text as well, at least until it's so embedded in your brain that you'll never forget it.

I've just revisited the pieces I learned this year, three by Christopher Norton from his Rock Preludes book, and three Preludes by Bach, ones that I've known for decades, since I first learned any Bach, but have never memorised. I had to start from scratch on each of them, because even though I could play them fairly well, I had no real idea of what notes I was playing. Which is the case for many musicians who rely on sightreading to get themselves through the day.

One of the Bach Preludes, number XV from the first set of 24, has always delighted me. I don't know what it is about it, but there a some bars that just feel like a taste of heaven - to me. No doubt there are bars in other Preludes that do the same for other pianists. Anyway, having revised this today to the point where I could comfortably play it again, I played it with my eyes shut. I have a feeling that I read in Cienniwa's book that he doesn't recommend this, but I can't find a reference to it. He does say that printed music gets in the way of your communication with your audience. I remember that.

However, I played through the piece, eyes shut, and found that instead of seeing notes on the page, I was visualising where I was on the piano and what my fingers were doing. This may not be unusual, and in fact, when I've gone back to the printed music after having learned a piece the notes often seem not quite where they are in my head anymore. It's the same with text. Once it's learned it becomes part of something in your head, and you visualise it differently in the brain.

At my advanced age it's great to be able to sit down and play something without the music in front of me. It's an achievement after all these years of feeling that I just couldn't memorise, and an encouragement to go on and memorise other music. I began one of Prokofiev's sonatas a few months back, but struggled greatly with it. I think I got about two pages into it before I had to give up. However, I've begun a work that's just as long in the last couple of weeks: Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Though it appears simple at first sight, he seldom does the same thing twice: harmonies change on repeats, and not only do the time signatures shift, but even within those time signatures, there are shifts of the main beats.

I've got the first section mostly under my belt, the one where the main theme is introduced, and have begun the second. It might take all of next year, but I'd like to get it so that I can play it from memory, even if it's only for my own satisfaction.

Mostly Paranoid

Watched Shawshank Redemption again (or most of it; missed a chunk near the beginning) the other night. Must be the third of fourth time. It's intriguing that a movie that takes so much time over its story is so watchable. The acting is detailed and strong, but it can't be just that. And it can't be the story, because once you know the ending, you won't forget it.

We've also been watching Paranoid on Netflix. A British/German co-production about an investigation into the seemingly out-of-the-blue murder of a young female doctor in a playground full of children - including her own.

Three detectives are on the case: Nina, played with verve by Indira Varma, switching from sane to slightly crazy at the drop of a hat; Bobby (Robert Glenister), well into middle-age, and with a tendency to panic attacks; and Alec (Dino Fetscher) the youngest of the three: likely to go off full-throttle, but also capable of understanding Nina (to her surprise), with whom he falls in love.

Their German counterparts (the reason for the murder turns out to be in Germany) are Christiane Paul (Linda) and Dominik Tiefenthaler. Linda has some issues of her own, which aren't revealed until the last episode; otherwise she's sane - running a household of boys with ease - and sharp, and delights in Skyping her British colleagues.

Like all British detective series, it relies greatly on character. Sometimes there's almost a bit much character here: Bobby gets himself involved with a woman, Lesley Sharp, who's is the key witness to the first murder, and she's forever trying to bring him into a calmer place, being a Quaker. But in general the interaction moves the story forward, because, being a relatively small town, detectives and suspects are interlinked by existing relationships.

It relies a bit too strongly on coincidence, and sometimes the weather changes without warning, mostly for effect. I know that in Britain, in winter, day can turn into night fairly quickly, but here, at more than one point, it does it in seconds. And, as so often in thrillers, people manage to get from A to B between scene changes, even though another character has just spent a great deal longer getting there.

Small quibbles, and never quite as bad as some of those US series where the detectives are always at the right place at the right time, usually after the computer whiz kid has done a few clicks on the keyboard. Considering how many serial killers they present in some of these US series, and how regularly they're dispatched, it's a wonder there are any left. And why do US serial killers almost always kill women, rarely men? Peculiar.

Enough: watch Paranoid if you get a chance.

In the tearoom

A post from the past - not entirely dated in what it says. This item first appeared on Bloggerwave, probably in early 2007. 

The tearoom – the one where only the men go – is a place where unpolitical correctness reigns. And so do strong opinions. And shared stories, made more alive by kinetic retelling.  

It’s the place where grassroots thinking exists, and where all the liberal left-wing PC stuff seems to have barely made a dint. What it’s like for these men outside is another matter; in the tearoom opinion is at its most forthright. 

The anti-smacking bill, for instance, got a clobbering, and lots of witty remarks about what the men did or didn’t do to their own children, or had done to them. For the most part it wasn’t nearly as bad as Helen Clark and her cohorts would like to think. Most men these days are not given to smacking their kids with any degree of regularity. 

The stadium issue, here in Dunedin, gets aired almost every other day – because something turns up in the paper about it every day, and the newspaper is shared around the room in section (after the one who always reads it first has had a go). Opinions on the need for a new stadium are both pro and con, and strong in both directions. But everything is seasoned with good humour, and no one comes to blows over any of the issues.

But I think the matter that surprised me a little today was when it was announced that the Privy Council had deemed David Bain’s first trial to be a mistrial, and therefore his conviction was overturned. What it will mean for Bain in reality is another matter. It seems unlikely the police will let the matter lie. Someone who was convicted of murdering the other five members of his family early one morning isn’t likely to be let go scot free, whatever the Privy Council states. 

The tearoom, almost to a man, is convinced that he was guilty anyway. Why? There’s no obvious reason.Even those who’ve read Joe Karam’s books on the subject are still not convinced of his innocence.  

I was surprised because I’ve never believed that the case was as cut and dried as the police made out. There have always been flaws in the whole thing, and there’s absolutely no motivation for David Bain, a mild-mannered youth, to suddenly strike every one of his family down in a few short minutes. Only one other man in the room felt less comfortable with the general verdict, and he’d actually known Bain at school. 

There was talk about all the compensation Bain would get – the millions! One wit said, Well he could pay for the new stadium with all the money and then, instead of it being called the House of Pain, it could be called the House of Bain.  

At the time, the Labour Government brought in a bill to stop parents smacking their children. It wasn't as popular as the liberals made out. Helen Clark was the Prime Minister at the time. 

The Dunedin Stadium cost the city a fortune, and is still costing. It's never paid its way, and was the dream-child of people who didn't take responsibility for the cost. 

David Bain was accused of murdering his father, mother and siblings but the evidence was circumstantial and he has since been freed, and, very recently, paid the relatively small sum of $1 million, mainly to cover his legal costs and such that have accrued over various trials and re-trials. NZ is still very divided on his guilt/innocence. 

The House of Pain was the name for Carisbrook, which was replaced by the Stadium. 

Treasures old....

Back in 2006/7, when I was out of work for some months, I was persuaded I could produce some income by writing blog posts for various sites. According to the site owners I would make piles of money and probably never have to go to work again. Yeah, right.

However, I did write a lot of blog posts, including ones for a site called Orble, where I had two blogs running consecutively. Both of these blogs mysteriously disappeared a few years ago, and no amount of inquiry to Orble elicited any response. Thankfully, I'd kept the posts from one of the sites - WorkReport.net - relating to issues I had with my prostate in the late 2008-early 2009, because I wanted to write a book using them. (The book eventually got published as Diary of a Prostate Wimp, available as an e-book on Amazon Kindle as well as other devices.)

I did make some cash out of these sites, through Google Adsense, so they weren't entirely wasted.

Another site, Triond, where I also made a small amount of cash (they paid monthly, rather than waiting till the payments had built up to US$100) also eventually went into some kind of AWOL status, and refused to respond to enquiries. Dozens of bloggers wrote to them but they just ignored us all.

The problem with these sites gradually disappearing off the Net is that you lose all the blog posts you've written - unless you're very good at backing things up. I wasn't that good, but early on I tended to write the posts offline, in Word, and then upload them to the blog. Which meant I had copies of them.

I've been sifting back through my old files, and have discovered a fairly large wad of posts, some good, some not so good. In order to give the better ones a new lease of life, I'll add them to this blog over the next months/year. I'll note on when and where they first appeared (if I actually have those details) so that you don't think you're reading totally new material. Not that it would matter: there's an awful lot of recycled material on the Internet!

Just another little project....

Spare me from 600-page books

I started off the year with a bit of a bang, aiming to read at least one classic this year. The Brothers Karamazov got the short straw, and while I found there some longish moments in it, when Dostoevsky seemed to go off on some tangent (and I don't mean the Father Zossima passages, which are excellent), I still finished it, because there are many wonderful stretches of writing in it. I don't know how many pages it is, because I read it on Kindle - the paperback version I'd had since I was a teenager was falling to bits, and I didn't think to check the number of pages before I threw it out. Anyway, the print was ridiculously small in that edition - for an older person.

I also read Dickens' Our Mutual Friend during the year. Another whopper, also with many byways included, a number of them tedious, and some of them downright silly. Of all the Dickens books I've read this has to be the one that balances some of his best writing with some of his worst. The satire is often superb (the nouveau riche people, for instance); on the other hand some of it hits you over the head with everything Dickens can find. The love story is all over the shop, as well. However, I still finished it, though there were some skimmed moments.

You can tolerate the length of classic novels because you know they were written for an age when reading was something that people did in the long evenings, an age when there was no TV, movies, radio, Internet. But when people produce 600 page novels these days, there had better be a darn good reason for it.

I do quite a bit of reviewing for our local paper, and I got not one but two 600-page novels to deal with recently. The first was The Nix by Nathan Hill. Honest reviewers have said that it's just too long in spite of its wit and satire. I understand it was originally over a 1000 pages. Thankfully that version wasn't published. But the version that was published tried my patience. I finished it, but only by skimming increasingly as I went along. Hill allows himself so many interruptions and authorial reflections and back stories and side stories and streams of consciousness and I don't know what, that the story, such as it is, almost gets swallowed up by all the malarky going on in the writing. There's no doubt the man can write, but perhaps next time he should commit to producing a couple of hundred pages that are really page-turning; just as a challenge, maybe,..

And then came Under a Pole Star, by Stef Penney, also at 600 pages. I got about 200 pages into this, a book that seemed to be about exploration in the Arctic, and seemed as though it was going to be interesting because of that. But for some reason Penney decided that we should have access to her main characters' sexual lives - at length. In the 200 pages I read, very little of this sexual information was relevant to the story; certainly not in the detail we were given. I'd no sooner skim a bit than they were at it again. The exploration seemed continually to be taking a back seat. I'm assuming her two main characters eventually got together at some point in the book. They didn't look as though they were going to remotely get there when I stopped reading, and handed the book back to the Book Editor.

I'm puzzled why publishers think that books have to be long these days. Even the lightweight romance I've just finished (again, for review) was heading up to 400 pages - at least there were fewer words on each page because there was a lot of dialogue. 300 to 350 pages is a good length for me, if the book isn't a classic that's been around since the 19th century. Obviously editors no longer do the job of cutting out swathes of unnecessary material.

I've just remembered that I also started to read, this year, the 571-page Here I am, by Jonathan Foer, and the 560-page Sport of Kings, by C E Morgan, and didn't finish either of them, for various reasons. How many trees are cut down to provide these tomes?

When I was doing a writing course back in the 80s I was asked to write a short story for an assignment (and it was a short one). And then, in the next assignment, was asked to cut it in half. I thought: impossible! But no, it's never impossible. You just have to be willing to let go of a lot of 'stuff' that really isn't as relevant as you first thought. And it teaches you to be concise as well.

I'm not saying that writers must reduce their novels down to the bare bones, Readers Digest-wise, but surely their editors could persuade them that maybe a 100-150 pages of their 600-page book might be cleared out of the way, so that real story could find its feet?