Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Erm… end lecture.
Please don’t – it was shiny. I just have a weak spot for cheesy SF apocalypses set to Steven Tyler power ballards. Armageddon, sigh…
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s there now: Garth George: I hope I’m dead and gone before drugs are legalised.
Must… resist… urge… to… be… mean-spirited. Thankfully, Jacinda Adern & Nikki Kaye’s tag-team fudge on marriage equality contained my rage. (And, FFS, Broadsides was the best column name they could come up with? Was 'Catfight' already taken?)
Do newspapers accrue karmic debts – because the New Zealand Herald is on track to be reincarnated as some particularly nasty canine parasite.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Paul Campbell,
To be fair medical pot prescriptions in California must be the most abused prescriptions around
Fair enough -- I don't know enough about how it works there to make an informed comment. But I sure hope Kiwis can do a lot of worthwhile things better than our American friends.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Russell Brown,
In one of the South Island cases one cop even trotted out an elaborate story about needing to grow medical marijuana for a relative with cancer, in order to trap a wary shop assistant into giving advice. That’s just insane.
QFT. You know what a square I am (and being an alcoholic with mental health issues, psychoactive drugs are dangerous for me), but a cancer patient who desperately wants to take the edge off chemo nausea isn't exactly Pablo Escobar.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to BenWilson,
Ben:
I think Sturgeon was snarkily defending science fiction against genre snobbery. I read a LOT, from highbrow lit to low trash, and when I graduated from uni I made a vow that unless there was a cheque or academic credit on the horizon, I’d never force myself to read a bad book out of duty. (Which is an often unacknowledged virtue of public libraries.) Yes, there’s an awful lot of crappy SF/fantasy out there. But there’s also an awful lot of bad “literature” out there too. You can find shitloads of rubbish everywhere, and the only way to avoid that is to retire to a sensory deprivation tank and never come out.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Russell Brown,
Entrapping and then busting shop assistants isn’t really solving anything.
No, and as the election draws ever closer I’m sure we’re going to hear much from Greg O’Connor about how terribly under-resourced and disrespected police officers are. Well, with no due respect whatsoever, I’d suggest the Whangarei Police haven’t exactly enhanced their mana and effectively optimised their budget with this nonsense.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Russell Brown,
It's quite odd. On one hand, dubstep really has opened up new vistas. On the other, it's about 90% shit.
It's called Sturgeon's Law, as defined by the OED:
A humorous aphorism which maintains that most of any body of published material, knowledge, etc., or (more generally) of everything is worthless: based on a statement by Sturgeon (see quot. 1957), usually later cited as ‘90 per cent of everything is crap’.Typically used of a specific medium, genre, etc., originally and esp. science fiction, and now freq. also of information to be found on the Internet.
The aphorism was apparently first formulated in 1951 or 1952 at a lecture at New York University (letter to the O.E.D. from Fruma Klass, the wife of science fiction writer Phil Klass (‘William Tenn’), 5 Dec. 2001), and popularized at the 1953 WorldCon science fiction convention (see J. Gunn in N.Y. Rev. Sci. Fiction (1995) Sept. 20).
[1957 T. Sturgeon in Venture Sci. Fiction Sept. 49 On that hangs Sturgeon's revelation. It came to him that s f is indeed ninety-percent crud, but that also—Eureka!—ninety-percent of everything is crud. All things—cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles, people and pins are, to the expert and discerning eye, crud, except for the acceptable tithe which we each happen to like.]
1960 P. Schuyler Miller in Astounding Sci. Fact & Fiction 162/2 Theodore Sturgeon once attacked it from the other side with what has become known as Sturgeon's Law: ‘Ninety per cent of everything is crud.’ The remaining ten per cent is what we call ‘good’ and ten per cent of that—one story in a hundred—is ‘really good’.
And, sadly. it's funny because it's true. Crap.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to nzlemming,
Persons under 18 are restricted from buying alcohol, yet we see 12, 13 and 14 year olds regularly getting drunk. So that really worked, didn’t it?
there's several meters of links missing in that chain of reasoning. With all due respect, I think there's plenty of evidence that your hypothetical pre-pubescent lush is more likely to be influenced by an environment where a pervasive binge drinking culture among adults than where the frig the "drinking age" is.
And I've also said more than once (most recently in my latest Public Address Radio piece) that concern trolling around the "drinking age" doesn't really mean jack shit if there's no political will (or resourcing) to properly enforce licensing and sale laws.
Hell, if you really want to get into the reductio ad absurdum the the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was a epic win for public order and health, wasn't it?
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I've got to admit that you've quoted the obvious anthology piece (which it is for good reason), but the Curnow poems that always get me is Magnificat from his 1972 sequence Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects:
Who hasn’t sighted Mary
as he hung hot-paced
by the skin of the humped highway
south from Waikanae
three hundred feet above the
only life-size ocean?
Tell me, mother of mysteries,
how long is time?Twelve electric bulbs
halo Mary’s head,
a glory made visible
six feet in diameter,
two hundred and forty-five feet
of solid hill beneath,
Tell me, mother of the empty grave,
how high is heaven?Mary’s blessed face
is six-and-a-half feet long,
her nose eighteen inches,
her hands the same.
Conceived on such a scale,
tell me, Dolorosa,
how sharp should a thorn be?
how quick is death?Mary’s frame is timbered
of two-by-four,
lapped with scrim and plastered
three inches thick.
Westward of Kapiti
the sun is overturned.
Tell me, Star of the Sea,
what is darkness made of?Mary has a manhole
in the back of her head.
How else could a man get down there
for maintenance, etc?
Mary is forty-seven feet,
and that’s not tall.
Tell me, by the Bread in your belly,
how big is God?I AM THE IMMACULATE
CONCEPTION says
Mary’s proud pedestal.
Her lips concur.
Masterful giantess,
don’t misconceive me,
tell me, mother of the Way,
where is the world? -
The most casual flick through Stet would reveal that Athill is about as sentimental as a flick knife – she has Naipaul’s measure (and several other authors) with forensic precision. But she also provides a useful reality check on anyone who wants to get too nostalgic about the good old days of London’s gentlemen amateur publishers. She’s rightly proud of the books André Deutsch published; but also very candid about how cavalier Deutsch could be about the tiresome practicalities of running a business… like paying people’s (hardly extravagant) wages in full and on time. (She doesn't give herself much slack either -- calling herself out on enabling some frankly appalling nonsense from her boss.)
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