Worksheet #77, or "Kay Fabian Phone Home"

Today's anxiety brought to you by the fact that...

...in about an hour I'll be on a digital-only TV channel for two minutes. And when I say "I" I mean snippets of my face, interspersed with stuff in my office (Cuban cigar, Maasi warrior doll, pictures of antique guns?), while snippets of my voice ramble on about antique pictures of guns and writing on weekends. And by snippets of my face and office and voice, I mean the face and office and voice as it was one afternoon in September.  So it's my old laptop I'm pretending to type profound words on (but I'm just typing: "So, this is weird. Don't you think this is weird') in the body of a story I've long since put to bed (and roused for publication in January).

I don't like hearing my telephone voice on radio. Seeing my face-for-radio on TV at the same time... ugh.

You know you've made a small dent in the psyche when... #14


...when you are a dummy answer in the Stuff daily quiz:

Of all the books in all the world, I walk into this one?


Failed Radiohead covers #2

I don't plan on making a habit of this, but I came across another cover of a Radiohead song this week after Weezer's too-similar version of 'Paranoid Android' last week.

Today it's Sarah Jaroz doing another OK Computer track: 'The Tourist'. It passes the not-too-similar hurdle by virtue of it's jangly Americana feel (but do I hear ukuleles? aren't they Hawaiian? I guess that's part of America), but fails in my jaundiced (and slightly sick of Americana to begin with-) eyes because that very same jangling is far from euphonous.


Video I haven't watched yet but I will

The gala opening of the 2011 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, which I missed because I was still in Wellington - but everyone who I spoke with up there said it was the bomb.


A long-ish poem that employs move #14 in the first line...

...and probably the title, but gets away with it. Jenny Bornholdt's 'Poem About A Horse'.  I am a sucker for poems featuring yaks!!

One day I'll have my own yak photos. This one's from www.project-himalaya.com 

Impulse competition corner

Here's my yakky poem from 2008. I'll give a free book to the first person to identify any moves from the 41 Moves in Contemporary Poetry which I've deployed (having not scoured it myself yet... so this may be an unwinnable prize).

Snippet from the internet that I came across while conducting legitimate research but have no idea how I got there or how it links to vaudeville tours in 1902-03, but continues to interest me both conceptually and linguistically

Kayfabe:

The origin of the term is uncertain. Pro wrestling can trace some of its stylistic origins back to carnivals and catch wrestling, where the term "kayfabe" is thought to have originated as carny slang for "protecting the secrets of the business". With money tight, a carny would call home collect, telling the operator their name was "Kay Fabian". This was code letting the people at home know they had made it safely to the next town. The family would then deny the call. This was a method of communicating without paying for the cost of a phone call or telegram.
However, another tradition holds that "kayfabe" was merely Pig Latin for "be fake", and thus an instruction by one carny to another not to break character at the moment a "rube" or "mark" was close by.

Asked and answered

My Q&A with Unity Books is up on their website, replete with terrible mixed mythological reference and questionable capitalisation ("up Mt Olympus to join the Pantheon").

The newly expanded Unity Books in Wellington is the only place right now you can buy a genuine signed and officially stickered "2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book winner") copy of A Man Melting.


Perfunctory wrap-up

I had other things to say/link to, but it's now 30 minutes till showtime and I think I might go play with the fusebox or something...