Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Worksheet #49, or 'The Last Review?'

I bought a copy of Landfall #220 'Open House' today. Only got the chance to flick through it on the bus ride home but it looks like a cracker. Not the least because it features what could be the last review of A Man Melting for the foreseeable future.

Kate Duignan seemed to dig the stories.  Selected highlights:

"A Man Melting is a fine set of stories. It foots lightly through the angst of the young and the restless - schoolkids, teenagers, ex-pats, small-town boys and grils returning home, the entire 'Diaspora of Privilege' as one character puts it. It mixes PhDs and office jobs and classroom bullies with exotica gleaned from Google and presumably Cliff's own teeming brain..."

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I'd much prefer to quote the whole review (there's no negative bits to leave out), but people should be buying/subscribing to Landfall.

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"Cliff's quarry is the human heart and he hones in on it with a fierce accuracy."

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When I'm not hunting for human hearts, I'm writing fortnightly light-hearted reflections for the Dom Post. It took my Gran to point out that the headline for my column on Saturday - "Keep up the with Joneses" had a typo in it.

No one else has mentioned this to me, and my gran is pretty eagle-eyed...

I'm not too put out because I don't even write the headlines (well, I submit my columns with a proposed headline, but so far I have a 1 from 6 success rate). My proposed headline for this particular column was A Man Mingling.

Dammit. Now that I've seen the typo, I can't unsee it.

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No one has mentioned any typos in A Man Melting. I'm sure there are some. Milson Line appears as 'Milson Lane', but unless you're from Palmerston North, this wouldn't register as a mistake. In fact, the story ('Another Language') never explicity says it's set in Palmy, so it could be some other town with a Ruahine Street and a Rutland Place. Is there one?

GoogleMaps says No.

(There are Ruahine Streets in Paraparaumu, Hataitai, Dannevirke and Avondale, but no other Rutland Places).

If you find a proper typo, keep it to yourself.

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"Perhaps more writers should train up on Excel."   (Truly.)

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