I should be proofing the ms about now

Some people the other night were praising Banksy's guerrilla art. I like Banksy too but he has a hard-working and very protective agent and licenses his works, neither of which is that guerrilla. The London guerrilla artist I really like is Slinkachu, who makes tiny street art. I've also discovered the work of W. Eugene Smith, who took photographs only from the window of his New York apartment. He also secretly recorded jazz greats. I wish I'd known about Smith years ago -- it would have saved me making up stories in that vein.

The article on Smith is online at the New York Times, which plans to charge for content. It's the one online paper (sic) I'd probably pay for although I will always pick up the print version. (Sometimes I think newspapers are really nothing more than a crossword delivery platform.) The NYT announcement is thought to chime with Apple announcing what Gizmodo calls the Jesus Tablet. If what blogs are saying about an Apple tablet is true then it will be good for print journalism but I still can't see it working for novelists, at least not directly.

The issues around e-books are so complex I could write a couple of thousand words on the subject, which I don't have time for -- I have an actual novel sitting in paper form (pictured) that I really need to proof, and typing this bl*g is not getting that done. But in short, it is the hope of the publishing industry that e-books will shore up their business. This plan is a paradox because it aims to use disruptive technology to preserve the status quo.

Mr Paul Reynolds' blog introduced me to a New Zealand project, 1000 Great New Zealand E-books. I refer to slide two of the project presentation, under the heading "Market focused aims": authors are the second to last priority, readers the last. Not to criticise the project per se, but this highlights the above paradox. MP3s and file sharing were a consumer-led disruption of the status quo, the piracy creating a new business model which forced change on the establishment. With e-books, book publishers are hoping to let the genie out of the bottle a little bit at a time.

To wit, some are trying new things, such as giving away e-books for free.

Neither Amazon nor other e-book retailers make any money on these giveaways either. But it is a way of luring customers to their e-reading devices. Free e-books are also a way of distinguishing a less-well-known author from the marketing juggernauts of the most popular books.

Publishers -- and record companies -- have always given away free samples, but what is new about it this time is that they are doing so to attract subscribers to a device and network rather than readers to an author:

Book publishers, who rail against the dominance of Amazon and its insistence on discounting new releases to $9.99, are now playing the tech titans against each other.
In the process, they may be rushing from the clutches of one tenacious chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, into the arms of another, Steven P. Jobs, whose obstinacy over pricing has given the music industry similar paroxysms of anxiety.
“Will Kindle pricing trump Apple sex appeal? Isn’t that the question, really?” said Richard Charkin, executive director of Bloomsbury Publishing in London, who has been watching developments in e-book sales with keen interest. “I haven’t the faintest idea. All I would say is, great. The more people that are out there marketing books in digital or any other format, the better.”

All the publishing notes from the above are from the IHT / NY Times but I read them in the print version first.

Faceless

My 200-plus friends want me to come back to Facebook. I know this because three have emailed me. The rest of my Facebook friends have not. They don't know how to get in touch with me, because I'm not on Facebook.

I joined the social network in 2007 for the same reason I first logged on to the internet in 1994: I like talking to people and discovering how new things work. I never want to be the guy who can't program -- well, I won't say "the VCR" because that technology has come and gone, but you get my drift. I'm a novelist who works from home and the web is indispensable. I have a site, a blog and accounts with Yahoo, Gmail and YouTube. I chat, video conference, bank, book flights and back up my work online. Memes, 4chan: it's all good. If I squint, I can almost see the point of Twitter.

But Facebook? You couldn't drag me back.

I liked it at first. I joined and was quickly "friended" by an ex-colleague, then a real-life friend I hadn't seen in years, and a fan of my novels. I connected with mutual friends, people in media, journalists and other writers. Over the next year I noticed the circle widen as less tech and more "everyday" friends came online. I viewed their holiday snaps and uploaded my own, including scans of the good old days when I would have killed to be this connected.

I didn't "friend" strangers or celebrities. My fan and I enjoyed a single exchange ("When's your new novel coming out?" is a question a writer can only answer every two years) but one of her friends was an editor whom I friended, and suddenly I had placed a short story in his collection. I was making money off this thing.

More old friends joined. Fellow clubbers. Drinkers. Exes. Persons from whom I had become estranged. Sometimes there was a frisson; other times a frank exchange. Working alone in my study I knew that even if my email fell silent there would always be a conversation waiting on Facebook. The more trivial the better. Five Albums That Changed Me! The Lesbian Test! If a conversation became boring, I could come back to it later. I was connected, I was in control.

There were professional issues. To wit, would the photograph of you at the BDSM party negatively affect your future employment prospects? It seemed like a no-brainer to me. Don't post what you don't want people to see. This issue was as old as the Internet itself.

I even remained sanguine during the infamous March 2009 redesign in which Facebook's interface was tweaked to act less like a group of social pages and more like Twitter, the short message network that has been described as "Facebook on crack".

Now, rather than a ruminative tangle of Top Fives, amusing profile images and cryptically funny bulletins, the newly emphasised news feed encouraged users to constantly update their status. Out went the philosophical non-sequiters, in came banal minute-by-minute updates. ("Having a coffee." Who cares?)

In fact, I was relying on Facebook even more. Having moved to the UK I was using it to stay in touch with friends back home and people I was meeting for the first time. Londoners introduce themselves via (in order) their mobile phone, Facebook and (quaintly) their business card. I was using the site to arrange business meetings, social events, email friends and family and publicise my work. Facebook had become indispensable.

At which point, Facebook became totally useless.

There's a difference between staying in touch with your friends, and telling all of them the same thing at once. With my closest friends, I'm totally open. If I'm miserable or angry, they know. But I don't want to communicate that to an ex. And I don't want to talk about them to my new friends, and I don't necessarily want to bore my new friends about my work.

My stepsons were friends, as were my nephews. But I'm meant to be setting some kind of an example to them, and knowing about their social lives was about as appealing as peeping into a stranger's window. As for my editors and readers: I write fiction. The point of novels is to filter out that stuff. Like the movie actress whose skirts fell down on set, I felt like I had lost my mystique.

Facebook isn't socialising: it's broadcasting. Addressing these different groups was like being on a podium. My status updates had become as cautious as press statements. How could I say I'd seen Friend A when he was arguing with Friend B? How could I say I'd been out drinking with Friend C when I'd blown off a date with Friend D? As for professional complaints - forget about it. Add a journalist friend to that mix and you have a prairie fire.

I froze. I became frustrated. I tried using the site less but couldn't because it had become so central. It was all or nothing. I deleted all of my data and closed the account.

After a few weeks, three people wrote me emails saying they missed me. While 200-plus friends couldn't keep me on Facebook, those messages tugged at my conscience. And why wouldn't they? Real friends stay in touch.

-- The Age, September 2009 

Postscript: Parlance's blog on the evolution of language, Words All Around discussed the use of the word "friend" as a verb; Jesse Sommer discussed the article on Small Fried Chips of Thought; Brenda Chillingworth discussed it on her blog about journalism.

1980s: a photo-essay

It was a late afternoon in August and they were strolling towards me along K Road and I recognised them instantly. We'd been clubbing at A Certain Bar and seen Danse Macabre in Parnell and the Screaming Blam Matic review at Mainstreet and sunk martinis at Le Bom. Except that my memories were more than twenty years old and the group of kids filling the sidewalk would have barely been born. They only looked like they were there at the time, with their RayBans and fluoro and small feet and big hair. They were perfect reproductions: they'd just dialled the look up. Mine was a disconsolate double-take. The 1980s were over. The 1980s were back.

So did we not look stupid then? Because the fashions look brilliant now and the rehashed blippy pop sound has saved the dance floor now that rap has wrapped and the oonst has run out. Miami Vice has been remade and Brideshead Revisited has been revisited. The music industry is once again threatened by copying technology (having survived, er, cassette recording). Global warming is poised to destroy the world that the nuclear arms race did not. And now, perfectly, the stock market has once again gone up like the Hindenburg. This isn't a revival of the 1980s: this is a re-enactment.

The 1980s was an era of extremes in that things were either taken too seriously or not seriously enough. Historians point to the era's tumult (Springbok tour, Queen Street riot, political correctness) but my memories are nothing but frivolous (dance mixes, nightclubs, cocktails the size of a lamp). The 1980s were up and funny because ignoring reality was the point.

There was a lot of it to be ignored here. Week nights were boring. Villas were old. City living was for eccentrics. You couldn't buy a drink on a Sunday. But for a moment the aesthetic of wealth was easily faked. Our Pacific locale was chic. Decor that cost a fortune to staple up in Trader Vic's was a bob a penny at Cook Street market. Duran Duran blew millions filming the videos for Rio actually in Rio. Sucked in: we could just hire the Spirit of Auckland. We were close to the sea and credit cards didn't need to be paid back.

I can see why kids are mad for the 1980s. They see it as a time of style, colour, brightness and energy. They are wrong, of course. We had to wait for music to be freighted in while they can download the very same tracks with a click. We queued to flick through month-old copies of the NME in Whitcoulls while they can Google articles for free. Anyone who says victory is sweeter for being harder won never had to secure a postal money order in Sterling to pay for a Rough Trade single. That's all really good music, by the way: the heavy, squarish stuff gathering dust under the bed.

A question, then, for the generation born after Return of the Jedi: will you ever experience such nostalgia? Floating on social networks, with your digital images and your social sites maintaining every moment on artificial life support, your youth has the potential to remain constantly accessible. How will you miss it if it never goes away?

My 1980s have been fading with the media I'd stored it on: Xerox photocopies and mix cassettes. The only moments that were truly preserved were the photographs, which I planned to get around to some day but never did. It was only after my brush with my not-friends shambling along the sidewalk that I realised now might be the time.

Digging out the old negatives and scanning them, I counted three formats (126, 110, 35mm) and four stages of nostalgia:
1. Thinking you were cool.
2. Realising you weren't.
3. Realising you were, kind of, but not for any of the reasons you imagined.
4. Realising it's gone.

I'm currently locked in the fourth quarter. I should be making fun of such easily mocked images but the memories they provoke are paradoxically distant and comforting and more than a little melancholy. I didn't even think I was old but I guess by definition I must be. Damn.

Much later after these images were taken the buildings we lived and partied in would be knocked down and we would peer through the gaps and see, finally, how small and crappy things really were. But that was later. Now, strolling past in the opposite direction, the 1980s look pretty good.

(Sunday magazine, 2008)

Translation

I've yet to meet every one of my translators. Strangers assume that the process of having your words swapped into a different language is intimate but I've found it's almost the opposite. The publisher gives the translator the novel and the translator comes back to the author with questions, and even then only sometimes. My French translators have had many questions, the Italians a few and the Germans hardly any. The biggest sticking problems with language have been those between editors in the UK and the US but even these have been merely a matter of a few words or a local phrase. In such cases the most important language becomes that of the printer, "STET" and "COLLOQ" being two useful examples.

Overall the experience of having my work transformed so efficiently and without fuss has been a nice reality check. No matter how much you sweat over a novel, in the end that's all it is: just another book.

My French translators Anouk Neuhoff and Isabelle Chapman speak English as well as I do plus a few other languages besides. I blame them for my dismal French because they are excellent conversationalists and even better hosts. Whenever I've attempted a few phrases in their presence their comments are nothing but kind. Anouk translated Shirker and Electric for Christian Bourgois in Paris, and Isabelle translated Departure Lounge. It's my impression that each has imparted her own style to my work but I don't know what that might be. I do know that in France even readers of popular fiction can pay as much attention to the translator's name as they do to the author's. Which is logical if not sobering.

The effects of translation on a writer's work can of course be radical. A good modern example is the Japanese author Haruki Murakami whose novels lurch in accessibility depending on whether his translator is Jay Rubin or Alfred Birnbaum. Rubin's English language version of Murakami is poetic and calm but Birnbaum's, I'm told, is "more Japanese." If readers of Lugenspiele (Pack of Lies - Aus dem neuseelandischen Englisch von Dietmar Hefendehl) or Fuori dal tempo (Shirker - traduzione di Massimo Ortelio e Annamaria Raffo) are experiencing a similar disjunction I can only be thankful to be in such company.

As a writer I owe a great deal to works in translation. When I was growing up in south Auckland the local cinema screened Italian spaghetti westerns and Hong Kong martial arts pictures in which the overdubbed dialogue or subtitles was an integral part of the viewing experience. Similarly the local library held an oddly comprehensive collection of French and Japanese novels which I enjoyed as much for the clarity of the translator's prose as I did for the stories. There were doubtless gaps in meaning but like scratches in a favourite vinyl LP or reflections in a painting's glazing the disjunctions seemed a natural part of the work.

Subsequently the thought that a novel might be translated has encouraged me to focus not on the details of language so much as the broader story. Even if my words will be changed I know the brute narrative will survive. The first question an author is always asked is "What's it about?" so it helps to be able to say in English or any other language. Travellers to foreign lands know how far they can spin out simple phrases such as "Do you have a table?" and "What time is the ferry?" Authors likewise could do well practicing the sentence beginning "My novel is..." Try it some time. Translating the words is easy: finding them in the first place is hard.

(Sunday Star Times, 2004)

Boxing as a metaphor

The romance between boxers and writers has been going on for a long time. Fighters want to be poets and poets want to be fighters despite the fact that neither party is equipped to deal with their respective aspirations. Fighting is a direct method of problem-solving at odds with the shaded ruminations of literature. Writers don't like being punched in the face.

The messy affair has continued nevertheless. Ernest Hemingway belonged to a boxing generation, making his well-publicised dalliance with the sport less of a cliche than it seems now. In Cannibals and Christians, Norman Mailer - who also fancied himself with the gloves - describes a 1929 bout in which El Papa was knocked down at the end of a round that lasted four minutes instead of three. The nominated time keeper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had become so distracted by the spectacle that he forgot to watch the clock. At least, that's how Norman tells it. Like most boxing anecdotes, the story has probably been jazzed up a little.

The wiry French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus, a contemporary of Hemingway, fought until tuberculosis ended further participation. James Ellroy writes about the sport with almost weary expertise although he's only ever put in hours as a golf caddy, as far as I can tell. Less famous authors, but two of the best to chronicle the experience are Timothy Mo (Sour Sweet) and Pete Dexter (Brotherly Love). When Dexter describes the worn gloves and stinking wraps his prose has the chime of someone who's actually done some fighting instead of just watching it. The author photo also provides a clue: his nose is slightly to the right of where you would expect it to be.

The instinctive analogy between the closed fist and the moving hand, the fighter's punch and the keyboard's click has survived into the computer age. Writers are attracted to boxing because it is a solitary craft: a vehicle for justice and a release for pent-up frustration. Surveys have shown that writers engage in more useless feuds than professionals working in other creative fields: logically, it would help if they let off steam. Andy Warhol mused about setting up a ring in Madison Square Gardens where Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote could scrap it out. Consider how long the recent Kidman / Grimshaw feud would have lasted if both had consented to some regulated biff. The photos alone would have put some zip into the literary section.

If there is an uppermost reason for non-fighters' fascination with the ring it's that boxing is a source of great stories. The associated corruption only makes it more so. A fixed fight is more exciting than the real thing, as the saying goes, rendering its true moments as plangent glimpses of a greater, ongoing tragedy. The simple bravery of a bout is so apparent that the intrigue piled up around it becomes disproportionately amoral and complex: an ongoing car wreck of greed, shadows and fools. It was not for nothing that Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull portrayed Jake La Motta as Christ-like: bloodied and arms outstretched as the crowd bayed for more. By reversing the image - the saviour as brutalised fighter - Mel Gibson's Passion merely returns the compliment.

Beyond the arts, it is intriguing to contemplate the extent to which boxing is employed as an everyday metaphor. You don't need to be a poet in order to step into the ring, throw in the towel, box clever or roll with the punches. At some time or other we have all taken it on the chin, stood our ground or been saved by the bell. With further conversational effort we might have taken the purse, thrown the fight or retired to the corner. Businessmen in particular love the the metaphor of "one man left standing". Comparing oneself to the winning fighter lends takeover bids and market contests a ruthless, gladitorial flavour.

In boxing, none of these sayings are sayings. They are descriptions of what actually happens. "Taking it on the chin" means a big fist bringing your teeth together so hard that the the conscious self shuts down for measurable seconds. A "knock out punch" is an impact that it shakes the brain in its bone and liquid pouch hard enough to cause permanent damage. Going "out for the count" means the difference between millions and zip. If you are the one man left standing, the other man will be bleeding on the canvas. Actual blood, actual canvas. Boxing is not a metaphor. Boxing is real.

My generation came with Muhammed Ali pre-installed as champion. Growing up square-eyed in the suburbs, I vividly recall two televised events: the 1969 manned moon landing and the 1971 Ali - Frazier World Heavyweight title. Both spectacles were strangely weightless. If contemporary technology struggled to convey the immediacy of the moment with their bobbing, black & white images and rasping commentary, it likewise ordained them as iconic. Armstrong walked on the moon and Ali danced in the ring: they were complimentary, monochrome heroes.

My childhood impression of the Ali - Frazier bout was that it went on forever. As an adult, I realise it lasted somewhat longer. Their first contest went 15 rounds; the 1974 rematch went for 12. The third - "the nasty one", as a boxing friend nicely put it - was stopped in the 14th. Ali opened with a range of combinations early on. Frazier dominated the middle rounds with what one critic called "the most vicious body punches seen in heavyweight history." Ali could barely return to his corner after round 10 but had closed his opponent's left eye by the 13th. In round 14 Frazier's trainer, Eddie Futch, called it off. "Joe would have been hit by a car and he wouldn't quit, so I had to do it for him," Futch said.

That's merely a summary. To watch the fight nowadays is to witness unheralded savagery. Consider also that the Manila fight took place in an absurd heat and that Ali, we now know, had made weight by taking drugs that shed body fluid, including the waters that rimmed his cerebral cavity. Stripped of this protection, the Manila fight was slow murder.

No matter who the fighter, we all know how the story ends. Sugar Ray Robinson: Alzheimer's. Joe Louis: dementia and paranoia. Joe Frazier watches over his North Philly gym through corneal implants. In his professional days his sight was so poor he would memorise eye charts for the pre-fight medical. Equally, we ourselves have become blase about Muhammad Ali's struggle with Parkinson's. When a British journalist commented in a 2000 interview that the ex-champ could tie his shoes unassisted, it was intended as a compliment, not an irony. Seated ringside for a bout starring his daughter Talia, Ali was also able to shut his eyes and turn his head away to avoid the sight of his daughter being hit. As numb gestures go, it said a lot.

The ongoing peril of boxing was highlighted by Beethoven Scottland, an obscure last-minute substitute who stepped into the ring to face a taller, heavier opponent in New York in 2001. As the fight progressed, the imbalance became obvious both to the television commentators and also to Bee's wife, Denise, who screamed from her ringside seat for it ton be stopped. The referee and fight doctors stopped nothing. Bee was not the man left standing. He went down in the tenth. The first attempt to revive him lasted 15 minutes. He died in hospital six days later.

After Scottland's death the calls to reform and regulate the sport grew louder. Journalists suggested a national commissioner to set standards for health and safety; a league and schedule of events. To this day, however, the standards float and the lawyers sting. Each match remains a separate deal. The sanctioning bodies that rate fighters force champions to pay huge sanction fees for the right to defend their titles. Evander Holyfield's bill is conservatively estimated at $20 million.

The sport sees no conflict of interest between managing and promoting a fight. The fatal Scottland bout was promoted - legally - by the opponent's manager. Don King's fighters say they are not permitted to hire their own lawyers or accountants. These legal circumstances are the air and water that has allowed Don King to become the monarch that he is today. His levy is the broadcasters' and fans' pay for view. For newcomers to the sport, King is the guy with the Bride of Frankenstein hair-do grinning at the camera and waving an American flag like a puppeteer trying to entertain a simple child.

The fans are not stupid. They accept the corruption. If you earned four million dollars, you wouldn't need to pull out a calculator to know that you would have to pay tax. By a similar rule, you know most of a champion's purse won't be going to the champ. Mike Tyson has declared bankruptcy. David Tua is filing for what he earned. Anyone who watches boxing, myself included, is party to this bad situation. This is the real reason that fans look for a champion with the primal rage. We are all frustrated and guilty of sins that can only be absolved by someone who can cut through the bullshit and rage at how unfair the sport has become.

This is the real reason for the furore over the ear-biting incident between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield at the MGM Grand Garden in 1997. Holyfield had been dragging on the young street-fighter, trying his patience, wearing him down. Tyson decided - if not planned in his corner - to discourage the clenching by biting his opponent. "A little bit of the ear came rolling over toward us," blinked Showtime analyst Ferdie Pacheco. "It was sick, inhuman, despicable!" But the media's hollering were the cries of an audience hating themselves for getting what they really wanted: a fighter with teeth. We saw the same flash in the eyes when Tua met Hasim Rahman in their equally frustrating 2003 fight. Sensing a win by decision, Rahman raised his gloves in celebration seconds before the final bell. You just don't do that to boys from South Auckland, and Tua went for Rahman like he was going to kill him. Really. To paraphrase what fans said of Sonny Liston, these moments are the difference between boxing and, you know, a fight.

Women also box, now. There are well-regulated Olympic contests with head gear and of short duration, and Sylvester Stallone played a boxer in those movies but frankly - honestly - it's not the same. There is no civilised alternative to two men smashing each other in the face and chest because hitting each other, by definition, is uncivilised. There's simply no polite or fair way to go about it. People cite the Queensbury Rules in the same way that armchair militarists cite the Geneva Convention but if you've ever read the Queensbury Rules pretty much all they say is: two corners, a certain number of rounds, the bell stops the fight, and well, yeah - hit each other all you can. Hit. Hit. Hit. May the best man win, and may you both pee pink for the following week.

In writing this, in the process of digging out all the dirty facts, I have to ask myself why I watch boxing. The easy out is that its fatefulness mirrors humanity's own. Boxing gives you brain damage just as alcohol destroys your liver and smoking causes cancer and driving fast kills: there are just as many "lifestyle choices" that are as dangerous and corrupt. Why, in the Middle East alone, nations are conducting an experiment to test the relationship between civilisation and spilling blood. And there you have it. Even writing it down, the analogy between boxing and larger moral issues is difficult to avoid. You cannot begin to debate the paradoxes of the sport without naturally segueing into a larger debate about violence & culture; the individual & society; the whole shebang. Try it at the dinner table. You'll come to blows in minutes. No, on second thoughts: don't. Leave that to the guys in the ring.

What do the fighters have to say about it? Plenty, most of it practiced in front of a mirror beforehand. Lennox Lewis's power is unquestioned but when he talks about being a "pugilist specialist" the rap is embarrassing and inauthentic. So most of the talking is left up to the writers: the sports hounds, and the poets. This is a poor second. Writers don't write about boxing: they write about watching boxing. Big difference.

When I looked for what boxers have actually written about boxing, I found the piece that moved me most on a Christmas card to Sam Eveland, the 1950s Golden Gloves champion who shared a cell with Sonny Liston in the Missouri State Penitentary. After leaving jail, Liston went on to fight as one of the most convincing champions the world has seen, closing down opponent after opponent with his big hands before falling to Ali's "phantom punch" in 1964. What happened in that fight is a sad story. Sadder, however, are the contents of the card, dated December, 1961. Liston's words to his former cell mate were his own: Sonny Liston. Unschooled, illiterate and a world champion, he had finally learned to sign his own name.

I think if you wanted to nail the character of boxing you have it right there. For the reader, the simplicity of Liston's missive expresses all about the sport that is grave and pathetic; heroic and tragic; sentimental and grave; noble and wasted. Liston, of course, would have found no pathos in it. His name was not a metaphor. Liston was a boxer. He boxed.

(Originally published in the Sunday Star Times, 2004)