A most irregular column
There’s something funny going on at the Listener. Errors are creeping in. In the 30 June issue, a caption calls Gandhi Ghandi. Well, stuff happens. But in this week’s issue there are errors even in pages that should be perfect, ie the editorial and the letters pages.
The editorial is unsigned for, I think, the first time ever. That is either an error or it’s deliberate, in which case there should be an explanation. So either way, it’s an error.
The letters pages appear not to have been edited, sub-edited or proofread. The letter from Brian Booth on the apparent GP crisis has an opening parenthetical comma but not a closing one:
Communal self-sufficiency (sans) cars, as advocated by WHO in 1940 remains a possibility.
The letter from Simon Upton on global warming refers to the new coal-fired power plants due to open in China, India and the US as emitting “an additional 900 million tons” of CO2 per year. Did Upton mean tons or tonnes? Someone should have rung him to ask and, if he meant tons, inserted “[sic]” to make it clear.
Okay, nit-picking so far (though there never used to be nits to pick). How about this letter from Victoria Wynne-Jones on being a tenant:
In an ideal world insulation would be installed and the windows double-glazed, but the owners of the property were unwillingly to provide a dehumidifier, let alone insulation.
And there’s a punctuation doozey in this letter from Terri Byrne on SOEs:
If profitability is dependent on ignoring social and environmental impacts. It is robbery, because it suggests that only by behaving badly towards others, including your customers, can you profit.
In a book review we get this:
Their exploits are among the fascinating array of historical anecdotes that make up Myint-U’s modern historiography The River of Lost Footsteps: A History of Burma.
Er, no. That’s not what “historiography” means. If the writer got it wrong, the sub should have fixed it. That’s the sub’s job.
In his preview of films on TV, Philip Matthews writes of Independence Day:
In the 90s, films like this and Emmerich’s follow-up, Godzilla, were totalitarian rabble-rousers made by a country that wished it had a real war to fight.
Let’s not stop to wonder if this is how the movies seemed in the 90s – let’s ask how on earth a movie can be “totalitarian”. Because the director is German and therefore a modern Leni Riefenstahl? Unlikely, really. He’s gay, and his business partner is Jewish. Another part of the sub’s job is to save writers from making idiots of themselves.
It’s not just the subs who are nodding off. Denis Welch’s “Culture Vulture” column tells us that the winner of “Australia’s top literary prize”, the Miles Franklin Award, is Carpentaria by Alexis Wright. But:
Despite several calls, the Vulture has been unable to establish who in New Zealand, if anyone, will publish Carpentaria.
The short answer is: nobody, obviously. Books published overseas don’t get published here, they are imported by a distributor eg Random House, Penguin, HarperCollins, Southern Publishing Group etc. You’d think a former books editor of the magazine would know that. So the real question is: “who in New Zealand, if anyone, will distribute Carpentaria”. Shouldn’t be hard for a journalist to answer, should it? It took me a minute of Googling to find out who the publisher is, maybe 30 seconds to email him and ask “Do you have a distributor in New Zealand?” and about an hour to get the reply, “I wish we did, but we don’t.”
There may seem minor points, and would be with any other New Zealand magazine, but the Listener has for so long set the standard that it is disappointing to see such slipshod work. One hopes this is a temporary glitch. According to the staff listing the magazine no longer has a Chief Sub-Editor, so presumably there is no one in charge of quality control. There should be.
Meanwhile, over at the newly editorless Metro – and isn’t Lauren Quaintance a huge loss to the industry – the new issue has a useful roundup of bars and stars, the “20 Questions” are still funny, photography and design are sharp, and the features look promising. But as with the Listener there are some odd glitches. Gary Steel’s review of Tinariwen’s new album absurdly refers to “Gaddafi’s rebellion against the Malian government” (how does a head of state rebel against his neighbour’s government?) and Graham Adams writes of Paris, Je T’Aime or, as he calls it, Paris Je T’Aime that “the cinematography is, as you might expect with such a glittering roll-call of directors, first rate”. Actually, cinematography is due to the cinematographer, not the director. Does anyone read this stuff before it's printed?
Small points all, perhaps, but when you can’t trust details in a magazine, you start to wonder if you can trust anything in it.
Sir Richard Branson should be banned - from the USA. He's just admitted using narcotics - specifically cocaine and Ecstacy, which under the US Homeland Security Act is grounds to bar him from entry.
