The Imaginary Museum

Two Jameses (3): "Two Doctors"

2012-01-18T12:07:00.002+13:00

[M. R. James: A Thin Ghost and Others (1919)]

Would it be fair to say that the present-day mania for zombie movies is based on some kind of visceral fear of overpopulation?

Consider, for a moment, those times when you find yourself looking out over a crowd of human beings and feeling almost unable to conceive of each of them as harbouring a world of complex emotions and thoughts like you (and your soulmates and friends).

Hence all that stuff about "they don't feel it like we do" (because it would be so horrible if they did). Hence, too, the slavering mass of reanimated corpses which seems to spring up so readily in the contemporary imagination.

I know that I've already speculated that the vogue for vampires is based on their perfect complexions and inability to put on weight (which makes them alluring role models for more than just teenagers, I'm sorry to say). This idea probably sounds almost equally frivolous, but it isn't really.

I mean, what other theory can you advance to account for it?

I know that it might seem as if I've been maundering on about ghosts and ghost stories (and various examples of each by the two Jameses), but all this is gradually drawing to a point, I'm glad to say.

I fear that it's a point that I can only make by doing a bit of textual analysis (what we used to call "close reading"), though, so I propose to look through one particular story by M. R. James with a certain amount of attention to detail.

The story in question is called "Two Doctors", and it comes at the end of his strangest and most inaccessible book, A Thin Ghost and Others (1919)

Note the date of first publication, for a start: straight after the First World War. Note, too, that it's quite a thin volume, with fewer stories than either of its pre-war predecessors:

There's something a bit thin and apologetic about the preface, too:

"Not a great deal is risked" is a rather roundabout way of launching a new book into the world - far less weighty than that comment about sequels being "not only proverbially but actually, very hazardous things." What on earth is that supposed to mean? In what way are they "hazardous"? To one's reputation? One's mental health?

Perhaps ... some one's Christmas may be the cheerfuller for a story-book which, I think, only once mentions the war.

That last remark certainly fits the whole atmosphere of psychic distress so noticeable at the end of that appallingly wasteful war, with its slew of publications by spiritualists and eminent divines attempting to substantiate communication with loved ones on the Other Side ...

So, first of all, you'll notice that there is no story in the book called "A Thin Ghost."

The textual justification for the title in fact comes towards the end of the story above, "The Residence at Whitminster," with its "cruel child" Saul who becomes (apparently) a strange insect-like ghost felt only once, in passing, in the dark:

"A withered heart makes an ugly thin ghost" [pp. 45-46]

All the stories in the book are interesting. The first three, about (respectively) a scrying glass, a haunted diary, and a vampire, have been frequently reprinted. The second-to-last, "The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance," uses the iconography of the Punch and Judy show to great effect, though at times the story becomes almost too allusive to grasp - almost in the manner of late Kipling, strange stories such as "They" or "Mrs Bathurst."

It's the last story I want to talk about here, though: "Two Doctors." It's pretty obvious even to the casual reader that it's constantly teetering on the edge of ceasing to be a "story" in the conventional sense altogether.

Is there more to it than that, though?

TWO DOCTORS
[Full text available here.]

It is a very common thing, in my experience, to find papers shut up in old books; but one of the rarest things to come across any such that are at all interesting. Still it does happen, and one should never destroy them unlooked at.

[Compare the opening of HJ's “The Turn of the Screw”:

"The story's written. It's in a locked drawer - it has not been out for years. I could write to my man and enclose the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it."
…
"Then your manuscript--?"

"Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand." He hung fire again. "A woman's. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in question before she died."
…
he opened the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album.

Here the assumption seems to be that the story is interesting because it's been concealed so sedulously from the world up till now.]

Now it was a practice of mine before the war occasionally to buy old ledgers of which the paper was good, and which possessed a good many blank leaves, and to extract these and use them for my own notes and writings.
["MRJ is describing his own habits at this point", according to Rosemary Pardoe's useful set of annotations to the story (first published in Ghosts & Scholars 15 (1993), and available online here [henceforth marked RP]).

Note, too, the one "mention of the war” referred to in his preface above.]

One such I purchased for a small sum in 1911. It was tightly clasped, and its boards were warped by having for years been obliged to embrace a number of extraneous sheets. Three-quarters of this inserted matter had lost all vestige of importance for any living human being: one bundle had not. That it belonged to a lawyer is certain, for it is endorsed: The strangest case I have yet met, and bears initials, and an address in Gray’s Inn. It is only materials for a case, and consists of

137

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statements by possible witnesses. The man who would have been the defendant or prisoner seems never to have appeared. The dossier is not complete, but, such as it is, it furnishes a riddle in which the supernatural appears to play a part. You must see what you can make of it.

The following is the setting and the tale as I elicit it.

Dr. Abell was walking in his garden one afternoon waiting for his horse to be brought round that he might set out on his visits for the day.
["The similarity between Quinn and Abell, and Cain and Abel, is probably not coincidence, although in "Two Doctors" it is Abell/Abel who is the murderer" [RP].

It's certainly notable that we first encounter "Abel" in a garden, from which state of calm he is abruptly transported by his servant's resignation.]

As the place was Islington, the month June, and the year 1718, we conceive the surroundings as being countrified and pleasant. To him entered his confidential servant, Luke Jennett, who had been with him twenty years.
[Note the lawyer-like particularity of time, place, and personnel. The figure of twenty years may also prove significant to our reading of the story. Henry James died in 1916, during the First World War, approximately twenty years after the publication of "The Turn of the Screw" (1898). M. R. James's first ghost story, "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book was written in 1894 and printed soon after in the National Review" (The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931): p.ix).]

“I said I wished to speak to him, and what I had to say might take some quarter of an hour. He accordingly bade me go into his study, which was a room opening on the terrace path where he was walking, and came in himself and sat down. I told him that, much against my will, I must look out for another place. He inquired what was my reason, in consideration I had been so long with him. I said if he would excuse me he would do me a

TWO DOCTORS 139

great kindness, because (this appears to have been common form even in 1718) I was one that always liked to have everything pleasant about me.
[The editorial intrusion here seems unusually heavy-handed: nor is it quite clear whether it's "liking to have everything pleasant about me" or "doing me a great kindness" which appears (to MRJ) anachronistic for 1718.]
As well as I can remember, he said that was his case likewise, but he would wish to know why I should change my mind after so many years, and, says he, ‘you know there can be no talk of a remembrance of you in my will if you leave my service now.’ I said I had made my reckoning of that.

“‘Then,’ says he, ‘you must have some complaint to make, and if I could I would willingly set it right.’ And at that I told him, not seeing how I could keep it back, the matter of my former affidavit and of the bedstaff in the dispensing-room, and said that a house where such things happened was no place for me.
[What is this "matter of the bedstaff"? In a conversation about this story at the SFF website (henceforward SFF), "The Judge" replies to "Fried Egg's" perplexity on the subject as follows:
Firstly, I checked out 'bedstaff' to see if that gave a clue - apparently it's a wooden pin that used to be stuck at the side of a bed to stop the bedclothes slipping ...
There's a good deal more about bedclothes and pillows later in the story.]

At which he, looking very black upon me, said no more, but called me fool, and said he would pay what was owing me in the morning; and so, his horse being waiting, went out. So for that night I lodged with my sister’s husband near Battle Bridge and came early next morning to my late master, who then made a great matter that I had not lain in his house and stopped a crown out of my wages owing.
[His reluctance to spend the night there is not unmotivated, as will later become apparent.]

“After that I took service here and there,

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not for long at a time, and saw no more of him till I came to be Dr. Quinn’s man at Dodds Hall in Islington.”

There is one very obscure part in this statement, namely, the reference to the former affidavit and the matter of the bedstaff. The former affidavit is not in the bundle of papers. It is to be feared that it was taken out to be read because of its special oddity, and not put back. Of what nature the story was may be guessed later, but as yet no clue has been put into our hands.
[Whether the "nature" of the story really "may be guessed" is (as you will see) extremely debatable.

Rosemary Pardoe is of the opinion that "'Two Doctors' is MRJ's weakest and most difficult story." she sees this statement, along with the earlier one that "The dossier is not complete, but, such as it is, it furnishes a riddle in which the supernatural appears to play a part. You must see what you can make of it" as "a kind of apology for the fact that the tale is so confused." [RP].

Whether this "confusion" is accidental or deliberate remains to be seen, however.]

The Rector of Islington, Jonathan Pratt, is the next to step forward. He furnishes particulars of the standing and reputation of Dr. Abell and Dr. Quinn, both of whom lived and practised in his parish.

“It is not to be supposed,” he says, “that a physician should be a regular attendant at morning and evening prayers, or at the Wednesday lectures, but within the measure of their ability I would say that both these persons fulfilled their obligations as loyal members of the Church of England. At the same time (as you desire my private mind) I must say, in the language of the schools, distinguo.
["I distinguish." [RP].]
Dr. A. was to me a source of perplexity, Dr. Q. to my

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eye a plain, honest believer, not inquiring over closely into points of belief, but squaring his practice to what lights he had. The other interested himself in questions to which Providence, as I hold, designs no answer to be given us in this state: he would ask me, for example, what place I believed those beings now to hold in the scheme of creation which by some are thought neither to have stood fast when the rebel angels fell, nor to have joined with them to the full pitch of their transgression.
["Dante placed the creatures in the anteroom of hell, endlessly pursuing a shifting banner and stung by wasps and hornets (Divine Comedy, Canto III, lines 34-69). But according to Celtic tradition these not-quite-fallen angels became fairy folk (The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legends by Katherine Briggs [Pantheon 1978]." [RP].]

“As was suitable, my first answer to him was a question, What warrant he had for supposing any such beings to exist? for that there was none in Scripture I took it he was aware. It appeared – for as I am on the subject, the whole tale may be given – that he grounded himself on such passages as that of the satyr which Jerome tells us conversed with Antony;
["In Jerome's "Life of St Paul the Hermit", he recounts how St Antony encountered a satyr while journeying to visit St Paul. This "dwarfish figure...its nostrils joined together, and its forehead bristling with horns: the lower part of its body (ending) in goat's feet" wants nothing more than for Antony to intercede for him and his tribe with God. Jerome adds "And this, lest any hesitation should stir in the incredulous, is maintained by universal witness during the reign of Constantius". For an English translation, see The Desert Fathers by Helen Waddell (Constable 1936), p.33." [RP].]
but thought too that some parts of Scripture might be cited in support. ‘And besides,’ said he, ‘you know ’tis the universal belief among those that spend their days and nights abroad, and I would add that if your calling took you so continuously as it does me about the country lanes by night, you might not be so surprised as I see you to be by my suggestion.’ ‘You

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are then of John Milton’s mind,’ I said, ‘and hold that

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.’
["Milton's Paradise Lost, Book IV, line 677." [RP].]

“‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘why Milton should take upon himself to say “unseen”; though to be sure he was blind when he wrote that. But for the rest, why, yes, I think he was in the right.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘though not so often as you, I am not seldom called abroad pretty late; but I have no mind of meeting a satyr in our Islington lanes in all the years I have been here; and if you have had the better luck, I am sure the Royal Society would be glad to know of it.’
["The premier scientific society, founded in the 1660s, was by the early 1700s much concerned with classification of species; hence the Reverend's quip about the Society's interest in satyrs." [RP].]

“I am reminded of these trifling expressions because Dr. A. took them so ill, stamping out of the room in a huff with some such word as that these high and dry parsons had no eyes but for a prayerbook or a pint of wine.

“But this was not the only time that our conversation took a remarkable turn. There was an evening when he came in, at first seeming gay and in good spirits, but afterwards as he sat and smoked by the fire falling into a musing way; out of which to rouse him I said pleasantly

TWO DOCTORS 143

that I supposed he had had no meetings of late with his odd friends. A question which did effectually arouse him, for he looked most wildly, and as if scared, upon me, and said, ‘You were never there? I did not see you. Who brought you?’ And then in a more collected tone, ‘What was this about a meeting? I believe I must have been in a doze.’ To which I answered that I was thinking of fauns and centaurs in the dark lane, and not of a witches’ Sabbath;
["Abell was clearly not a lone dabbler, but a member of some sort of coven. This distinguishes him from MRJ's other black magicians." [RP].]
but it seemed he took it differently.
“‘Well,’ said he, ‘I can plead guilty to neither; but I find you very much more of a sceptic than becomes your cloth. If you care to know about the dark lane you might do worse than ask my housekeeper that lived at the other end of it when she was a child.’ 'Yes,’ said I, ‘and the old women in the almshouse and the children in the kennel. If I were you, I would send to your brother Quinn for a bolus
["A pill." [RP].]
to clear your brain.’ ‘ Damn Quinn,’ says he; ‘talk no more of him: he has embezzled four of my best patients this month; I believe it is that cursed man of his, Jennett, that used to be with me, his tongue is never still; it should be nailed to the pillory
["The pillory was a wooden device in public places where offenders would be restrained at the neck and arms. It was common for blasphemers to have their tongues nailed to the crosspiece." [RP].]

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if he had his deserts.’ This, I may say, was the only time of his showing me that he had any grudge against either Dr. Quinn or Jennett, and as was my business, I did my best to persuade him he was mistaken in them. Yet it could not be denied that some respectable families in the parish had given him the cold shoulder, and for no reason that they were willing to allege. The end was that he said he had not done so ill at Islington but that he could afford to live at ease elsewhere when he chose, and anyhow he bore Dr. Quinn no malice. I think I now remember what observation of mine drew him into the train of thought which he next pursued. It was, I believe, my mentioning some juggling tricks which my brother in the East Indies had seen at the court of the Rajah of Mysore. ‘A convenient thing enough,’ said Dr. Abell to me, ‘if by some arrangement a man could get the power of communicating motion and energy to inanimate objects.'
["A power which Abell himself would appear to have, judging from his movement of the poker. This may also go some way to explaining the mystery of the bedstaff in the dispensing-room ..." [RP].]
‘As if the axe should move itself against him that lifts it; something of that kind?’ ‘Well, I don’t know that that was in my mind so much; but if you could summon such a volume from your shelf or even order it to open at the right page.’

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“He was sitting by the fire – it was a cold, evening – and stretched out his hand that way, and just then the fire-irons, or at least the poker, fell over towards him with a great clatter, and I did not hear what else he said. But I told him that I could not easily conceive of an arrangement, as he called it, of such a kind that would not include as one of its conditions a heavier payment than any Christian would care to make;
["The loss of one's soul." [RP].]
to which he assented. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I have no doubt these bargains can be made very tempting, very persuasive. Still, you would not favour them, eh, Doctor? No, I suppose not.’

“This is as much as I know of Dr. Abell’s mind, and the feeling between these men. Dr. Quinn, as I said, was a plain, honest creature, and a man to whom I would have gone – indeed I have before now gone to him for advice on matters of business. He was, however, every now and again, and particularly of late, not exempt from troublesome fancies. There was certainly a time when he was so much harassed by his dreams that he could not keep them to himself, but would tell them to his acquaintances and among them to me.
["I assumed the dreams were procured in some way by Abell as part of his supernatural powers - after all, if you want revenge, it isn't enough to kill the person quickly, you want them to suffer for some time. A dream of digging up any swaddled corpse would be unpleasant, but to have an image of one's own dead body is, I'd have thought, much worse." [SFF].]
I was at supper at his house, and he was not inclined to let me

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leave him at my usual time. ‘If you go,’ he said, ‘there will be nothing for it but I must go to bed and dream of the chrysalis.’ ‘ You might be worse off,’ said I. ‘ I do not think it,’ he said, and he shook himself like a man who is displeased with the complexion of his thoughts. ‘I only meant,’ said I, ‘that a chrysalis is an innocent thing.’ ‘This one is not,’ he said, ‘and I do not care to think of it.’

“However, sooner than lose my company he was fain to tell me (for I pressed him) that this was a dream which had come to him several times of late, and even more than once in a night. It was to this effect, that he seemed to himself to wake under an extreme compulsion to rise and go out of doors. So he would dress himself and go down to his garden door. By the door there stood a spade which he must take, and go out into the garden, and at a particular place in the shrubbery somewhat clear and upon which the moon shone, for there was always in his dream a full moon, he would feel himself forced to dig. And after some time the spade would uncover something light-coloured, which he would perceive to be a stuff, linen or woollen, and this he must clear with his hands. It was always the same: of

TWO DOCTORS 147

the size of a man and shaped like the chrysalis of a moth, with the folds showing a promise of an opening at one end.

“He could not describe how gladly he would have left all at this stage and run to the house, but he must not escape so easily. So with many groans, and knowing only too well what to expect, he parted these folds of stuff, or, as it sometimes seemed to be, membrane, and disclosed a head covered with a smooth pink skin, which breaking as the creature stirred, showed him his own face in a state of death.
[This "chrysalis" seems a little more than just a prevision of his own body wrapped for burial -- there's something very phallic about the imagery of that membrane-wrapped "head covered with a smooth pink skin", and the "state of death" referred to could as easily be orgasm as death.

"Why [after all] was Dr. Quinn having dreams about digging up a chrysalis of himself? Was he a regular purchaser of goods stolen from mausoleums? Why introduce that concept at all? Dr. Abell had a grudge against Dr. Quinn for supposedly stealing his patients and therefore I suppose a motive for killing Dr. Quinn. What did stolen bed furnishings have to do with anything?" asks "Fried Egg" on the SFF site.

All this evidence about bedclothes, soiled, aristocratic or otherwise, reminds one of that other legal cause célèbre of the late 1890s: the Oscar Wilde trial (much of which hinged on the evidence of hotel servants about the state of the bedclothes in various hotel rooms ...]
The telling of this so much disturbed him that I was forced out of mere compassion to sit with him the greater part of the night and talk with him upon indifferent subjects. He said that upon every recurrence of this dream he woke and found himself, as it were, fighting for his breath.”

Another extract from Luke Jennett’s long continuous statement comes in at this point.

“I never told tales of my master, Dr. Abell, to anybody in the neighbourhood. When I was in another service I remember to have spoken to my fellow-servants about the matter of the bedstaff, but I am sure I never said either I or he were the persons concerned, and

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it met with so little credit that I was affronted and thought best to keep it to myself. And when I came back to Islington and found Dr. Abell still there, who I was told had left the parish, I was clear that it behoved me to use great discretion, for indeed I was afraid of the man, and it is certain I was no party to spreading any ill report of him. My master, Dr. Quinn, was a very just, honest man, and no maker of mischief. I am sure he never stirred a finger nor said a word by way of inducement to a soul to make them leave going to Dr. Abell and come to him; nay, he would hardly be persuaded to attend them that came, until he was convinced that if he did not they would send into the town for a physician rather than do as they had hitherto done.

“I believe it may be proved that Dr. Abell came into my master’s house more than once. We had a new chambermaid out of Hertfordshire, and she asked me who was the gentleman that was looking after the master, that is Dr. Quinn, when he was out, and seemed so disappointed that he was out. She said whoever he was he knew the way of the house well, running at once into the study and then into the dispensing-room, and last into the bed-
["Lance Arney (... "An Elucidation (?) of The Plot of M.R. James's 'Two Doctors'", in Studies in Weird Fiction 8 (Necronomicon Press, Fall 1990), pp. 26-35) assumes that Abell put some sort of magic spell on Quinn's bedclothes. This may be the case, but the fact that Abell visited the dispensing-room before the bed-chamber suggests that he could have reinforced the spell in a chemical manner, so that Quinn would experience sufficient discomfort to necessitate the purchase of new bedding." [RP].]

TWO DOCTORS 149

chamber. I made her tell me what he was like, and what she said was suitable enough to Dr. Abell; but besides she told me she saw the same man at church and some one told her that was the Doctor.

“It was just after this that my master began to have his bad nights, and complained to me and other persons, and in particular what discomfort he suffered from his pillow and bedclothes. He said he must buy some to suit him, and should do his own marketing. And accordingly brought home a parcel which he said was of the right quality, but where he bought it we had then no knowledge, only they were marked in thread with a coronet and a bird.
["I see Quinn as being directed to buy the bedclothes from the fence by Abell's powers - since this is seen as something strange by Quinn's servants. I assume that more than just the pillow is bought in order for James to show us the fine thread of the linen itself with its embroidered coronet. And it is the stolen pillow - with its deep filling of soft, noble feathers - which suffocates Quinn after it has (presumably) been manipulated by Abell." [SFF].]
The women said they were of a sort not commonly met with and very fine, and my master said they were the comfortablest he ever used, and he slept now both soft and deep. Also the feather pillows were the best sorted and his head would sink into them as if they were a cloud: which I have myself remarked several times when I came to wake him of a morning, his face being almost hid by the pillow closing over it.

“I had never any communication with Dr. Abell after I came back to Islington, but one

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day when he passed me in the street and asked me whether I was not looking for another service, to which I answered I was very well suited where I was, but he said I was a tickleminded
["mercurial." [RP].

I suspect that there's a little more to his choice of words, though. Abell is, after all, "tickling up" his victims by playing with them before he seal the deal. Jennett has escaped the bedstaff, but Quinn will not escape the bedclothes.]
fellow and he doubted not he should soon hear I was on the world again, which indeed proved true.”

Dr. Pratt is next taken up where he left off.

“On the 16th I was called up out of my bed soon after it was light – that is about five – with a message that Dr. Quinn was dead or dying. Making my way to his house I found there was no doubt which was the truth. All the persons in the house except the one that let me in were already in his chamber and standing about his bed, but none touching him. He was stretched in the midst of the bed, on his back, without any disorder, and indeed had the appearance of one ready laid out for burial. His hands, I think, were even crossed on his breast. The only thing not usual was that nothing was to be seen of his face, the two ends of the pillow or bolster appearing to be closed quite over it.
["In a sense, ... there was no need for James to introduce the pillow and other bedclothes from the mausoleum. Quinn could have been suffocated by Abell's powers pulling up the ordinary blankets around him or something. But the idea of using the winding sheet of a corpse as the victim's bed linen, and its pillow as the murder weapon adds a frisson to the story." [SFF].]
These I immediately pulled apart, at the same time rebuking those present, and especially the man, for not at once coming to the assistance of his master. He, however, only

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looked at me and shook his head, having evidently no more hope than myself that there was anything but a corpse before us.

“Indeed it was plain to anyone possessed of the least experience that he was not only dead, but had died of suffocation. Nor could it be conceived that his death was accidentally caused by the mere folding of the pillow over his face. How should he not, feeling the oppression, have lifted his hands to put it away? whereas not a fold of the sheet which was closely gathered about him, as I now observed, was disordered. The next thing was to procure a physician. I had bethought me of this on leaving my house, and sent on the messenger who had come to me to Dr. Abell; but I now heard that he was away from home, and the nearest surgeon was got, who however could tell no more, at least without opening the body, than we already knew.

“As to any person entering the room with evil purpose (which was the next point to be cleared), it was visible that the bolts of the door were burst from their stanchions, and the stanchions broken away from the door-post by main force; and there was a sufficient body of witness, the smith among them, to testify

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that this had been done but a few minutes before I came.
[Presumably by the servants, rather than by any supernatural intruder, since Abell's powers of psychokinesis would presumably be sufficient to manage Quinn's death.]
The chamber being moreover at the top of the house, the window was neither easy of access nor did it show any sign of an exit made that way, either by marks upon the sill or footprints below upon soft mould.”

The surgeon’s evidence forms of course part of the report of the inquest, but since it has nothing but remarks upon the healthy state of the larger organs and the coagulation of blood in various parts of the body, it need not be reproduced. The verdict was “Death by the visitation of God.”

Annexed to the other papers is one which I was at first inclined to suppose had made its way among them by mistake. Upon further consideration I think I can divine a reason for its presence.

It relates to the rifling of a mausoleum in Middlesex which stood in a park (now broken up), the property of a noble family which I will not name. The outrage was not that of an ordinary resurrection man. The object, it seemed likely, was theft. The account is blunt and terrible. I shall not quote it. A dealer in the North of London suffered heavy penalties as a receiver of stolen goods in connexion with the affair.
["How Abell engineered matters so that Quinn would buy the bedding from this particular dealer is one of the unexplained mysteries and frustrations of the story." [RP].

"... the Middlesex mausoleum belongs to a noble family. This suggests to me ducal - which also suggests crowns/coronets, which links up to the very fine bedding with its coronet and bird. A mausoleum means the noble bodies are entombed rather than buried, so it's possible one was coffined with the bedding. The not-quite resurrectionists ransack the tomb (resurrectionists were body-snatchers - they removed new corpses to give to medics for dissection practice/research) and steal what they can, and Quinn then buys the bedding from the North London fence who gets convicted later." [SFF].]

Printed in Great Britain by
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON

[Two Doctors]

So, is "Two Doctors" just a terrible story? "His weakest and most difficult," says Rosemary Pardoe; while "Fried Egg" at the SFF site, concludes his long Q & A session about it by saying "Thankfully he doesn't always leave that much for the reader to fill in the blanks because he would find me wanting!"

It's true to say that all truly original writers are forced to create and train their own ideal readers. An MRJ-trained reader can easily fill in a lot of the dots and hints in the story. The fact that there's little there but hints and allusions does strain his method to its utmost limits, though. In that sense the story (like the whole book, really) could be said to be "experimental" - designed to test his method to its breaking point.

The "test" is to see if his readers will (or even can) construct a story out of so little material. Lance Arney, Rosemary Pardoe, and the "Judge" at the SFF site, prove that it is possible to disentangle a narrative from these hints and evasions. Have they missed the larger point of "Two Doctors," though?

After all, what other famous ghost story, concerned with two ghosts (male and female), two children (male and female), and one governess, similarly tests its reader with evasions and complicated levels of framing and obfuscation?

Is seems to me only too probable that Henry James's death, in the middle of the war, would have reminded his greatest rival in the "paranormal" line, of the almost ridiculous extremes to which the former had taken the "psychological" type of ghost story.

Might that not have prompted him to attempt a similar extreme in his own, more "traditional" vein? "Two Doctors," after all -- two authorities -- two (if you like) Jameses ...

The materials of the actual story are sordid enough:

a bedstaff
a chrysalis
a poker
a monographed pillow & sheets

Most of these are phallic or at least suggestively bedroom-related in nature. The fact that all the relationships in the story are male does tempt one to read it in terms of the Oscar Wilde scandal (almost contemporaneous with "The Turn of the Screw" -- the title itself containing a suggestively sexual choice of words).

Or is that yet another decoy? Edwardian ghost stories do almost insist on being read in terms of repressed sexuality - perverse or otherwise. "Two Doctors" refuses to commit itself beyond the suggestive on this level just as every other.

In their very triviality, though, the tendentious bric-a-brac on which this story hinges also seem to recall H. G. Wells's famous denunciation of HJ's methods in his wartime cri-de-coeur Boon (1915):

His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle. … It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost even at the cost of its dignity upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. Most things it insists are beyond it but it can at any rate modestly and with an artistic singleness of mind pick up that pea …”

I doubt that Monty's story will ever attract the almost feverish thirst for closure so characteristic of interpretations of Henry's "Turn of the Screw" almost from the moment of its publication. In its own pared-down, economical way it seems to me almost as interesting a story, though.

I read it as a metafiction, a story about the process of its own reading, its own "construction" out of the blank leaves of an old ledger, Borgesian avant la lettre. The ghosts in "The Turn of the Screw" may or may not be real, the governess may or may not be psychotic, but the relations between Drs Abell and Quinn (reversed Cain and Abel, as Rosemary Pardoe notes) will continue to defy reduction even to so simple a set of questions as that ...

Is Abell intended to be read as Monty, striking his greatest rival dead from a distance (or rather, encouraging him to choke himself in the snobbish clouds of his own verbiage)? Or is it the other way round? Is it the unscrupulous psychologist, intent on causing movement-at-a-distance who chokes the innocent, undesigning Quinn in his own bed?

One thing's for certain, the actual materials of the story itself will never be sufficient to enable us to decide.

[Benjamin Britten: The Turn of the Screw (2003)]

Two Jameses (2): Henry James

2012-01-10T10:47:00.001+13:00

[Henry James]

When I said, in my previous post, that the Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, by M. R. James, scared me when I first read them, I was telling the truth, but not really the whole truth.

The truth is that I'd already heard one of those stories, one dark evening in a campground when I pestered my mother to tell me a ghost story before we went to sleep, and she'd obliged with a rather abridged version of "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" - it was that which really terrified me (perhaps it had something to do with the flapping tent and the pitch darkness outside, too). I had the greatest difficulty in getting to sleep at all that night, and the fear of that disturbingly material spectre has never quite left me.

[M. R. James: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. 1904. (London: Pan Books, 1953)]

I must have already been obsessed with ghosts and ghost stories, though, to have insisted so vociferously on being told one before I could get to sleep. I remember making a hunt through my grandmother's books for anything faintly supernatural, and having to be fobbed off with Wuthering Heights (which does, admittedly, contain a number of apparitions and ghostly occurrences) ...

[M. R. James: More Ghost Stories. 1911. (London: Edward Arnold, 1924)]

Henry James is clearly on quite a different level of eminence than M. R. James. Nor are his ghost stories anything like so likely to turn up in paperback anthologies of spooky stories or horrific tales. The best known of them, The Turn of the Screw, is a bit too long for that, and the others, too, are a bit too "literary" for such treatment.

Luckily there's been a recent attempt to collect the best of his stories in this genre:

[Ghost Stories of Henry James (2001)]

Ghost Stories of Henry James. Ed. Martin Schofield. Wordsworth Classics. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 2001.

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes (1868)
The Ghostly Rental (1876)
Sir Edmund Orme (1891)
The Private Life (1892)
Owen Wingrave (1892)
The Friends of the Friends (1896)
The Turn of the Screw (1898)
The Real Right Thing (1899)
The Third Person (1900)
The Jolly Corner (1908)

As you'll observe, the stories are heavily weighted towards the latter end of James's career, after the traumatic failure of his theatrical ambitions (culminating in the horrific first night of his play Guy Domville (1995), when he was literally booed from the stage) ...

The blurb to Schofield's collection claims that:

Henry James was arguably the greatest practitioner of what has been called the psychological ghost story. His stories explore the region which lies between the supernatural or straightforwardly marvellous and the darker areas of the human psyche. This edition includes all ten of his 'apparitional' stories, or ghost stories in the strict sense of the term, and as such is the fullest collection currently available. The stories range widely in tone and type. They include 'The Jolly Corner', a compelling story of psychological doubling; 'Owen Wingrave', which is also a subtle parable of military tradition; 'The Friends of the Friends', a strange story of uncanny love; and 'The Private Life', which finds high comedy in its ghostly theme. The volume also includes James's great novella 'The Turn of the Screw', perhaps the most ambiguous and disturbing ghost story ever written.

Interestingly enough, our two very different Jameses did actually once meet:

"The following month, August [1903], [M. R. James] was in Kent, bicycling with Percy Lubbock ... In Rye they met Henry James, a friend of Lubbock's. 'A very pleasant man, he is,' was Monty's verdict, 'talking just as he writes, with punctilious effort to use exactly the word he wants: looks like a respectable butler.'
- Michael Cox. M. R. James: An Informal Portrait. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. p.123.

Henry would have been 60 at the time, Monty almost exactly twenty years younger.

The source of Henry's fascination with the occult probably lies in his very beginnings, though. His father (Henry James, Senior, almost as diligent an author as his two sons, William and Henry, Jr., though far less famous) suffered a strange cerebral disturbance in May 1844, when the family was living abroad in England, which dominated the rest of his life. He called it a "vastation" (in Swedenborgian parlance) and described it as follows:

... a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.
- Wikipedia

Whatever actually happened that day by the fire, it converted him to a strange type of religious enthusiasm, and formed the subject of most of his subsequent writings.

Henry, then, grew up in a hothouse atmosphere of supernatural credulity and religious fervour (which possibly had some part in inspiring his brother William's psychological investigations into the subject in later life, culminating in his masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)).

None of this really accounts for the continuing fascination of The Turn of the Screw, though. Readers were beguiled by its strange atmosphere and curious dead-end maze of self-defeating meanings long before the publication of Edmund Wilson's essay suggesting that there are, in fact, no ghosts: only an incipient mental breakdown on the part of the unnamed governess.

Since then the debate has tended to be framed in terms of whether there are or are not actual ghosts haunting young Miles and Flora (Benjamin Britten declaring himself definitely in favour of there being real ghosts rather than suggestive stage absences in his 1954 operatic version).

Rather more interestingly, Leon Edel points out in his magisterial 5-volume Life of Henry James (1953-1972), the ages of the various endangered heroines in the works he wrote immediately after the debacle of Guy Domville seem to increase at a steady rate, as if charting some kind of internal psychological process of healing from the "obscure wound" of his public rejection:

Taking them in their sequence as he wrote them, we begin in the cradle with Effie, who is murdered at four (The Other House, 1896); she is resurrected at five (What Maisie Knew, 1897) and we leave her at seven or eight, or perhaps a bit older. Flora is eight ('The Turn of the Screw,' 1898) and the one little boy in the series, Miles, is ten: we are in the period of the child from eight to ten. Then we arrive at adolescence: the adolescence of an unnamed girl in a branch post office ("In the Cage," 1898). Little Aggie, in the next novel, is sixteen, and Nanda Brookenham eighteen when the story begins (The Awkward Age, 1899). With the writing of this novel, James completes the series. He wrote also a goodly number of tales during this time but the childhood sequence is embodied in the longer works ...
- Leon Edel. Henry James. The Treacherous Years: 1895-1901. 1969. New York: Avon Books, 1978. p.261

Once it's been pointed out, this sequence of ages is a bit difficult to dispute. Of course, while it implies a certain self-identification with his heroines, there's also an unmistakable fear of the feminine apparent in James's work at this time.

Like so many other Victorian and Edwardian ghost story writers (the high water mark of the genre), James's spectres seem to embody the more smothering and therefore terrifying implications of domesticity (the "face of crumpled linen" in M. R. James's "Oh whistle and I'll come to you" is one case in point - translated in a recent (2010) TV adaptation of the story into an actual wife, suffering from dementia in a nearby nursing home; some of E. F. Benson's ghost stories - "The Room in the Tower", for instance - are even more unequivocal).

A recent graphic adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, by Guido Crepax, sees it (somewhat predictably) as a parable of the governess's repressed sexuality:

[Henry James. The Turn of the Screw. Adapted & illustrated by Guido Crepax. 1989. Translated by Stefano Gaudiano. New York: Eurotica, 1995.

Most readers would see her as more threatening than kittenish as she manifests in the pages of the story, though perhaps Crepax is right to couple her directly with the seductive brunette Miss Jessel in the front and back cover illustrations to his version.

James had, after all, observed at close hand the ingenious way his invalid sister Alice used her illness as emotional blackmail in the long struggle for the sole attention of her companion Katharine Loring. He'd also been appalled by his own close friend Constance Fenimore Woolson's suicide in Venice in 1894. Whatever the truth of his relationship with "Fenimore," he regarded this act as a betrayal of their intimacy, and immediately rushed to Italy to secure any of his letters or other papers which might be found lying around among her effects.

Seen in these terms, then, the other James's admission "that, though I have not hitherto mentioned it, I have read The Turn of the Screw" might be seen as more the recognition of a kindred spirit than with any implication of disdain or bafflement.

More on that subject in my next post, though:

[Nicole Kidman in The Others (2001), Alejandro Amenábar's strange hommage to "The Turn of the Screw"]

2011 - Our Year in Review

2012-01-02T10:29:00.002+13:00

[Jack & Bronwyn (27 August 2011)
[Photo: Katharine Jaeger]

Last year at about this time I put up a post about various of the projects Bronwyn and I had got involved with in 2010. This year I thought I might do the same -- a little anthology of the year's activities (& blogposts):

February 17:

[Massey University Vice Chancellor Steve Maharey launches 11 Views of Auckland, an anthology of essays about the city edited by Grant Duncan and myself, with a cover image by Graham Fletcher].

May 20:

[Scenes from The Puppet Oresteia, a collaboration between me and US-based UK artist Bill Ayton, goes live on online publishing site Lulu.com].

June 6:

[Bronwyn announces the completion of the Pania Press edition of Jen Crawford's poetry book Pop Riveter on her Mosehouse Studio blog].

July 4:

[Launch of my online edition of Leicester Kyle's collected poems, a dual index / text website which I fear I'll have to continue to work on for quite some time (though the texts of all the major books are now up in full)].

July 8:

[I give a paper entitled “A brief Poetics” at the Poetry & the Contemporary Symposium (Melbourne: Deakin University, 7-10 July)].

July 12:

[I give a paper called “The Twenty-Year Masterclass: Paul Celan’s correspondence with Gisèle Celan-Lestrange” at the Literature and Translation Conference (Melbourne: Monash University, Caulfield Campus, 11-12 July), a summary of my two-year project of translating all the dual-text poems included in Celan's letters to his wife].

July 29:

[Lopdell House's late Poetry Day reading in Titirangi coincides with the launch of Ila Selwyn & Lesley Smith's beautifully produced poetry anthology The Winding Stair].

August 26:

[Bronwyn's Lugosi's Children exhibition opens at Objectspace in Ponsonby Road].

November 9-13:

[Ian St George unveils our joint edition of Leicester Kyle's posthumous epic Koroneho at the William Colenso Bicentenary celebrations in Napier].

November 27:

[Michele Leggott launches Bronwyn's first book of short stories The Second Location, together with Scott Hamilton's new book of poems Feeding the Gods, at Objectspace].

November 29:

[Launch of the online Jacket2 NZ Poetry feature, edited by me].

December 25:

[Bronwyn's wonderful Christmas gift: a limited edition of my Britain's Missing Top Model poem as a Pania Press single].

Two Jameses (1): M. R. James

2011-12-15T08:47:00.004+13:00

[M. R. James: Ghost Stories (BBC)]

Bronwyn and I have been spending a fair amount of time lately watching this set of old M. R. James ghost stories, some filmed in the 1970s, others more recently. There's no sense in which it's "complete" - it lacks various other television and film dramatisations, mostly released through ITV - but it's not a bad representative sampling.

Here are two other short M. R. James films not included in the box-set:

[M. R. James: Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance (1975)]

[M. R. James: Casting the Runes (1979)]

I guess what it made me realise is just how difficult it is to make a convincing and scary ghost story - either in print or on film. Probably the most effective versions included here are the ones filmed in Kings College, Cambridge, where Christopher Lee sits with a glass of port and simply retells various James stories to an audience of gowned undergraduates - thus re-enacting M. R. Jame's own annual Christmas ritual.

But who was M. R. James, anyway? I suppose that nowadays he may need a certain amount of introduction:

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936)

James, M. R. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. London: Edward Arnold, 1904.
James, M. R. More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. London: Edward Arnold, 1911.
James, M. R. A Thin Ghost and Others. London: Edward Arnold, 1919.
James, M. R. A Warning to the Curious. London: Edward Arnold, 1925.
James, M. R. The Ghost Stories. London: Edward Arnold, 1931.
Cox, Michael, ed. The Ghost Stories of M. R. James. Illustrated by Rosalind Caldecott. 1986. London: Tiger Books International, 1991.
James, M. R. ‘Casting the Runes’ and Other Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Cox, Michael. M. R. James: An Informal Portrait. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Collins, V. H., ed. Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood. Introduction by Montague R. James. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1924.

The first of these books I read was the first he wrote, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, when I was a kid, and it scared the life out of me. James was an Academic by profession, specialising in palaeography and the compilation of catalogues of manuscript collections (particularly ecclesiastical ones), so it wasn't hard for him to counterfeit a "scholarly" atmosphere of old libraries and dusty erudition.

His other two tricks are simple enough to describe, but quite difficult to emulate (as most of the various people who've tried to imitate him since have found). He makes sure that the ghost steals upon his protagonist largely unobserved until the denouement of the story, but then - looking back - obvious (though overlooked) in a number of early scenes.

He is also careful to make his ghosts completely malevolent - some mindlessly so, others with a distinct purpose - but never friendly or even neutral in their demeanour. Nor do his stories contain any clear moral or instructive purpose.

James never married, and seems to have confined his emotional life to close friendships with college chums (though it seems unlikely that any of these were ever consummated physically). Psychological readings of the "fear of the feminine" implicit in some of his ghastlier phantoms - the "face of crumpled linen" in "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" (included in two separate versions in the DVD-set mentioned above) - therefore abound. They don't really seem to solve very much, though. His fascination with ghosts remains enigmatic and unexplained.

He gives an excellent account of his own close study of the genre in the introduction to V. H. Collins' 1924 anthology Ghosts and Marvels, but leaves open the question of his own belief in the supernatural. His final word on the subject is given in the preface to his Collected Ghost Stories: "I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me."

One interesting aspect of James's writing is the fact that his first book was originally intended to be a collaboration with his friend James McBryde, an accomplished amateur artist:

[James McBryde: Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You My Lad (1)]

[James McBryde: Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You My Lad (2)]

[James McBryde: Canon Alberic's Scrap-book (1)]

[James McBryde: Canon Alberic's Scrap-book (2)]

McBryde died when the project had just got underway, and only four of his illustrations, to two of the seven stories, were able to be included in the first edition of the book. Looking at them now, I think it's fairly apparent that he's fallen into the fatal error of trying to portray literally what is suggested with masterful indirection by the text: the animated bedsheets in "Oh, Whistle", for example. He was more in his element when it came to church interiors and architecture generally (those groynes in the "Oh, Whistle" seascape, for example).

James brought up his children as if they were his own, and made sure his widow was well provided for. It seems that McBryde's family provided him with some of the closest emotional attachments of his life, in fact.

M. R. James remains a distinct enigma, but somehow his stories refuse to die. Perhaps there's some curious heart to them, some secret they have not yet disclosed (a not infrequent motif in his own fiction: the hidden message on the stained glass windows in "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" or the sealed chest in "The Residence at Whitminster").

It may have been as a clue to this concealed "figure in the carpet" that he concluded a 1929 article called "Some Remarks on Ghost Stories" (quoted in Michael Cox's 1987 selection of his best stories, listed above), with the following words:

I will only ask the reader to believe that, though I have not hitherto mentioned it, I have read The Turn of the Screw.

[M. R. James]

Jackette

2011-12-02T08:34:00.012+13:00

[Jacket 2]

Jacket, the Australian online journal edited by John Tranter and (latterly) Pam Brown, is generally regarded as one of the most influential poetry magazines of the past two decades (you can access its entire forty-issue back catalogue, 1997-2010, from either the link above or the one below).

It's now succeeded by Jacket2, a website including Articles, Features, Reviews, Interviews, Commentaries, Reissues & Podcasts, all centred on contemporary poetry and poetics. The site is based in the US, but retains strong links with the Antipodes.

As proof of that, when I was at the Poetry & the Contemporary symposium in Melbourne in July, Pam Brown approached me about editing a New Zealand poetry feature for the site to parallel the one that she was doing on Australian poetry.

Both features are now up online. You can check out Pam's (which is pretty comprehensive: it's planned to include - eventually - 51 contemporary Australian poets) here, and my more modest selection of a dozen Kiwi poets here.

Once before I went through an exercise of this kind -- in 2004, seven years ago, when I co-edited 12 Taonga from the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive with Jan Kemp for the nzepc, at the end of our work on that 40-odd-CD-long, 171-poet-strong compilation of recordings and back-up materials.

Interestingly enough, there are two overlaps with the Jacket2 feature: Apirana Taylor and Richard von Sturmer. Besides that, though, I've tried to keep to the same principle of unearthing overlooked treasures in this new international showcase. Once again, it came down to 12 poets (though a number of those I asked were unable to participate for one reason or another -- I'd originally planned on including 15 or so: still well short of Pam's 50 -- we are only a quarter of the size, though: in population, at any rate ...)

The number rises to a neat Baker's dozen when you add in the strong, strikingly colourful images of local artist Emma Smith, which I attached to each page to give a kind of consistency of tone to these otherwise wildly various materials.

[Emma Smith:
"Even though you have lost your horse, don't pursue it"
[oil on canvas] (2011)]

•

So what's in the feature? It's entitled "Look and look again: 12 New Zealand poets," and the twelve poets in question are (in alphabetical order):

[Bio: John Adams]

John Adams:
- Fishing, off Kawau
- Did you hear the snicker/ of that piwakawaka?/ In which fold/ is the artist squeezed?
- Out the window there was a round goldfish pond with netting to keep the birds out and an aviary to keep their birds in

[Bio: Raewyn Alexander]

Raewyn Alexander:
- 'aged famous rockers tour the world'
- girls soft as new grass
- India - early 20th Century and other Tales

[Bio: Jen Crawford]

Jen Crawford:
- promontories
- The Black Valley

[Bio: Scott Hamilton]

Scott Hamilton:
- Elegy for a survivor of the war on Afghanistan
- Walking to the Dendroglyphs on Christmas Eve (a dream)

[Bio: Leicester Kyle]

Leicester Kyle:
- Happy Valley: A Lament for a landscape about to be mined (3 pp.) [31/10/03]
- I Like It When The Sun Doesn’t Shine [12/9/03]

[Bio: Aleksandra Lane]

Aleksandra Lane:
- Card games
- Three cheers for liberation
- Easter

[Bio: Thérèse Lloyd]

Thérèse Lloyd:
- The Nail I
- We’re All Here Buried
- Takaka

[Bio: Richard Reeve]

Richard Reeve:
- Uptake
- Meeting in a Field
- Croak

[Bio: Michael Steven]

Michael Steven:
- Dunedin Fives
  o The Octagon
  o Raven Books
  o Spring Broadcast
  o The Excelsior Cafe
  o Meridian
  o Le Punk
  o Dented Moon
- Elegy

[Bio: Apirana Taylor]

Apirana Taylor:
- fighting with words
- dame Margot on the line
- rat a tat tat

[Bio: Richard Taylor]

Richard Taylor:
- In the Silence Museum
  o again)
  o again) (2)
  o again) (3a)
  o again) (4)

[Bio: Richard von Sturmer]

Richard Von Sturmer:
- Book of Equanimity Verses
  o 58.
  o 59.
  o 60.
  o 61,
  o 62.
  o 63.

•

[Bio: Jack Ross]

Jack Ross:
- Look and look again: Twelve New Zealand poets

[Bio: Emma Smith (2008)]

Emma Smith

•

So obviously I think that each of these poets has something interesting to say to us right now. Check them out and see if you agree. It's an idiosyncratic selection, no doubt, but not one that I've put together without thinking about it quite a lot: a kind of personal anti-canon, perhaps - but one that's intended to intrigue you rather than provoke your wrath.

The "Jackette" pun was Jen Crawford's, in the first place, but it does seem rather appropriate to what I've tried to do here, so I've gratefully adopted it ... Enjoy.

Emma Smith:
"Hecate"
[mixed media on paper]
(2010)]

Dual Booklaunch at Objectspace

2011-12-01T08:02:00.021+13:00

Michele Leggott launching Bronwyn Lloyd's book

Well, the booklaunch duly took place, on Sunday 27th at Objectspace. There was quite a crowd gathered to hear Michele Leggott launch Bronwyn's book The Second Location, and Paul Janman launch Scott Hamilton's new book of poems Feeding the Gods (both available for order from the Titus Books website).

Michele Leggott & Bronwyn Lloyd
[Photograph: Farrell Cleary]

Michele reciting her poem

& here's the poem itself...
[copyright: Michele Leggott
(reproduced by permission)]

The catering, by Bronwyn and her sister Therese, was especially delicious -- there wasn't a cheesy scone or a madeleine left in the place by the time it all wrapped up, well after 5.30 pm. (As I carried off the last box of books to Brett Cross's car, I heard Richard Taylor calling after me, "Even Jack's doing some work for a change ...")

Bah! Sour grapes ... Here I am in full spout, sharing my views with the assembled company:

Jack Ross
[Photograph: Farrell Cleary]

& again

& again (though it's hard to say why anyone would want to take so many pictures of me -- at least this one shows the crowd: Mike Lloyd and my mother June prominent in the front row)

Unfortunately we didn't get any shots of Paul and Scott playing their celebrated game of monopoly, but you can read about it on Reading the Maps here & -- Stop Press -- I see that he now has pictures of it up here.

Scott Hamilton & Cerian Wagstaff

Scott & Karl Chitham
[Photograph: Farrell Cleary]

Richard Taylor & Cerian
[Photograph: Farrell Cleary]

Isabel Michell, Margot Nicholson & Scott (in profile)

Isabel checks out the gallery show
[Photograph: Farrell Cleary]

Phew! It took a bit of putting together, but everything seems to have gone very well indeed -- I guess that's what happens if you just live right. Time for a well-earned rest ...

By now Olive had had quite enough ...

The Second Location

2011-11-16T12:10:00.004+13:00

[Bronwyn Lloyd: The Second Location]

Dual Titus Books Launch

at Objectspace
8 Ponsonby Road, Auckland
Sunday 27 November, 3-5pm:

Bronwyn Lloyd's first book of stories
The Second Location

Scott Hamilton's second book of poems
Feeding the Gods

The MC for the event is Auckland poet and academic, Jack Ross
Special guests Michele Leggott and Paul Janman will introduce Lloyd and Hamilton respectively
Refreshments and home-baked food will be served
A range of Titus titles will be available to purchase for Christmas presents.

ALL WELCOME

[Scott Hamilton: Feeding the Gods]

So obviously this is pretty exciting news in our household. My brother and sister-in-law are flying up from Welilngton for the event, and it's great that we'll be able to have the launch at Objectspace, where Bronwyn's exhibition Lugosi's Children has just been held.

If you want to know more about the book, and the event, check out Bronwyn's blogpost at Mosehouse Studio.

And if you'd like to read Scott's thoughts on the likelihood of this being a happy post-election extravaganza, clebrating the political demise of John Key and his right-wing allies, go to Reading the Maps ...

But seriously folks, a very special thank you should go to Brett Cross at Titus Books, for being the bastion of alternative publishing that he is. And another one to Ellen Portch, for her cool cover design for Bronwyn's book. And to Graham Fletcher, for letting Bronwyn use that image. And to Margaret Edgcumbe, for allowing Scott to use those Kendrick Smithyman photographs in his book. And to Cerian Wagstaff, for her promotional expertise. And to Michele and Paul, for contributing their time to this mad venture ...

So come along. Buy a book. Support the mavericks. You may need us one of these fine days.

Koroneho

2011-11-04T09:23:00.009+13:00

[Leicester Kyle: Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World (2011)]

Why pink, you ask? It does seem rather a garish shade for the cover of this first posthumous publication by my old friend Leicester Kyle.

Actually the whole thing came about rather serendipitously as the result of a request to republish some of Leicester's (many) poems about orchids by Ian St George, editor of the New Zealand Native Orchid Journal.

David Howard and I told him that, as Leicester's literary executors, we'd be happy to cooperate with such a scheme, but I also mentioned in my reply that - while there were certainly a number of short lyrics describing orchids he'd encountered in the hills around Millerton - his major contribution to the subject was a vast epic poem called Koroneho, an account of the life and work of pioneering printer, missionary and naturalist William Colenso (1811-1899), written in the form of a series of descriptions of 14 native orchids found by the latter in his wanderings around the North Island of New Zealand.

[William Colenso (c.1880)]

The significance of these orchids, for Leicester, appears to have been that, while Colenso's description of each of them been duly published in the scientific literature at the time, they hadn't been confirmed as separate species by subsequent classifiers.

They were, then, real specimens of phantom plants - a pretty appealing notion to any poet, given that our business is supposed to be the depiction of "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" (Marianne Moore, "Poetry").

In his reply, Ian mentioned:

Perchance I am also editor of eColenso, the newsletter of the Colenso Society. November 17 is the bicentennial of Colenso's birth, and we are having a Colenso Conference in Napier. It would be brilliant to have a few copies of Kyle's Koroneho available at the conference - perhaps a limited edition of 50 copies? I would be happy to arrange the printing.... are you interested?

Was I interested! Just about any plan that could help spread interest in the life and works of Leicester Kyle would interest me, especially one like this, which seemed just to have dropped into my lap out of nowhere.

So anyway, to make a long story short, having just laboriously transcribed the poem from the one surviving typescript, a mass of crumbling yellow pages given by Leicester to his great friend and poetic ally Richard Taylor in the late 1990s, I sent it off as a file-attachment to Ian.

He had a number of interesting comments to make about it:

I think it's an important (at least in NZ) modernist collage long poem in cantos, and I wondered if he had been influenced by William Carlos Williams' Paterson, as well as Ezra Pound.

(This was in response to my comparing it with The Cantos - not to mention Smithyman's Atua Wera - in the introduction I'd written to the poem.)

I had thought to make it a simple paperback in much the style of Colenso's Paihia press publications - even to the pink paper! Thus it would be all monochrome. An alternative would be to have a colour illustration of an orchid - or one of his orchid drawings (mine actually!) from the original, but in a way that detracts from the theme of insubstantial unreality.

Hence the pink cover, you see - hence too the rather offhand style of the production: Ian's encyclopedic knowledge of Colenso enabled him to find a form which seemed to fit so eccentric a piece of Colenso-iana, in a way which would make sense to the other enthusiasts attending the conference.

Another interesting point about the pink came up in a subsequent email, where he mentioned that it matched "the pink blotting paper that Colenso was forced to use when the CMS forgot to send out any printing paper." That was enough for me. Pink it must be.

Ian also mentioned that Leicester had been a bit premature in thinking that all of these particular orchid identifications by Colenso had been rejected. Apparently some of them have been reinstated in the latest listings. In his foreword to the book he enlarges on his belief that "in imagination Kyle WAS Colenso ...

(I suppose all biographers "become" their subjects) - both were botanists, priests, writers - had similar names - and Colenso stands as the kind of kafkaesque figure, sensitive and intelligent, but beset by machiavellian insensitive authority, that we all find it easy to identify with. There are a number of minor inaccuracies in Kyle's biographical bits about Colenso, but they don't matter: as he suggests, "if you want the facts, go to the biographies - this is about the truth".

•

Leicester Kyle. Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World. Edited with a Introduction by Jack Ross. Preface by Ian St George. ISBN 978-0-9876604-0-4. Auckland: The Leicester Kyle Literary Estate / Wellington: The Colenso Society, 2011. ii + 110 pp.

So there we are. If you'd like to purchase a copy of Koroneho, you can either contact me here online or at the address given on the cover page of the Leicester Kyle website. They're $NZ 10 each (plus $2 postage & packing).

Or you can write to Ian St George, secretary of the Colenso Society, at:

The Colenso Society Inc.
c/o 22 Orchard St.
Wadestown
Wellington 6012
New Zealand

For more about the centennial conference, see here.

What an auspicious project for an auspicious anniversary!

[Māori New Testament
printed by William Colenso (1837)]

Extraordinary Popular Delusions

2011-10-30T09:35:00.011+13:00

& the Madness of Crowds

[J. P. Chaplin: Rumor, Fear ... (1959)]

J. P. Chaplin. Rumor, Fear and the Madness of Crowds. New York: Ballantine Books, 1959.

There's just something about that title, isn't there? Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds ... It almost doesn't matter what the book is actually about: the name says it all.

Or does it? Clearly J. P. Chaplin (or his publishers) thought so when they tried to update Charles Mackay's nineteenth-century classic with their own new set of otherwise inexplicable brutalities and pogroms as Rumor, Fear & the Madness of Crowds in the McCarthyite 1950s.

Strangely enough, I'd never actually read the 1841 original, despite its having had such a disproportionate influence on historians and sociologists ever since.

I found a respectable copy of the "Wordsworth Classics" edition in the Local Op Shop on Friday, though, and am presently finding it rather difficult to put down.

[Charles Mackay: Extraordinary Popular Delusions ... (1841)]

Charles Mackay. Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. 1841. Rev. ed. 1852. Introduction by Norman Stone. Wordsworth Reference. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1995.

I guess I was secretly expecting to find it a bit of a disappointment, and it's true that some of the contents have gone off the boil a bit (the author does rather go to town on his idée fixe, the lives and works of the Alchemists), but - as Professor Norman Stone remarks in his introduction to the 1995 edition - it's terrifying how closely each of the items in the original table of contents resembles one of our own particular contemporary follies.

For Mackay's blow-by-blow account of the 18th century French Mississippi Scheme and its British equivalent, the South Sea Bubble, read the Wall Street bail-out and the Euro crisis.

For his chapters on Alchemists and "Modern Prophets", read local weather sage Ken Ring and the whole world-wide industry of snake-oil selling psychics, astrologers, self-help gurus and other charlatans.

For his chronicle of the almost unbelievable cruelties and fatuous pointlessness of the Crusades, read US foreign policy in Latin America or the Middle East over the last half century.

For his sections on ghosts, haunted houses and witches, read ... well, some of our own foolish books or TV series on precisely the same subject. If thereis a difference, it might be that people have grown a bit dumber and more credulous over the past 150 years.

[The Webb Ellis Cup]

One could protract the list almost indefinitely (Mackay's book is, after all, over 600 pages long -- though he remarks somewhat disarmingly in his preface that he could have filled another fifty or so volumes without too much trouble).

Where I'm rather going out on a limb (and risking being torn limb from limb for my lack of patriotism and proper feeling) is by suggesting that all the Rugby World Cup hooplah we've just emerged from is yet another example of the madness and hysteria of crowds.

Wasn't there a slight sense of let-down for just about everyone last Sunday after the All Blacks squeaked in their victory over the French by the hard fought margin of one point? It's hard to imagine anyone claiming to have actually enjoyed the game. Too much was riding on it - or, rather, too much seemed to be riding on it.

The local equivalent of the Boston Red Socks Baseball World Series curse, or England's long dry spell at the Soccer World Cup (since 1966, I believe), had finally been broken. 1987 / 2011 - almost a quarter of a century between victories, after various other teams had actually succeeded in winning it twice in the intervening period.

Yet now, in the cold light of day, so the hell what? Yes, we won it. Yes, it was all done fair and square. Yes, we have a good rugby team. Didn't all our real problems come flooding back over us with a vengeance when we all woke up on Monday morning, though?

[Roman Charioteer]

It's quite funny sometimes to study accounts of the rivalries between supporters of the Blue and Green teams of chariot racers in Ancient Constantinople (one of the many vices the Byzantines borrowed from Rome). Whole families and dynasties were born into the faith of one or other team. Emperors were defined in terms of which faction they supported. Riots, violent deaths, murder were common occurrences on the streets after a big race. Don't think that the Brits invented soccer hooliganism - Byzantium was way ahead of them on that one. An estimated 30,000 people died in the sports-inspired Nika riots of 532 AD.

It all sounds a bit odd when you read about it now. How on earth could it matter which chariot team won the race? But it did matter - it mattered desperately. It was apparently even worth killing and dying for, that elusive victory over the Blues (or was it the Greens?)

Dare I suggest that this particular extraordinary popular delusion is pretty similar to our own rugby mania: our own unreasonable fanaticism over the fortunes of the team we "support"? What has all that got to do with playing the game, anyway? Isn't it all supposed to be for fun - or if not fun (perish the thought), fitness, team spirit, all those other strange old virtues? Does gathering around the big screen with a bunch of other chip-guzzling and beer-swilling bozos to bay and leap and scream do anything to promote such ideas? Hardly.

So don't think you can get away with simply calling me "anti-sport" or "unpatriotic" ... Trying, on a daily basis, to be a bit less of an imbecile than at least some of the people I see around me is, I must confess, one of my principal objects in life. And I'm afraid, at times, that that means calling the madness of crowds just what it is ...

[The All Blacks]

Selling C. S. Lewis

2011-10-15T12:51:00.011+13:00

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they're not out to get you. By the same token, just because you're a bit unhinged, that doesn't mean you're necessarily wrong about everything.

As a follow-up to my post on the J. R. R. Tolkien Estate, I thought I might address the even more vexed issue of C. S. Lewis's literary legacy, complex and almost beyond disentanglement as it is at this point.

It comes down (for the most part), to a battle of the Titans between two rather dubious people: in the right corner, Walter Hooper, allegedly Lewis's "secretary" in the last few months of his life (though it now turns out that the two were only in contact for a few weeks at most); on the left, the bed-ridden literary sleuth Kathryn Lindskoog, crippled by multiple sclerosis, whose "fanciful theories have been pretty thoroughly discredited" (according to Lewis's stepson Douglas Gresham).

Walter Hooper (b.1931)

Kathryn Lindskoog (1934-2003)

What's the easiest way of summarising this controversy? Well, to make it simpler to visualize, I thought I might do what I did for Tolkien: compare the published works from Lewis's lifetime with his posthumous productivity (edited, or introduced - for the most part - by Walter Hooper):

Lifetime
(1898-1963)

Poetry:

Lewis, C. S. [as 'Clive Hamilton']. Spirits in Bondage (1919)

Lewis, C. S. [as 'Clive Hamilton']. Dymer (1926)

Fiction:

Lewis, C. S. The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933)

Lewis, C. S. Out of the Silent Planet (1938)

Lewis, C. S. Perelandra: A Novel (1943)

Lewis, C. S. That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (1945)

Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce: a Dream (1945)

Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)

Children's Books:

Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: A Story for Children (1950)

Lewis, C. S. Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (1951)

Lewis, C. S. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: A Story for Children (1952)

Lewis, C. S. The Silver Chair: A Story for Children (1953)

Lewis, C. S. The Horse and His Boy (1954)

Lewis, C. S. The Magician’s Nephew (1955)

Lewis, C. S. The Last Battle: A Story for Children (1956)

Theology:

Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. The Christian Challenge Series (1940)

Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Lewis, C. S. Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947)

Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity [consisting of Broadcast Talks (1942), Christian Behaviour (1942) and Beyond Personality (1944).] (1952)

Lewis, C. S. Reflections on the Psalms (1958)

Lewis, C. S. The Four Loves (1960)

Lewis, C. S. The World's Last Night and Other Essays (1960)

Criticism:

Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: a Study in Medieval Tradition (1936)

Lewis, C. S. Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)

Lewis, C. S., & E. M. W. Tillyard. The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939)

Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost(1942)

Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man: Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (1943)

Lewis, C. S. Arthurian Torso (1948)

Lewis, C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama. Oxford History of English Literature (1954)

Lewis, C. S. Studies in Words. (1960)

Lewis, C. S. Experiment in Criticism (1961)

Lewis, C. S. They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses (1962)

Autobiography & Letters:

Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)

Lewis, C. S. [as 'N. W. Clerk']. A Grief Observed (1961)

Edited &c.:

Lewis, C. S. ed. George MacDonald: An Anthology (1947)

Lewis, C. S. ed. Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947)

That's a pretty substantial oeuvre: novels, children's books, poetry, critical books, as well as the works of popular theology he's most famous for ("easy answers to difficult questions," as one of his more sardonic friends called them).

So what happened afterwards?

Posthumously
(1963- )

Poetry:

Lewis, C. S. Poems. Ed. Walter Hooper (1964)

Lewis, C. S. Narrative Poems. Ed. Walter Hooper (1969)

Lewis, C. S. Collected Poems. Ed. Walter Hooper (1994)

Fiction:

Lewis, C. S. The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Ed. Walter Hooper (1977)

Hooper, Walter, ed. Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis (abridged: 1985)

Lewis, C. S., & W. H. Lewis. Boxen: Childhood Chronicles Before Narnia. Essay by Walter Hooper. 1985. Introduced by Douglas Gresham (complete: 2008)

Theology:

Lewis, C. S. Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer (1964)

Lewis, C. S. Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces (1965)

Lewis, C. S. Of Other Worlds. Ed. Walter Hooper (1966)

Lewis, C. S. Christian Reflections. Ed. Walter Hooper (1967)

Lewis, C. S. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Ed. Walter Hooper (1970)

Lewis, C. S. Fern-seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity. Ed. Walter Hooper (1975)

Lewis, C. S. The Weight of Glory. Ed. Walter Hooper (1980)

Lewis, C. S. Of This and Other Worlds. Ed. Walter Hooper (1982)

Lewis, C. S. The Business of Heaven. Ed. Walter Hooper (1984)

Lewis, C. S. First and Second Things. Ed. Walter Hooper (1985)

Lewis, C. S. Present Concerns. Ed. Walter Hooper (1986)

Lewis, C. S. Timeless at Heart. Ed. Walter Hooper (1987)

Lewis, C. S. Christian Reunion. Ed. Walter Hooper (1990)

Lewis, C. S. Readings for Meditation and Reflection. Ed. Walter Hooper (1992)

Lewis, C. S. Compelling Reason: Essays on Ethics and Theology (1998)

Lewis, C. S. Essay Collection: & Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley (2000)

Criticism:

Lewis, C. S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964)

Lewis, C. S. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Ed. Walter Hooper (1966)

Lewis, C. S. Spenser’s Images of Life. Ed. Alistair Fowler (1967)

Lewis, C. S. Selected Literary Essays. Ed. Walter Hooper (1968)

Translation:

C. S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile. Ed. A. T. Reyes. Foreword by Walter Hooper (2011)

Autobiography & Letters:

Lewis, W. H., ed. Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966)

Lewis, C. S. Letters to an American Lady. Ed. Clyde S. Kilby (1967)

Hooper, Walter, ed. They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963) (1979)

Lewis, C. S., & Don Giovanni Calabria. Letters: A Study in Friendship (1988)

Lewis, C. S. Letters. Ed. W. H. Lewis. 1966. Rev. ed. ed. Walter Hooper (1988)

Lewis, C. S. All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927. Ed. Walter Hooper. Foreword by Owen Barfield (1991)

Lewis, C. S. Collected Letters, Volume I: Family Letters, 1905-1931. Ed. Walter Hooper (2000)

Lewis, C. S. Collected Letters, Volume II: Books, Broadcasts and the War, 1931-1949. Ed. Walter Hooper (2004)

Lewis, C. S. Collected Letters, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy, 1950-1963. Ed. Walter Hooper (2007)

Kathryn Lindskoog:
Sleuthing C. S. Lewis (2001)

Kathryn Lindskoog estimated that, by 2001, when her book Sleuthing C. S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands appeared, Walter Hooper had edited, or written forewords for, no fewer than 27 books of C. S. Lewis material, and written over 300 pages of prefatory material for them. Since the appearance of her book, he's edited another 4,000-odd pages of Lewis's letters in the three-volume set of his Collected Letters.

One would certainly have to call him industrious, considering the fact that during this same period he also collaborated with Roger Lancelyn Green on the 1974 authorised biography of Lewis, wrote a critical book on the Narnia books (Past Watchful Dragons (1979)), and compiled the immense C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (1996).

So what's wrong with that? Nothing, surely. Lewis's fans have an apparently inexhaustible appetite for anything from the Master's hand. Why should Hooper be criticized for providing precisely that?

Well, I guess that one could begin with the nature of Hooper's editing - the bibliographical chaos of all of those overlapping volumes of theological essays, constantly repackaged in different ways as the decades unfolded. One might also cite the fatuous, gushing tone of his prefaces, comparing Lewis to one "of the Apostles," recounting silly snippets of conversation from the period when he was "his private secretary in the last months of his life" (elsewhere: his "companion-secretary").

All this rings a bit false when one discovers that Hooper and Lewis were in fact personally acquainted for only a few weeks in the last year of the latter's life, and that there's even some dispute about whether he ever did in fact live in his house. He certainly wasn't there for very long if so.

Hooper certainly exaggerates the extent of his "intimacy" with Lewis, and it's a bit hard to understand how he's come to assume such a crucial role in the centre of "Lewis studies" (for want of a better description).

There is, however, one very important event which does go some way towards explaining it: the famous "bonfire" of Lewis's literary remains which (allegedly) took place in January 1964.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of Hooper's activities over the years has been his systematic undermining of the reputation of Major Warren Lewis ("Warnie"), C. S. ("Jack") Lewis's beloved brother and friend.

First of all there was this tale of the bonfire on which "Warnie" allegedly cast all of Lewis's manuscripts and proofs. In chapter three of her exhaustive study, "Throwing Water on the Bonfire Story" (pp.41-55) Lindskoog does an interesting job of comparing the various conflicting accounts of this event, which has gradually come to assume dimensions as terrifying as Lady Burton's holocaust of her husband's literary remains, or the burning of the first book of Carlyle's French Revolution by a careless housemaid.

Did it ever take place? Nothing was said of this three-day orgy of destruction by anyone until 1977, when Hooper told the sad tale in his introduction to The Dark Tower. Also, within two months of the great burning, W. H. Lewis was advertising in the press for unpublished C. S. Lewis letters for his projected biography of his brother. It just doesn't seem that probable that he would have destroyed all those suitcases full of papers described so movingly by Hooper ...

When was it, in any case? The Dark Tower preface dates it to January 1964. But in a letter of W. H. Lewis's to Hooper dated 8 February, written from Ireland, he remarks that "I look forward to meeting you." If he hadn't even met Hooper at this point, how does this square with his allowing the unknown American to save so many pages of manuscript remains from the engulfing flames a few weeks before?

Perhaps the fire actually took place in February. But if so, why did Hooper specify that he had to drag two large trunks of papers back to his rooms in Keble College, where he was living in January, but not February 1964?

Less and less seems to have been heard about this famous bonfire, the source of Hooper's unrivalled (and largely unseen) collection of Lewis typescripts and manuscripts, since the 1980s. The story does not make it into his 940-page C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (titled in the US: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works). But either it happened or it didn't. If it didn't, why has Hooper told the tale so often and so circumstantially? If it did, why has he stopped doing so?

LIndskoog also points out that Fred Paxford, Lewis's gardener, the man who allegedly performed the fell deed (albeit on Major Lewis's orders) categorically denied it:

"As regards Walter Hooper's story about a bonfire, I am still in touch with Paxford and went to see him yesterday," Len Miller wrote to me. "He says it is all lies." ... he added, "I am afraid anything Hooper says should be taken with a large pinch of salt." [p.47]

The bonfire has been very useful to Hooper (as Lindskoog points out), since it provides a source of manuscript authority for any subsequent changes and additions he has made to the Lewis canon. Whether or not it actually happened - and it is a little hard to believe that it can have, given the conflicting nature of the accounts given of it over the years - it does rather cast a shadow over Hooper's credibility in general.

Then there's the matter of "Warnie's" (again alleged) alcoholism and general unreliability. What people could be forgiven for not realizing, as they read Hooper's bumptious and patronising account of his "old friend's" little failing (in the preface to his 1988 "corrected edition" of Warnie's 1966 collection of his brother's Letters, among other places), is that W. H. Lewis was himself a considerable scholar (of French history and literature, mainly) and wrote a number of works about the era of Louis XIV which are still well worth reading.

The Sunset of the Splendid Century: The Life and Times of Louis Auguste de Bourbon Duc du Maines, 1670-1736 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955), is particularly entertaining, but Levantine Adventurer: The Travels and Missions of the Chevalier d’Arvieux, 1653-1697 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1962) also has its moments.

Far from the ill-informed, querulous drunk he's gradually been reduced to in the Hooper demonology, W. H. Lewis should be seen as an indispensable part of his brother's life work, and a valid and honorable person in his own right.

For so systematic, cunning and ruthless a campaign of petty subterfuge and damning with faint praise, I think one would have to go back to the egregious Rufus Griswold, the alleged "friend" (but actually bitter enemy) of Edgar Allan Poe, who (as the latter's literary executor) managed to create, almost single-handedly, the black legend of Poe's drunkenness, perverted taste for young girls, and general irresponsibility in worldly affairs.

It took many many years for Poe's reputation to recover from Griswold's calumnies; hopefully the reputation of C. S. Lewis may eventually be able to be seen apart from the misrepresentations of Walter Hooper.

Anthony Hopkins as C. S. Lewis
[Shadowlands (1993)]

You'll notice how often "Warnie" is seen staggering about drunkenly in this rather romanticized account of Lewis's late love affair with Joy Gresham. To do them credit, the film-makers are also careful to show him as the most humane and wise member of Lewis's entourage.

Joss Ackland as C. S. Lewis
[Through the Shadowlands (1985)]

None of this can be allowed to detract from the fact that Lindskoog is herself not beyond reproach. The central contention of her book is that Walter Hooper is not simply an egotist, determined to promote himself to centre-stage in the Lewis story, but also a ruthless and cunning forger, who has systematically contaminated the gene-pool of pure Lewisiana with his own foolish impostures (the fragmentary Dark Tower novel principal among them).

She may well be right, but unfortunately extraordinary accusations need extraordinary levels of proof, and this she fails to provide. She gives any number of excuses for this in her book, but I'm afraid the basic rule of scholarship is that what cannot be proven, should not be asserted.

A brief examination of some of her other theories (such as her notion that the subject of Botticelli's enigmatic painting Primavera is actually Dante's meeting with Beatrice in the final canto of the Purgatorio; or her discovery that "parts of Huckleberry Finn were copied from a book by Scottish author George MacDonald"), do not inspire very much confidence in her judgement or sense of the value of hard evidence.

For what it's worth, I suspect that The Dark Tower is indeed a piece of poor early writing by Lewis, rather than a cunning forgery by Hooper. Without a close examination of the manuscript, though (including, perhaps, a test for scorch-marks) it's hard to be absolutely sure.

What is certain is that the multi-million dollar Lewis estate has, for reasons of its own, allowed Walter Hooper to issue volume after volume of ephemeral material by Lewis, edited without any systematic scholarship or method. That's a pity, given C. S. Lewis's own lifetime of devotion to the niceties of scholarship.

I suppose the best of his work will survive it, though - as will the best of his friend J. R. R. Tolkien's.

[Sandro Botticelli: Primavera [Spring] (c.1482)

Saturday event at Objectspace

2011-09-22T08:15:00.008+12:00

[Sait Akkirman: Arts Diary]

The purpose of this post is not to draw attention to these beautiful images of the opening of Lugosi's Children by Sait Akkirman at Artsdiary.co.nz (though I certainly recommend that you visit his amazing site).

Actually it's to advertise a Saturday event in the Objectspace public programme:

Dr Jenny Lawn & Dr Jack Ross
Saturday 24 September, 11 am - 12 noon.

A discussion of the gothic as a recurring theme in contemporary New Zealand film, literature and art.

Here's Jenny at the opening:

[Sait Akkirman: Jenny Lawn & Olivia]

& here's me on the far side of the table (glass in hand, as usual):

[Sait Akkirman: Jack & Shelley Norton]

We're planning to discuss Jenny's Gothic course, which she's been teaching at Massey Albany now for almost ten years; also the anthology she co-edited with Misha Kavka & Mary Paul, Gothic NZ: The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006):

[Gothic NZ]

After that we'll be throwing things open to the audience, I think: just why is this "darker side" of things so dominant in Kiwi culture? Is it simply that we see what we want to see? That we create this "trend" by imposing it on a lot of diverse and value-neutral materials? Or is there really some deeper fear or malaise within our society which manifests itself in this way?

Is it just that we lack a sense of the numinous and supernatural in our surface-obsessed official culture? As Jenny once put it, "Vampires don't wear shorts" ...

Is it, in the final analysis, a European fear of the depths and mysteries of the indigenous culture of these islands which masks itself under these Gothic tropes?

Come along, if you're curious to hear more. And be sure to leave a question for the Oracle when you do. It will be answered within seven days ...

[Sait Akkirman: The Oracles]

Berlin, 1938

2011-09-12T15:01:00.000+12:00

[Berlin in Bildern]

Cool dinosaur skeleton, huh?

But - oh, whoopsie! Look down there on the left-hand side of the photo. What's that little flag doing there?

[Berlin in Bildern, ed. Dr. Robert von Wahlert. Berlin: Verlag Scherl, 1938.]

The other day I was snouting around the Hospice shop in Takapuna when I came across this book, Berlin in Bildern [Berlin in pictures]. It cost the princely sum of $2. Even so, I was about to put it back on the shelf when I noticed the date:

Die Reichshauptstadt ist in einen entscheidenden neuen Abschnitt ihrer Geschichte getreten. Nach dem Willen des Führers wird die vor einiger Zeit in Angriff genommene städtebauliche Neugestaltung ihr innerhalb weniger Jahre ein in wesentlichen Zügen durchaus anderes, ein schöneres und klareres Gesicht geben.

Das Berlin von heute aber, innerhalb kurzer Menschenalter in stürmischer Entwicklung zur Weltstadt emporgewachsen, ist Millionen zur Heimat geworden, in der sie wurzeln, wie nur ein Mensch in seiner Heimat wurzeln kann. Berlin ist darüber hinaus unserem Volke und der ganzen Welt als politischer Mittelpunkt Deutschlands ein wesentlicher Ausdruck deutschen Wesens und Deutscher Art.

Die räumlichen Ausmasse der Stadt und die Vielfalt der Umstände, die auf ihre bauliche, wirtschaftliche, verkehrspolitische, auf ihre gesamte kulturelle Entwicklung eingewirkt haben, machen es dem Besucher der Reichshauptstadt, ja schon dem Berliner selbst oft nicht leicht, ein einheitliches, übersichtliches Bild von ihr zu gewinnen.

Ich begrüsse es daher, wenn es in dem vorliegenden Buch in Wort und Bild unternommen wurde, eine Darstellung der Reichshauptstadt zu geben, so wie sie heute ist, und zugleich in ihrem Erícheinungsbild die Buntheit ihres Entstehens zu deuten.

Berlin, im Juni 1938

Oberbürgermeister und Stadtpräsident

It's quite difficult to make out the signature. A bit of research reveals, however, that it's that of Dr. Julius Lippert (1895–1956), Mayor of Berlin between 1937 and 1940.

Here he is again, collecting money for some patriotic purpose (the flowers they appear to be handing out suggests that it might be the German equivalent of Poppy Day):

["The capital of the Reich has entered a decisive new phase in its history. According to the Führer's will, some time ago a redevelopment project was launched, which has succeeded in creating in a few short years ... a better and clearer face for the city.

The Berlin of today, however, within a short lifetime ... has become home to millions. They are rooted here, as a man can only be rooted in his homeland.
...

I welcome, therefore, what has been done in this book in words and pictures to give an account of the imperial capital as it is today, and also to indicate in this beautifully rich way the variety of its structures.

Berlin, June 1938

Dr. Lippert

Mayor and State President"]

Or words to that effect, at any rate ...

Yep, June 1938. After the Berlin Olympics (which Lippert helped to organise), after the March Anschluss with Austria, but before the Munich conference in September and (more to the point) the Kristallnacht pogrom on the night of 9th-10th November 9-10 - the so-called “Night of the Broken Glass” ...

It's a bit like that Hitchcock scenario about the two men meeting in the cafe and having a very boring conversation about nothing in particular. On and on they drone. There's nothing interesting about it at all.

Except that the cinema audience saw a man leaving a suitcase under the table shortly before they sat down, and we've been shown that there's a bomb in it.

The longer the excruciating chatter of the two men goes on, the greater grows our anticipation that the bomb will go off and kill them ...

The clock is ticking ... will they get up and go away in time? Who knows? All may yet be well, they could still be saved ...

But no real salvation is possible. As Hitchcock concludes, "The bomb must always go off." That's his first rule of narrative.

For "Hitchcock", read "History".

It's a pretty bizarre book, not that that's exactly surprising. On the one hand it's full of pastoral scenes of people enjoying themselves in parks and bars:

On the other hand there are a fair few hints of what's to come:

Better get used to rolling out those hoses, guys ...

And whose noble tomb is this, beside the floodlit dome?

Oh.

Nice little Wagnerian echo there, a boat called the Rheingold ...

What a lovely, atmospheric city.

1937

April 9
The Mayor of Berlin orders public schools not to admit Jewish children until further notice.

1938

January 5
The Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names forbids Jews from changing their names.

April 22
The Decree against the Camouflage of Jewish Firms forbids changing the names of Jewish-owned businesses.

April 26
The Order for the Disclosure of Jewish Assets requires Jews to report all property in excess of 5,000 reichsmarks.

November 9-10
Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”)

- Holocaust Encyclopedia

Yes, life is fantastic in the new Berlin. Just one or two little readjustments of the borders of the greater Reich to be made, and the future is assured ...

Collecting Paul Celan

2011-09-03T11:10:00.009+12:00

[Gisèle Celan-Lestrange: Etching]

Reading these letters doubled with poems is also to delimit the space where Celan habitually deployed his language, and which he referred to – not entirely seriously – as his “Celanie”: the Rue des Ecoles, the Rue de Lota, the Rue de Montevideo, the Rue de Longchamp, the Rue d’Ulm, the Rue Cabanis (Faculty Clinic, Saint-Anne), the Rue Tournefort and Avenue Émile Zola …

– Bertrand Badiou, “Notice Editoriale”. In Paul Celan & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Correspondance (1951-1970). 2 vols. Librairie du XXIe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001): 2: 10.

Map of Bukovina
[Israel Chalfen (1979)]

I did some translations from Paul Celan, from his posthumously-published book Schneepart (1971), in about 2001 (You can find them online here).

Now, ten years later, I've re-entered the Celanian labyrinth (not that I ever really left it), and am working on some more translations (mostly from the poems included in his letters to his wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange).

A lot of new books have appeared or been translated in these ten years. I did read most of what was available (in English) in 2001, when I made my first set of versions. Since then I've ranged a bit further afield - into the latest German editions, as well as the sumptuous 2-volume French edition of his correspondence with Gisèle.

The advantage of this is that he generally included vocabulary lists and comments on the poems he sent to her (her German was far from fluent) - sometimes complete literal French versions - which gives one a kind of authorial double-focus on each of the poems: very useful in the case of a poet so famously "difficult" as Celan.

The point of this post, though, is to make my own list of the most useful materials by and about Celan available at present to any reasonably enterprising English-speaking reader.

There are certainly some omissions from the list: I haven't recorded all the translations of the poetry - only the ones I myself have found useful (some of the older versions are now, in fact, out of print and hard to find). Nor have I been at all exhaustive in my listing of secondary materials.

For what it's worth, though, here's my working bibliography of Celan materials:

Paul Antschel [Paul Celan]
(1920-1970)

[Texts:]

[Paul Celan: Gesammelte Werke]

Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Erster Band - Gedichte I: Mohn und Gedächtnis; Von Schwelle zu Schwelle; Sprachgitter; Die Niemandsrose. 1952, 1955, 1959, 1963. Ed. Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert. 1983. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986.

Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Zweiter Band - Gedichte II: Atemwende; Fadensonnen; Lichtzwang; Schneepart. 1967, 1968, 1970, 1971. Ed. Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert. 1983. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986.

Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Dritter Band - Gedichte III: Der Sand aus den Urnen; Zeitgehöft / Prosa /Reden. 1948, 1976. Ed. Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert. 1983. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986.

Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Vierter Band: Übertragungen I - Zweisprachig. Ed. Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert. 1983. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986.

Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Fünfter Band: Übertragungen II - Zweisprachig. Ed. Beda Allemann & Stefan Reichert. 1983. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986.

This is the standard German edition of Celan's works (now expanded to seven volumes, with the addition of some juvenilia and manuscript materials).

[Paul Celan: Die Gedichte]

Celan, Paul. Die Gedichte: Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band. Ed. Barbara Weidemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003.

The best edition of the complete poetry available at present.

[Paul Celan: Gesammelte Werke]

•

[Correspondence:]

[Paul Celan & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange: Correspondence]

Celan, Paul, & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Correspondance (1951-1970), avec un choix de letters de Paul Celan à son fils Eric. I – Lettres. Ed. Bertrand Badiou & Eric Celan. La Librairie du XXIe siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001.

Celan, Paul, & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Correspondance (1951-1970), avec un choix de letters de Paul Celan à son fils Eric. II – Commentaires et Illustrations. Ed. Bertrand Badiou & Eric Celan. La Librairie du XXIe siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001.

An indispensable work for true Celan fans. It's also available in German, but not (as yet) in English.

[Paul Celan & Nelly Sachs: Correspondence]

Celan, Paul, & Nelly Sachs. Correspondence. Ed. Barbara Wiedemann. 1993. Trans. Christopher Clark. Introduction by John Felstiner. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995.

An important correspondence with the Nobel-prize winning poet Nelly Sachs.

[Paul Celan & Ilana Shmueli: Correspondence]

Gillespie, Susan H., trans. The Correspondence of Paul Celan & Ilana Shmueli. 2004. Preface by John Fesltiner. Introduction by Norman Manea. Afterword by Ilana Shmueli. Conversation between Norman Manea & Ilana Shmueli. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 2010.

Letters to his last love, whom he first knew as a girl in Romania, then met again long after the war in Israel.

[Paul Celan & Ingeborg Bachmann: Correspondence]

Bachmann, Ingeborg, & Paul Celan. Correspondence: With the Correspondence between Paul Celan and Max Frisch, and between Ingeborg Bachmann and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Ed. Bertrand Badiou, Hans Höller, Andrea Stoll & Barbara Weidemann. 2008. Trans. Wieland Hoban. The German List. London: Seagull Books, 2010.

Ingeborg Bachmann, herself an important German poet and fiction-writer, was Celan's lover in the late 40s and again (for a time) in the early sixties.

[Ingeborg Bachmann & Paul Celan]

•

[Translations:]

[Paul Celan: Selected Poems (1972)]

Celan, Paul. Selected Poems. Trans. Michael Hamburger & Christopher Middleton. 1962 & 1967. Introduction by Michael Hamburger. Penguin Modern European Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

This is the Celan volume in that wonderful series, the Penguin Modern European Poets. Middleton only supplied a couple of versions to what is essentially the first draft of Hamburger's larger translation project.

[Paul Celan: Collected Prose]

Celan, Paul. Collected Prose. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. 1986. Fyfield Books. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2003.

Still a very useful book, often reprinted.

[Paul Celan: Selected Poems]

Celan, Paul. Selected Poems. Trans. Michael Hamburger. 1988. Penguin International Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.

A beautiful and poetic version, frequently revised and reprinted.

[Paul Celan: Selected Poems and Prose]

Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose. Trans. John Felstiner. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2001.

The scrupulousness of Felstiner's scholarshop makes this an indispensable volume for Celanians.

[Paul Celan: Romanian Poems]

Celan, Paul. Romanian Poems. Trans. Julian Semilian & Sanda Agdidi. Green Integer, 81. København & Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 2003.

Rather weird surrealist prose poems, written by Celan in Romanian immediately after the war. Of interest mainly because they show that German was not the only language in which he could write creatively.

[Paul Celan: Selections]

Celan, Paul. Selections. Ed. Pierre Joris. Trans. Pierre Joris & Jerome Rothenberg. Poets for the Millennium, 3. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press / London: University of California Press, Ltd., 2005.

A well-judged selection of Celan materials, imaginatively edited and beautifully translated. Perhaps the best single-volume introduction to his work.

[Paul Celan: The Meridian]

Celan, Paul. The Meridian: Final Version - Drafts - Materials. Ed. Bernhard Böschenstein & Heino Schmull, with Michael Schwarzkopf & Christiane Wittkop. 1999. Trans. Pierre Joris. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2011.

I have this on order but haven't seen it yet: twenty pages of text to 200 pages of notes and false starts. Just what the Doctor ordered!

[Paul Celan: From Threshold to Threshold]

Celan, Paul. From Threshold to Threshold. ['Von Schwelle zu Schwelle', 1955]. Trans. David Young. Grosse Point Farms, Michigan: Marick Press, 2010.

Some translators have started to provide us with complete dual-text versions of each of his major books - a trend which I for one certainly welcome. This is the first of three promised middle-period Celan books to be translated by David Young.

[Paul Celan: Breathturn]

Celan, Paul. Breathturn. ['Atemwende', 1967]. Trans. Pierre Joris. Sun & Moon Classics, 74. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995.

Joris has a good claim to be considered the most subtle living interpreter of Celan's poetry and thought. This is the first of a trilogy of versions of his last three books.

[Paul Celan: Threadsuns]

Celan, Paul. Threadsuns. ['Fadensonnen', 1968]. Trans. Pierre Joris. Sun & Moon Classics, 122. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 2000.

[Paul Celan: Fathomsuns]

Celan, Paul. Fathomsuns / Fadensonnen and Benighted / Eingedunkelt. 1968. Trans. Ian Fairley. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2001.

It's nice to have Ian Fairley's complete translation of Fadensonnen to set beside Pierre Joris's. I'd have to award the palm to Joris, but that's not to say that Fairley's doesn't have considerable merits also (as well as including the strange "abandoned sequence" Eingedunkelt).

[Paul Celan: Lightduress]

Celan, Paul. Lightduress. ['Lichtzwang', 1970]. Trans. Pierre Joris. Green Integer, 113. København & Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 2005.

[Paul Celan: Snow Part]

Celan, Paul. Snow Part / Schneepart. 1971. Trans. Ian Fairley. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 2007.

This is Fairley's second volume of Celan translations, a complete version of his posthumously-published last book Schneepart.

[Paul Celan reads]

•

[Jack Ross:]

This might seem vainglorious, but - after all - it is my blog. I've included here a list of my published work to date (translations, versions and critical essays) about Celan. There's quite a bit more to come, but this is where I am at present:

[Jack Ross: The Britney Suite]

(May 1, 2001) The Britney Suite, by Paul Celan, Wendy Nu & Jack Ross. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2001. [25 copies (20 numbered)]
- [Paul Celan:] SCHNEEPART, gebäumt, bis zuletzt … (22/1/68)
- Snowpart (24/10-30/11/2000)
- [Paul Celan:] ERZFLITTER, tief im … (20/7/68)
- Orespark (24/10-30/11/2000)
- [Paul Celan:] KALK-KROKUS, im … (24/8/68)
- Chalk-Crocus (24/10-28/11/2000)
- [Paul Celan:] DAS GEDUNKELTE Splitterecho … (5/9/68)
- Dark (24/10-28/11/2000)
- [Paul Celan:] BEIDHÄNDIGE Frühe … (29/9/69)
- Both-Handed (24/10-28/11/2000)

(August 17, 2006) “Coromandel" (after Paul Celan, 'Corona').

[Percutio 1 (2006), ed. Bill Direen
[front cover image: Sandra Bianciardi]

(September 12, 2006) “Poems from Schneepart: Translations into English.” Percutio 1 (2006): 60-62.
- Snowpart (24/10-30/11/2000)
- Orespark (24/10-30/11/2000)
- Chalk-Crocus (24/10-28/11/2000)
- Dark (24/10-28/11/2000)
- Both-Handed (24/10-28/11/2000)

[Albrecht Durer, Melancholia II]

(March 23, 2007) “Meeting Paul Celan." Poetics of Exile conference, Auckland University (July 2003)

[All Together Now (2010)]

(August 24, 2010) “Celanie.” All Together Now: A Digital Bridge for Auckland and Sydney / Kia Kotahi Rā: He Arawhata Ipurangi mō Tamaki Makau Rau me Poihākena (March-September 2010). [visited 25/8/10]
- Leave [24/6/67] (8/2-25/4/10)

[brief 41 (2010), ed. Richard von Sturmer]

(December 31, 2010) “Celanie: 5 Versions from Paul Celan.” brief 41 (2010): 54-59.
- Maïa [7/1/52] (9/3-11/4/10)
- Islandward [22/6/54] (5/3-11/4/10)
- Matter of Britain [13/8/57] (9/3-29/4/10)
- Heart (for René Char) [6/1/60] (9/3-11/4/10)
- Kew Gardens [6/4/69] (11/3-25/4/10)

[Paul Celan & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange]

(July 12, 2011) “The Twenty-Year Masterclass: Paul Celan’s Correspondence with Gisèle Celan-Lestrange (1951-1970)." Literature and Translation conference, Monash University, Melbourne (11-12 July 2011)

[Jack Ross: The Britney Suite (2003)
Front cover image: Gabriel White]

•

[Secondary Texts:]

These are mainly biographical rather than critical works. There are just too many for me to list in the latter category. Felstiner's is the major biography still, but Israel Chalfen is necessary too for the earlier period:

[Israel Chalfen: Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth (1979)]

Chalfen, Israel. Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth. 1979. Trans. Maximilian Bleyleben. Introduction by John Felstiner. New York: Persea Books, 1991.

[Jean Daive: Under the Dome (2009)]

Daive, Jean. Under the Dome: Walks With Paul Celan. 1996. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Série d'écriture, 22. Anyart, Providence: Burning Deck Press, 2009.

[John Felstiner: Paul Celan (1995)]

Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

[James K. Lyon: Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger (2006)]

Lyon, James K. Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951-1970. Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

[Marc Chagall: Bridges over the Seine (1954)]

Rest in peace

Lugosi's Children

2011-08-16T09:49:00.010+12:00

[Objectspace]

The opening of Bronwyn's new show is on Friday (26/8). You can find her write-up about the show here. And here's the advertising copy that's gone out about it (copied from Eventfinder):

"Listen to them. Children of the night! What music they make!"

Few can forget Bela Lugosi in his famous role as the blood-sucking Count in Tod Browning's 1931 cult classic Dracula, delivering these immortal lines of dialogue in his sonorous Hungarian accent as a pack of wolves howls outside in the darkness.

The idea of Lugosi's offspring, his children of the night, and the music that they might make, is the concept that underpins the thematic group exhibition Lugosi's Children at Objectspace, but the works of the eleven exhibitors are not simply an evocation of the darkness that is an ever-present part of our lives. On the contrary, each of the works deals, in some sense, with the ways in which we cope with, understand, and confront the darkness through humour and parody; through observations of the beauty and symmetry of the natural world; through rites, superstitions and spiritual beliefs; through myth and story; and through history and memory.

Lugosi's Children, then, are the antithesis of escapists. They examine their own inner space for clues to the true nature of our experience of the world - in all its majesty and horror. A trio of oracles, a ceramic cross-dresser, a set of sutured goblets, a stuffed aunty, a vinyl curse, a plastic bag Olympia, a Freudian thought forest, a bejewelled gosling, a trio of predator/prey brooches, boxed addictions and charms, a floral memento mori, and three inedible cakes are all clues, potential maps of this numinous area where we confront our deepest hopes, memories, desires and fears.

When you examine these strange, dreamlike works of Lugosi's Children you will see that their wisdom may be intuitive; their 'music' a response to the logic of darkness rather than that of the daylight world, but sometimes those can be the only answers one can bear to listen to.

'Listen to them. Children of the night! What music they make!'

•

"Lugosi's Children" features works by Bronwynne Cornish, Julia deVille, Jane Dodd, Katharina Jaeger, Steph Lusted, Rosemary McLeod, Tim Main, Shelley Norton, Ben Pearce, Paul Rayner and Tanya Wilkinson.

Exhibition curated by Bronwyn Lloyd, and designed by Karl Chitham.

Publication: available online (from 26 August) at www.objectspace.org.nz. The Exhibition catalogue essay is written by Auckland writer and exhibition curator Bronwyn Lloyd, with an introduction by Dr Jack Ross.

Associated Objectspace public programme:
Curator Bronwyn Lloyd in conversation with various makers, Saturday 27 August, 11am.
Dr Jenny Lawn (Massey University) and Dr Jack Ross - a discussion of the gothic as a recurring theme in contemporary New Zealand film, literature and art, Saturday 24 September, 11am.

This exhibition is Part of the REAL New Zealand Festival.

Image credit: Jane Dodd, "Ursus Arctos" (brooch), 2011. Lignum Vitae, 18ct gold, sterling silver, stainless steel, 39 x 15 x 30 mm. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph: Studio La Gonda.

•

[12/9/11]:

There's a cool review of the show by Graham Reid in this Saturday's Weekend Herald:

& a lot more pictures of the opening on Bronwyn's blog here.

Under which king?

2011-08-15T08:45:00.013+12:00

[Stephen King: 11/22/63 (due out November 2011)]

Under which king, Bezonian?
Speak, or die ...

So the ranting, bombastic soldier Pistol to poor Justice Shallow in Henry IV, Part Two. I don't want to put you on the spot to quite the same extent, but the other day, when I found myself pre-ordering various novels online, I began to wonder when and how it is that an author crosses over from a subject in which one takes a general interest to an indispensable, habit-forming drug.

I realised that had happened with Stephen King when I ceased to be able to wait for his books to appear in paperback (let alone in second-hand shops) before I bought and devoured them. I think that happened somewhere around the time of Needful Things (1991), a good twenty years ago. I have to say that the Master has seldom disappointed, though there have undoubtedly been some ups and downs along the way.

So it's not surprising that I would want to guarantee my copy of his latest tome well ahead of the crowds (and, given what appears to be the imminent demise of High Street bookselling as we know it, that I should end up doing so online).

What did surprise me was the discovery that there were some other writers who had imperceptibly slipped into the same status for me. I find him a bit frustrating at times, but there's just something so very congenial about the literary territory of kooky occultism and historical conspiracy theories Umberto Eco inhabits, that I found I couldn't resist the lure of his latest:

[Umberto Eco: The Prague Cemetery (due out November 2011)]

I mean, seriously: Prague? A cemetery in Prague? Nineteenth-century craziness instead of his usual medieval and renaissance craziness? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Umberto Eco? What's not to like?

That one went on the list, too. As did:

[Haruki Murakami: IQ84 (due out October 2011)]

Again, I have slightly mixed feelings about Haruki Murakami. The fact remains that I appear to have collected all of his books. I've seldom bought one new before, but the prospect of a 1,000-odd-page epic did rather attract me, I must confess. Even though I don't profess to understand him, I find myself compulsively reading and rereading him almost against my will. I do have my theories about what it's all about, mind you, but I seem to be happy to keep on reading in a state almost of suspended animation -- a little like the heroine of Sputnik Sweetheart, perhaps ...

An American, a European, and a Japanese: all novelists, each putting out another big fat tome later this year - more or less in time for my birthday and the beginning of summer vacation ... I can almost taste the suspense.

It did make me think, though. Who else is on my list? Well, just to continue the rollcall of global regions, there's my favourite Latin-American novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa:

[Mario Vargas Llosa: The Dream of the Celt (due out 2012)]

This latest novel of his hasn't been translated yet, and so it won't actually appear till next year. I did use to try and force myself through each of his new books in the original, but now I'm content to wait for the English version. This one is all about Roger Casement and his adventures in the Congo and on the Amazon, I gather, so I don't want to miss any of the niceties through my rough-and-ready Spanish.

I know that Mario has a lot of critics who find him a bit dubious politically, but I do think he thoroughly deserved that Nobel Prize they finally awarded him last year. The sheer scale of his achievement is pretty impressive, and it's hard to think of any of his contemporaries (Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Carlos Fuentes? certainly not Isabel Allende ...), who's still writing at the same level of intensity and commitment.

What about the Antipodes? Of course I have many favourite New Zealand authors whose work I follow. When it comes to snapping up each book the moment it appears, though, I guess the one who springs to mind is Martin Edmond. I talked in the previous post about his latest, Dark Night Walking with McCahon (2011). Here's one from last year, though. This is the second of two books of poetic prose he's put out (so far) through Dunedin's Kilmog Press:

[Martin Edmond: Hypnogeography (2010)]

Nor is it just novelists and prose-writers I follow. Here's the new book from one of my favourite poets, Canadian classical scholar (and all-around extremist) Anne Carson:

[Anne Carson: NOX (2010)]

The book's appearance - a long, corrugated, paper scroll in a hard cardboard case - is almost as eccentric as its contents. She's long since become an indispensable writer for me.

Who else? Here's another poet I find it impossible to ignore, British "laureate of grot" Peter Reading:

[Peter Reading: Vendage Tardive (2010)]

Reading has shifted his principal target somewhat from bourgeois complacency and greed to an even more extreme set of Philippics against environmental destruction. He's a very angry man. Long may he prosper.

Of course there are far more names I could mention, but I've tried to confine myself to those for whom there's no question that I'm going to get the latest book. I'm possibly even keener on Paul Muldoon than on Peter Reading, but I don't find myself rushing out to buy every one of the former's publications. An element of selectivity (as is only right!) enters into my relations with most authors, I'm happy to say.

Nor (while I'm on the subject) do I buy each new critical book of critical prose that appears by Umberto Eco or Mario Vargas Llosa. I do find I have to get each of their novels, though ... whether I like it or not.

Late Poetry Day Event at Titirangi

2011-07-31T09:10:00.014+12:00

Lopdell House Gallery
[Photograph: The Woods B & B]

I guess the idea of these posts is more to advertise things in advance than to conduct subsequent post-mortems, but I can't help wanting to spread the word about the lovely little publications associated with these Lopdell House readings.

This is the third year in a row that Lesley Smith at the Gallery has been printing handmade covers for chapbooks of poems by the various readers at their Poetry Day celebrations (albeit a week late on this occasion). The contents are selected by her and MC Ila Selwyn, and sold at the bargain price of $10 each - $20 for a package of three at the reading on Friday (29th July).

And here they are, in reverse order of publication:

Selwyn, Ila, & Lesley Smith, ed. the winding stair: Poems by Rosetta Allan, Murray Edmond, Siobhan Harvey, Alice Hooton, Michele Leggott, Judith McNeil, Bob Orr, Alistair Paterson, John Pule, Jack Ross, Ila Selwyn, Penny Somervaille, Robert Sullivan & Denys Trussell. Limited edition of 80 copies. Titirangi: Lopdell House Gallery, 2011.

•

Selwyn, Ila, & Lesley Smith, ed. Red Tendrils: Poems by Selina Tusitala Marsh, Kevin Ireland, Janet Charman, Courtney Meredith, Daniel Larsen, Mark Pirie, Ross Brighton, Raewyn Alexander, Doug Poole & Ila Selwyn. Limited edition of 110 copies. Titirangi: Lopdell House Gallery, 2010.

•

Selwyn, Ila, & Lesley Smith, ed. elusive but daring and strong: Poems by C. K. Stead, Glenn Colquhoun, Michael Stevens, Gus Simonovic, Tim Heath, Riemke Ensing, Karlo Mila, Genevieve Maclean, Renee Liang & Ila Selwyn. Limited edition of 150 copies. Titirangi: Lopdell House Gallery, 2009.

•

Bronwyn and I drove out there with Michele Leggott, who was also billed to read, and we spent a most pleasant late afternoon in a nice little restaurant called Takahe across the street, until it was time to climb the winding stair to the venue for the kick-off at 7 pm. My brother Ken, who is visiting from Edinburgh, also came along to sample this strange thing called a "Poetry Reading," and professed himself much pleased with the experience.

I can't speak for myself, of course, but everyone else seemed to be in fine form. Michele has a new way of reading which involves recording her poems in advance and then playing them back to herself through an earpiece as she performs them, as she can no longer make out the largest type on even the best illuminated page. She recited her poem peri poietikes (which you can find here), and there was something absolutely magical - I thought - about the effect she produced: something Mediterranean, classical almost.

Much of our talk, earlier in the evening, had been about Martin Edmond's latest book, Dark Night Walking with McCahon, which we'd both been reading. It was a dark night, and a rainy one, and the fact that we were actually in one of Colin McCahon's old stamping grounds out west somehow added to the atmosphere of the whole event.

Edmond, Martin. Dark Night: Walking with McCahon. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2011.

For the record, I think it's a wonderful book, constructed out of St John of the Cross's "Dark Night of the Soul" poem in much the same way as Michele's essay is constructed out of her meditations on those criss-crossing Cretan bees in her own poem.

We had to leave early, unfortunately, after only ten of the fourteen poets had read. Apologies for that, but one isn't always a free agent when acting as chauffeur as well. I would happily have stayed to the end, but it wasn't to be.

I had been anticipating it as a bit of an ordeal, I must confess: so many different tasks to fulfil, agendas to anticipate, all in the one evening. As it is, though, it seemed to fall into place in the most natural and harmonious way. Thanks once more to Ila (and Lesley) for organising the reading - and the chapbook, too.

Having some experience with such matters myself, I can imagine just how much invisible work had to go on behind the scenes for the whole thing to come off. Thanks, too, to the friendly and enthusiastic Titirangi audience who make driving out there to read such a pleasure.

•

Finds (6): Thoroughly Munted

2011-07-23T16:55:00.020+12:00

Guillaume Apollinaire. Alcools. 1913. Trans. Anne Hyde Greet.
Foreword by Warren Ramsey. Berkeley & Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1966.

It's funny when you go snooping around in the ripped old paperbacks in the back of a bookshop (in this case, Jason Books on High Street, long before it came up in the world and went boutique). You see something there which hardly even seems to merit picking up - in this case a backless wodge of papers with a pasted spine and no title-page - which turns out to be one of the finds of your life.

I see from the inscription above that it was on the 5th September, 1979, some 30-odd years ago, and the book in question was Apollinaire's Alcools - or, rather, a complete dual-text translation of the same, which some iconoclast had ripped apart and then deposited among the other trash to be pulped. A price of 15 cents hardly seemed exorbitant even at the time, especially when I think of the amount of time I've spent leafing through those pages, reading and rereading those amazing poems: "Zone", "Le Pont Mirabeau" - above all, "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé":

Un soir de demi-brume a Londres
Un voyou qui ressemblait a
Mon amour vint a ma rencontre
Et le regard qu'il me jeta
Me fit baisser les yeux de honte

More than a half-century has passed since the manuscript beginning with these lines was fished out of limbo, read and read again, and a dazzled magazine editor called across the room that here, at last, was a first-rate poem. A reader of the sixties might find other terms in which to express his approval, though some of Paul Léautaud's are still serviceable: "I read, read twice, three times, was carried away, dazed, delighted, deeply moved. Such melancholy, such evocative tone, such bohemianism, such rangings of the mind, and that faintly gypsy air and the total absence of that abomination of ordinary verse, la rime riche ... "

- Warren Ramsay, "Foreword"

I'm glad that that front page of the foreword hadn't gone the way of the title-page and all the other prelims (including the copyright page). That idea of an editor picking up the poem for the first time, reading it, and immediately recognising genius was, I suspect, the main reason I persevered through all the strange pages of Apollinaire's book. I'd never read poetry like this, had no frame of reference to set it in - for a while, it seemed to me as if I'd never read poetry at all before this, my discovery of the Modern.

Even as first published in that distant spring of 1909 (when it lacked two stanzas of the Zaparogian Cossacks' horrendous letter and, unlike the more characteristic final version, was punctuated), "La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" has the authority of the more mature Apollinaire, the vibrancy of a modern poet speaking in his own voice ...

I don't quite know why anyone would take what must have been a fairly new book (Anne Hyde Greet's version of Alcools was published in 1966, a mere ten years before I found it in those back shelves in Auckland) and dismember it like that. Had the poet displeased them somehow? Perhaps that word scrawled on the back cover holds some clue, like the "CROATOAN" found carved on a tree by the lost settlers of Roanoke Island: "scenarios", it appears to read. But what scenarios, when and where?

I doubt I'll ever know.

•

Arthur Koestler. Dialogue with Death. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. 1937. Abridged ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942.

DIALOGUE WITH DEATH
BY
ARTHUR KOESTLER
TRANSLATED BY TREVOR AND PHYLLIS BLEWITT

On February 8th, 1937, six months after the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain, the troops of General Franco entered Malaga. The author, then a war correspondent for an English Liberal newspaper, had remained in the besieged town after its evacuation by the Republican army. On the day after the entry of the conquering troops, he was arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to death. For four months he was kept in solitary confinement, witnessing the executions of his fellow prisoners and awaiting his own. He kept a diary in his cell, which he succeeded in smuggling out when released; this diary forms the main part of Dialogue with Death.

Under pressure of world-wide protests General Franco agreed that Koestler should be exchanged for a prisoner of the Republican Government. He was released in May 1937. Dialogue with Death was first published in January 1938, as the second part of Spanish Testament. The original edition, with an introduction by the Duchess of Atholl, contained a number of chapters dealing with political and military aspects of the Civil War, which was then still in progress. Since then it has become, in the words of the New Statesman and Nation, a book "which should rank among British classics."

This rather scruffy looking Penguin I found in the shelves of an old second-hand furniture shop which used to nestle in the heart of the Mairangi Bay CBD, between Max Paterson's stationers and the greengrocer's shop. It was run by a lady called Ruth Thorne, who maintained a couple of bays full of battered books at bargain prices.

This one probably set me back ten or twenty cents, in July 1979, a couple of months before I bought the Apollinaire. It had an almost equally great influence on me, though.

Those 1940s Penguins seem so strange and exotic to us now, but it's worth remembering that they just looked junky at the time. It was the content of the book that interested me, the strange intense account that Koestler gave of his experiences in a death-cell during the Spanish Civil War. I'd already read his classic novel about the Stalinist purges, Darkness at Noon, at the recommendation of our Russian teacher, Eddie Meijers, but it was this coverless paperback which had the stronger effect on me, I think. Something about the way he wrote was so vivid and immediate - I guess I've been trying to find something like it ever since.

DIALOGUE WITH DEATH
BY
ARTHUR KOESTLER
Translated by
TREVOR AND PHYLLIS BLEWITT

PENGUIN BOOKS
HARMONDSWORTH MIDDLESEX ENGLAND
300 FOURTH AVENUE NEW YORK U.S.A.

Published in 1938 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Abridged edition published in Penguin Books Feb. 1942
Reprinted in Penguin Books March 1943

FOREWORD

NONE of the characters in this book is fictitious; most of them are dead by now.

To die - even in the service of an impersonal cause - is always a personal and intimate affair. Thus it was almost inevitable that these pages, written for the most part, in the actual expectancy and fear of death, should bear a private character. There are, in the author's opinion, two reasons which justify their publication.

In the first place, the things which go on inside a condemned man's head have a certain psychological interest. Professional writers have rarely had an opportunity of studying these processes in the first person singular. I have tried to present them as frankly and concisely as I could. The main difficulty was the temptation to cut a good figure; I hope that the reader will agree that I have succeeded in overcoming this.

In the second place, I believe that wars, in particular civil wars, consist of only ten per cent action and of ninety per cent passive suffering. Thus this account of the hermetically sealed Andalusian mortuaries may perhaps bring closer to the reader the nature of Civil War than descriptions of battles.

I dedicate it to my friend Nicolas, an obscure little soldier of the Spanish Republic, who on April 14th, 1937, on the sixth birthday of that Republic, was shot dead in the prison of Seville.

A.K.

THE AUTHOR

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905, a Hungarian subject, and studied engineering and psychology respectively at the Technische Hoschschule and the University of Vienna. He became a journalist at the age of 21,lived as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Paris and Moscow, travelled in Soviet Central Asia and in the Arctic on board the Graf Zeppelin. While correspondent of the News Chronicle during the Spanish Civil War, he was captured by General Franco's troops and was imprisoned for having denounced, in the British Press, German and Italian intervention on the Nationalist side.

In 1938 he abandoned journalism to take up novel-writing. His works include The Gladiators, Darkness at Noon (fiction), Scum of the Earth, which relates the author's experiences during the French collapse, and Spanish Testament, of which Dialogue with Death is an improved version. Koestler is now serving as a private in the British Army.

Of course the word "abridged" always acts on me like a red rag on a bull. I always want the book, the whole book and nothing but the book.

As I read more about Koestler, though, I began to understand the curious politics behind these various versions of his Spanish civil war memoir, the strange fusion of communists propaganda and personal testimony in the original version (which I found some years later in a pile of old Gollancz Left Book Club editions:

Koestler, Arthur. Spanish Testament. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. Left Book Club Edition. London: Gollancz, 1937.

Eventually I even discovered a third version of the book, from the "Danube Edition" of his collected works, which began to appear in the 1960s. There's something about that battered old Penguin that seems almost to embody history for me, though.

The fact that it had been printed a mere six years after the events described in it gave me a powerful sense of their reality, their tangible weight and gravity.

I've never been able to ignore those ripped and munted books at the backs of bookshops ever since. How can you know what treasures might be sitting there, glowing radioactive in the dark?

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. 1937. Abridged ed., 1942. Rev. Danube ed., 1966. London: Papermac, 1983.

Launching Leicester Kyle's Collected Poems

2011-07-04T08:16:00.018+12:00

Leicester & his trademark fire-engine-red Land Rover
(Buller, 2000)

It's five years to the day since poet, priest and ecological activist Leicester Kyle (1937-2006) died in Christchurch hospital. I doubt that he'd recognise the city of his childhood if he could see it today. That former Christchurch is now a thing of the past ...

The main purpose of this post, though, is to advertise the Leicester Kyle website which has been set up by his literary executors (David Howard and myself) to make his writings more accessible in the future - both to those already familiar with his poetry, and those who've never heard of him or it. My model was Kendrick Smithyman's online Collected Poems 1943-1995 site, edited by Margaret Edcumbe and Peter Simpson, and designed expertly by Brian Flaherty.

There are eleven books (at present) listed under the name "Leicester Kyle" in the NZ National Library database, together with another earlier prose pamphlet indexed under "L. Kyle". My present intention is to put all of these up on the website. We'll be supplementing them with another eleven or so works which are not presently available in any public collection, though.

I certainly can't rival the snazzy production values and (very useful) search engine facilites on the Smithyman site. This will be another attempt on my part to make free space on the internet work for us as well as the corporate giants. What I've done, then, is to set up two linked websites:

The first site - Leicester Kyle - is basically confined to bibliographies and indexes. It aspires to provide complete listings of all primary and secondary material by and about Leicester. It gives details of each of his works, together with notes, and a table of contents hyperlinked to:
The second site - Leicester Kyle Texts - which will provide complete texts of each of the major books, together with a selection of the shorter poems.

The first site is as complete as I can make it at present, without further information and research. The second site is more of a foretaste at present, with only a few of his books up in full.

Basically, if you just want to read through one of them, you can go straight to Leicester Kyle Texts, and scroll down reading it page by page (I've also included a jpg illustration of each page, in order not to obscure any details of the original formatting. If you click on these pictures individually, they will enlarge).

If, on the other hand, you want to see the table of contents for a particular book, together with any notes or details from letters about it, you can go to the Leicester Kyle index site and click on the relevant link.

The list below will tell you which works are available already, and which ones will be going up over the next few months. I'll try to keep it continuously updated as each website grows:

•

Contents

[* = listed in the NZ National Library Network]

Accessible online:

Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World (1996-2001) [A4: iv + 96 pp.]
This work, a kind of Zukofskyan verse epic about the life and times of William Colenso ("Koroneho" in Maori) has never before now been published in full, although four extracts from it appeared in Alan Loney's magazine A Brief Description of the Whole World between 1997 and 1998.

A Christmas Book (2000) [A5: 26 pp.]
After moving to Millerton, an old mining town on the West Coast of the South Island, in 1998, Leicester developed the habit of producing a small book of poems every Christmas to send to his friends and family. This is the first of them, and one of the most charming and accessible of all of his works.

* The Great Buller Coal Plateaux: A Sequence of Poems (2001) [A5: 31 pp.]
Despite its unpretentious packaging, this little chapbook is one of Leicester's most important publications. It was an attempt to harness deliberately the propaganda power of poetry and the Arts in general against a large-scale commercial mining company. Of course we're constantly being told by every authority in sight that this is wrong, that Art should not be "political", that it's concerned with "higher things" etc. etc. But are there any higher things than the systematic despoliation of an untouched environment? The destruction of any joy or profit that any of us or our descendants can ever take from it in the future? This is an important book, and I'm glad to be able to make it accessible here to more people than were ever able to read it in Leicester's lifetime.

Dun Huang Aesthetic Dance (2002) [A4: 10 pp.]
One of Leicester's shorter poetry sequences. This was posted to me by him as a separate pamphlet, or else I might simply have included it in the "Shorter Poems" section of the site. It reflects his strong interest in syncretic religious traditions and in their bizarre and excessive linguistic registers.

* Things to Do with Kerosene (2002) [A5: 34 pp.]
Another one of his Christmas books, this one compiled from Aunt Daisy's depression-era household hints. One of the most entertaining books he ever put out, its publication was partly funded by the Buller Community Arts Council. It was launched by the Mayor, and got a great reception from the West Coast locals (by all accounts).

* Panic Poems (2003) [A5: 39 pp.]
Another Christmas book, this one concerned with the mechanics of his life in Millerton. His move there from Auckland was motivated (at least to some extent) by the death of his wife Miriel in 1998, so there must have been a lot of issues for him to work through. Others in similar circumstances may well find this book very helpful.

Living at a Bad Address (2004) [A5: 38 pp.]
The last of the full-scale Christmas books. This one is an anthology of shorter poems with brief introductions. Some of them are very moving to read, particularly those concerned with his daughter Anna's funeral.

* Miller Creek (2004) [A5: 22 pp.]
This is a beautiful gem-like little book of poems and pictures designed to draw attention to the ecological devastation caused by rivers poisoned by runoff from the mines. Joel Bolton's sketches are colourful and deft and the whole production deserves a wider audience, I think.

Pamphlets & Ephemera
This section includes the first and last of his Christmas letters and pamphlets, sent to various correspondents - principally Richard Taylor - between 1996 and 2005.

Miscellaneous Prose
A preliminary gathering of Leicester's reviews and critical introductions to the various publications he edited or contributed to in the last ten years of his life.

Secondary Literature
Articles, poems, reviews and tributes by a variety of people, among them Stu Bagby, Tony Chad, Scott Hamilton, David Howard, James Norcliffe and Richard Taylor. Again, this is a preliminary collection which will undoubtedly grow in the future.

Bibliography
As complete a listing as I can make at this point of his published works.

•

Not yet available:

* Options (1996-1997) [A4: 63 pp.]
Leicester's first long narrative poem: "This set of four poems examines, with a wickedly satirical eye, a series of religious and mystical vocations. We have Evagrius, the fourth century ascetic; Jeremy Taylor, the seventeenth-century Anglo-Catholic Jeremiah ...; Fran, a thirteenth-century Franciscan mendicant transported to contemporary Northland; and finally Maria, the celebrated nineteenth-century dancing prophetess of Kaikohe." [Jack Ross, "Leicester H. Kyle: Prophet without Honour." Pander 6/7 (1999): 21 & 23.]

[posted online Monday 19/12/11]

* State Houses (1997) [A4: 43 pp.]
This is a more personal piece: "interweaving tragic family history with the history of the first state houses in the Christchurch suburb of Riccarton. Leicester's 'dream-like recollection' of childhood 'is set against the ideology of which the state houses were part' (hence the Bauhaus epigraph, and the various diagrams and maps), but that 'progress is provided by a ritual house-blessing, an alternative ideology, which moves the family group from room to room, part to part, of reality'.” [Pander 6/7 (1999)]

[posted online Monday 12/12/11]

* A Voyge to New Zealand: The Log of Joseph Sowry, Translated and Made Better (1997) [A4: 117 pp.]
This is an actual nineteenth-century emigrant's journal, which has been "teased ... into strange shapes on the page and in the imagination. It reads as an affectionate tribute to the spirit of our pioneers, a fin-de-siècle version of Curnow’s 'Landfall in Unknown Seas'.” [Pander 6/7 (1999)]

[posted online Tuesday 20/12/11]

Heteropholis (1998) [A4: 52 pp.]
Some readers see this as Leicester's masterpiece. "It concerns a fallen angel, who has descended to earth in the form of a small green native gecko (species: Heteropholis gemmeus). This gecko has been caught by an apartment-dwelling Aucklander, and makes observations on his habits, on the weather (a subject of particular concern to angels, who are used to looking down), and on sundry other matters. ... It is, nevertheless, a profoundly serious and, indeed, partially autobiographical work." [Pander 6/7 (1999)]

[posted online Friday 16/12/11]

* A Machinery for Pain (1999) [A4: 37 pp.]
This is his first book written entirely at Millerton: "a ... sequence on pain management, prompted by close personal experience" - the death of his wife Miriel, in particular.

[posted online Monday 14/11/11]

* A Safe House for a Man (2000) [A4: 86 pp.]
The blurb copy I provided at the time read (in part) as follows: "The landscape of Leicester Kyle's long semi-narrative poem ... will be familiar to most of us: separation, self-analysis, acknowledgment of loss. There's little that's recondite or difficult about this poetry, and yet the craft and subtle intelligence of its author come through in every line. The title poem is accompanied by two others: The Araneidea - an oddly disturbing account of how to 'make good-looking, sightly cabinet objects' from live spiders; and Threnos - a moving elegy for the poet's wife Miriel."

[posted online Saturday 10/12/11]

* Five Anzac Liturgies (2000) [A4: 45 pp.]
Calum Gilmour, whose Polygraphia Press published both this and A Safe House for a Man, wrote of it at the time: "This set of poems contains five pieces addressed to the South Island towns of Hawarden, Waikari, Rotherham, Culverden and Waiau respectively. Each poem is based round the theme of Anzac Day and how it affects each place addressed. The focus is on Anzac, on the people involved, on the significance of the remembrance in each place."

[posted online Tuesday 29/11/11]

King of Bliss (2002) [A4: 46 pp.]
This book contains Leicester's thoughts on the subject of psychoanalysis, prompted by his experience of various therapies for clinical depression which he underwent while still living in Auckland in the 90s.

[posted online Thursday 1/12/11]

A Wedding in Tintown (2002) [A4: 36 pp.]
This is a portrait of a place, revealed through a blow-by-blow account of a wedding celebration. Leicester wrote to me about it: "The wedding is one I took here in Millerton, and this is a faithful account of its proceeding; I've set it in Tintown, a now vanished mining village on the Plateau ... My aim was to describe the events, with little overt interpretation, and by means of a low tone to - by contrast - heighten and clarify the colours of the day. ... My hope is that the peculiar culture of the occasion just might make it interesting enough to be a good read."

[posted online Tuesday 15/11/11]

8 Great O’s (2003) [A4: 46 pp.]
This is a set of interlinked pieces connected by themes of religion and ritual. Leicester's preface specifies that the main text "is an adaptation of the last page of a pious biography, ‘The Life of St. Mary tbe Harlot’, written by her uncle, Ephraem, deacon of Edessa, around the year 370. ‘The Word' is a family story. 'The Great 0 's' is a term taken from the Advent liturgy."

[posted online Friday 18/11/11]

Anogramma (2005) [A4: 64 pp.]
An amusing and lighthearted piece of autobiography, which records Leicester's first job after leaving school: as a "horticultural apprentice at the Christchurch Botanical Gardens ... All apprentices were required to attend monthly meetings of the Christchurch Botanical Gardens Horticultural Apprentices Mutual Improvement Society" and much of the text is devoted to an account of these meetings, together with some details of the 50 year reunion of the apprentices.

[posted online Saturday 10/12/11]

* Breaker: A Progress of the Sea (2005) [A5: 78 pp.]
Leicester's last book, and one of his most ambitious, "suggested by the Catalogue of Armed Forces in the second book of the Iliad. I read it in Pope's translation, and was fascinated by the whole idea and the poetry of it. The fascination led to a desire to do something of the kind myself and, casting about for a local battle, I hit on the idea of our self-defence against our eroding coast." says Leicester in his preface. The illustrations, by John Crawford, are very fine.

[posted online Sunday 20/11/11]

Selected Shorter Poems: 1 (1983-1998) [A4: 428 poems & sequences / 568 pp.]
This is a list of all the poems and sequences included in the first of the the two large "Collected Poems" fileboxes which David and I inherited from Leicester's estate, and which contained (in approximate chronological order) all of the individual poems (outside published books) he wished to preserve. I'll be putting up a bare selection of these poems to start with - more over time, if demand warrants it.

Selected Shorter Poems: 2 (1998-2006) [A4: 318 poems & sequences / 387 pp.]
This includes all of the poems written after Leicester's move to the West Coast, mostly contained in the second of the the two large "Collected Poems" fileboxes. I'll be putting up rather more of these poems than the ones in the first box, as befits their superior quality (in my opinion, at any rate).

Five Millerton Sequences (2011) [A5: viii + 48 pp.]
This is a preliminary selection from the Millerton poems, chosen in consultation with David Howard, and intended both as an advertisement for this site and (hopefully) to revive some interest in Leicester in general. Few people have ever had the chance to read any of these poems before, after all. I hope you enjoy them. The book will be launched sometime next year - details to be announced on this blog (and hopefully elsewhere as well).

[posted online Friday 16/12/11]

Prose Fiction
- * I Got Me Flowers: Letters to a Psychiatrist [A5: 56 pp.]
Leicester began as a prose writer, in the 1970s, and had some success with this and some of his other stories before switching to poetry in the early 1990s. This "excessively Jungian" (as Leicester himself described it) novella from the mid-70s is the finest of his extant works of fiction - or at any rate that was my impression when I read through them all while staying with Leicester at Millerton in 1998.

[posted online Sunday 13/11/11]

Chronology
As complete a listing as I can make of the known events and dates of Leicester's life.

[posted online Saturday 12/11/11]

•

So there you go. I know it's a bit crazy to entrust all this material to the tender mercies of blogspot, but you can be sure that I'll be keeping sedulous backups and printouts of everything as well.

•

The view from Leicester's verandah at Millerton
[photographs: Jack Ross (2000)]

Reading tomorrow

2011-06-27T11:57:00.005+12:00

[& no, I won't be looking anything like this ...
from a booklaunch in 2006]

I've been asked to fill in at Poetry Live (presently based at the Thirsty Dog, K. Rd.) tomorrow - Tuesday 28/6, from 8 pm onwards - as the scheduled poet has had to cancel.

I guess the fact that Bronwyn is away all this week visiting her mother in Christchurch (Chilean ash-cloud willing, that is ...) makes me a bit more prone to drive out into the moody, stormbeaten city of an evening, so I've said 'yes'.

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to be reading yet. One idea was to intone some bits from my version of the Oresteia in an attempt to flog some copies of this innovative and fascinating work ...

I do feel that I should dedicate the evening to Dave Mitchell, though. He died last week, on the 21st June, after a long and protracted illness, and though he could no longer speak or read with any ease, he must been pleased to see Run Away Boy, his selected poems (edited by Martin Edmond and Nigel Young) finally out and getting reviewed.

He was, after all, the guy who started off the whole thing, back in the 80s. It seems truly extraordinary that it's been running ever since ...

Here's a little suite of photos from the last time I saw him, in Sydney last year, sitting to one side of the Poetry Symposium at the University of Technology, and getting a hug from Michele Leggott:

[Dave Mitchell]

[Michele Leggott]

[a great big hug]

Fifth Anniversary (Wood)

2011-06-15T10:58:00.009+12:00

[Pollinating bee log]

I started this blog on the 14th of June, 2006, so this is The Imaginary Museum's fifth anniversary. I'm afraid that the traditional material for a fifth anniversary present is wood (though modern gift-givers have replaced that with silverware, apparently). For myself, I'm sticking with the wood.

Why? On the one hand, because it's rather shocking to look at all those posts and see just how much time I must have spent typing away in these little blogger text boxes. What a woodenhead! On the other hand, though it's nice to think how much wood-pulp I must have saved by not printing it all out ...

This blog is only part of the story, though. From the very beginning I saw this as a project space: somewhere where I could try online text experiments. The very first thing I did with it, in fact, was to put up a bunch of topographical poems about Auckland, Roadworks, linked to a game-board with twin axes of time and space (okay, maybe that one wasn't all that successful, but I was looking for a three-dimensional way of arranging texts outside the conventions of the book-codex ...)

Quickly, though, I realised that the best way to use a single centralised site, like this one, was as a crossroads to other websites, each one of which could be adjusted to display different techniques and materials. The sidebar over there will testify to the sheer number of these experiments I've done over the past five years. Basically, though, they've boiled down to one big project per year - I'm not quite sure why. Every time I complete one of these things I tell myself Never again ...

So here they are, the "big five", in rough chronological order:

2007:

(November 6-December 3, 2007) Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive: Bibliographical Aids for the Use of Those Consulting the Waiata Archive (1974) and the AoNZPSA (2002-2004) - Audio Recordings available in Special Collections, University of Auckland Library and in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

This website serves as an index to the contents of the:

Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive. Compiled and edited by Jan Kemp and Jack Ross, with assistance from Edmund King and Mark King. Materials collected by Jan Kemp, Elizabeth Alley, David Howard with Morrin Rout, and Richard Reeve with Nick Ascroft. (Special Collections Dept, Auckland University Library). [40 CDs Audio / 2 CDs Texts].

which is a project I worked on pretty intensively from 2002 to around 2008, when the last of the three linked audio / text anthologies I edited with Jan Kemp (Classic, Contemporary and New New Zealand Poets in Performance) was issued by Auckland University Press. We still get quite a lot of hits. There are 200-odd poets' pages included on the site, and I update it periodically with new information (on request).

2008:

The R.E.M. [Random Excess Memory] Trilogy (2000-2008):
- (January 19-30, 2008) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 1]: Nights with Giordano Bruno: A Novel.
- (January 20-February 13, 2008) [[The R.E.M. Trilogy, 2 - The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis]: Who am I? Automatic Writing.
- (January 20-February 13, 2008) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 2 - The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis]: Where am I? Cuttings.
- (August 15, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: EVA AVE– Inheritor of silence / shall I be? / Black mass below us / above us / only sky …
- (August 16, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: Moons of Mars – Welcome / to the new reality / Nothing’s stranger / than the will / to survive …
- (August 15, 2006-September 3, 2007) [The R.E.M. Trilogy, 3 - EMO]: Ovid in Otherworld – Wild geese draw lines / across an amber sky / fish bask / in frozen rivers / generators die …

Between 2000 and 2008 I published a trilogy of novels, which are now available in their entirety on these six linked sites: one for Nights with Giordano Bruno (Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000), two for The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Auckland: Titus Books, 2006), and three for EMO (Auckland: Titus Books, 2008). Of course, they're still a lot easier to read in their original print copies, but one must continue to experiment with new formats (I suppose).

2009:

Academica (1984-1995):
- (April 14-August 22, 2009) John Masefield: Early Novels 1908-1911. MA Thesis (University of Auckland, 1984-86).
- (April 14-July 22, 2009) Versions of South America: An Elusive Identity: Versions of South America from Aphra Behn to the Present Day. PhD Thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1986-90).
- (August 22, 2006-September 26, 2007) Scheherazade’s Web: The Thousand and One Nights and Comparative Literature.

This is an obeisance to the amount of time I've spent bumbling around in Academia: a complete online version of my MA & PhD theses and my post-Doctoral research (respectively: Auckland University, 1984-85 / Edinburgh University, 1986-90 / Massey & Auckland Universities, 1991-95). Since most of this stuff was composed in the transitional period before the digital age (the Masters thesis on a typewriter, in fact), it had to be scanned and re-edited before I was able to put it up online. Was it all worth it? Who knows? At any rate, there it all is, awaiting the curious ...

2010:

(June 1, 2009-July 4, 2010) A Gentle Madness: A Catalogue of My Book Collection: Geographical by Locations & Indexed by Categories.

It may not sound like much when you put it like that, but this was definitely the most laborious of these projects. It does seem worth all the time and trouble it took now, though - it's awful not to be able to locate a book you know you own when you really need it ...

2011:

(February 17-June 11, 2011) Leicester Kyle: An Index to the Collected Poems of Leicester Hugo Kyle (1937-2006).

And, last but not least, a work in progress: the online edition of my old friend Leicester Kyle's Collected Poems which I've been engaged on since the beginning of this year. It's just a tease at present, as the site is not yet complete. All you can access for the moment is the overall index, which lists all the works which will you eventually be able to consult in their entirety. This portion of the site does include a bibliography and reprints of all the secondary literature on Leicester I've been able to locate to date, however.

At times I despair at the magnitude of what still remains to be done on this project, but I suppose I can just continue to chip away at it gradually. Watch this space, though. I'm hoping to put out a limited edition of some late poems of Leicester's later this year, and the full text site should be online - albeit only in part - by July or so (I hope).

(By the way, any help in identifying the other person in this photo of Leicester Kyle in Auckland in the mid-90s - and the venue, and the photographer - would be greatly appreciated:)

At the Sign of the Unicorn:

2011-06-01T09:40:00.009+12:00

i.m. Richard Wasley
(died 19th May, 2011)

Unicorn Bookshop (Warkworth)

I'm afraid I missed the funeral. Carli had left a message the night before, mentioning that the service would be held at Snells Beach on Thursday afternoon. Unfortunately that's one of the days I teach, so I couldn't make it. I sent a card, but I doubt even that arrived in time.

I've been going to his shop for nearly twenty years. It seems incredible, but that would appear to be the case. I remember stopping in Warkworth for a coffee sometime in the early nineties, and asking the waitress just as an afterthought if there were any nice bookshops in town.

"Oh yes," she said. "Just down that sidestreet, in the little building with the unicorn mural on the side." (That was in the days when Richard conducted his operations from a strange little wooden annex just down from the medical clinic - before shifting round the corner to the brighter, more modern premises pictured above.)

We wandered up, had a look around, bought a stack of books. Richard (I didn't really know him at all then, or for some time afterwards) seemed to have some kind of secret source of new and nearly-new literature and poetry books: there were bright Penguins, stately AUP biographies and histories, masses and masses of anthologies, slim volumes, novels ... everything except Mills & Boons or Readers Digest Condensed Books: those he would have scorned too much to give them shelf-room.

[Richard Smallfield: Richard Wasley]

Here he is in better days. The last few times I saw him, he was far more haggard than that, and terribly thin - still recognisably the same person, though. Richard could be quite a bolshie customer at times, to be perfectly honest. I remember once overhearing him denouncing some random suit who'd come in to take shelter from a rainstorm outside and who was talking loudly and inconsiderately on a cellphone in the middle of the shop:

"D'you think this is a telephone booth?"

"Excuse me?"

"You can't talk on your cellphone in here."

"I was going to buy something, but now I won't."

"Good. I don't want you in here anyway. You're barred!"

It certainly put you off haggling about the - very reasonable - prices he charged for his books, but I have to say I liked his attitude. The comfort of real booklovers always mattered far more to him than currying favour with the hoi polloi ...

In fact, the very last time I met and talked with him, he was about to walk down into town to have it out with another local bookdealer who'd put in a complaint about Richard's prices on TradeMe. The prospect obviously filled him with glee. He wasn't too steady on his feet, and his voice was going, but the idea of going downtown and having a good old barney with some interfering neighbour was clearly the kind of thing that was keeping him going, long past the predictions of his doctors. That, and the love and patience and unstinting care of Carli Clark, of course ...

[Masonic Hall (Warkworth)

It sounds like a cliche to say that going to Warkworth will never be the same again. There are other bookshops there, nice cafes, shops, but nothing could ever replace that strange metropolitan haven of a shop, the little kingdom Richard built.

The regular poetry readings he held in Matakana will be missed too (we read there together, in the little church, on one occasion a couple of years ago). Poetry was one of his principal passions, in fact: writing it and reading it aloud. He'd always intended to put out a book, he told me, but somehow in those last months it didn't get done - there was time for it at last, but somehow not the energy, the passion you need. He leaves behind a good deal of work, though, a lot of memories of those curious evenings when he held court with Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts," poems by Charles Causley, Stevie Smith ...

I'll never drive north from the Bays again without thinking of him and missing him, missing that little bookish haven he built for me and others like me, people for whom a rummage through an old bookshop has something paradisal about it, the joy of discovery, the imminent prospect of something extraordinary waiting just for you ...

Go in peace, Richard. I guess the best thing might be to adapt Dean Swift's epitaph: "He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more - depart, wayfarer, and imitate if you are able one who to the utmost strenuously championed liberty" - albeit the liberty Richard championed was the freedom of booklovers and poetry fans to enjoy a moment's peace in the midst of their stressful days ...

[Swift's Epitaph (St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin)

Cultural Amnesia & the PBRF

2011-05-26T10:47:00.014+12:00

[Clive James: Cultural Amnesia (2007)

James, Clive. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from Culture and the Arts. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.

I picked up some pretty impressive-looking tomes at the Auckland Public Library sale this year, and one of them was the above.

I did think twice about it, since the respect I once had for Clive James as a cultural commentator and "metropolitan critic" had long been eroded by his foolish performances on TV as a kind of pompous self-parodying Kolonial Klown, not to mention his execrable fiction and worse poetry (Brilliant Creatures would actually be up there as one of my candidates for worst novel ever published - along with David Lodge's How Far Can You Go? and Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood).

Those early essays - and even some of that TV criticism - was pretty good, though, so I thought it was worth betting five dollars or so that he might have regained some of his earlier fire.

About fifty pages in, Bronwyn issued an ultimatum forbidding me from reading another word of it (in her presence, at any rate). The amount of snorting and cursing coming from my direction was affecting her digestion, she said.

I mean, the premise seemed sound enough. James had been meditating this "big" book for over forty years (he said). All through those international jaunts and photo-shoots, every time he found a congenial cafe he was taking notes for the great Summa Journalistica which was to justify his life and peripatetic ways.

Earnest debates with himself over a possible form for this huge gallimaufry of honed opinion and rapier wit resulted, eventually, in a kind of biographical dictionary of the forgotten: all the significant figures who'd been wiped from our cultural history by the instant amnesia of the brainwashed pop generation ...

So far so good. I certainly hadn't heard of quite a few of those obscure Viennese intellectuals and litterateurs whom James seemed determined to unearth and restore to centre stage. How can you quarrel with so inherently worthy an objective?

[Walter Benjamin: Work Card (1940)

I guess the first big alarm bell rang when I started reading James on Walter Benjamin. What a turkey! All these years I'd been thinking that Benjamin was something special, when actually all he was was wilfully obscure ("eloquent opacity" [p.48]; "With Benjamin, 'strain' was the operative word" [p.48]; "What was unique about Benjamin was not his readiness to take a side track, but the lengths he would go to when he took one" [p.49], etc. etc.) No wonder he was just too dumb to smuggle himself over the Pyrenees in advance of those Nazi hordes! Good riddance, actually ...

Hmmm. Well, that did seem a little harsh as a final judgment on the man (not to mention a bit on the - how shall I put it? - stupid side), but judging an alphabetical book by its treatment of the early "B's" might be seen as a trifle unreasonable, so I soldiered on.

Then, however, I reached Jorge Luis Borges. Now I'm the first to admit that Borges is not for everyone. You either like him or you don't. I happen to be an admirer of his poetry as well as his prose, but that again is a minority opinion (I've even had to take out "The Garden of Forking Paths", my favourite short story of all time, from the Stage One Creative Writing course I teach, since so few of the students seemed able to work out what the "fork" was going on - or to care that much, once they had worked it out). So, yeah, there's nothing intrinsically criminal - or intellectually indefensible - in disprizing Borges.

But how did James go about attacking him? By calling him a mediocre linguist:

His dialogues and essays can be recommended as an easy way into Spanish, a language which every student of literature should hold in prospect, to the extent of an elementary reading knowledge at least (Borges's own, and much vaunted, knowledge of English was really not much better than that.) [p.63]

Thank you, Professor James. There's a certain toplofty tone here which sounds like typical autodidact's schadenfreude ("I may not be a card-carrying Academic, but I can sound just as dry-as-dust as one of you over-paid, underworked bastards ...") But was Borges's "much-vaunted" command of English "really" as "elementary" as all that?

[Saka Freeman: Jorge Luis Borges has a posse (2009)

Another one of my recent purchases - from Amazon.com this time - was a CD of recordings of Borges giving a series of lectures on poetry: This Craft of Verse: Borges, In His Own Voice. The Complete Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard University. Set of 4 CDs. 1967 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000) - if you want to check it out.

I've played this through a couple of times now in the car, which (as I mentioned in a previous post) is my venue of choice for listening to books and epic poems. Borges was almost completely blind at the time he gave these lectures, in 1967, so they had to be delivered entirely from memory, which, since they consist mostly of analyses of particular poems and lines of poems in English, is no mean feat. Or, rather, would be no mean feat even in one's own native tongue.

All I can say is, if, with a "not much better than elementary" reading knowledge of English, this blind man was capable of giving six hour-long lectures in a foreign tongue, at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, then I'd really like to meet someone with a "good" command of the language. Who might such a person resemble? Shakespeare? Milton (another blind poet with a lot of linguistic chutzpah, presumably)?

Would that person look like Clive James, by any chance? Well, no, unfortunately. There are a number of apologetic asides on the subject in the early pages of his massive tome, where he explains that, while "English is this new world's lingua franca ... Born to speak it, we can view the whole world as a dubbed movie, and not even have to bother with subtitles", he too has deigned to wrestle with the odd foreign language (or, as he puts it, "savour the tang of alien tongues" [p.xxi]:

There was a time when I could fairly fluently read Russian, and get through a simple article in Japanese about my special subject, the war in the Pacific ... I hope they return as easily as they went, but I remember how long they took to arrive in the first place. [p.xxv]

It's not that great a tragedy, though, because "a complete picture of reality is not to be had. If we realize that, we can begin to be realistic. .... Stalin and Hitler both thought that they could see the whole picture, and look what happened."

In other words, if James had been better at languages, it might have turned him into a Stalin or a Hitler, and "look what happened" to them! (Apologies if I've misinterpreted this passage, since it did seem at first sight to be entirely meaningless, but that's what I've finally deduced from it ...)

The question remains, though, could Clive James give a series of lectures in one of those easier languages he claims an "elementary reading knowledge" of - in French, say, entirely without notes, at (say) the Sorbonne? I kind of doubt it, though I may be wrong. If he could, though (I certainly couldn't), then I would have no hesitation in calling his command of the language "excellent", rather than elementary.

You can see why Bronwyn forbade me to read on. The issue was not that James was ignorant (though he was, egregiously and unrepentantly so), it was the hasty snap-judgements peppered through every page, generally based on little information except a kind of knowing contrariness - a desire to contradict received ideas with cunning paradoxes, to deflate allegedly "overblown" reputations - which were the problem.

The thing was, he was just too fucking lazy and egotistic to carry it off. He clearly hadn't done any serious research for these little four to five-page essays on forgotten figures (Borges? Benjamin? Forgotten!) His great big tome, I was forced to conclude, was just a great big waste of time. "Books like these," as the Classical scholar (and occasional poet) A. E. Housman once remarked, "are mere interruptions to our studies."

[Clive James (2008)

So what's all this got to do with the PBRF, you ask? What is PBRF when it's at home?

If you already know what it is, it's probably because you have some kind of association with NZ Academia (other nations have their own - loathsome - parallel systems). PBRF stands for "Performance Based Research Funding" and it's the way the New Zealand government awards money to tertiary educational institutions based on the (alleged) "quality" of their research.

It's a way of quantifying quality, in effect, by bean-counting "expert assessments" of research across all the innumerable fields included in contemporary Academic institutions, according to pre-set criteria, with crude comparative tables for those on the outer fringes whose work is expressed in "performances," "exhibitions" or (for all I know) "be-ins" and "happenings." (Musicians, dramatists and creative artists generally, in other words).

Fair enough. It's a dirty job but it has to be done (allegedly, at any rate). How else could you possibly know who's been naughty and who's been nice? Who does deserve a big bucket of cash, and who's just been sitting around spinning out bullshit to no good effect?

I guess a dispassionate observer might point out that University Departments, Schools and Colleges already scrutinise their colleagues' research with a good deal of expertise and zeal - but it's true that they may lack the necessary international and discipline-wide perspective to know who's "excellent" and who's simply "average" in the work they're doing. A giant bean-count is therefore required (or so the government informs us) to make sure that nobody gets away with cushioning themselves a nice safe little featherbed with the help of their cowed, compliant colleagues ...

As a result, every "research-active" academic in New Zealand will be handing in a portfolio of research to the central PBRF authority on April 1st next year (how appropriate, I hear you say ...)

Before that magic date, though, each of us will be preparing "draft" and "mini" portfolios to make sure that we're telling the "story" of our research in the best possible way, that we're hitting the right key-words, that we're putting our best foot forward. And squads of glorified spin-doctors and other research "experts" have been hired to make sure that everyone succeeds in doing precisely that.

It doesn't sound all that complex, on the surface: a bit onerous to collect all the data, to blow one's own trumpet in precisely the right key, but - hey - anyone who's ever written any kind funding application (or a CV, for that matter), knows that one has to bow down in the House of Rimmon at least some of the time. Just for the sake of peace and all getting along.

There are, however, some uncomfortable facts that keep on obtruding on this colossal enterprise ("a golden opportunity to assess yourself and your own career as a researcher," as Massey's own Head of Research kept assuring us at the series of rallies she held to tell us where we were with the process this week). It's a little like the problems with Clive James's great career-crowning book.

In that case, the real difficulty is that you can't trust a word James says because he's too ignorant, cocksure and self-serving to be a reliable witness or an acceptable judge of the prowess of great artists and scholars whose boots he isn't worthy to lick (I stopped reading before he got to that poor, sad, noble soul Paul Celan, as I was afraid that I would want to tear out the pages one by one and shove them down his throat ...)

In the case of PBRF, the problems are, unfortunately, just as obvious. Of course it's a fine idea, much thought and care has gone into balancing out the competing demands of all those different disciplines, etc. etc. BUT ...

Who's going to read all those thousands and thousands of pages of portfolios? Subject panels of "top academics", of course. But just how much time do they have to devote to the task? How long is each panel going to meet for? A thousand years? In practice, each portfolio will be given (at most) about two minutes of the panel's attention. It'll be a bit like one of those old School Certificate marking committee meetings: "C" - "Next!" - "B+" - "Next!" - "Next - next - next." I'm sure they'll all do their best, but how seriously is one expected to take this snap judgement of a few senior colleagues on the value of your life's work? Not very, I'm afraid. It's still just glorified bean-counting, I'm afraid.

Who will win? How will the various universities stack up against each other? Well, believe it or not, Massey University's grand plan is to stay in precisely the same place. We don't want to sink back past AUT, and we don't - given the almost inconceivably vast array of academic and vocational subjects taught here, internally and extramurally - have the slightest chance of "beating" more traditionally focussed establishments. Why should we? We do what we do very well already. What's the point of trying to become another Auckland or Otago in order to win more PBRF funding? Students can already choose to study at those places if that's what they want. What Massey offers is something different - a whole range of subjects and approaches that nobody else can match.

What's the point, then? Why are we running so hard in order to stand still? Well, because everyone else has upped their game just as much as we're hoping to. Therefore we have to perform better to make up for the fact that they're all going to perform better, too. It's a kind of Academic version of the Arms Race: We need an H-bomb because if we don't make it then the Russians are bound to.

Who will it benefit in the long run? That's a complicated question. The threat brandished over our heads to make us comply with instructions is (as always) "redundancies." Any university that gets significantly less PBRF funding will have to fire a whole lot of people to make up for it. Who? Well, I guess the bureaucrats whose job it is to regulate all the bean-counting. I don't see any great point in firing me since most of my work is in teaching anyway. I'm not a full-time academic (point 7 of a fulltime load, in fact), so a good deal of the writing and research I do is on my own time (in case any of you were worrying that the taxpayer was funding my work in composing aberrant novels that nobody wants to read ...) Also, the government has other ways of funding us for the students we teach, so PBRF is only part of the complex equation anyway (albeit an extremely important part).

Individually, it makes very little difference to me how well I do in this PBRF round. There are a whole lot of complex rules surrounding who gets to see the results, and universities are specifically forbidden to use them as a pretext for letting anyone go (or for internal discipline, for that matter). Of course we all want to do well, because everyone likes to be told how good they are, but the big gains and losses are all on the institutional level, not the personal.

Will we all do well? I guess that's where the Clive James-ish self-contradictory cloth-headedness comes in. We're told that we have to demonstrate the (peer-acknowledged) "excellence" of our research profile. We must all be "excellent", in fact. But not everyone can be excellent all of the time. If they are, then you need another word, since "excellent" means "standing out from the common run." (as D. H. Lawrence once put it in a review, "If we use words like 'brilliant' and 'genius' for Miss Snodgrass's new book, then what words are left for Shakespeare or Homer?).

You know, the whole thing just doesn't worry me that much. I accept that you have to ride herd on Academics and what they actually do all day from time to time. Fair enough. I accept that I'll have to spend a lot of time entering research data into a particularly clumsy, inflexible and antiquated computer programme (there's no dispute about that, even from the professionals who oversee said programme). Them's the breaks. The chances that the data from this exercise will actually be available on time in usable form are roughly even-steven, I'd say, as it's quite possible that the whole lot will be lost in some immense meltdown on April Fool's Day next year. Them's also the breaks. Not even blogspot.com is infallible.

What I do kind of object to, though, is having my time wasted with briefing meetings from bureaucrats who can't answer a single discipline-specific question; who seem to feel that we should thrill to having take huge amounts of time away from our actual research to fill in complicated forms for the benefit of a bunch of people who won't (in turn) have time to read any of them in any detail; who, finally, expect us to turn off our brains and ignore all the fine distinctions we try to inculcate painstakingly in the lecture-room between fatuous doubletalk and actual information (the universal "excellence" required of our Academic population being only one and not the most egregious example) when it comes to compiling said forms.

Let's just get on with it, in other words. It has to be done. It'll be interesting to see if the Senior Leadership thugs at Canterbury actually get away with insisting that all of their earthquake-shocked Academics have to submit portfolios on research many of them are unable even to access physically at present. Seems a little harsh, no?

[Vanda Vitali (2010)

It'll be even more interesting to see if Big Chief McCutcheon at Auckland gets away with the mass redundancies he's threatened as a disciplinary measure against those Academics who are threatening not to submit PBRF portfolios as part of their industrial action against his ongoing threats to Academic freedom. I'd have thought that one redundancy at Auckland would solve that problem neatly and with minimal fuss - the Vanda Vitali solution, one might call it.

For myself, I love my job at Massey because of the students I get to meet there, because of my fine friendly colleagues, and also because of the physical beauty of the Albany campus. As a recent student survey revealed, the fact that you can always get a car-park was listed as reason number one for attending this august institution. That may be why they come, but I doubt that's why they stay. I hope to get back to concentrating on teaching (not to mention my own research!) just as soon as this colossal turkey-shoot is over. In the meantime, the less disruption it causes to everyone, the better ...

[ibikenz: Massey Albany from the Royal Albany Trail (2011)

The Cricket in the Lecture Room

2011-05-17T09:28:00.013+12:00

Maria Tatar: The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (2002)

My colleague Mary Paul forwarded me this invitation to a public lecture at Auckland University the other day. I suppose I should try to get back on their mailing list myself, but so much random spam seems to come in every morning already that I no longer sign up to anything if I can help it. It does mean you sometimes miss out on hearing about quite interesting events, though:

Fairy Tales in an Age of Electronic Entertainments
Professor Maria Tatar, Harvard University

Can fairy tales survive in the age of Kindle, Twitter, and Facebook? How have stories from times past, once told around the communal hearth, managed the transition into an age of electronic entertainments? Professor Tatar will turn to "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Bluebeard" to explore how tales with a whiff of the archaic have been revitalised with expressive intensity, even in cultural spaces that have been secularised and disenchanted.

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard, where she chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology and teaches courses in German Studies, Folklore, and Children's Literature.

Tuesday 29 March, 6pm
Library Theatre B10
The University of Auckland

Kind regards,
Faculty of Arts

I don't know quite what I expected of the event: something about the digital frontier, perhaps: video games and virtual reality worlds. It's a subject that interests me a good deal, as I think I've made clear in previous posts.

That wasn't quite what happened, though.

[Professor Maria Tatar]

The name "Maria Tatar" was not unfamiliar to me. I have a number of her books, not just the beautiful editions of "annotated" fairy tales she's been putting out through W. W. Norton (I've got the Classic Fairy Tales, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Andersen volumes), but also some of her more scholarly works.

Her analyses are not exactly world-shaking, but she's undoubtedly well-informed. She certainly makes a nice change from Jack Zipes, whose books used to dominate the field in the eighties and nineties of last century: his doctrinaire denunciations of patriarchal and bourgeois values now sound a bit quaint, curious relics of a revolution that never quite happened. Sometimes a little bit boring is not the worst thing to be.

[Red Riding Hood: The Movie (2011)]

So anyway, Bronwyn and I dutifully trooped into town and got to the university wildly early and sneaked into the lecture theatre with the film crew way ahead of time to make sure of getting good seats where we could actually see the speaker.

This seems a bit weird, in retrospect, as the room was only ever about half full, but we were motivated by having heard how Tariq Ali had packed out three whole lecture theatres a week or so before - his words of wisdom being beamed from auditorium to auditorium by video link. I suppose that fairy tale experts are somewhat less topical, but then we New Zealanders are such slaves to the overseas reputation ...

In any case, there we sat, two rows from the front, like a couple of nerds, notebooks and pens at the ready, as Maria and her Auckland Uni minders swept in to check out the room and test the sound system.

That's when I first saw the cricket.

[Pinocchio kills the cricket]

I should explain that we were in one of the big lecture theatres under the university library, dug deep under ground, with no actual exits to the open air. The only way in and out was through the doors at the back - though there must be some service doors down at the front of the auditorium, since that's where it was.

Where he or she was, rather. I immediately conceived a fellow feeling for that cricket. He (or she) looked lost. And, really, one can hardly think of a worse place for a cricket to be than at the front of a concrete room full of hard-booted humans.

He was moving slowly, but with a certain determination, towards the podium, "as if he had something to say" (to quote from a poem by my old friend John O'Connor). Maria hadn't yet started to talk, but zero hour was imminent.

"Should we go down and rescue him?" muttered Bronwyn. (We generally know what the other one is thinking on these occasions).

"I don't think we've got time ... And what if he runs away?" I answered timorously. I guess I was afraid of being tackled to the ground by Auckland Uni security if I made what seemed like an unmotivated dash for the front of the room. Mainly, though, I didn't want to look like a fool in front of an entire audience of Auckland culture-vultures ... "Where would I take him, anyway?"

"You could carry him out to Albert Park," she persisted, but I think we both knew that it wasn't going to happen.

In any case, Misha Kavka had now stood up to make her introduction, and the event was underway ...

I hadn't seen the cricket for quite some time, so I'd begun to hope that he'd found some microscopic egress, invisible to mere humans. Now, though, he hove back into view, limping manfully past the podium in the opposite direction from the one he'd been going in before.

Maria was going on about how beautiful New Zealand was, how the air smelt so much better than the air in Boston, how friendly and welcoming everyone was (especially her hosts, whom she repeatedly invoked by name, as if to convince them that they really must have her to stay again ...)

After these polite opening noises, she swung into her real subject, which appeared to be (somewhat disappointingly) various recent literary and cinematic retellings of classical fairy tales - particularly Little Red Riding Hood.

From where I was sitting, to the right of the lectern, quite a bit of the stage was blocked from me, but now, suddenly, I saw the cricket again. Having traversed the room twice, first left, then right, he'd apparently decided that there was no escape this way. Instead he'd started on the long perilous journey to the exits at the back of the room, over all those leagues of carpet and dozens of stairs. He at least had the sense to cling to the wall, and it was there I saw him, climbing step after step, the little cricket that could.

Then he disappeared again. By now I'd lost any concentration I'd ever had for Maria Tatar's lecture (which was winding to a close, in any case). Instead I was lost in memories of singing, dancing Jiminy Cricket ("Always let your conscience be your guide") from the Disney version of Pinocchio ... In Carlo Collodi's original book there is a talking cricket, but it gets sconed by the terrifyingly amoral wooden puppet pretty early in the piece. It seems characteristic of contemporary sentimentality that his Disney avatar ended up as a kind of ubiquitous talking head for public service cartoons ...

As we filed out of the auditorium to the waiting "reception" (a bunch of tables laden with glasses of wine and nibbles, positioned to one side of the library foyer) I kept my eyes open for the cricket, but I couldn't see him.

"Let's get out of here," said Bronwyn. And that was that.

Kan Muftic: Her Scent

I think about that cricket sometimes. I hope he managed to get out too. But I suspect he didn't.

Manuel Augusto Dischinger Moura: The Wolf

The Puppet Oresteia

2011-05-02T09:41:00.015+12:00

[Cover Design: William T. Ayton]

Sorry for any of you who've been disappointed by the lack of action on this blog over the past few weeks. I really have not been idle, but there are just so many things to keep up with mid-semester.

The most fun thing I've been doing lately, though, is collaborating with a US-based British artist, Bill Ayton, on an ilustrated version of my Puppet Oresteia play.

[back cover blurb]

The vicissitudes this text has been through since I first came up with the idea a couple of years ago - writings, rewritings, overhauls etc. - are probably not at all surprising for those of you who move in theatrical circles. After a while it became clear to me, though, that the only meaningful existence this text could ever have (for me, at any rate) was as a text - rather than as some kind of viable script for performance.

Bronwyn had made an entire puppet theatre, complete with backdrops and little puppets, in the meantime, though. Never mind. It still looks great in the photographs:

Scene One: a bedroom off the garden
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]

Young Iphigenia (Gene) is explaining to her brother Orestes (Rusty) exactly why her wedding ceremomy is planned for the harbour at Aulis instead of at the palace at Mycenae as per usual. Is it because her betrothed, Achilles (aka Col. Killer), is anxious to get away to the Trojan war? Or are they cooking up something else for her down there ...

[Scene Two: in front of the jacuzzi (Mycenae)]
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]

Clytemnestra (Mummy) has rather a hard time acccounting for just what she and her longtime boyfriend Aegisthus (Uncle Al) have been doing to Agamemnon (Daddy) and his new girlfriend Cassandra (Candy) when Rusty stumbles in on them unexpectedly. Is revenge really always a dish best eaten cold?

[Scene Three: in front of the shrine at Tauris]
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]

Rusty's a junkie, haunted by demons, when he just happens to get shipwrecked by the very same shrine where Gene's been living all this time. But will she recognise him in time? The local custom is to sacrifice all strangers to the angry goddess, after all ...

It's not the most elegant of retellings, really. In fact it's as rough as guts in parts. But then that's kind of the point. The young girl whose puppet play this is is far more interested in her own family dynamics than she is in Ancient Greek tragedy ...

[William T. Ayton: A Strange Nest]

The wonderful thing about working with Bill has been watching a whole new dimension of the text swim into being as his various ink illustrations morphed and evolved. There are now twenty-four of them, accompanying twenty-odd pages of text, so there can be no question of calling this mere "illustration" - on the contrary, this has been a true collaboration.

[William T. Ayton: The Seashore at Tauris]

If you'd like to see what I mean, you'll have to go and check out the whole thing at lulu.com. This is my first venture into listing a book on that site, which has been another very interesting learning experience. I'm afraid that it's not yet on general sale, but I'll put up a link here as soon as it's available.

You can sample some of the choruses (all spoken by Cassandra / Candy) here.

[Update 20 May, 2011: I'm glad to be able to report that the book is now live on lulu: you can find it here, where it can be ordered for the pretty reasonable sum of $US 15 (plus postage).

Alternatively, you can order a copy from me for $NZ 20, and I'll even throw in the postage free (within New Zealand, that is) ...]

4 Poets & Dave

2011-04-08T07:25:00.007+12:00

[Adam Art Gallery (interior)

Sorry if this poster is a bit difficult to read: I've been trying to crop it down to just the middle bit, but the software is being recalcitrant: "image resolution too low," it tells me. Ah well, never mind ...

Anyway, the more vital point is what it says:

ADAM ART GALLERY
WEDNESDAY 13 APRIL 7 PM

4 POETS
& DAVE

POETRY AND FICTION
FROM THE IOWA WRITERS'
WORKSHOP VIA VICTORIA

ALAN FELSENTHAL
ALICE MILLER
DAVID FLEMING
LEE POSNA
THERESE LLOYD

[(12/4/11): My friend John van Houten has just written in with a recropped version of the image, so here goes:

Thanks, John]

Unfortunately I'll be stuck up here in Auckland and won't be able to make it, but for any of you who are in Wellington, I'd really recommend this reading.

I understand that Bill Manhire will be kicking off the intros, after which we'll go into the four poets and one fiction writer.

Alice Miller won the Landfall essay competition a couple of years ago, and I believe she's won the Katherine Mansfield short story competition too, which is a pretty impressive achievement. She's clearly as much at home in the realm of prose as that of poetry.

Thérèse Loyd was her successor as the winner of the IIML fellowship in Iowa. She is (in my opinion) a fantastic poet and performer. She's also my sister-in-law, but my admiration for her work did long predate the family involvement, I assure you. Any of you who want to follow up on her work will find a selection in New New Zealand Poets in Performance (AUP, 2008).

Her husband, Lee, also a very fine poet, is one of my favourite people on this planet - a truly gentle and dedicated soul. Lee and Thérèse met at Iowa, and it'd be great to hear them reading together again (I hosted a reading at Massey a couple of years ago with Lee, Thérèse, Sarah Broom, Michael Steven and Jen Crawford - a pretty stellar line-up, in retrospect), so I have some idea what it may be like.

I don't know the other two readers, so I can't comment on their work, but I'm sure they're of equal calibre. Any of you who know more might like to write in and tell us about it.

And, for any of you who don't know, the Adam Art Gallery is right in the quad at Victoria University. Yes, it's that one surrounded by rubble and construction equipment -- still open for business, though.

Good luck to all, then! I'm sure it will be a great occasion (and good on you Bill for continuing to lend your support to such events ...)

[Adam Art Gallery (exterior)

Reviews of Alt

2011-04-01T15:58:00.009+13:00

Lisa Samuels
[photograph: Tim Page]

Well, it's April Fool's day - and, sure enough, a review of my book of short stories Kingdom of Alt (Titus Books, 2010) has appeared on Landfall's new online site here ...

The review is by Lisa Samuels, who teaches poetry and creative writing at Auckland University, and I think it would have to be described as extremely charitable by any standards.

In fact, as Lisa conducted her forensic enquiry into the inner workings of the various stories in the collection, I did begin to expect some kind of flying boot to appear out of nowhere and crush my impertinence forever. Not so, though. She ends as judiciously as she began - and to anyone who knows Lisa's fierce regard for accuracy and truth in all she says and does, this is quite a tribute.

I also have to register a strong vote in favour of the new Landfall Review Online here, too. it's been very frustrating, for a long time now, to see excellent books appearing here in New Zealand which can't get a decent review for love or money. Quote Unquote, Mark Pirie's mid-period JAAM, the pander - all those journals which aspired to cover the more interesting stuff appearing here have either bitten the dust or changed their formats. Yes, reviews are complicated to organise and expensive to commission. Congratulations to David Eggleton, Landfall's new helmsman, then, for getting this new initiative up and running. Even if my book had been slated (which it wasn't), it'd still great to see some solid discursive critical writing out there, easily accessible on the internet.

That's not to say that I agree with everything Lisa says, mind you ... but how else are you going to find out how your writing means to other people than through a comprehensive discussion of this sort by a careful and honest critic? What you think is perfectly clear may not turn out to be so ...

brief 41 Launch (19/1/11)
[photograph: Michael Arnold]

The other substantive review of Kingdom of Alt which has appeared in the past couple of months was in brief 41 (2010): 103-5, edited by Richard von Sturmer. The reviewer, one Elmar Ludwig, characterised himself in the "notes on Contributors" at the end of the magazine as having:

... sold his second-hand bookshop in Hamburg in December 2007. He then decided to spend the next ten years in ten different countries. In 2008 he lived in Yokohama, Japan; in 2009 in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil; and in 2010 in Auckland, New Zealand. Next year he will relocate to Israel. His choice of countries is based on a mathematical equation. [107-8]

briefers
[photograph: Michael Arnold]

As the immortal Rabbie Burns once observed: "Would the good Lord the gift would gie us / To see ourselves as others see us" (or words to that effect). One of the most interesting things about Elmar Ludwig's review - to me, at any rate - was the fact that virtually everyone seemed convinced that I'd somehow fabricated his very existence in order to review the book myself ...

Even my publisher, the redoubtable Brett Cross, seemed to have a few doubts on the score. It's true that my fiction is a bit on the tricksy side, and I wouldn't swear not to have invented the odd alter-ego from time to time, but to review my own book? No, honestly not.

Mr Ludwig does sound a bit unlikely, on the surface, but anyone who knows Richard von Sturmer knows that he'd be about as likely to endorse George W. Bush for a Nobel Peace Prize as to collaborate in a literary hoax of this sort ...

You can check out parts of the Ludwig review at my bibliography site here. Elmar Ludwig begins by expressing doubts about my knowledge of contemporary Korean fiction. In this he is quite correct, I should say.

Lisa Samuels begins similarly by wondering if I'm ignorant of J. G. Ballard. There I would have to say that she's less justified, however. The obituary I wrote for him on this very site should constitute evidence of my reverence for the Master's works (though it's true that I haven't actually reread The Atrocity Exhibition all that recently ...)

[J. G. Ballard: The Terminal Collection
(Selected Cover Art: 1978-1984)

On Not Writing Disaster Poems

2011-03-16T07:48:00.011+13:00

[Earthquake / Tsunami (Japan 11/3/11)]

I was walking down the corridor yesterday when one of my colleagues stopped me to ask, "Written any poems lately?"

Rather a surprising question, I thought. Practically unprecedented, in fact.

"No, not really," I replied.

"I'd have thought there'd be quite a lot to write about at the moment," she continued.

"Yeah, I suppose so."

It was only then that I understood what she was getting at. "Disaster" = "disaster poem" / "Multiple disasters" = "suite of disaster poems".

"Where," she was asking (in effect), "is your Christchurch poem? Your Japanese earthquake poem? Maybe even your Libyan insurrection poem?"

There aren't any, I'm afraid.

I certainly don't want to legislate for other people, since a brief sampling of the blogosphere would reveal a number of Canterbury & Japanese earthquake poems already out there, and who am I to say if they're good or bad individually? "It's all just a matter of your opinion," as my Creative Writing students keep on reminding me. I do think it's an interesting matter to discuss, though.

I remember on the morning of 9/11, waking up to the news of the fall of the Twin Towers with the somewhat shamefaced realisation that I'd actually been at a poetry reading the evening before. Counting back through the time difference, I was glad to work out that I hadn't actually been intoning stanzas at the moment of the calamity - not that that would matter at all to anyone else - but had been asleep instead.

Who cares what I was doing? But somehow it mattered to me. I felt almost physically nauseated at the thought of standing there smugly self-promoting while other people were dying in flames. Irrational, really, but there you are ...

The only 9/11 poem that sticks in my mind is Amiri Baraka's ("Someone Blew Up America"), and not entirely for good reasons. It was those lines "Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion / And cracking they sides at the notion" which caused most of the problems, as I recall - though my memory had transformed the last bit into "laughing they asses off" ... Never mind. The point of his poem is clear enough.

For weeks and months afterwards, though, you couldn't go anywhere without a shower of 9/11 poems dropping around you like confetti. Somewhat perversely (or so it must have seemed), I determined not to write any. I know such decisions are generally futile - one is immediately struck with an idea for a verse epic on the subject. In this case, though, they've mostly faded on the page.

It seems obvious in retrospect that there was something spurious, second-hand, video-linked about the whole idea of writing verses about 9/11. I felt even at the time that one would need some exceptionally cogent personal link or angle to attempt it at all. Amiri Baraka's certainly fulfilled that criterion - with a vengeance. It was undeniably heartfelt, whatever else it was.

How can I explain what probably sounds like a rather pointless set of prescriptions about when (I think) one should and shouldn't write poetry (or, rather, publish it - an important distinction)? There's a fine section in Huckleberry Finn where Huck (or, rather, Mark Twain: the authorial mask wears pretty thin at this point) is describing the poetic efforts of one Emmeline Grangerford:

She warn't particular, she could write about anything you choose to give to write about, just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her "tribute" before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker - the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was Whistler. She warn't ever the same, after that; she never complained, but she kind of pined away and did not live long. [ch. xvii]

[Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn (1884)]

And what were Emmeline's poems like? The one Huck quotes, "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd", is certainly a stirring piece:

... Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly,
By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.

All I can say is that you would have to go a lot broader nowadays for this to stand out as conspicuously bad poetry. Emmeline understands metre and rhyme better than most. She has a certain tendency towards the bathetic, but then that's hard to gauge at the best of times.

If you want to see a lot more of this sort of stuff - far less accomplished technically, far clumsier and more naive in subject-matter - go to the obituary page of the NZ Herald (or most other daily newspapers). The funny thing is: I adore the poems I read on the back page of the Herald. I love the way that the people who write them often stop looking for rhymes after a while and just stop any old where. I admire the way in which they always go for the half-remembered scriptural / hymn-tune phrase rather than any concrete or living expression.

There's a sort of blunt-force trauma behind the words they seem to have literally wrenched out of themselves to express the sheer depth of their passionate feelings of loss. Very few of them resort to quotation from more accomplished bards. Most appear to feel they have to go it alone, through the shaky quagmire of five or ten lines of rhymed (or vaguely rhythmic) verse.

What Twain deplores in Emmeline, I feel, is her slick facility with words. She may not be entirely in control of her medium yet, but you can see that she had a great future ahead of her compiling the nineteenth-century equivalent of greeting-cards.

So what's all this got to do with 9/11?

I remember a few weeks afterwards seeing a TV interview with one of the survivors, who'd actually managed to get out of (I think) the second building just before it collapsed. The most striking thing about the whole event, for this woman, was the fact that she'd been personally rung up by Bruce Springsteen, who'd spoken to her for almost twenty minutes on the subject of her sensations and impressions during her journey down those smoke-filled stairs.

Twenty minutes talking to the Boss! What a thrill! And, sure enough, a few months later a Springsteen album was duly churned out, replete with husky, breathy phrases about "stairways filled with smoke / can hardly breathe / how'm I gonna get out?" Nice to see how the Master is able to achieve these striking effects ...

Now, I'm sure all the proceeds were donated to charity, and I don't doubt Mr. Springsteen's honest good intentions, but I just can't bring myself to take his "9/11" album very seriously. Why? Because he's just a bigger, slightly more professional version of Emmeline Grangerford, so far as I'm concerned. Shutting up would be the best thing he could do about 9/11, and that goes for most of the rest of us too. If you were trapped in there and got out, or know someone who was, or lost a friend, those might (to me) constitute legitimate prompts (or excuses) for penning some verses on the subject. If not, don't waste my time. I can watch the TV as well as you can.

One of the first pieces of writing preserved by the youthful Eric Blair (later to become famous as George Orwell) was an Ode on the Death of General Kitchener, drowned when his warship was sunk by a mine in 1916. He was not alone. Just about everyone in Britain seems to have found this watery death sufficiently striking to deluge the newspapers with similar poems (mostly along the lines of "we will fight on to avenge you ...")

I don't think Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen bothered, though - they had more important things to write about. Or perhaps one should say that they had more to think about. Facile verses full of patriotic cliches were, in that year of the Somme and Verdun, the last thing that anyone needed to hear. Similarly, a few less "Yahda yahda yahda 9/11 yahda yahda yahda I'm so angry yahda yahda yahda & kinda blue at the same time" poems might have provided a bit more room for thinking about whether it would be such a great idea to ... start a new war in the Middle East. Don't you think?

Perhaps it's foolish of me to think of poems as having any particular importance for anyone anytime when it comes to "serious" issues of politics and history (or natural disaster, for that matter). But, foolish or not, that's what I believe. It's for that reason that I'm not particularly into people churning out the equivalent of "Lord Kitchener is dead / the mighty warrior lies cold / with the coiling fishes / every hair of his moustache we shall avenge / on the dastardly foe" poems every time some new sensation comes up on the evening news.

It's not in the least that I have no sympathy for the tragic events in Japan and Christchurch (or NY in 2001, for that matter). It's just that I have nothing to say about them beyond what's being pumped out nineteen yards to the minute by every news medium known to man - until the next disaster sends all the reporters jetting off somewhere else. It's perhaps a little exigent of me, but I'm afraid I really do judge people as much by what they don't write as by what they do.

Second-hand emotions are, by and large, easy to access and not particularly difficult to express. Getting across something of how you actually feel about your life in this world is on a completely different order of complexity.

[Bruce Springsteen: The Rising (2002)]

Moon Man Blues

2011-03-05T09:43:00.012+13:00

Christchurch Earthquake I (4/9/10)

I've been reading an interesting book about old abandoned colonies and outposts of progress. In it, I came across the curious fact that most scientists in the seventeenth century were of the opinion that precious minerals (such as gold, silver and gems) were likely to be found closer to the surface in the tropics. Why? Because they'd been drawn up by the magnetic influence of the sun. It was, after all, well known that the fertility of the soil near the equator was also due to this quasi-sexual attraction between earth and sky.

I'm not quite sure what authority Ed Wright (author of Ghost Colonies: Failed Utopias, Forgotten Exiles and Abandoned Outposts of Empire. Sydney: Pier 9 Books, 2009) has for making this assertion. His book is a little short on referencing, nor is his bibliography much help. I do tend to believe him, though. It makes sense - stands to reason, in fact. It accords with what I understand of the theory of the Humours and the Great Chain of Being and all that good stuff. And, after all, it's not really that nonsensical, even with all we know today. The sun does exert an influence on the earth - it even affects the tides (though not as much as our much closer neighbour the moon does, of course).

However, most of us would probably dispute the idea that gold is more likely to be found in the tropics. What about the Klondike and the great Alaskan gold rush? What about the mineral deposits of Siberia, mined by so many hundreds of thousands of hapless Gulag prisoners? The reasons for ore and precious stones being further or nearer from the surface of the earth are many and various, and understanding them would probably involve at least some knowledge of geology, plate tectonics, and a number of other sciences. It's called "evidence". Without it you don't have a case.

Or, then again, you could just grab a bent stick or an old clothes hanger and go dowsing, now, couldn't you? You might even find something. It stands to reason. Doesn't it?

I'm no stranger to occultist mumbo-jumbo. It's a subject that interests me a good deal. I've probably read more books on pendulums and dowsing sticks and all the rest than most true believers. Far more than I should have, that's for sure. So don't take me as some wowser, determined to expunge the astrology column from the daily newspaper and to forbid fortune-telling in public places. But I do draw the line at the Moon Man, I'm afraid.

The Moon Man

Who's the Moon Man? Well, for those of you who don't reside anywhere near the earthquake-stricken city of Christchurch, his real name is Ken Ring, and over the past couple of weeks he's become a household name in New Zealand because of his (alleged) ability to predict seismic disturbances.

The facts appear to be (according to John Campbell, who's got into very hot water indeed for daring to dispute the oracle) that Ken Ring said, after last year's September earthquake in Christchurch (which he unfortunately failed to predict - by any laws of evidence except those of a card-carrying Ringian), that he felt the aftershocks would tail off by the end of November. They didn't. He then explained that he didn't mean little aftershocks, which had tailed off by November (they hadn't), but only big earthquakes which caused harm to people and property, and that there was at least one of them still to come. I don't quite get how all that follows, but let's let it ride. That big one would strike on or about the 20th of March 2011.

Now, since the seismologists studying the September quake had been saying all along that there was a strong possibility of at least one very large aftershock, which would not reach the magnitude of the original earthquake but which might cause considerable damage, this hardly seems very prescient. Especially as the big one, when it came, did not arrive on 20th of March, but almost a month before, on February 22nd. And, as predicted by the seismologists, it was almost a point lower on the Richter scale (albeit far closer to the surface, hence the far greater damage and loss of life caused by it).

Christchurch Earthquake II (22/2/11)

Ken Ring's uncanny precision as a prophet tends to boil down, in practice, to generalised pronouncements that there's a greater risk of earthquakes and general seismic (or tidal) disturbances for roughly one week to either side of the new moon - and the full moon. As John Campbell pointed out, this covers the entire month.

As for his famous (or infamous) "Valentine's Day Tweet", in what sense does predicting a "potential earthquake time for the planet between 15th-25th" with a slight narrowing down of scope to "especially 18th for Christchurch, +/- about 3 days" for a city which had suffered three thousand or so aftershocks since September require any great acumen? And how does getting the day of the "big one" wrong (and not even within your scope of variation, albeit quite close to it) inspire such unreasoning awe?

The processes he uses to obtain such accuracy are rather shadowy, but - as Ring sagely remarked during the TV3 interview - nobody requires a tertiary degree of the Captain of the All Blacks, so why should he himself need one (or any scientific knowledge or credentials whatsoever) to act as an earthquake predictor?

Campbell certainly lost his cool during the interview. Wonder of wonders, it seems that he actually thought that offering untrained weathermen such as Ken Ring such excessive airtime to state their views (basically tantamount to astrology) was undesirable in the middle of a national emergency, with a frightened population ready to listen to anyone who offered them certainty.

Mind you, there's an obvious paradox here. As so many have already remarked, why offer Ring time on your own news programme if you don't think he should be given more free publicity? It's a fair point, and I suppose it might even be held to justify Campbell's abject on-air apology to Ring the day after their argument / interview.

What's truly fascinating to me, though, is the amount of response to the TV3 segment which concentrates on John Campbell's alleged "rudeness", and the paucity of any particular feelings of indignation at Ken Ring's sheer breathtaking chutzpah in using this appalling tragedy to boost his own profile and his own methods of predicting the future. Here's one fairly typical comment:

"JC acted like an arrogant opinionated jackass. What was meant to be an interview turned into John's personal vitriolic attack on Mr Ring's theory, interrupting and over talking Mr Ring every time he was trying to answer a question," said a commentator called Gareth on TV3's website.
- Stuff.co.nz

Note how Ken Ring gets the proud title "Mister" while John Campbell is reduced to a pair of initials ... "Mr Ring's theory" indeed! Campbell constructed his questions purely from quotes from Ken Ring's published writings. How "arrogant" and "opinionated" of him! If it's opinionated to think that the earth goes around the sun and that water flows downhill, then I fear I too am an arrogant round-earther. But pax vobiscum, Gareth, in any case. I can't help feeling that you're acting like a bit of a jackass yourself, but hey, since when did that become illegal in a free society?

Like Nostradamus, and so many other successful prophets before him, Ring has mastered the art of wrapping his pronouncements in the mistiest and most imprecise language, susceptible to almost any interpretation one wishes to put on them. In his particular case, though, it takes a pseudo-scientific form: plus / minus various arbitrary numbers of days; vague estimates of the type or magnitude of the event to be expected.

And, as we all know when we stop to think about it for a moment, if you make enough scattershot claims, over a long enough time, one of them is almost bound to come true - or kind of, anyway.

I'm happy to be schooled by any of you out there who are better informed. Can anyone quote an accurate prediction - i.e. one which was actually completely correct in terms of the exact day (not plus-minus three, five, or seven days either side), and exact type (not disturbance of a tidal nature = earthquake, high tide, unseasonable bird migration etc.) of event - made by Ken Ring, ever?

I may well be wrong, but the impression from here is:

Ken Ring did not predict the September earthquake in Christchurch
Ken Ring did not predict the huge February aftershock in Christchurch
On the other hand,he did predict a tailing-off in aftershocks last year which did not take place
& he has predicted an earthquake for March 20th, which may or may not take place. I'm not holding my breath.

I do think that John Campbell should be censured for allowing Ring on his programme in the first place, but I also believe that a bouquet would be a more appropriate response than the various brickbats he's been handed for his "bad manners" ever since. Ought one to be polite to timewasters like Ring at a time like this?

Watch the interview again, and note how Ring evades every one of Campbell's questions, how he constantly sidesteps every quoted example of erroneous reasoning or faulty mathematics. He relies on looking like a harmless, frightened old codger - and he may well be sincerely deluded into thinking that he can help. I can't help feeling dubious about the way he's succeeded in publicising himself at the expense of so many others' suffering, though.

Ring in Rain

"Give Ken a fair go" say the comments on Redneck Central (otherwise known as the YahooXtra newssite). Oh, I know there'll always be another snake-oil salesman out there, whether he's called Cagliostro, Nostradamus, Anne Elk ("This is the theory that is mine") - or George W. Bush (remember those WMDs?). Don't waste your sympathy on them. The experts may well have got it wrong, but at least their evidence is out there in the open and susceptible to examination. Ken Ring and his ilk rely on trade secrets and invocations of the esoteric arts to obtain their results. Why? Because they know the moment they open up their boxes of tricks they'll be laughed out of town.

11 Views of Auckland

2011-02-04T10:22:00.003+13:00

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Albany Campus
Massey University

are happy to invite you
to celebrate
the publication of

11 Views of Auckland

An anthology of essays
by members of the College

Volume 10 in our ongoing Monograph Series
Social and Cultural Studies

The book will be launched by
Massey University’s Vice-Chancellor
The Hon Steve Maharey

At a special launch price of $15
[RRP: $20]

In the Study Centre Staff Lounge,
East Precinct, Albany Campus, Auckland
on Thursday 17th February
from 5.00-6.30 p.m.

For directions please visit this page.

For catering purposes please RSVP to
Leanne Menzies
By Friday 11th February, 2011