Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient: Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Vol. 32, No. 9. 1969.

Letters To The Editor

Letters To The Editor

All Letters Submitted For Publication Must Be Signed With The Writer's Own Name. No Pseudonyms Will Be Accepted Save In Exceptional Circumstances.

Cappicade

Congratulations to the Cappicade crew for a biting, satiric, ironic, mean, witty, colourful, clever, anti-Establishment, penetrating, brilliant, culling, antagonistic, adult, over-sexed, apt, appropriate, apposite, literary, Swiftian, Shavian, erudite, far-seeing, absolutely naughty and wicked, sloeblack, slow, black piece of literature. At Professor Tolkien wrote of Barliman Butterbur: "He can see through a brick wall in time, as they say in Bree." And all che to Smith.

Jane Rankin.

Security issue

Reference the bigoted letter signed Jerome Wallace in last issue. Strange that a correspondent in the same issue (who signed himself correctly) has Jerome far a middle name. Stranger, too, that this person was heartbroken when another bigot, Wallace by name, failed to moke It in the last political gangsplash in the land of the free.

Arthur Baysting.

Extrav

Extravaganza this year sets new standards of immaturity and irrelevance. The music and the acting are just fine, but the socalled script is pathetic. Will somebody tall me exactly what is funny about an actor standing before art audience and mouthing words like "shit" apparently limply for the sake of doing it? Admittedly most infants would find this spectacle amusing, but Extrav is not deviled for the benefit of small boys at the stage of enjoying lavatory humour. (And I'm sketches — I'm talking about almost the entire show!) There is nothing intrinsically funny about slang or boorish allusions to sex. Nor are impersonations of policemen or politicians automatically hilarious. All these things have to be at least slightly clever and set in a genuinely amusing context.

A loud, unfunny, unoriginal, mostly [unclear: ontopical] Extrav is not better than no Extrav at all.

Stephen Hunt.

•Review, p. 9.

Cinematic history?

In Salient 8 the following extraordinary sentence appears In the review of Ingmar Bergman's "The Hour of the Wolf"—"She bears a breast to show a mark Johan has made ..."

I have not, sir, gone Into the full ramifications of afterbirth, nor do I cease to wonder at the Increasing precociousness of today's infants. I fancy, however, that this scene must create cinematic, if not medical History.

Roger Lawrence.

. . .Wagner

After much deliberation I have decided to seek those Interested in the formation of a Wagnerian Society within the university. We would listen to the works of Wagner, discuss the works, read books on the subject, and generally discuss Wagner's ideas. We would also do our utmost to reflect all that Wagner thought was good, and pure.

Ron Pretty.

... Traitor scum ...

On this campus there is a group of people that could only be described at Traitorscum. These villainous Lord Haw Haws are of the opinion that the best thing they can find to do with their money is to give it to hordes of screaming ravenous wogs. That these creeps want to pay for an invasion with their own money is not enough for them; they want our government to subsidise our own destruction. India, as the epitomy of all underdeveloped countries, has ...

Correspondents an requested to keep letters as short and as succint as possible. Preferably 150 words.—Ed.)

Ron Pretty.

Labour conference

I Am sure there were many people who were amused by Alister Taylor's article on the Labour Party conference. However, apart from some smart abuse at a member of the party's executive who could be immediately recognised by Mr Taylor's description, the article contained the same hackneyed phrases and cliches we can the Labour Party which have become popular among left and right wing critics of the party over the last couple of yean.

Indeed, I was disappointed that Mr Taylor, who is, I believe, himself a journalist, could not produce anything more perceptive than the cry that the Labour Party has no policy, a statement which could just as easily have been road in the Dominion or N.Z. Herald.

His description of Labour's leadership as "an entranehed and bureaucratic USSR type hierarchy" might seem imaginative and cutting although it was merely a steal from Owen Gager's idea of labour leaders as the "Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party" (Salient. May 21, 1968). Another interesting reference was the mention of political commentators Professors Chapman and Jackson who "knew by heart their lines for the numerous radio and TV interviews ... they've learnt them at the three or four or five or ten previous ... conferences they've attended. Nothing ever changes." An interesting comment, especially when compared with tome of Professor Chapman's remarks at the end of the conference which he said was "such a contrast to the last three that it's startling". Mr Taylor said that the young radicals come full of hope "and at the end go away shattered". But Professor Chapman told us that "youth have got their major beachhead"—a representative of the party's executive.

For all its faults, the Labour Party Is the only political party in New Zealand which offers any hope to the left wing in New Zealand (among whom I count Mr Taylor) for the implementation of the progressive policies they espouse. Withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, radical re-organisation of the Security Service, a more liberal education policy than Mr Muldoon's, the lowering of the voting age to eighteen; all these are policies which we can expect a Labour Government to implement.

I do not expect or ask Alister Taylor to jump on the Labour bandwagon for 1969, but I would have hoped that, as a responsible political commentator and activist he might have bean able to provide more constructive criticism of the Labour Party and its policies, instead of repeating the old hackneyed cliches and criticisms of read anytime in the Sunday Times or the Red Spark.

P. L. Franks,

Hutt Youth Branch, N.Z. Labour Party.