Another day, another dollar

Stories of the disastrous Australian bushfires are winging around the globe, and donors, including celebrity donors, are responding worldwide. But while the multinational anglophone news services – the Mail, the Guardian, the BBC  –  are in prime position to spread the word of the millions being pledged, they are having trouble, not for the first time, deciding exactly what kind of millions they are.

We have previously seen how a libel settlement awarded in Australian dollars was reported around the world, even in the US, as being simply in “dollars”. But this time, it’s not the media that is being vague about currency – it seems to be the celebrity donors themselves.

Elton John announced simply that he would be donating “$1m” to firefighters, speaking live on stage at a concert in Sydney. Chris Hemsworth made the same non-specific announcement in a video on social media. John is a Briton with ties to both the US and Australia, but particularly the former; Hemsworth an Australian who works in Hollywood but now chooses to live in his home country. What denomination of currency does each of them think in when they are speaking off the cuff? What kind of dollars do they mean?

Other celebrities have joined in. The singers Kylie Minogue (Australian, famous in Australia and Britain, somewhat less so in America) and Pink (American, lives in America, popular around the world) both pledged “$500,000”. If one were to guess – and it would only be a guess – one might surmise that Minogue meant Australian dollars and Pink United States dollars. But if so, that creates considerable unease about allowing the sentence “The pop star Pink said she would donate $500,000, which is the same amount Kylie Minogue pledged.” Is it actually the same amount?

The Daily Mirror, which professes less global ambition than some of its British rivals, feels confident enough to convert Minogue’s pledge into pounds on the assumption that she meant Australian dollars: £265k (as opposed to something like £380k if she had meant US).

But they haven’t done the same for Hemsworth, her fellow Australian, who broadcast his pledge at home in Australia but was equally non-specific.

Of course, in a crisis of this magnitude, when aid is urgently needed, this is a detail that should only worry sub-editors. Or perhaps sub-editors and international hard rockers with an eye for detail:

Thanks, Metallica.

 

Let it be

© Jane Draycott, 2016

There are times when one longs not to be an editor – such as, for example, when reading this poem in Jane Draycott’s wonderful recent collection The Occupant. “It Won’t Be Long” is a mesmerising meditation on the fact (of which I was unaware) that With The Beatles, the Beatles’ second album, came out on the same day that John F Kennedy was assassinated: 22 November 1963.

Named after the first song on the album, the poem is set in Draycott’s childhood home on the day in question, where father is struggling to make dinner for the family because mother is ill, and rapidly the political, cultural and domestic all get swirled together. The title of the poem simultaneously refers to the record, the progress in the kitchen and the events soon to occur in Dallas, six hours behind. Mention of the Vesta instant curry brings to mind Vesta, Roman goddess of hearth and home, who then seems to appear, flickeringly, in the outfit Jacqueline Kennedy wore that day (“navy trim and matching pillbox hat“). And because it’s 1963, no one (in the Beatles, presumably) has “even thought of going to India” – at least, not yet.

© EMI Records

But if it is 1963, that brings me to the thing I trip over in the first line, that brings the editor in me to alert and stops me being captivated straightaway (although I end up being captivated in the end). If you are an editor or a Beatles fan, you probably noticed it too. “Here Comes The Sun” isn’t on With The Beatles. It’s on Abbey Road. On 22 November 1963, it was still five years away from being written.

It’s a wonderful first line. And of course the purpose of the sun in the poem is not just to be a Beatles reference but to provide the light source that creates the shadow over America’s future, the globe in black and white, and perhaps even the half-moon faces of the Fab Four on the album’s famous cover. The poem would go dark without it.

Maybe if it wasn’t in italics, I wouldn’t trip over it so hard. Certainly elsewhere in the poem there are anachronistic echoes of lyrics from Come Together and I Am The Walrus (“come together now”, “we are all together”) that intrude less. But the fact that “Here comes the sun” is emphasised, and the fact that it comes directly after the citation “With The Beatles (Parlophone)”, makes it impossible for my literalistic, fact-checking soul to overlook. A lifetime on the desk leaves you mentally Googling everything. There are times when one longs not to be an editor.