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- Article Title: Letters to the Editor
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Writing first
Dear Editor,
Rock critic Robert Christgau once argued that ‘writing about music is writing first’. His edict puts paid to all those who have erroneously demanded that music reviewers must be musicians themselves or otherwise musically literate. If you can listen to and appreciate music, then you can write about it.
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Kerryn Goldsworthy replies:
Whatever blame may be involved here should be firmly directed at me. Any perceived gaps in the responses to my questions should not be interpreted as sidestepping on the part of the respondents, but rather as holes in my own survey; I could not have reasonably expected people to answer questions that I had not asked. And the respondents were so astonishingly generous and thoughtful in their replies that there was no possibility of quoting or paraphrasing them in any more detail without going well over my allotted space; while making every effort not to distort or misrepresent, I cherry-picked the responses mainly for points of contention, points of broad agreement, surprises, and quotable quotes. Perhaps I should have included a question specifically about the aesthetic value of a book review as a piece of writing in itself, but I doubt whether there would have been much disagreement about it. Personally I regard it as a given, which is probably what produced the blind spot.
Who said what, anyway?
Dear Editor,
Kerryn Goldsworthy writes, in the context of Australian reviewers’ positive self-assessment of the quality of their reviewing: ‘one possible retort would be the Christine Keeler classic – “well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”.’
Those of us who followed keenly the events of the Profumo affair in the Melbourne Sun News Pictorial in 1963 would know that the retort belongs not to Christine Keeler, but to Mandy Rice Davies. And what she said, more precisely, was ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’
The change from the plural to the singular is important, because if we are to believe Richard Davenport-Hines (An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age Of Profumo), the evidence suggests that ‘he’ (Bill Astor) was telling the truth and Mandy Rice Davies was lying. Is this important in terms of the retort’s ‘classic’ status? We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?
John Broderick, St Kilda, Vic.
Kerryn Goldsworthy replies:
It was indeed Mandy Rice-Davies, and that is an error I am ashamed to have made. (Note the hyphenated surname; Mr Broderick may or may not be familiar with Skitt’s Law, which states that any communication correcting another person’s error will contain at least one error itself.) Regarding singular, plural, and misquotation, I make no apology for adapting the quotation for my own ends, but should indeed have either identified it as an adaptation or not put it in quotation marks.
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