Greetings from - sorry - Wellington

The heading above and the following is an extract from the first posting on Guy Somerset's new Culture Vulture Blog which I warmly recommend to all my readers.

Culutre Vulture
Tales from the boot room
The paper chase: weekend book pages around the world

At the risk of giving Gordon McLauchlan, Hamish Keith, et al, even more to complain about, this blog is being written from Wellington. Writer, reviewer and columnist McLauchlan, for those who don't follow such things - and Lord knows, why should you? - had a right old go at the capital and its "stranglehold on New Zealand culture" at the monthly meeting of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors in February. Arts commentator Keith - whose Cultural Curmudgeon column appears fortnightly in the Listener - came to his support in the comments section when McLauchlan's "little rant" (as he himself described it) was posted on Beattie's Book Blog .

"We really need to ask why every New Zealand cultural lever or button has a Wellington hand or finger on it," reckoned Keith, - and why ever major cultural resource is Wellington based."

McLauchlan certainly fired off some good one-liners: "Let me make the point that Wellington would be a fishing village based in Island Bay were it not for Government and its bureaucrats"; referring to one of the two Wellington runners-up in the fiction category at last year's Montana New Zealand Book Awards as "unreadable" and going on: "Who lost?
Well, most obviously CK Stead, whose novel [My Name Was] Judas has been published since last year into Polish, French, Croatian, Hungarian, and Spanish. The unreadable Wellington novelist hasn't, to my knowledge, been published in any other language, perhaps because they haven't yet found a translator to stay awake to do the job."McLauchlan's stone-hearted and crassly casual description of the unnamed other fiction runner-up - Nigel Cox - as "A dead Wellingtonian" didn't do much for his cause, but that cause is not without substance, whether you agree with it or not. I won't go into that here, though, as I plan to write about it in the Listener.

I only bring the subject up to demonstrate, in introducing myself and Culture Vulture, that I am acutely aware of the suspicions that fall upon a Wellington-based arts and books editor of the Listener and blogger for the New Zealand Herald.What can I say? The last time I looked, I wasn't part of the IIML/VUP/CNZ-Industrial Complex (if such a thing exists), but others may beg to differ. I have, after all, supped with the "unreadable" Wellington novelist - or at least been in the same room as him when supping. I have also - more damningly? - been a fellow shortlist selector for the International Institute of Modern Letters' Prize in Modern Letters for an emerging New Zealand writer (to be announced on Saturday as part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival .Does that taint me irrevocably? A cynic's careful scrutiny of the finalists might suggest it does, but I plead innocence on both my own and my colleagues' parts. These were the best writers. Regardless of provenance.

Perhaps, as Auckland Writers and Readers Festival director Jill Rawnsley suggested to me the other day, I am extended a Get Out of Jail Free Card because I am a Briton. Perhaps that is an offence in its own right. (Having worked for the Hampstead & Highgate Express newspaper in North London for five years, I know all too well what it's like to be the object of literary loathing. At least no one yet speaks of "the Wellington novel" as they do of "the Hampstead novel" - the acme of artistic complacency, with the suburb's postcode, NW3, shorthand for middle-class liberal smugness.)

To visit Guy Somerset's new blog go here.........