Three opinions (mine and others)

On Witi Ihimaera's recent plagiarism debacle

Reading the Maps has come up with an opinion piece titled Plagiarism: What Ihimaera could learn from Eliot. Basically, the writer says that the Witi issue has been debated wrongly. First of all, those wanting to defend or attack Witi's plagiarism have not discussed the instances when literary borrowing is allowed. The writer insists that, as in the case of TS Eliot's The Waste Land (which I have not read, nor have I read Witi's The Trowenna Sea), borrowing without acknowledgement is good if it builds on the context of the original source. Whereas in Witi's case, Witi has borrowed to make his own prose look pretty - hardly a collaborative effort & smacks of vanity.

The difference between the plagiarisms in The Waste Land and the plagiarisms in The Trowenna Sea is closely related to the different intentions of the two plagiarists. Eliot has appropriated the refrain of Spencer's 'Prothalamion' because he wants to make the author of The Faerie Queen into one of the voices in the large, discordant chorus that is The Waste Land; he does not want to assimilate Spencer's verbal felicities, but rather to present them to the reader alongside his own.

Witi Ihimaera's plagiarisms are both far less ambitious and far less noble than those of Eliot. Ihimaera seems to have borrowed attractive passages from other authors simply because they make his own prose seem more attractive. Rather than making some sort of original use of the passages he has borrowed - by juxtaposing them with dissimilar passages, for instance, or adding commentary to them - he has sought to insert them as gently as possible into his text. Indeed, Ihimaera appears to have 'tweaked' many of the passages he has appropriated, so that they fit more comfortably into their new contexts.

If Eliot is like the modernist architect who wants his building to bear witness to the origins of its materials, then Ihimaera is like the tasteless but conceited renovator who insists on painting over brick and plastering over iron fills.

Speaking of artistic borrowing, have you read Jonathan Lethem's 2007 essay, The Ecstasy of Influence? It is about plagiarism and it is plagiarism, since every sentence in Lethem's essay is a paraphrase of somebody else's work! It's all there in the footnotes.

On The Woolshed Sessions

Released a year ago, this album was recorded in an old woolshed in Takaka Valley simply because the acoustics of the woolshed were so damn good. So good, in fact, that the music evokes the landscape around it, no kidding. At the end of Sun Song, for example, what sounds like an e-bow over a guitar bringing the song to a close calls to mind the sun setting over yellow grassy plains.

There is the atmospheric track Waterfall, the delightfully playful Stringing Me Along and the sweet Only Your Arms... It's got those twangs, lilting guitars and drum brushes that I love. It's warm country music - life-affirming (with one or two hints of the darker side of life) and smelling of manuka bush, pampas grass and waterfalls. If I had to describe this album in one word, it would be sun-soaked. Perfect for summer.

Listen to filmmaker Gaylene Preston, the owner of the woolshed, talk about it here. Retailing at $29.95 at Real Groovy.

Speaking the words

Sam Hunt reckons it's a mistake to think of poems in terms of words on a page. For him, the written poem is, to borrow a musical word, the 'score' and the real poem is the one that is spoken. He writes:

Imagine looking at a score of sheet music and reading the notes without actually listening to the notes in your head - that would defeat the point. For me it's exactly the same with poems. - From Backroads

But then again, some poets absolutely kill their poems, Sam! Uh, I don't want to name them, but...

Often poets can murder their own stuff - I'm aware of that. Alistair Te Ariki Campbell murdered his stuff on stage yet he had the perfect ear - the words and the score he created are absolutely perfect. - From Backroads

Oh, okay.

Well, I do read poems out loud, but only when I'm the only person in the room! In front of other people, I'd be too conscious of my nowhere-accent. New Zealanders have variously told me I sound Canadian, South African, Russian(!) and have described my Malaysian accent as 'sing-song'. Hahaha!

Sam Hunt

Here's another giant who walks the earth. Sam Hunt is arguably New Zealand's best known living poet. Not only that, he is a full-time poet.

I have just been given his latest book, Backroads: Charting A Poet's Life. It is a beautiful book which makes me think Sam's a lucky guy indeed, since writers don't get much of a say in the appearance of their books. Everything about this book wows me: the stories, the paper quality, the reproductions of typewritten and handwritten poems, and the lovely story about his beloved dog Minstrel.

Have a listen to a podcast of his musical collaborations here. I'd love vinyls of these recordings but apparently they are extremely rare. My favourite pick in this podcast is "Your body has no flaw" - it verges on the ridiculous, rather like Leonard Cohen's amusingly absurd women-worshipping poems.

Your body has no flaw - for now

You live outside the law...

Buttocks breast and thigh

Curved apples where I lie

Your calves another shore

Your body has no flaw...

And here's a delightful Sam Hunt radio appearance.

Changing her mind

Zadie Smith's first non-fiction collection is out.

"Reading for Smith is a mind-changing, life-giving, soul-saving affair and her criticism has a missionary urgency." - The Guardian

Definitely on my reading list for Christmas.

Changing my mind

Baby steps

The end of August marked the sixth month of my full-time art practice, so I took stock of how productive I'd been so far, tallying up the hours spent on various projects. This was not as hard as it sounds, since I note down my activities daily using a timesheet.

The timesheet is a concept I borrowed from lawyers. A unit of time is six minutes. This makes it easier to manipulate the figures using base-10. Hence:

Stretching watercolour paper, 5 units (half an hour). Writing an art proposal, 70 units (7 hours). Writing an exhibition review, 146 units. Attending an art opening, 10 units. Keeping abreast of art news & blogs, 5 units. And so on...

When I looked at my results, I was disappointed because I always expect more from myself. After a while, I consoled myself with the fact that dealing to my art practice for an average of 4 solid hours per day was not so bad after all, given I was still trying to find my daily rhythm. It was also reassuring to know that a large bulk of that studio time was devoted to painting, writing & preparing proposals (all the proposals came to no fruition, but that's okay, I'm still learning).

The results also helped sharpen my daily goals. I now tell myself every day that I have to get over that 4-hour mark. This helps when the day starts to drag after lunchtime!

Here are some organizational tips that I find very useful

If something can be done in under 2 minutes, just do it immediately before you forget. The '2-minute rule' is especially useful when having to send brief email replies.

At the end of your day, plan for the next by deciding on 2 things to accomplish before 10am, be it making a telephone call or finishing a drawing.

Take note of the things you tend to do when you procrastinate. For some, it's attending to emails and surfing the internet (I'm guilty as heck). For others, it's going to the coffee shop on the pretext of planning in your diary.

Maya Lin

She of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial fame, commissioned while the artist was still a Yale undergrad. Good to know that she's still trucking along. Her latest exhibition, Three Ways Of Looking At The Earth, looks stunning. It must have been a royal pain to install! Joanne Mattera has the scoop. More amazing images can be found on Lin's website.

OK so

As much as I want to be as open as I can about art, I don't like art that is only about the art world. I have a great aversion toward insularity of any kind, be it in people, in religion, and yes, in art that is made for other artists to applaud at its own cleverness.

(I don't like films that are about film, for that matter. Festival In Cannes, a film starring Greta Scacchi, is an example of this. By contrast, a director like Tarantino references other people's films as well as his own but his body of work rises above simple fanboy discourse and, to me at least, his films offer interesting points of discussion about feminism. [Had to edit this part because I just remembered how the debate went exactly:] And to digress even more: I was listening to a friendly debate among friends recently about this. Somebody was pooh-poohing the idea that Tarantino is more of a feminist than Sofia Coppola has ever been (which is my take on the subject). Not that Coppola has ever claimed to champion feminism, but as only the third female director to be nominated for an Oscar, she unfortunately carries that torch. My friend said that Tarantino's pro-feminism is incidental in the way that Coppola is 'incidentally' misogynistic and the reality is that Tarantino merely displays a fetish, if you like, for strong women - the same way R Crumb has a fetish for big women. The use of the word 'incidental' was interesting.)

Sigh. It's very difficult to talk about art in this way. I feel as though I've painted myself into a corner. I guess the lesson is that one can't really talk about art, only around it. For instance, I don't know what the function of art is, I only know what I don't want it to do.

To change the subject

I like books immensely. Books present a welcome distraction when I'm trying to write art proposals. You can tell it hasn't been a productive last few days for me, hehe. Having just put down a CK Stead novel, Talking About O'Dwyer (not one of his best but engaging enough and generous toward its characters), and Yasmina Reza's novellas (brilliant, stylish, some might say too stylish but young people like myself don't mind that eh!), my next plan is to attack this pile of books awaiting my attention:

Tash Aw's Map Of The Invisible World

Nicolas Bourriaud's Postproduction - it looked interesting in the library & tiny enough for me to handle. Let's hope the translation is better than what I remember of his earlier book, Relational Aesthetics

Frank Sargeson's bio by Michael King

Janet Frame's autobiography - am looking forward to this one. CK Stead wrote an illuminating article about Frame here.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas - a few eminent writers have praised this but I don't know if I will in fact give it a try... It's been sitting on my shelf for months now

Lloyd Jones' Here At The End Of The World We Learn To Dance - another one I'm looking forward to

Mark Haddon's A Spot Of Bother

...Oh dear. These will take me into the new year, I'm sure.

OK back to work now.

I'm guestblogging

for Sharon on New Zealand Book Month.

Two loving poems about fathers

The first one is by Bill Manhire, who Lloyd Jones said is the best living New Zealand poet (I don't concur, as I have my own favourites). In Our Father, I love how he builds up a sense of height in the poem, from a child's foot to a child on his dad's shoulders to a tall pole out of reach. Parents are indeed larger than life.

Our Father

by Bill Manhire

On one trip he brought home

a piece of stone from the river,

shaped like a child's foot

and filled with the weight

of the missing body. Another time

he just walked in

with our lost brother

high on his shoulders

after a two-day absence;

and it seems like only yesterday

he was showing us

the long pole, the one

out there in the yard now,

taller than twice himself,

that still hoists

our mother's washing out of reach.

This next one is by earlier New Zealand poet James K Baxter who has a new book on the shelves 37 years after his death, a fresh selection by Sam Hunt. There is such love in this poem, as he describes his father's smile like 'a low sun on water'.

To My Father In Spring

by James K Baxter

Father, the fishermen go

down to the rocks at twilight

when earth in the undertow

of silence is drowning, yet

they tread the bladdered weedbeds

as if death and life were but

the variation of tides -

while you in your garden shift

carefully the broken sods

to prop the daffodils left

after spring hail. You carry

a kerosene tin of soft

bread and mutton bones to the

jumping hens that lay their eggs

under the bushes slily -

not always firm on your legs

at eighty-four. Well, father,

in a world of bombs and drugs

you charm me still - no other

man is quite like you! That smile

like a low sun on water

tells of a cross to come. Shall

I eavesdrop when Job cries out

to the Rock of Israel?

No; but mourn the fishing net

hung up to dry, and walk with

you the short track to the gate

where crocuses lift the earth.

Melbourne

Visited the Royal Botanical Gardens yesterday. When I own a house, it will have a glasshouse with rainforest ferns and climbing roots, where I could sip my tea, read and write.

What I've been up to

Before...

After...

Painting

and scriptwriting, on the sly. Oops, that was a secret. Dialogue is hard. It sounds super fantastic in my head, but when spoken aloud... yuck.

Proposals, artist statements, proposals...

So much effort without knowing the outcome. I console myself with the fact that architects are forced to prepare proposals, too, but in a costlier fashion than artists!

Gardening and exercising again

after a long bout of sickness.

Immersing myself in New Zealand poetry and a bit of local history.

I'm a not-so-recent immigrant but am still trying to find a place for myself in my adopted country. New Zealand poems seem to help me understand the local psyche better than any history book can. I'm discovering how the older generation (Allen Curnow, Keith Sinclair, Jim Baxter) tried to carve out a cultural history for New Zealand. Their hang-ups about living in a remote country ("A country with no momentous present, but with a future," as CK Stead explains Curnow's take on the subject) is comforting to me, in fact, because Malaysia is going through an identity crisis herself. As far as Malaysian art and literature goes, we've only just started finding our own unique voice.

Speaking of which

Funny to think of a time when the "New" in "New Zealand" actually did mean "new". In those days, the pioneers, including the generation that followed, looked back to England for an identity. This act of looking back interests me greatly, for I often 'look back' to whence I came - the distance provides a tension that is useful in my creative life. Hence I completely identify with CK Stead's sentiment that "remoteness is not something our writers should deny or regret, but something to be acknowledged, and exploited as an analogue for the immovable tensions which are universal in human experience" (from his award-winning essay (wah, essays in New Zealand can win awards, ar?) For the Hulk of the World's Between written in 1961).

As for contemporary poets, I'm dipping into some Manhire, CK Stead and Sam Hunt whose lyrical evocations of the New Zealand heartland feel like a welcoming hug.

Feeling fresh again!

Spring, la la. Makes one feel young, la la. Few months ago, I was struck with a case of mild career anxiety. You know what I'm talking about. "I'm pushing thirty and what have I achieved? I may as well die glueing paper tole in the suburbs!" or something like that (for the record, I don't actually indulge in paper tole). But now I've got that fresh-out-of-art-school mojo back. I don't know how it happened, but it did.

Related post: from a year ago

Above images (c) Lydia Chai

"To Leanora, we are my favorite story"

The above dedication opens the book 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill (Stephen King's son?) and you can read more zany, lovely, funny dedications on the Auckland City Library blog. The ones by Tad Williams made me laugh out loud.

I tried to recall memorable dedications I'd come across and this famous one sprang to mind immediately:

TO LEON WERTH

I ask children to forgive me for dedicating this book to a grown-up. I have a serious excuse: this grown-up is the best friend I have in the world. I have another excuse: this grown-up can understand everything, even books for children. I have a third excuse: he lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs to be comforted. If all these excuses are not enough, then I want to dedicate this book to the child whom this grown-up once was. All grown-ups were children first. (But few of them remember it.) So I correct my dedication:

TO LEON WERTH

WHEN HE WAS A LITTLE BOY

& this morsel from Wikipedia makes it all the more poignant: "At the end of World War II, which Antoine de Saint Exupery didn't live to see, Leon Werth said: "Peace, without Tonio (Exupery) isn't entirely peace." Leon Werth did not see the text for which he was so responsible until five months after his friend's death, when Galimard sent him a special edition."

Zesty Zadie

I am totally chuffed that the brilliantly clever Zadie Smith has a collection of essays due out in November. This will sate my appetite while I await her next novel.

"When you finish a novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second - put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal - but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer...

"...You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it's not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professorial editor who's read it in twelve different versions. It's the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.

"...After I read Alan Hollinghurst's magnificent novel The Line of Beauty, I met him at a dinner, and drunkenly I think I asked him how he got his novel to be so magnificenty. He said: "Oh; I left it for a long while. And then I tinkered with it. Five years, actually."

"That's the best piece of writing advice I ever had."

From a lecture given by Smith to students at Columbia University in March 2008. The full lecture may be read in Believer magazine.

The world weeps for Betty

Archie has finally popped the question and it's not to Betty. Not to Jughead either, for that matter, although that would have been an interesting match. (If I recall, one of Jughead's love interests was Archie's descendant January - when Jughead travelled to the future - so there was always that Andrews-Jones attraction there. Also, the internet says that the dot-and-dash symbol on Jughead's crown is the morse code for 'A').

Yes, Archie has proposed to spoilt heiress, Veronica.

The Archie comics played a large part in my childhood. They enriched my vocabulary and opened my eyes to Americana, to quaint phrases like "Put it on my tab, Pops!"

My siblings and I were usually allowed to buy the latest comic from the kedai runcit while waiting for our mother to finish getting her hair cut at the salon. It was such a treat! One memorable story was how the schoolgirls at Riverdale High came up with a strategy to study History effectively while engaging in their favourite pastime: they would gossip historical facts to each other.

And the comics kept us guessing about so many things. Will Archie choose Betty or Veronica in the end? (Feminists might irk at the notion that women are always looking to men for their cues in life.) What does the 'S' on Jughead's sweater stand for? (He once sheepishly refused to answer when the question was put to him. S for Sex? Sandwiches? Speculation?) Will Moose ever make it through high school? (A later feature film has Moose ending up as a gifted masseuse.)

To me, the greatest mystery of all is, what do these women see in Archie? He's neither bright nor charismatic. Betty, forget him. Go with Jughead. Look, he's the guy standing right by your side!