When to Rob a Bank - The Freakopedia - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

... and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants from the Freakonomics Guys. 
 

As co-authors Levitt and Dubner explain at the start of this brilliant collection, that, a decade ago, and in concurrency with their publication of the ground breaking Freakonomics, they decided to start a blog with the same name.   It was a baby that grew and demanded feeding, and was nourished by new and wacky ideas.  A source of experimental conversations.  Wisdom, they argue, is on line like water.  Free, when you take it for granted and costly when you want it and pay to owning it.  Still it live, this web site.  This blog of Freakery.  And eight thousand posts later, they're still writing, even though the blog generates no income and probably cannibalizes sales from their books. For the site's anniversary, they've finally had arms twisted and released a collected works The result is a hearty, enthusiastic, but random collection of posts, arranged around topics as varied as the benefits of terrorism, restoration of the draft (stupid concept), getting rid of pennies, that ogre 'obesity',  Internet poker, steroid use in the Tour de France (a major target that one), the pathetic D.C. gun ban efforts, and other things all from a distorted but quite plausible economic stand point.  i.e if there's money in it, then it could fly.  There's an assurance of an entertaining read for fans and newbies. It seems likely to prove the authors right in their gamble that even content available for free can be a viable product, especially with such a large, devoted fan base. Oddly when checking their web site, the book doesn't feature high in the promo lists.  Still it's a marvel, and that's the long and short of it. 

Steven D. Levitt is an economist. Stephen J. Dubner is a writer. In 2005, they co-authored Freakonomics, a book about cheating teachers, bizarre baby names, and crack-selling mama’s boys. They figured it would sell about 80 copies. Instead, it has sold 5.5 million, in roughly 40 languages. In 2009, they followed up with SuperFreakonomics, with stories about drunk walking, the economics of prostitution, and how to stop global warming. (To date, SuperFreakonomics has sold 1.5 million copies.) In 2014, Dubner and Levitt published Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain, which made its debut at No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list. Their latest book, to be published in May 2015, is When to Rob a Bank: …And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants. It is a compilation of “greatest hits” from 10 years of blogging at Freakonomics.com. Along the way, a lot of other stuff has happened too. An award-winning blog. A movie. Lectures. And a No. 1-ranked podcast, with more than 5 million monthly downloads. This is the place where all that stuff continues to happen. Welcome to http://freakonomics.com/

Landfall 229

‘This is the little magazine that always produces great issues packed with fine writing. The writing is highly readable, sometimes controversial, but never dull.’ – Canvas, Weekend Herald, 31 January 2009

I have to take issue.  Not with writers or with the content of this icon of kiwi literature, for the content page for this, the 229th edition of Otago  University's wonderful dedication  to Aotearoa's arts, literature and correspondence.  This particular edition addresses the winner of the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize: Sue Wootton.  No.  I take issue with the cover.  But I'll get to that later.  Let's focus on the positive.  There's a challenging and reflective piece on ANZAC Day in the guise of a fantasia showcasing iconic cultural figures from the last century.  John Mulgan, Winston Churchill, 'Blue Smoke'.  Playwright Dean Parker has created a sort of 'radio play' for the page about the feeling of being and AZAC.  But, it's like war - glorious, epic, confusing but pointless.  Journo Adam Dudding takes a personal slant on the death of his father Robin, also a journalist (and the editor of the infamous Islands).  There's Elizabeth Smithers making a wry, small town affair of the heart, 1950's style.  It's deliciously retro, like the vinyl couch in your grandparents rumpus room.    There's opener Sandra Arnold, 2014 recipient of the Serisin Landfall Residency, who, almost in gloat writes of her time in the idyllic Waterfall Bay.  "I wake to a bird piping in the garden.  The hill and water are silver in the pre-dawn light.  I set up a writing room upstairs with a view of bush and sea.  Through the open window I can birds, water, and the occasional boat in the jetty, fish jump for insects and weka call to each other in the bush"  I'm dead jealous.  Lucky buggers.  Shouldn't have read this on the train in to my office day job!

Speaking of residencies, Randell Cottage 2014 homebody Tina Makeriti must have found time in her busy schedule to whip up an essay that challenges the individual and personal identity in our contemporary lands.   For someone with deep Maori sensitivities, the idea of even the individual that can be separated from one's history, whakapapa, land is in a way, an oddity.  We are, and always will be owned by where we are - in time, space and place.  Or are we?  She documents travelling to the Frankfurt Book Fair, with taonga, strange and rare to Europeans, who still gawp like their ancestors did when they made landfall here, over 170 years ago.  It's about looking at things from a differing perspective, another angle.  "Sometimes we have to excavate the good from the things we have always viewed as bad.  New Randell resident, Owen Marshall wades in with more profound poetry on a less than perfect book launch and Emma Neale laughs her way through the agony of how to write a short story.  In my head that Monty Python skit of Hardy in a stadium writing his open sentence, treated like the World Cup final with cheering fans, chanting and beer on tap plays in my head.  But my favourite is Nick Ashcroft
s word play of a UK multicultural supermarket - The Osney Snag -  it's like an out-take from Trainspotting - I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but loved it anyway.  

And there's plenty more.  This is a great dip into the deep literary pool. 

But none of this explains my issue with the publishers.  I loved all this wonderful creative writing.  What I take issue with is the cover.  "As calligraphic as 1940's De Kooning, gruesome as Bosch, crudely cartoonish as Guston, a Rabelaistian carnival of excess complete with distorting mirrors..." wrote Andrew Paul Wood in the catalogue of Rob McCleod's 'Untitled', which adorns the cover of Landfall 229.  "a Freudian phallus nose there, a creature in tartan (an allusion to the artist's Scottish origins) with dugs interchangeable with her flesh-pink Mickey Mouse ears may be Miley Cyrus at the 2003 VMA awards, twerking  away among the stylised comic strip shorthand of swooshes...."  What a load of tosh!  Sometimes art is pretentious nonsense.  I take issue with the publishers selecting such immature, amateur rubbish.  Perhaps there's some sense of elitism, but it really belittles this fine publication and it ties it to the 1980's to the dusty origins when, really there needs to be new growth and an embracement of the future.  I judge a book by its cover, especially in the age of the Kindle.  I want the perfect package.  And it almost is.  Just loose the awful artwork and embrace something that doesn't look like what my kids drew, eh?

Griffith Review 48 Enduring Legacies

https://griffithreview.com/

The modern world was shaped by the wars of the twentieth century. The centenary of Gallipoli provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies – human, political, economic, military – that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. The carnage of the world wars, and those that followed, gave extra meaning to the phrase 'lest we forget'. Beyond the commemorations, consequences still reverberate.

Exploring the consequences of Australia's involvement in war with a critical and inquiring eye, Griffith Review 48: Enduring Legacies assembles a team of scholars, non-fiction and fiction writers, journalists and broadcasters to pose hard questions about why we remember and what we forget. How did the wars shape Australia socially, economically and politically? How did they alter the understanding of Australia's place in the world and in our region? Did Gallipoli mark the coming of age of the new nation, or did that war devastate its potential?

I recently returned from a brief trip to Australia where the "BRANZAC" debate, the commercial exploitation of the 100th Year Commemorations of the Gallipoli landings, has been raging.  Australians, it seems. at least in the major dailies are keen to honour their fallen.  An that is perfectly understandable.  But the way it's gone about and the shunning of any deeper debate or inquiry is less than palatable.  In issue 48 of the "Griffith Review", a regular publication of Brisbane's Griffith University, tackles war through the Aussie lens.  In 21 short essays, nine memoirs, a work of prose fiction and one poem this journal seeks to explore the enduring legacies of war.  "The modern world was shaped by wars of the 20th Century.  The centenary of Gallipoli provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies - human, political, economic, military - that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions."  This is the standpoint from which we begin the journey.  Peter Cochrane, in "The past is not sacred", seeks to challenge the dangerous obsession with the myth of ANZAC, the connection with the returned servicemen's need to find honour and fulfilment from a time of futility and waste and the rhetoric of politicians like Tony Abbott who send troops to modern day Iraq under the banner of "The Spirit of ANZAC." He dissects the reasons for Australia's need to go to war in 1914 and how that has been overshadowed by the spectre of 'sacrifice'.  That's a common theme here too, in New Zealand.  Raise a conversation about how our troops were duped by incompetent British commanders and a false dream of adventure and you'll be knocked back by aghast listeners who will immediately reply "My relative died in that war, are you calling them naïve and stupid?"

Cochrane notes with despair how the Australian press have  whipped up the Commemorations into a untouchable and sacred edifice.  He quotes the Australian from 2013 on the nation's perceived response to any in-depth academic analysis of Gallipoli.  "They (academics) must recognise that the current intellectual zeitgeist is at odds with the spirit of Anzac (note the lower case spelling, now a noun not an acronym). It recognises neither the significance of a war that had to be fought nor the importance of patriotism.  Honour, duty and mate ship are foreign to their thinking.  They may be experts on many things but on the subject of Anzac, they have little useful to say." It is this very message that Cochrane tears down, as does the rest of this editing of the Griffith Review.  In her introduction Co-Editor Julianne Schultz reminds us that the Great War did not "make" Australia and the myths of Baptisms of Fire or Freedom from Bloodletting are very naïve attempts to curtain the historical motivations of the time.  In New Zealand, I'm sure we all argue that we were a nation of settlers obsessed by the superiority of England and all things British.  But in Australia, barely a nation, more a collection of states and colonies, the people were more independent and divided.  This was also a social laboratory and a world leader of what colonisation could achieve, indigenous segregation and their poor treatment aside.  In several places the questions of why Australian needed to flex it's muscles and prove its worth when it was already so far ahead are asked time and again.  Because it was this driver that encouraged so many young men to enlist - to prove Australia (and here too, in New Zealand) could cut it on the world stage. 

With vigour and creativity, prominent Aussie academics and four Kiwis, including military scholar Chris Pugsley tackle 20th Century Wars and the dirty secrets that lie under the surface.  These go further than WWI, stretching right up to Afghanistan but dwell mainly on the earlier, where rightly distance of time allows subjective, at least in part. Pugsley's "Breaking Ranks" essay has to be the most thought provoking, after Cochrane's.  It's a fascinating breakdown of the official reporting of Gallipoli loses and of four controversial memorials erected at Gallipoli.  He also looks at the legacy of the losses on Massey's post war government (97% of New Zealanders were hurt or died on the peninsular, compared to 22% of British troops).  New Zealand poet Rosetta Allen writes about Japanese Kamikaze pilots in "Dear Mother" - "I am your sacred cherry blossom /that falls in the spring... I kept my daughter's dollhouse close/Pinned to the steel of my cockpit."  It's a moving essay from the pilot's perspective, perhaps an attempt to understand...ultimately unanswered.
Fred Dagg (aka John Clarke) writes of his neighbour in "A remarkable Man", a simple memoir of a time in war, but well balanced, and a response to that age old adage of regret "we learned to cope!"   

The Griffith Review won't be the only voice of debate in this commemorative year but it might be the most sane to date.  I've read many books already that tackle different aspects of the war but nothing is as poignant or a well informed, travelling between high level political and socioeconomic to individual and very personal accounts and critiques.  For all this it proves the sheer capacity for us all to think.  It's just a shame that our leaders and politicians don't read this before they act.

https://griffithreview.com/store/enduring-legacies/

Annie's War - A New Zealand woman and her family in England 1916 -19. Edited by Susanna Montgomerie Norris with Anna Rogers

This is an extraordinary, and personal book.  There are plenty of diaries from this period floating around, especially from soldiers themselves.   But rarer is the first hand account from the perspective of a family caught up in the turmoil of war.  Viewers of the Downton Abbey series would have had a glimpse of life during wartime, through the thickly glazed windows of the Crowley's country seat.  But that was fiction, interpreted history.  This book is the real deal. 

War has broken in Europe.  Annie Montgomerie has two sons, Oswald and Seton sign up as pilots in the Royal Air force.  This means the whole family must up sticks and relocate to London.  That, in itself is a remarkable thing!   London is a million miles from Godzone.  London endures Zepplin attacks, shortages and endless news of the horrors of the Great War.  Whilst her sons are serving Annie billets Kiwis coming over to enlist.  She packs them off with a bit of cheer, knowing that some will not return.  Oswald falls to the influenza epidemic that comes by the end of the war.  There are plenty of other trials. too.  This is a very rare insight, from a Kiwi point of view of the UK at this time.  I wonder as I read it, how Annie felt about this place that all subjects of the Empire called "Home".  After all settlers left Blighty to escape the Empirical vices and squalor less than 50 years prior.  Now the spectre called them back like a horrific drug addiction demanding their very lives.  How strog was the pioneer spirit that people like Annie could allow their sons to not only go off to slaughter - all in the name of a King who was so distance and ethereal he was simply a vision on a postage stamp.  For a Kiwi like me, looking back at the delusion of Empire, that tricked an entire generation to support a war that was such an incompetent farce it all seems so bizarre that a mother would voluntarily support such a risk as to let, nay support her sons to take on such a wild, daring ad hair brained activity. 

Susanna Montgomerie's archives are exceptional.  There are many family photos, reference points of their trips.  Annie's had some means to document her trip in both words and pictures.  Also, letters and other documents illustrate with a real sense of reality.  Helping to paint the full picture is Anna Rogers' foot notes and asides, which a necessary to get a full picture, and sometimes to simply help the reader to understand what is happening.  Because Annie, I think was only writing for herself.  Diaries at this time were not intended as anything else but as a personal conversation between the writer and God.  In that sense we are prying, perhaps uninvited into a life that was not meant to be revealed.  None the less this is an extraordinary journey, perhaps not really understood - except to say that a mother will always do what they think is right by their Sons.  And in 1916, moving to London to support a foolhardy adventure to fly over the Western front was a seemingly legitimate pursuit.

Susanna Montgomerie Norris was born in 1940 and brought up on the family farm, Taukoro, near Wanganui. She qualified as a teacher and spent two years teaching in London, then travelling in Europe and North America. She later trained as a children’s librarian. Susanna, who has a lifelong interest in history, especially that of her family, has spent many years transcribing and working on her grandmother Annie’s diaries, which were discovered by her cousin, John Montgomerie, who has also supplied a large number of the photos used.

Anna Rogers has spent most of her working life as a fiction and non-fiction book editor. She is also the author of eight books, including While You're Away: New Zealand Nurses at War 1899–1948 and illustrated histories of the West Coast and Canterbury, and is a regular book reviewer.

http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/booksauthors/2014/annies_war.html



Gallipoli in Minecraft® - Fri 24 Apr – Sun 11 Oct 2015 / Auckland War Memorial Museum

Anzac Cove, Gallipoli in Minecraft created by Alfriston College students.
Auckland War Memorial Museum - Tāmaki Paenga Hira.

Come and explore the Gallipoli campaign in an exhibition featuring the interactive world of Minecraft®. This hugely popular online game is about breaking and placing blocks. Since its inception players have worked together to create all sorts of incredible and imaginative things.
Over the past year students from Alfriston College have re-created the landscape of 1915 Gallipoli in Minecraft®, block by block. Working with the Museum’s staff and utilising our First World War collections, the students have learnt about the experiences of the New Zealand soldiers in the 1915 campaign.
The Gallipoli in Minecraft® world will be available to download from 25 April.

The Anzacs: An inside view of New Zealanders at Gallipoli - Author: Auckland War Memorial Museum - Published by Penguin

The Gallipoli campaign was one of New Zealand's darkest and most dramatic, one that resulted in a devastating loss of life and cultivated a lasting legacy of sacrifice and nationhood.

This carefully chosen selection from the Auckland War Memorial Museum's extensive catalogue, with many images never published before, sheds new light on New Zealand's Anzac story. Through soldiers' amateur photography – candid, unassuming, revealing and, at times, haunting – The Anzacs charts life for those who served in Gallipoli: from leaving New Zealand and encountering an unexpected landscape to the realities of combat and dealing with death and loss. It is a book that casts an unstinting eye on the history – and the men who lived it – presenting events as they unfolded through the photographic lens.

'There is an air of expectant calm; no evidence of artillery fire or shot and shell, just a scene that suggests a successful landing . . . " writes military historian Chris Pugsley, in the introduction to this remarkable boo. "...all of that would change by the afternoon, and the keen young men in these photographs would end the day fighting for their lives.'

Barges of men towed to shore, Gallipoli, 25 April 1915.
Auckland War Memorial Museum - Tāmaki Paenga Hira. PH-ALB-382p7-3.

And this sentiment s reflected in Damien Fenton's essay of the campaign, which opens the first chapters.  He skilfully covers the main points from the botched landing at what became Anzac cove (the intended position a 1/4 mile further on) to the final retreat.  He also reflects on the demise and resurrection of the ANZAC day parade in the Kiwi psyche and what that means for us today and into the future.  This is one of the most chilling parts of the book because as I reflect myself on what inspired all those young men to eagerly join up, how they were so easily duped by the flimsy propaganda devised by Empirical nationalism, I wonder how easy it would be to involve us all again in new war simply by reintroducing those elements: the axis of evil, the need to protect and the promise of glory.  Today, as in virtually every theatre of war since New Zealand was first colonised, Kiwis have been the first to sign up and get involved.  Our urges of FOMO (fear of missing out) seem insatiable.  You see it here in the early photos of these ghosts - young men and their supporting families, as they embark for the 'great adventure'.  These are photos almost exclusively taken on rugged and bashed box brownies, owned by soldiers who could barely find their way to the toilet, let alone fight as a crack garrison against the desperate and fanatical Ottoman army.  Many of these photos are taken in the quiet moments, but you can just imagine the smells, the heat, the sounds of continuous gunfire, explosions and shouting.  Most of these photos are of men at rest.  It would be very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to capture fighting in action, given dangers of the close quarters trench warfare.  Stick your head over the parapet to take a snap and you'll instantly lose it. There's a couple of particularly desperate images taken in June 1915 of men wedged into a trench on Quinn's post, the most notorious outpost of the peninsular.  It's the newly arrive troops from the Otago regiment.  In the background  spotter has just seen a trench of 20 Ottoman troops and is in the process of directing his snipers towards it.  The business is as soulless and clinical as pouring concrete on a building site.  It has to be.  No room for emotions here. The look on the faces of the kiwis is brave in the face of complete terror.  This is likely a situation that they will not survive!

Two thoughts struck me looking at these photos.  One: How did these men so blatantly snap away?  Weren't there military restrictions or issues of intelligence and secrecy?  It appears things were less regimented back then.  It would have been relatively simple to carry a camera into battle.  Troop's postcards and letters were censored but not their access to a camera it seems.  Some photographers like Kiwi John Burnet Davis, were likely officers, who were able to take in personal affects like phonographs, to the trenches.  Davis spent time in Egypt, at the training facilities, and like many early ANZACS were amongst the bored and restless who were initially in reserve to the main action in Europe.  He took shots of the men sightseeing and hanging around in camp.  At that point it was a lark of sorts, but for the venereal disease and gambling vices of Cairo.  All that was soon to change!

Harvey Maitland Crystall was another 'correspondent' with wide access - he and his four brothers were all volunteers, Crystall himself was in the Royal Engineers both at Galipoli and at the Western Front, so carrying a camera would have been a part of his job, or at least permissible.  He was also away from the firing line for some of the war.  Of course the engineers were also those responsible for building the telephone networks and restoring bridges and trench fortifications so they spent periods of time in the thick of it. 

The interesting thing about these photo collections, which make up this book, is that all photographers made it back, and on the whole lived until their 70's.  What happened to the photographers that didn't make it?  What happened to their work I wonder?  The book has a few insights on this, but  really wanted more back ground to these photos - and about the people in the photos.  Much of the accompanying dialogue is about the situation of the photo but not the detail.  Of course, it might not have been possible to interview the photographers - some in their later years of life, and perhaps understandably unwilling to part with the painful details.  It reminds me to talk to my relatives about my only family collections and quiz them in detail about the individuals in the photos - lest they fade to the graveyard of history and be forgotten.

About the Auckland War Memorial Museum Pictorial Collection

The Auckland Museum is an authoritative source of images depicting New Zealand and Pacific culture and history with a particular emphasis on the Auckland region including photographs, prints, drawings, posters and paintings.  The photograph collection in particular is a major New Zealand Collection.

The Museum holds one of the nation's most important pictorial collections - a wealth of historic paintings, rare watercolours, photographs and other artworks. Selections of these are periodically exhibited in the Pictorial Gallery along with other touring pictorial exhibitions.
The Museum's pictorial collections are truly world class.  Most of New Zealand's greatest photographers are represented here, while amateur albums of family snaps and soldiers mementos are a hidden treasure for descendants and social historians.
The Polynesian Photograph Collection in particular is one of the most complete collections of Pacific "pre-arrival" photography and imagery to be found anywhere in the world.

For more go to : http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/collections-and-library/collections/documentary-heritage-collection/pictorial-collections

 

Many thanks to the Auckland War Memorial Museum and Penguin Books for an advance copy of this book.

The Conch Trumpet - David Eggleton

David Eggleton is a Dunedinite and author of 6 previous books of poetry and short fiction.  He's tackled many topics before but this one is the most ambitious.  The Conch is an ancient Maori symbol of heraldry.  A loudhaler from the past and a metaphor for now.  He uses it to call to the scattered tribes of Aoteaoa - the anciet tangata whenua and the recent arrival; those with guilt of iperialism and those withthe ambitions of commerce and betterment.  But these are not poems that always explore possible melding of cultures.  Instead they begin to  tread on the familar territories of land, home and sea. Every Kiwi knows about this.  In that sense I was a little disappointed.

But Eggleton does a wonderful job of exploring the natual world and the spiritual world whilst nodding to other things later on.  His collection compresses history, the majesty of a harbour or a mountain or lake or river and occasional political satire,  He connects with Maori lore and legent many times connecting the complacency of discarded kelp, for instance with the ancestry of birds like the Petrel (in Ode to The Beach Wrecked Petrel) or the juztaposition of mountains and the eternal changing weather (in Cloud Piercer).  On that latter poem there are beautiful lines such as "On winter's serrated-edge glints/ snow's teeth, talons, feather-slick tints/ Nothing loath, prowled by air's current,/ great alps bulk above canopy."  These are the best moments, they conjour up for me those icons of sweeping mountainscapes from a helicopter at 1000 feet up.  Eggleton covers many subjects in this slim volume and not all of these are natural.  Towards the end politics and the state of the world bleed in.  There's an oddly creepy poem about the death of Gaddafi, for ezample.  And another that talks of modern day terrorism in today's life.  The lines "Praise be to the internet, now my mind is a search engine"  The terrorism he speaks of is more about the climate of info-fear.  He's almost saying if knowledge is power then when is there to much power?  What happens when we all know everything?  Is it better to be a little ignorant, if only to retain a little sketicism of the knowledgable among us!  He continues on with the best lines of the book: " ...humming under flags of convenience, seen through Google Glass smoked darkly."  

It's a collection that starts with the natural and ends up with the contrived.  It should work.  But I wonder.  If I could cut this book into two and select the later poems about potilics and social comment (New Zild Book Awards Considered as a Five-Horse Race, for example.  C'mon the title says it all - doesn't it Ellie Catton?), then I'd be happy.  Eggleton is clearly a better poet than I am a reader.  So, instead of dismissing the parts of this collection that I can't find comfort with I'm determined to re-read.  Like a cryptic crossword you need to think and ponder some of these awhile before giving up.  In the age of instant gratification Eggleton is a challenge worth taking.