Posts by Jake Pollock
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Arguments about Sport A vs Sport B are pointless
Over to you, Your Views.
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Adrian Johns argues that early-modern print culture did not spring fully formed from the press of Gutenburg. The qualities that we normally associate with the printed word -- reproducibility, broad distribution, fidelity to the source, and authorship -- were absent from printing for the first three centuries of its existence in Europe. Rather, printing was a craft, printers were as involved in the construction of meaning on the page as authors were, and piracy was rife.
Piracy is particularly pertinent to this discussion, because, in the 17th Century, it had a much broader range of meanings than the copying and distributing works wholesale which we have today. It could also mean the practice of attributing a text to an author that didn't write it (in order to increase sales), attaching new sections to works and claiming that they were 'new additions', thus increasing sales, as well as libel and inserting chunks of one text into another. And that's just a start. They were scurrilous, these printers.
Over the seventeenth and early-eighteenth century, one of the first things readers had to do was determine whether or not the work was pirated. So, alongside the commercial sinews of distribution, the men and women of the printing culture developed a system of 'credit'. Is the printer well-regarded? What do we know about the author? Who are their authorities? Is it a quality binding? By determining the answers to these kinds of questions, readers would decide just how seriously to take the book, whether or not to 'credit' it with any kind of authority. We still use the idea of credit -- the word is used several times in this thread, in fact -- and the assumptions is brings with it are very much embedded in our reading and writing practices.
One of the bi-products of this system was the notion of the author as the sole authority on the fidelity of the text, and some fairly rigorous ideas about what practices are valid, and what practices are not. One that is not is plagiarism.
So (and I know you were being facetious, Philip), the differences between the printed word and the film is not just the material characteristics (one is words on a page and the other is pictures on a screen), but also a host of cultural practices and assumptions to do with the history of the different media's development. The two media are emphatically not analagous, and although a comparison of both could be an interesting exercise, it must be undertaken with an understanding of both contexts, and not in the frankly cack-handed manner that people have gone about it here. Literature is 'behind' film? Go tell it to Laurence Sterne.
BUT, just because these are cultural practices not determined by the 'nature' of the media, doesn't mean they should be ignored, or contravened with impunity. If you're going to do something like that, there has to be a point to it. I agree that if Ihimaera had set about exploring the ideas of publishing and plagiarism and the history of print and history in New Zealand it would have been fascinating and adventurous (here's a good place to start). I want to read that book. But, as Giovanni points out, his actions after getting busted suggest that he didn't, and anyway, he's not that kind of writer.
TL;DR Film, a modern art, developed in the age of mass production and mass democracy, massive state apparatuses, and global distribution, has a different set of cultural practices to writing, the history of which stretches back thousands of years, and has gone through many incarnations as societies have changed. We can explore those practices, of course, and many have (Giovanni listed four who did a pretty good job of it above), but we also have to acknowledge them.
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not everyone does know that. certainly not your average white muthafucka
I don't have it with me now, but I'm pretty sure it's in Keith Sinclair's History of New Zealand, which is about as white muthafucka as you can get about New Zealand history. I think it's in King, as well, and probably Belich.
And, if my MA thesis is to be believed, all of those books are about the question of indigeneity, and by what methods a people can become some version of tangata whenua.
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Don't worry Gareth, the Puritans really hated the Catholics, possibly more than Harawira hates white motherfuckers.
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If I recall correctly David, you still owe me a beer for my recommendation of the Anthology of American Folk Music to soothe Bob's country music yearnings. I've listened to this EP twice, and consider the debt settled (unless of course you're going to be in Auckland between December and March). Thank you. I'm pleased to hear that Bob has moved on to TMBG -- I didn't get into them until I was at least 14. Careful though, because at this rate he'll be into Tom Waits by the time he starts school, which is recipe for a hard life.
Also, the frailing in the intro to the second track reminds me a bit of Your Rocky Spine by the Great Lake Swimmers. They're a bit hipster country, but rather pleasant for it.
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Hmmm ... interesting. It has just been suggested to me that Labour's new, liberal intake helped dissuade some older hands from the idea of "doing a Brash" over the issues at hand.
Good, because if they tried it I'd never vote for them again.
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Oh, and before you say anything, I joined a Facebook group, so I've done my bit.
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Graeme: Wasn't 'vote yes to get no' only one of a number of problems with the Smacking referendum? If the MMP referendum question was 'should a system in which MPs are elected by a distribution of votes that are both based on local electorates and a proportion of the national vote as part of a good constitutional structure be part of parliamentary representation in New Zealand?' he might have a point.
Also, the coattails appear to have turned into a life-raft. In my understanding, those that wear coattails are not usually politically marginal, although, in the case of the Titanic at least, they sometimes end up in life-rafts.
+1 for keeping MMP, by the way. Without wanting to sound like a concern troll, I do worry about the way that people who basically support the system can get into some (extremely interesting but decidedly) bitter arguments about the threshold before considering how they're going to defend the thing itself in the face of people who, you know, want to get rid of it.
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Don't forget Maresyev's PhD! Those aren't easy to get.
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Aside from the fact that it has dated so poorly, I wonder if the weirdest thing about that Nightlife video is that it's entirely urban. They may exist, but I don't think I've ever seen a New Zealand tourism promo that didn't focus almost exclusively on the nature's wonderland side of things.
I can't imagine seeing a poster in Murray Hewitt's office with a picture of a Fat Freddy's Drop gig, saying 'New Zealand, it's hip', is what I'm saying.