Showing posts with label Mike Johnson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mike Johnson. Show all posts

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Mike Johnson Triple Booklaunch (5/10/23)


Mike Johnson: Selected Poems, ed. Jack Ross (2023)



Mike Johnson & Leila Lees: Sketches (2023)



Mike Johnson: Afterworld (2023)

Mike Johnson:
Afterworld / Sketches / Selected Poems


Celebrated New Zealand novelist and poet Mike Johnson is having a triple booklaunch on Waiheke Island, where he lives, on Thursday next week. This biblioblitz of material includes a new novella, a new book of poems, and a substantial Selected Poems (edited by yours truly), sampling from his work in that medium over the last four decades.

Unfortunately I'm unable to be there, but I'm sure it will be a riproaring event - Murray Edmond will be launching the novella, and there will be discussion and readings from Mike and his collaborator Leila Lees, as well.

The details are as follows:

Afterworld, a novella, will be launched on Oct 5th, 6.30 – 7.30 pm, Waiheke Library, 133/131 Ocean View Road, Oneroa, part of our triple book launch which also includes Sketches, with Leila Lees, and Selected Poems edited by Jack Ross.

Afterworld is a novella length work of magical realism with a whodunit element. The plot follows a ghost who ends up in a hut on a New Zealand mountain. As the ghost seeks to understand their life and death, fragments of their past are remembered. Contending identities, times and events emerge.

Sketches contains lines caught on the fly. Poems which capture and celebrate the momentary, provisional nature of existence. Here we find the natural world, and matters of the heart, caught as they happen in language both natural and precise. They are beautifully complemented by the drawing and sketches of Leila Lees.

‘The immense complexity of human relationships, social, sexual and everyday are at the heart of much of Mike’s best poetry. However, there’s an almost equal pull towards the empyrean: the cosmic mysteries of nature and the visible world.' - Jack Ross, editor of Mike Johnson's Selected Poems (1983-2023).

Where: Waiheke Library, 133/131 Ocean View Road, Oneroa

When: Thursday 5 October, 6.30 to 7:30 pm



Mike Johnson: Three Books (21/8/23)


Mike himself comments:
I'm excited to have three new books to launch. These projects came together at the same time.

Sketches – Facebook readers might remember the Wednesday Poems that ran from June 2019 to June 2021, accompanied by Leila Lees' illustrations.

Afterworld – A novella which was also posted on Facebook, over 21 posts and finishing on Oct 19th 2022. Here it is thoroughly revised.

Selected Poems – Edited by Jack Ross, a selection of my poems since 1983, including Sketches.

NB: For further information, please go here



Katy Soljak: Mike Johnson (27/9/23)


Saturday, December 05, 2020

Mike Johnson: Driftdead Launch (Waiheke, 4/12/20)



Mike Johnson: Book Launch (4/12/20)


Here's my launch speech for Mike Johnson's new novel, at the Waiheke Public Library in Oneroa:

"Now that she is out of danger, the librarian starts to shake. 'Damn you to hell,' she says under her breath to the First Person. 'You nearly lost me. What if I'd turned into one of them? What would you have done then?
Of course I can't answer her. It's not my job to intervene. Sometimes she treats me like a deity, the way the reverend thinks of God. I am her First Person, and therefore all-powerful. Of course that is not true. I am not the author of her being. She is. But when she gets frightened she turns on me and accuses me of all kinds of crimes.
She says no more, but I'm not fooled. This issue lies in wait for us further up the plot line. I don't have to be the First Person to see that." [155]




At some point in their careers, most writers dream of attempting the big one: the project to end all projects, the book which will allow them to use everything they've learned so far: in the case of fiction-writers, some version of that mythic entity called the Great New Zealand novel.

Driftdead is certainly Mike Johnson's most ambitious work to date. It's certainly the longest. In it, he distills a lot of his previous thinking about the true nature of small town life, his fears for the future, and - indeed - about the nature of life and death itself.

If I were forced to define it, I guess I would still call it SF: not sci-fi, mind you, but the other sense of that acronym: speculative fiction. It's set in the future - how near or far away is debatable, but certainly some cataclysm or series of catastrophes has taken place, leaving parts of the world desert and erasing much of our machine civilisation.

The setting is New Zealand. The novel doesn't actually say so, mind you, but the name 'Keatown' suggests it very strongly. As do the frequent references to State Highway 6, which - if I'm not mistaken - runs from Blenheim to Westport, then down the West Coast to Haast.


State Highway 6 (New Zealand)
"You can always turn to the mythical First Person Singular and appeal to be released from your lowly third-person subjective status into the generality of the driftdead, the 'they' and the 'them'. The grey murmuring. The mass shuffle." [377]

Nor is this geographic orientation irrelevant to some of the other themes in Mike's novel. The driftdead - 'dead like zombies, but with no interest in eating human flesh, and driven by a force beyond hunger,' as the blurb puts it - come down the coastal highway from the north, and move on through Keatown towards the south. Nothing will stop them: not fences, fires, or guns. Even when pushed into the sea they can still be seen, unbreathing, making their way southwards.

You wouldn't be much of a local if you didn't notice how precisely this reverses the traditional movement of our dead souls northwards, to Cape Reinga and their final leap out into the ocean towards Hawaiki.

The nature of these driftdead occupies much of the novel. I don't want to introduce any avoidable plot-spoilers here, but it's worth nothing that - like zombies - they are physical beings rather than ghosts or shades; also that virtually every one of them is carrying a single object of desire: a mirror, a book, a photograph - something (presumably) whose desirability outlasts all other forms of memory.

That's not to say that there aren't ghosts and other supernatural phenomena in the book - it might as easily be labelled a supernatural thriller as a work of speculative fiction. It's both, in fact. But that's not all it is. There are elements of magical realism in there, too.



Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967 / 1970)
"The abrupt cessation of the roar of words leaves her feeling giddy and ill. It's one thing to stop writing, for her Chronicles to hit a wall, but this sensation of walking through her library as through a forest of dead leaves is something else. Perhaps she can bear her own silence, but the silence of the world staggers her. She is too afraid to pick up a book in case all the words have deserted it, and there is nothing but blank pages. a library full of blank pages, all the words gone south.
In which case, she might as well do the same thing.
I have to exercise my right as the First Person and step in. I have managed to keep out of it so far, but now duty calls. There is a solution, reluctant as I am to suggest it. In her darkest hour, I come to her with my solution. That gap, that bleeding gash in the narrative, she could fill with her own invention. She could make it up." [241]

As I read Mike's meticulous inventory of Keatown, its various groups of inhabitants - the drunken mayor, the psycho pump-jockey, the Indian supermarket owner, the crowd of itinerant children (in fact one of my suggestions for the second edition would be a list of characters appended at the back, like the ones in old Russian novels) - I was reminded above all of Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo, the imaginary village at the heart of his classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

As in Macondo, ghosts wander in and out of the houses as readily as people. And, as in García Márquez's Colombia, the villagers are slaves - mostly without knowing it - to the material interests of the moneymen: the companies and corporations far to the north.

Mike's novel is political, too, make no mistake about that: the politics of colonialism, of dispossession, of Māori and Pākehā history, all carefully recorded by the librarian in her 'Chronicles of Keatown', a very self-conscious attempt at an objective historiography of the region. And she, too, whether she likes it or not, is continuously influenced by genre models:
Her mind flounders around for literary references to which she can cling. The atmosphere is Edgar Allan Poe, the territory is the Twilight Zone. Not bad. The Frights provided by Lovecraft, picked up by Stephen King by way of Charles Dickens. [87]
She's not the only source for the complex backstory of Mike Johnson's narrative, though: there is also her omnipresent imaginary friend, the first person singular:
At the same time, ghostlike, she senses the presence of another first person, the source of all narrative authority. In such moments I am very near her. I can hear her short, shallow breaths. She imagines she can hear mine. She imagines she can feel me in the muted clickety-click of the keyboard. A presence very near yet very far, and hence a riddle. A presence that seems to permeate all points of view. [140]
Is this invisible presence Mike himself? It would be naive to suppose so. So we're forced to suppose at least three levels of narrators to get through before we can reach the bedrock of actual events. Whatever those may be.



Mervyn Peake: Gormenghast (1946-59)
"Just as Sirocco talks to his lizard, and Akona will talk to her ancestors, and the baron talks to his Arya Tara, and Annanda will talk to his absent friend Suneal, and Flay will talk to his shotgun, the librarian talks to me, or thinks she does. In her mind I am this shady, sovereign character she calls The First Person." [96]

Driftdead is Mike Johnson's War and Peace. It's a major novel, written by a consummate artist at the top of his form. Or perhaps I should say his Gormenghast, because in many ways the tone of his work is more reminiscent of Mervyn Peake's late, baroque masterpiece.

What does it all mean? Well, I can't really help you with that. You'll have to read all the way to the end even to start to understand the novel's unsettling climax. It still perplexes me, and I find myself going back to it again and again. All I can say is that the game is worth the candle. Mike's vision of the future, our future, is certainly not an optimistic one, but it would be hard to deny its importance.

There's a lot more to say about this book, and perhaps some day soon I'll get a chance to say it. For the moment, though, all I can say that I envy those of you who are about to start reading for the first time the saga of Keatown. And for those of you who've already read it, I'd like to tip you some kind of conspiratorial wink, and an urgent request for your own view of what precisely you think this most baffling of parables denotes - the end of Western hegemony? The return of the Collective Unconscious? Or (in H. G. Wells's famous phrase) the recurrent nightmares of a Mind at the End of its Tether?

Buy it. Read it. Now. Then we can talk.



Mike Johnson: Driftdead (2020)
Blurb:

At the end of the world, Keatown is already struggling for existence. Then come the driftdead! Dead like zombies, but with no interest in eating human flesh, and driven by a force beyond hunger.
"Driftdead is as canny a book about the uncanny as you would want to read. Past and future stream; our catastrophic present is registered with hallucinatory clarity: haunting characters from a small Aotearoan town speak the rhapsodies of their passing from a dreamland where beauty and horror orbit each other in the eye of an incorrigibly domestic storm. It is disturbing and salutary in equal measure; philosophically astute; a slow burn which generates terrific suspense. Mike Johnson has written a classic."
- Martin Edmond.





Launch times & dates (4-8/12/2020)


Thursday, December 12, 2019

Mike Johnson & Leila Lees - Booklaunch on Waiheke Saturday 14th December



Mike Johnson & Leila Lees: Ladder With No Rungs



Booklaunch

Mike Johnson & Leila Lees:
Ladder With No Rungs
Community Room - Waiheke Library.
Saturday 14th December @3 pm.

ALL WELCOME




Mike asked me to come along on Saturday to say a few words about his new book, but unfortunately I'm unable to make it. Once before, in 2007, I did make the trip to Waiheke to speak about one of his books of poetry, and this is what I had to say on that occasion.

That was a lot of years ago, though. Since then his rate of production has, if anything, increased - as you can see from the bibliography I've included below. Nor has he allowed himself to be pigeon-holed as a novelist who occasionally writes poetry (or, for that matter, as a poet who's gone over to prose ...). Both modes seem equally natural to Mike, and he's continued to produce distinguished work in each genre.

I'm told that there's a substantial new novel in the offing, and I'm very much looking forward to reading that. In the meantime, though, this latest book of poems seems quite ambitious enough. The poems themselves are short, "haiku style" verses charting the way of a soul in the world and (in particular) through relationships with nature and with each other.



Ladder With No Rungs: Blurb


Leila Lees' graphic works do indeed seem like the perfect accompaniment to Mike's words. The book would be well worth having just for those, in fact. There's yet another technical innovation - albeit quite a light-hearted one - to recommend it, though. I'm referring to the final section, where lines and words surplus to the main text have been presented in a graphic extravaganza of colour and experimental form.

This is what Mike had to say about this part of the book on Facebook (25/9/19):



Ladder With No Rungs: Rejects (1)

What qualifies a poem as a reject? My next book of poetry, LADDER WITH NO RUNGS is in preparation, with the last section entitled REJECTS. Instead of the rejects going into the trash, I suggested to Daniela Gast, our book designer, that she 'mangle them up' in contrast to the rest of the book. Like you'd screw up a piece of paper. And what a wonderful result she achieved. So these are my words, suitably mangled, Leila Lees' art work, suitably mangled, and the work of Daniela, Mangler in Chief. Enjoy!


Ladder With No Rungs: Rejects (2)


I hope that everyone who's able to attend has a wonderful time. I'm sure they will. Though I can't be there in person, I'll certainly be lifting a glass to Mike and Leila in spirit. This is probably the most delightful books of poems I've read this year - moreover, it's a truly collaborative work between artist, designer and poet, something much rarer than it should be.

Lasavia Publishing is quitting the year 2019 in style. Bring on 2020, and the bumper crop of new books it no doubt has in store for us!

on the seventh hour they lay down
to rest
their words hung in the ruby air

first ever dawn chorus
making a fuss

[Ladder With No Rungs, p.24]




Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson

Select Bibliography:


    Poetry:

  1. The Palanquin Ropes. Wellington: Voice Press, 1983.
  2. From a Woman in Mt Eden Prison & Drawing Lessons. Auckland: Hard Echo Press, 1984.
  3. Standing Wave. Auckland: Hard Echo Press, 1985.
  4. Treasure Hunt. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996.
  5. The Vertical Harp: Selected Poems of Li He. Auckland: Titus Books, 2006.
  6. To Beatrice Where We Crossed The Line. Auckland: Second Avenue Press, 2014.
  7. Two Lines and a Garden. Illustrated by Leila Lees. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2017.
  8. Ladder with No Rungs. Illustrated by Leila Lees. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019.

  9. Fiction:

  10. Lear: the Shakespeare Company Plays Lear at Babylon. Auckland: Hard Echo Press, 1986.
    • Lear: the Shakespeare Company Plays Lear at Babylon. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2016.
  11. Anti Body Positive. Auckland: Hard Echo Press, 1988.
    • Zombie in a Space Suit. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2018.
  12. Lethal Dose. Auckland: Hard Echo Press, 1991.
    • Lethal Dose. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019.
  13. Foreigners. Auckland: Penguin, 1991.
  14. Dumbshow. Dunedin: Longacre Press, 1996.
  15. Counterpart. Auckland: Voyager, 2001.
  16. Stench. Christchurch: Hazard Press, 2004.
  17. Travesty. Illustrated by Darren Sheehan. Auckland: Titus Books, 2010.
  18. Hold my Teeth While I Teach you to Dance. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2014.
  19. Back in the Day: Tales from NZ’s Own Paradise Island. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2015.
  20. Confessions of a Cockroach / Headstone. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2017.

  21. For children:

  22. Taniwha. Illustrated by Jennifer Rackham. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2015.

  23. Non-fiction:

  24. The Angel of Compassion. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2014.






Leila Lees

Leila Lees

Select Bibliography:


  1. Mike Johnson: Two Lines and a Garden. Illustrated by Leila Lees. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2017.
  2. Into the World: A Handbook for Mystical and Shamanic Practice. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019.
  3. Mike Johnson: Ladder with No Rungs. Illustrated by Leila Lees. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019.




Thursday, August 01, 2019

My new book Ghost Stories is available today:



Cover image: Graham Fletcher (by courtesy of the artist) /
Cover design: Daniela Gast (2019)


The official publication date for my new collection of short fiction, Ghost Stories, was yesterday, 31st July 2019.

It's been a great pleasure to work on it with the team at Lasavia Publishing on Waiheke Island: editor Rowan Sylva, designer Daniela Gast, publisher Mike Johnson, as well as the other members of the collective. I also owe a big thank you to Graham Fletcher for the use of his cover image, and (as always) to my lovely wife Bronwyn for invaluable advice at every stage of the process. Thanks, too, to Tracey Slaughter for the use of that blurb quote.

So how do you obtain a copy of the book? That is, after all, the $64,000 question. If you wish to order one online, it's available from any of the following websites:
Amazon.com
RRP: $US 15.00 (+ postage)

Amazon.co.uk
RRP: £UK 12.28 (+ postage)

Book Depository
RRP: $NZ 29.44 (free postage)

Wheelers Books
RRP: $NZ 49.50
As usual, the Book Depository seems to offer the best deal, but remember that copies can also be purchased at a discounted rate, $20, at the Waiheke Market, or (for that matter) directly from Lasavia Publishing:
Lasavia Publishing
37 Crescent Rd West
Ostend
Waiheke Island
Auckland 1081
https://www.lasaviapublishing.com/
Lasavia Publishing: Editorial

RRP: $NZ 20.00 (+ postage)
We're planning a big launch party later in the year, which I'll describe in detail here on the blog once all the arrangements are finalised, so - if you prefer - you could wait until then. But I know what eager beavers some of you readers can be!






So what exactly is the book about? The easiest thing might just be to quote from the blurb:
David Foster Wallace once wrote that 'every love story is a ghost story.' Not all of the stories in Jack Ross’s new collection are about love, but certainly all of them concern ghosts – imaginary, real, or entirely absent. As it turns out, there are even stranger things in the world: from haunted hotel rooms in Beijing to drunken poetry readings on Auckland’s North Shore. Or perhaps, as the Mayan prophets foresaw, the world really did end on the 21st December, 2012, and 'all bets are off, all the rules have changed, and – new Adams, new Eves – we have to find the courage somehow to start naming the strange new things we see.'

'There’s no one in New Zealand literature exploring the dark ways of narrative with the alchemical touch of Jack Ross, and his gift of spinning tales which jump "from track to track on the time-space continuum" never fails to leave me exhilarated, in outright awe'.
- Tracey Slaughter

Jack Ross works as a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University. He is the author of five poetry collections, four novels and three books of short fiction. His novel The Annotated Tree Worship was highly commended in the 2018 NZ Heritage Book Awards. He has also edited numerous books, anthologies, and literary journals, including brief, Landfall, and Poetry New Zealand. He blogs at http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.

And here's a - slightly more informative - abstract I composed to send to my masters at Massey University, who insist on full details of every publication by their staff:
This is a set of ten short stories, with two essays: 'The Classic New Zealand Ghost Story,' an introduction to the collection as a whole; and 'Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences,' an account of the alleged attempts at communication from the other side by various dead members of the Society for Psychical Research in the early years of last century. The stories, too, are grouped around the common theme of ghosts and ghost stories, but in some rather unexpected ways. Two ('The Scam' and 'The Cross-Correspondences') are set in China, but most are explorations of the haunted landscapes of the New Zealand's North Island, from Featherston and Eketahuna to Raglan and Auckland. All of them (with the exception of 'Paragraphs') have been previously published in periodicals or online.


Now those of you obsessed (as I am) by numerology, might well have noticed an ominous feature of that list of publications in the blurb above. My breakdown of books now stands at:
5 poetry books
4 novels
3 short story collections
+ 1 stand-alone novella
= 13 in total
Yes, this is indeed my number thirteen!

All I can say is that nearly as many traditions see thirteen as a lucky number as fear it for being unlucky.

Mind you, I could fudge the count a bit if I wished. I could count my novel The Annotated Tree Worship as two books rather than one, given it appeared in two separate volumes. But they are intended as interlinked novellas, and were never really meant to be read independently.

There's also the fact that I've published 16 chapbooks at one time or another. That would bring up the total to an innocuous 29!

And then there are the various books and anthologies I've edited (15 in all, it would appear). That would bring us up to 44.

But these expedients would really just be cheating. So far as I'm concerned, I've now written 13 books, so I've taken some care to make the thirteenth as appropriate as possible. It is, after all, an exploration of the paranormal, the supernatural, as it manifests (for the most part) in some of the gloomier parts of New Zealand ...

I hope it's enjoyable. I know not everyone shares my fascination with such matters, but a great many people do. And I would argue that most of these stories can be read in a variety of ways: as actual 'ghost stories' being just one of them.






Here's a list of the contents:
Introduction
The Classic New Zealand Ghost Story

Stories
Eketahuna
The Scam
Featherston
Leaves from a Diary of the End of the World
Is it Infrareal or is it Memorex?
Company
General Grant in Paeroa
Brothers
Catfish

The Cross-Correspondences
Paragraphs
Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences

And here's a list of my 13 books to date:

  1. City of Strange Brunettes. ISBN 0-473-05446-9 (Auckland: Pohutukawa Press, 1998) [poetry book 1]
  2. Nights with Giordano Bruno. ISBN 0-9582225-0-9 (Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000) [novel 1]
  3. Chantal’s Book. ISBN 0-473-08744-8 (Wellington: HeadworX, 2002) [poetry book 2]
  4. Monkey Miss Her Now & Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know. ISBN 0-476-00182-X (Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004) [short story collection 1]
  5. Trouble in Mind. Titus Novella Series. ISBN 0-9582586-1-9 (Auckland: Titus Books, 2005) [novella]
  6. The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. ISBN 0-9582586-8-6 (Auckland: Titus Books, 2006) [novel 2]
  7. To Terezín: A Travelogue. Afterword by Martin Edmond. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007) [poetry book 3]
  8. EMO. ISBN 978-1-877441-07-3 (Auckland: Titus Books, 2008) [novel 3]
  9. Kingdom of Alt. ISBN 978-1-877441-15-8 (Auckland: Titus Books, 2010) [short story collection 2]
  10. Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan. by Jack Ross & Emma Smith, with an Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd. ISBN 978-0-473-22484-4 (Auckland: Pania Press, 2012) [poetry book 4]
  11. A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014. ISBN 978-0-473-29640-7 (Wellington: HeadworX, 2014) [poetry book 5]
  12. The Annotated Tree Worship (Auckland: Paper Table, 2017) [novel 4]
    • Draft Research Portfolio. ISBN 978-0-473-41328-6. Paper Table Novellas, 2 (i).
    • List of Topoi. ISBN 978-0-473-41329-3. Paper Table Novellas, 2 (ii).
  13. Ghost Stories. ISBN 978-0-9951165-5-9. 99% Press (Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019) [short story collection 3]



Monday, October 04, 2010

Johnsons or Shits


I've just been reading a very entertaining graphic novel (or series of comics brought to a premature end by lack of commercial success, if you prefer) called Outlaw Nation, by Jamie Delano. It elaborates on a concept of William S. Burroughs, which divides the population of the world into two groups: Johnsons and Shits. A bit of ferreting around on the internet brought up the following definition:

Burroughs first encountered the concept of the Johnson Family while still a boy reading the book You Can’t Win by Jack Black [no relation to the actor - Ed.]. First published in the 1920′s, Black’s autobiographical account of hobo life was immensely popular in its day. Burroughs describes the Johnsons in The Place of Dead Roads:
`The Johnson Family’ was a turn-of-the-century expression to designate good bums and thieves. It was elaborated into a code of conduct. A Johnson honors his obligations. His word is good and he is a good man to do business with. A Johnson minds his own business. He is not a snoopy, self-righteous, trouble-making person. A Johnson will give help when help is needed. He will not stand by while someone is drowning or trapped under a burning car.
In contrast to the honorable world of hobos and criminals, Burroughs describes a type of person known simply as a `Shit.’ Unlike the Johnsons, Shits are obsessed with minding other’s business. They are the town busy body, the preacher, the lawman. Shits are incapable of taking the honorable road of each-to-his-own. Burroughs describes the situation in his essay “My Own Business” thus:
This world would be a pretty easy and pleasant place to live in if everybody could just mind his own business and let others do the same. But a wise old black faggot said to me years ago: `Some people are shits, darling.” I was never able to forget it.

So what about it? Which one are you? A Johnson or a Shit? I came across what seems to me the perfect example of a literary shit the other day whilst idly clicking on links in other people's posts: British Historian Orlando Figes.


Here are some quotes from mini-reviews on Amazon.com of books by various of Figes' rivals:

Description by "Historian" of Molotov's Magic Lantern, by Rachel Polonsky:

"This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published … Her writing is so dense and pretentious, itself so tangled in literary allusions, that it is hard to follow or enjoy."

"Historian" described Robert Service's 2008 work Comrades, a world history of communism, as 'rubbish':

"This is an awful book. It is very poorly written and dull to read … it has no insights to make it worth the bother of ploughing through its dreadful prose."

And here's a little piece by the same reviewer about one of Figes's own books:

The Whisperers (2008) was "beautiful and necessary":

"A fascinating book about the interior lives of ordinary Russians … it tells us more about the Soviet system than any other book I know. Beautifully written, it is a rich and deeply moving history, which leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted … Figes visits their ordeals with enormous compassion, and he brings their history to life with his superb story-telling skills. I hope he writes for ever."

And who was "Historian"? Why, none other than Orlando Figes himself.

Yes, yes, very naughty, I hear you saying, but surely puffing your own books anonymously isn't that mortal a sin? Silly, yes ("I hope he writes for ever"), but hardly criminal. Fair enough. Putting up damning reviews of other people goes a bit further, but it's still not completely beyond the pale.

Attend the sequel, though. Some of Figes' victims began to suspect who'd really written these "anonymous" reviews, and even began to voice their suspicions. Figes immediately instructed his lawyer to threaten them with a libel suit.

When that didn't work (his footprints weren't particularly difficult to trace: "orlando-birkbeck" isn't that cunning an alias for a historian called Orlando who teaches at Birkbeck College, London), he then blamed his wife, barrister Stephanie Palmer, for the whole thing. "I've only just found out about this, this evening," as he said in a statement released through his lawyer a few hours after demanding damages from a prominent newspaper which had printed some information on the matter.

But after a week of questions and increasingly critical headlines, Figes today [23/4/10] revealed that he had been responsible for the comments.

A bit reminiscent of Richard Nixon, really. I didn't do it; well, actually, even though it looks as if I did it, it was actually my wife; well, no, it wasn't my wife, it was me, but I was perfectly justified in doing it; well, no, I did do it, and I wasn't justified in doing it, but it was because I was under a lot of pressure of the time and I'm very sorry so please go away and don't bother me any more ... Man up, Orlando. For a historian of the Stalin era you don't exactly exhibit that good old Mandelstam spirit.

Robert Service, one of the Russian historians defamed by Figes puts it rather succinctly in his quote for the Guardian article I got all these details from in the first place:
I am pleased and mightily relieved that this contaminant slime has been exposed to the light and begun to be scrubbed clean ...

That's what Burroughs means by a shit, I think: a petulant little whinging coward who cries like a baby and begs for mercy when he's found out, all the time sharpening the knife he's longing to plunge into you the moment you turn your back. More like Beria than a full-fledged monster such as Stalin himself ...

What about a Johnson, though?


[Mike Johnson: Travesty (2010)]


Funnily enough, that seems to be the main subject of Mike Johnson's novel Travesty, which appeared earlier this year from Titus Books, after what Mike described at the launch as an almost thirty-year gestation period.

Travesty is a very strange book indeed. It includes some (very striking) illustrations by Darren Sheehan, some of which are in strip-cartoon form, but doesn't seem otherwise to conform to the "graphic novel" genre. Why call it a graphic novel, then? Why not simply an illustrated (or even, in a rather more Blakean vein, an "illuminated") novel?

I think part of the answer may lie in the book's lack of a conventional, overt narrative drive. Nobody, I suspect, could help but find the various characters and settings interesting - poor burnt-out glow-addicted Harvey, Drunk Len, the sneaky double-dealing therapist Dr Reingold, and (best of all from my point of view) batty old "people's advocate" Dilly Lilly, trapped in her mountainous accumulation of old toys and teddy-bears.

But what's the point of them? They're all burnt-out, used-up human shadows, recycling old damaged neural pathways in some kind of semi-official holding-pen ("Travesty") threatened by the Lion King and his sinister allies named after old characters from Donald Duck (Chip 'n' Dale, the Beagle Boys, the Gladstone Ganders). And as the fog gradually envelops their clapped-out roach motel, the "rathouse", they're all gradually forced out onto the streets awaiting some wondrous (or horrendous) lolly scramble on the Day of Delights. And it seems that something apocalyptic has indeed been averted in the last couple of chapters, where Harvey gets it together sufficiently to complete the set of equations in his head.

But none of it's clear, exactly. All of it's told as though through a glass, darkly. And while it's hinted that Harvey's otherworldly saviour Hermes may simply have been sent by "Netlife, that vast illegal gambling operation on the blacknet where credits, zings and even souls are waged on how people behave":

Netlife is not above prodding things along when the show gets slow. Push the emotional infant, Harvey, out of his nest. Get cameras on him, take over Mercy's eyes, get the punters punting - build up the tension. .... Big bikkies riding on ever twist and turn. [p.231]

Travesty, then, "was caught up in Netlife in ways it did not understand."

Is Travesty, then, a huge gameshow run by net gamblers who prod it from time to time like children stirring up a big glass-fronted ant's nest? In one sense, yes, but it's not just that. Travesty can't be decoded as simply as The Matrix. Once you get behind the mask, you find the same confusions, the same infinite spectra of possibilities as in (so-called) "real life".

"I should like to live in a very much simpler world," Harvey says [p.196]

As Dr Reingold meditates on the (programmed) flirting propensities of his holographic secretary, as Nisa Michelangelo constructs his exact scale model (except in one respect) of Michelangelo's "David", we begin to see that the thing that holds these various levels of reality (or "virtuality") together is - as in the Christian cosmos of Dante's Divine Comedy - love, that Aristotelean "love that moves the sun and the other stars" (Paradiso, canto xxxiii, last line).

The book concludes with a series of meditations on works of art. Mercy, the holographic secretary, recites Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to her master Dr Reingold (himself, one presumes, named after the central symbol in Wagner's Ring):

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

We leave him contemplating the "her impeccable thighs and the perfection of her smooth backside. Cold pastoral! Pit this against the living, sweating, stinking, bloody flesh whose privilege it is to know pleasure and death in equal measure." [p.238]

Nisa Michelangelo, the (alleged) reincarnation of the "real" Michelangelo, sees the huge erect penis of his redesigned "David" being shot off almost at the moment of its completion. Like any revisionist artist, though, he manages to tell himself that this reversion to the statue's original state is somehow for the best:

Looking at the statue now, he sees there is a kind of truth in the mutilation, the severance; the gunman might have taken aim with an artist's eye. All the upright virtue of the lost member is merely suggested now, not blatantly exposed. The mind may build its own addition where he imposed his; the severance itself speaks in resonances. [p.243]

It's an interesting place to end. The fascination of Travesty has lain all along in the parts rather than the whole. The world Mike Johnson constructs up so painstakingly is contradictory, partial, jerry-built to its very bones. But so's the one we live in.

Dilly Lilly's long crawl through the rat burrows that criss-cross her heap of toys is a kind of narrative tour-de-force which calls to mind some of the more extreme passages in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, but the tiny mutant rat she extracts, then nurses on her own blood comes from an even more extreme universe (reminiscent as it is of Philip K. Dick's apocalyptic masterpiece Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the War). In his refusal to resolve his warring plotlines, to explain the tie-ins which unite all these various levels, Mike Johnson goes them both one better, though.

The mercy of that all-forgiving narrative plot-doctor, knotting up all the loose ends, is perhaps the last thing we must abandon before opening the doors of perception to see each thing "as it is, infinite."

Travesty, then, is (at any rate in conventional terms) a magnificent wreck of a novel. Make sure you unroll a thread behind you before you venture into its intricacies, though. This is the kind of book that might insist on reading you.

[William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93)]

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Some Ads:


[Rubble Emits Light]

RUBBLE EMITS LIGHT
The Film Archive presents films by Richard von Sturmer

Where:
The Film Archive, Auckland
When:
Wednesday 14th July 2010 - Friday 13th August 2010


I went to the opening of this limited season of Richard von Sturmer films (curated by Gabriel White) the other night, and I definitely think it's worth making the effort to check it out when you're next on K Rd. There are three films, The Search for Otto (1985), Aquavera (1988) and 26 Tanka Films (2007), all on continuous loop. There are also a lot of other bits and pieces of footage taken at various times to sample.

Von Sturmer is (I think) one of our most interesting poets, and these films form an essential part of his work to date. Gabriel's essay in the exhibition catalogue is also well worth reading.





[John Dickson & Ted Jenner, “After Hours Return"]

brief the fortieth
Editor: Ted Jenner
Number 40 (July 2010)


The latest issue of New Zealand's longest-running avant-garde literary magazine (1995-2010) is now out, and can be ordered from the Titus Books website here.

Guest editor Ted Jenner has assembled a rather modified assemblage of whacked-out freaks for this special anniversary issue - not just your old favourites but some newcomers too ...





[bravado 19 (July, 2010)]


The latest issue of Tauranga's literary magazine bravado is also now out, with the fiction guest-selected by yours truly, and the poetry chosen by Majella Cullinane.

I would have liked to include quite a few more of the stories which were sent in, I must admit, but the ones that did make the cut certainly constitute a pretty strong group, I reckon.





[Jack Ross: Kingdom of Alt]

This is Brett Cross's rather elegant ad for my forthcoming book of short stories, Kingdom of Alt. The image comes from Bronwyn Lloyd's pop-up version of the Wolfman story "Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret". The basic idea of the collection is storytelling through unusual means: notes written in the margins of other texts, in course journals and private diaries and even email exchanges ...

Just to give you an idea of what to expect, here are some of the reactions I got to my previous collection of short fiction, Monkey Miss Her Now, in 2004:

Original, dense, musical; and … erm … confusing. … Reading this book is like a wild lunge in the dark – you just never know what you’re going to find.
– Sue Emms, Bravado

As postmodern as it is parochial, Monkey Miss Her Now drags a venerable tradition into the strange new worlds of twenty-first century New Zealand.
– Scott Hamilton, brief

Woody Allen sometimes springs to mind, but so equally do the Surrealists.
– Roger Horrocks

Nobody else in New Zealand writes quite like Ross …
– Mark Houlahan, NZ Books

Outside of literati farm, this sort of thing has a very limited life expectancy.
– Joe Wylie, Takahe




Oh, and last but definitely not least, Mike Johnson's eagerly-awaited new graphic novel Travesty is due out from Titus Books next month. The book will be launched by Dylan Horrocks at the AUT Centre for Creative Writing on Thursday August 5, at 6.00pm:

"Mike's thirteenth published book, it's also a graphic novel in several senses of the word - including more than 30 striking panels drawn by comics artist Darren Sheehan.

To attend Thurs August 5 @ 6.00pm please RSVP Helen HuiQun Xue - HXue@aut.ac.nz - by Friday 30 July."






Monday, March 31, 2008

Sound-bytes in Cyberspace


[Leonardo da Vinci, Analysis of a bird's wing
- looks a little like a digital soundfile, doesn't it?]



There's a new set of soundfiles up on the Titus Books website.

They include:

  • David Lyndon Brown reading from his novel Marked Men (Titus, 2007)
  • Bill Direen reading from his poetry collection New Sea Land (Titus, 2005)
  • Scott Hamilton reading from his poetry collection To the Moon in Seven Easy Steps (Titus, 2007)
  • Mike Johnson reading from The Vertical Harp, poems of Li He (Titus, 2007)
  • Alistair Paterson launching Olivia Macassey's Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Titus, 2005)
  • Olivia Macassey reading from her book during the Rakino launch (2005)
  • Olwyn Stewart reading from her novella Curriculum Vitae (Titus, 2005)
  • & me reading from my novel EMO (upcoming: Titus, 2008), with backing music by Padmanabha Fischlinger.


I don't know about you, but I really like the idea of checking out upcoming purchases online through sound as well as text extracts.

It makes me realise, yet again, how desirable it would be to complete my online listing of the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive (2002-4) with just such a set of soundfiles -- at least one extract from every author willing to participate in the project.

Alas, I lack the technical expertise (and, at least at present, the time) to attempt such a task, but how about it? Are there any people or institutions out there anxious to help out? Watch this space for further developments. ...

Thursday, February 01, 2007

I like Mike



This is the text of the speech I'm intending to give at Mike Johnson's sixtieth birthday party / launch for his new book on Waiheke island tomorrow (fingers crossed):


Everybody knows that Mike Johnson’s one of New Zealand’s foremost writers of fiction. If you didn’t know you really haven’t been keeping up. His strange, futuristic debut Lear (1986) matured into the dark Faulknerian vision of Dumb Show (1996), but there are a host of other fascinating novels and stories to be enjoyed along the way – and I hope there’ll be plenty more to come.

The success of his fiction may have had the effect of obscuring to some extent the fact that Mike actually began publishing as a poet, and has kept up this side of his oeuvre with almost equal intensity. His 1996 AUP volume Treasure Hunt, for instance, is woven around the tragic 1993 death of the Chinese poet Gu Cheng, who committed suicide after killing his wife here on Waiheke island.

The book that we’re here to celebrate today, then, The Vertical Harp: Selected Poems of Li He, represents the coming together of a number of strands both in Mike Johnson’s own work and in recent New Zealand culture.

It’s a obvious truism that, like it or not (personally I like it a lot), New Zealand is moving ever faster towards becoming a multicultural society. The trend is clearest in Auckland, because it’s the biggest population centre, and thus plays a kind of Ellis Island role in our cultural melting-pot.

It’s evident on our streets, our shops, and (above all) in our schools. As a tertiary teacher, Mike Johnson has experienced this evolution firsthand (as have I in my own teaching jobs at local Language Schools and at Massey Albany).

For writers, of course, this is truly priceless material – an “international theme” to parallel the New World / Old World divide of Henry James. And what better way to signal this than by publishing this book of poems from the works of that classic Chinese poète maudit Li He (who some of you might know better under the earlier Anglicisation Li Ho)?

Each of the major T’ang poets has his English adherents. The great rivals Tu Fu and Li Po are probably the most frequently translated (by Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound intially, but then by a host of other more-or-less inspired amateurs or experts), but then there’s the beautifully contemplative landscape poet Wang Wei as well, and then – probably somewhere quite far down the list because of his perceived personal and poetic intransigeance – we eventually encounter Li He, the so-called “Chinese Baudelaire” (perhaps Lautréamont might be a better analogue, considering the fact that he died at the age of 26).

In my case it was in a Penguin book called Poems of the Late T’ang (still one of the great titles, I think), translated by a guy called A. C. Graham. I found the whole thing completely entrancing, and spent far too much time reading it the summer I was supposed to be studying for my end-of-school exams (which is one of the many reasons I bombed out so badly, I suspect. I don’t think the English examiners appreciated being bombarded with platoons of quotes from obscure Chinese poets).

I first came across Mike’s own translations when working on collecting texts for the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, an immense collection of 171 New Zealand poets reading their own work, on 40 audio CDs, collected between 2002 and 2004 in all four of the major centres (and now housed in Auckland University Library and the Turnbull in Wellington, if you’re curious to check it out). I was very intrigued by the way Mike seemed able almost to ventriloquise through this 9th-century Chinese poet.

I had, however, encountered something similar with Kendrick Smithyman’s translations from the Italian. In Kendrick’s case, it was as if the necessity to incorporate an ideal of the Mediterranean – amore, pane e fantasia – somehow liberated him from late twentieth-century irony, the corner his exquisite art had ended by painting him into.

In Mike’s case, however, Li He appears to have liberated a kind of inner barbarian, a wilder, crazier poet than traditional Kiwi mores really allow us to be (perhaps he’ll prove me wrong later in the evening).

I don’t want to quote too many examples, as I know he’ll soon be introducing and reading from the poems himself, but I’d like to make just this one citation from “occult strings” – a poem about a female shaman exorcising demons:


on her passion-wood lute, the gold-leafed phoenix writhes
as she mutters and mumbles, face twisting to the harsh sounds
picking note for word, word for note

descend stars and spirits! come
taste meat!

That doesn’t sound like Arthur Waley. It doesn’t even sound like Ezra Pound (whom T. S. Eliot referred to as “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time”). It’s time for some new inventors now, I think: both of Chinese poetry in English, and of New Zealand poetry itself. Mike Johnson is among those brave, outward-looking pioneers.


[This is what came up when I first googled Li He, trying to find a representative image. It’s hard to feel that either poet would really disapprove]: