Posts by philipmatthews
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Ya know who said that? Garth George.
Given it's Garth George calling you "last century's men" that means 18th Century.Come on, fair's fair. This was Garth George in a kick-ass mode we knew nothing about. As in the last par:
The description of the report by Finance Minister Bill English as "too radical" is the final absurdity. The report is not just too radical; it is economic and social bullshit, a serious waste of taxpayers' money, and every copy should be recycled into toilet paper.
If he hadn't described Mike Moore as venerable and captivating, I might have said I loved every word of it.
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I vote: InTimeForTheWorldCup.
My vote too.
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While you're waiting for that, can I upset you with the news from Booksellers NZ that The Trowenna Sea was the best-selling New Zealand novel for the week ending Nov 21 -- that's three weeks at number one now.
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he's a decent man who will cynically pander to them for a poll point.
Got it in one. Eg:
We can choose our future based on principle and with the interests of all New Zealanders at heart.
Or we can have a country where one New Zealander is turned against another, Maori against Pakeha, in a way that Labour strongly rejects.
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Wow, a couple of comments here are really running close to the "clever game to identify him" aren't they?
That's what I thought. We can now officially rule out John Rowles and Hayley Westenra.
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By comparison Richard Gage must have thought he'd died and gone to heaven when he was interviewed on Active89 in Wellington yesterday morning by two "rank amateurs*" Liam Luff and Red Bird, who asked well-researched questions, gave him a chance to talk, and stopped him from drifting/ranting. Was a fascinating chat.
Is there audio of this online anywhere?
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So I heard a "rumour" on the weekend -- and it's not the first time that I have heard it, and from sources as reputable as you would want -- that Witi Ihimaera "farms out" the grunt work of writing his novels to a collection of minions*. He supplies the plot/narrative framework, and they flesh it out with the words.
Last year, Lynda La Plante got pinged for exactly that. Her novel Entwined was found to have plagiarised a Holocaust memoir called Five Chimneys. From the Sydney Morning Herald:
La Plante's passages were so close to the original, it was clear she had done more than draw on the heart-rending memoir for background, instead lifting whole sections of text and putting them into Entwined with the lightest of massaging.
When the Herald asked her how this came about, La Plante did not reply directly. Through her lawyers, she said she had never read Five Chimneys herself, but that a research assistant she no longer uses may have lifted the passages for her. La Plante denied intentionally plagiarising Five Chimneys, and the Herald makes no claim that she did. But outsourcing any task always has its perils, and when asked how much material her assistants put into her novels and how she checks that they are not plagiarising other books, La Plante's lawyers said Entwined was unique and her other books were not "researched on the same basis".
There is another popular crime writer I read about this year who does a similar thing: supplying basic plot outlines and chapter summaries to an army of assistants who do the grunt-work of writing. Name escapes me now though.
The SMH link:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/la-plante-novel-lifted-holocaust-story/2008/09/05/1220121523455.html -
Fiona Kidman's A Captive Wife (about Betty Guard) and Annemarie Jagose's Slow Water (the doomed career of a gay missionary) are also based on real people and events and have relied heavily on letters and diaries.
There's also the famous example of Maurice Gee and Plumb, which drew on the diaries of his grandfather, James Chapple.
Ian Wedde in Symmes Hole used the diaries of James ‘Worser’ Heberley, a 19th century whaler (and the man behind the Worser Bay name). The book's at home but there's an acknowledgements list as long as your arm, from whaling histories to books about Polynesian navigation to a history of McDonalds. Probably as close as NZ lit had got by then -- the mid-80s -- to Pynchon-like fiction.
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Interestingly, you get The Matriarch cited in a University of Canterbury English Dept essay writing guide, written in 1990.
1.5. WHAT YOU SHOULDN'T DO: PLAGIARISM
It was different in the old days, when there was no such concept as cultural or intellectual "property". Bach and Handel could appropriate themes from other composers and use them in their own works without objection or penalty. In the late 1970s, on the other hand, George Harrison was sued for over £3 million for using an old song by the Ronettes ( He's So Fine ) as the musical basis for his hit song "My Sweet Lord." The point was not that he actually used the song, but that he did so without seeking permission and without attributing the origin of his song. He was deemed in court to have stolen the original and perpetrated a fraud by using it as his own original work: the result for Harrison was an expensive settlement which also included huge court costs. In 1989, Witi Ihimaera was publicly accused of plagiarising sections of an historical article on the Land Wars by Keith Sorrenson in the New Zealand Encyclopedia in his1986 novel The Matriarch. Although his excuse was that in the heat of creative composition he had forgotten to cite the source in his Acknowledgements page, it was clear that he knew very well that he was using someone else's words and presenting them as his own ^In academic situations the equivalent crime is called PLAGIARISM, which is the stealing of the words or ideas of others and presenting them as your own". The phrase in quotation marks in that sentence is taken from Donald Hall, Writing Well, 6th edition (Glenview, 111.: Scott, Foresman, 1988), p. 7. If I had left out the inverted commas and the reference I have just given, then I would have been guilty of plagiarism for stealing Hall's words and fraudulently pretending they were my own. There are also more subtle ways of plagiarising which include the unacknowledged appropriation of a phrase from another writer, rewriting a sentence or paragraph in your own words, or following the same process of argument or logic as in the original source as if it were your own. Although it is sometimes argued that some cases of plagiarisim are unintentional, or simply occur in the "heat of créative composition," we argue that the essay demands conscious attention to all details and that includes an awareness of sources and the necessity to cite references. In the section on planning in this Guide, I indicate ways of avoiding potential difficulty in this area through the practice of keeping accurate notes. A small amount of effort in note-taking will mean the avoidance of "accidental" plagiarism. There is naturally a very good reason for avoiding plagiarism, whether intentional or otherwise. It is that the crime carries very severe penalties, which include a mark of zero for the essay and the possibility of a failing grade for the course. If you are in doubt about what constitutes plagiarism in a particular case, consult your tutor or lecturer. If you are not in doubt,don't plagiarise.Link here:
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The little I could find Googling before breakfast suggested that text Sorrenson wrote for the 1966 Te Ara encyclopedia of New Zealand entry about native land tenure had been used, unattributed.
You get a summary here:
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Whi06Kota-t1-g1-t2.html
Key quote:
The history of the area in question in the two novels is given, if in a fractured manner, by Ihimaera during the course of the narrative action. For much of the information on land confiscation Ihimaera has used J. B. Mackay’s Historic Poverty Bay and Keith Sorrenson’s entry on “Land Confiscations” in the Encyclopedia of New Zealand History.8
And the footnote:
Mackay’s text has been extensively used by Ihimaera in the section on Te Kooti in Act Two of The Matriarch. In Act Three (238-244) Ihimaera uses Mackay’s chapter entitled “Spoils to the Victors” (305-309) alongside Sorrenson’s essay. Ihimaera’s failure to acknowledge Sorrenson as a source sparked controversy – see “Matriarch Passages Copied – Historian” by Andrew Johnston, Dominion Sunday Times, 26 Nov. 1989:1.