Muse by Craig Ranapia

We're all hip, cynical, sceptical-to-a-fault media types around here, right?  Oh, sod off.  For all it's flaws, the British Broadcasting Corporation is still the kind of brand that has an authority you can't buy, spin or fake with a social media strategy.  So, when I got an e-mail from Polly Proctor, who produces Word of Mouth for BBC Bistol asking if I'd like to contribute to a show on referenda, the art of the leading question and how you make sense of it all I did two things.  Say yes.  Then have a wee panic attack.

The context-slash-inciting incident was this Public Address Radio piece on the so-called "smacking referendum." Horrendously unamused would be a fair paraphrase.

Did my views shift any over three years?  You're going to have to go here and see (hear?) for yourself.

Here's the blurb for the show - and, yes, I do have the decency to blush at being counted in the company of "experts". 

As Scotland grapples with the wording of a possible referendum on independence, Chris Ledgard takes a look at the art of asking the right question. Whether in a referendum, survey or in a court room, how do you avoid writing an incomprehensible question or - perhaps worse - a leading question?

Experts in linguistics, law, politics and psychology as well as politicians themselves explain the importance of getting the wording of a question right.

Contributors:

Pupils from St Katherine's School in North Somerset
Joan McAlpine, Scottish National Party MSP
Willie Rennie, Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats
Professor John Curtice, University of Strathclyde
Professor John Joseph, University of Edinburgh
Amanda Pinto QC, Criminal Barrister
Professor Robert Cialdini, Arizona State University
Craig Ranapia, New Zealand based blogger and broadcaster

Producer: Polly Procter.

The only story on the local cultural front today is the death of Margaret Mahy yesterday, at 76 .  I don't think I'm the only reader who was shocked, but shouldn't have been, that this intensely private woman (despite her vivid public persona) was diagnosed with cancer in April.

Others can write with more authority about a career that ranged from children's picture books and poetry, through "Young Adult" novels every bit as fine as "real literature" (gag!) through to a singular (and under-rated at the time) foray into science fiction-ish television writing that makes me wish she'd done more.  Marketing catergories, genre and arbitrary age distinctions were treated by Mahy with all due disrespect.

It's certainly not my place to talk about the private woman I never knew.  But even the most cursory reading of Tessa Duder's Margaret Mahy: A Writer's Life (HarperCollins, pbk. $40.99) is a sobering experience.  It's almost as if the life Mahy wanted, even was compelled to live -- as a writer and a woman -- never had a easy option.  In the often petty, bitchy and feud-raddled literary scene, Mahy's grace and genuine niceness stood out as much as her work.  If anyone ever had a mean word to say about her, they sure seemed to keep it to themselves.

Margaret Mahy knew that writing -- and her advocacy for libraries, literacy and the word -- had a vivid element of performance art.  I doubt I was the only child beguiled into delightedly sitting still by this storytelling witch in the candy-coloured afro clown wig.  But her magic was something deeper and more profound.  It was about respect.  Respect for language and story, expressed though an extraordinary level of craft regardless of whether the target audience was five, fifteen or fifty.  Respect for the rich tradition of literature we brought from far away and eons past, and making something new from it right here in Aotearoa that could go back out into the world without apology or special pleading. Respect for the knotty, exquisitely human truth that joy and sorrow, delight and loss, are inextricably linked and the young can handle it.  They need to.

Most of all, it was respect for the reality that parents, critics and academics all too often forget.  Children know when they're being talked (or written) down to.  Growing up is full of wonderful things -- sex, booze, money, car keys, staying up late -- but that doesn't include the idea that "literature" requires us to put up with the pretentious, the shoddy and the dull because it's really good for us.  Mahy knew that the young not only deserve better, but they demand it.

Her real legacy is that she never stopped delivering. 

It's time for me to stop talking, and you to start.  The comments are open for you to share your thoughts and memories about this woman, her career and legacy but most of all her work.  Weeping is OK, making merry is compulsory, but please don't get drunk and trip over the coffee table.  M'kay?

It was Bernard Shaw who said the English and Americans were divided by a common language, but there's no place in the world where something won't make you giggle like a dirty-minded infant...

...Though it's more unusual for a ferry ride to trigger an existential crisis.

Public art is kind of depressing...

('The Words Don't Fit The Picture' by Ron Terada. Vancouver Central Library, South Plaza, 350 West Gerogia Street)

....or creepy...

(Detail, Vancouver Police Department Memorial, 240 W. Cordoba Street)

... or simply worng in ways that defy human comprehension. 

If that does anything for your appetite, please get off my virtual lawn. Now.

Still, Vancouver may be kind of grey and wet, but how could not not love a city that embraces Ryan Adams and Michael Buble by putting plaques in the middle of streets instead of brands on their foreheads?

And you what know what happiness is?  After a morning absorbing Matisse and indigenous hip-hop contemporary art practice at the excellent Vancouver Art Gallery  step outside and let beautiful and charming Canadian women in a truck will sell you three types of grilled cheese in one glorious toastie pie of death. 

I’m sure there’s many things more fair:

The smell of burnt caramel nuts drift by

As gaggles of giggling chavs seek their destiny:

This City does, like a sweaty garment, wear

The beauty of the twilit evening; here

A perplexed gentleman from Mumbai tries

To take a photo; there, a baby's cry;

A tour party isn’t sure where is here.  

The last rays of the sun beautifully peep

Round The Eye the South Bank lion ignores still.

The exhaust fills me with a lethargy so deep!

You stop and start and shamble still:

Dear God! will I ever get some sleep;

Unlikely. The bus has just been cancelled.

I've always found it impossible to walk past a bookstore, even if there's nothing in it I can read apart from the imported pornography (don't ask unless you have serious cash-money in hand).

But anyone who cares to explain this, seen eariler today in a bookshop in Cologne, will have my eternal gratitude. (There is a law of tourism that you can only do two museums and one department store, or three cathedrals and six department stores in a single day without mental gridlock.) Perhaps. 

Yes, I should be feeling a patriotic glow of some description but the woman giggling softly beside me over another of Frau Lark's roman, Im Schatten des Kauribaums (I shit you not), one is not optimistic.  

Could any of our German readers enlighten us -- is it hot throbbing Mandingo down under action, or a sensitive work of historical ethnography with a plea for tolerance and understanding on the side?  Failing all else, and Public Address being what it is, the most imaginative and/or disgusting confection will get you a vaguely smutty postcard from Amsterdam (where we're off to around 8pm tonight, New Zealand time).

And if you don't I will post ever damn photo of every church I've been in between here and Hong Kong.  Your life is not that long.