I first discovered the blogosphere back in the early 2000s, thanks to a talk by one of my Academic colleagues, poet and political scientist A/Prof Grant Duncan.
I’d been planning for quite a while to transfer - or at least record - at least some of my literary activities onto the internet, but had really only thought of setting up a personal website, like so many other writers back then.
In pursuit of this aim, I’d taken a couple of short courses in web design, and had concluded that there was more to it than met the eye. In particular, I discovered that you could invest a lot of time and money in something which might easily turn out not to suit your needs at all if you weren’t careful.
In particular, I wasn’t keen on paying some expert to set up a site which I was unable to update myself on a regular basis.
Grant spoke of his various experiments with blogs: how flexible they could be – and, in particular, how easy to edit. He’d found them valuable both for posting his own work, and - since one could limit the audience, or even make them completely private - had seen how easily they could be adapted for graduate students to share work with their supervisor/s.
Free – flexible – easy to edit … all that was music to my ears. I asked him a few questions after the talk, and had another, longer chat with him about it later. The result, a few weeks later, was my very first blog - this one - The Imaginary Museum (14/6/2006- ). It was named after a novel I'd just published, The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Titus Books, 2006), parts of which were set out in a kind of proto-hypertext.
Eventually I ended up adapting what had started off as a poetry blog into one concerned almost exclusively with my twin hobbies of bibliography and book-collecting. There was a further site devoted to a catalogue of my book collection, and another one that chronicled my own publications and other activities.
As well as that, I started to build individual websites for each of the writing courses I was teaching at Massey University, along with companion sites where I could anthologise work from the students in those courses (with their permission, of course).
And so it's gone on to this day, some twenty years later.
In the process I became pretty familiar with basic html code, and was thus able to reproduce reasonably complex texts when I needed to. For the most part, though, it remains a way of commenting on and recording things in an easy and accessible way.
This, then, is the fourth five-yearly report I've published about the progress of this experiment in online publishing. Each time I've highlighted five major web projects undertaken in the years in between.
- [14/6/2021]: Fifteenth Anniversary (Crystal)
- [14/6/2016]: Tenth Anniversary (Tin)
- [15/6/2011]: Fifth Anniversary (Wood)
- (January 19 - October 18, 2021) Michele 2021: A Birthday Festschrift for Michele Joy Leggott.
- (June 2, 2022 - October 29, 2023) Jack Ross: Stories.
- Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000)
- The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006)
- E M O (2008)
- Monkey Miss Her Now & Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know. ISBN 0-476-00182-X. Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004. [13 short stories]
- Trouble in Mind. ISBN 0-9582586-1-9. Auckland: Titus Books, 2005. [novella]
- Kingdom of Alt. ISBN 978-1-877441-15-8. Auckland: Titus Books, 2010. [8 short stories]
- The Annotated Tree Worship: Draft Research Portfolio. ISBN 978-0-473-41328-6. Auckland: Paper Table, 2017. [novella]
- The Annotated Tree Worship: List of Topoi. ISBN 978-0-473-41329-3. Auckland: Paper Table, 2017. [novella]
- Ghost Stories. ISBN 978-0-9951165-5-9. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019. [12 short stories]
- Haunts. ISBN 978-1-991083-17-3. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2024. [13 short stories]
- (May 27, 2023-April 2024) Jack Ross: Poems
- City of Strange Brunettes. ISBN 0-473-05446-9. Auckland: Pohutukawa Press, 1998.
- Chantal’s Book. ISBN 0-473-08744-8. Wellington: HeadworX, 2002.
- To Terezín. Afterword by Martin Edmond. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132. Auckland: Massey University, 2007.
- 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.
- A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014. ISBN 978-0-473-29640-7. Wellington: HeadworX, 2014.
- The Oceanic Feeling. Drawings by Katharina Jaeger. Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd. ISBN 978-0-473-55801-7. Auckland: Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021.
- Ezra Pound’s Fascist Cantos (72 & 73) together with Rimbaud’s “Poets at Seven Years Old.” Translated by Jack Ross. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 1997.
- A Town Like Parataxis. Photographs by Gabriel White. ISBN 0-473-07104-5. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000.
- The Perfect Storm. Video by Gabriel White. ISBN 0-473-07350-1. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000.
- The Britney Suite. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2001.
- A Bus Called Mr Nice Guy. ISBN 0-473-10526-8. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2005.
- Love in Wartime. Wellington: Pania Press, 2006.
- Papyri: Love poems & fragments from Sappho & elsewhere. ISBN 978-0-473-12397-0. Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2007.
- The Return of the Vanishing New Zealander. ISBN 978-0-9864507-6-1. Dunedin: Kilmog Press, 2009.
- Scenes from The Puppet Oresteia. Artwork by William T. Ayton. ISBN 978-0-473-18881-8. Rhinebeck, NY: Narcissus Press / Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2011.
- Fallen Empire: Museum of True History in Collaboration with Karl Chitham and Jack Ross. Dunedin: Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 2012.
- Collage Poems (1997-2005)
- Poems from Novels (2000-2008)
- Poems from Stories (2004-2019)
- Tree Worship (2011-2012)
- Tales from the 101 Days (2022-2024)
- (November 27, 2023 - May 2, 2024) E M O: EVA AVE / Moons of Mars / Ovid in Otherworld (27/11/23-2/5/24)
- EVA AVE (15/8/06-3/9/07)
- Moons of Mars (16/8/06-3/9/07)
- Ovid in Otherworld (15/8/06-3/9/07)
- (August 20, 2012 - June 5, 2026) Acquisitions & Discoveries
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2021:
Dear Jack,
Please accept this piece - 1000 words exactly, plus title and sign-off details - for the celebration confabulation you are creating for Michele, with deep thanks for your care and work making this event happen.
With fond respect,
- Lisa Samuels. "Email to Jack Ross" (11/9/2021)
I've always liked the idea of an Academic Festschrift, or collection of celebratory essays and pieces to celebrate the achievements of a writer or researcher at some watershed moment in their career: often - as in this case - on their retirement from Academia.
In the case of the multi-talented poet, cultural historian, and literary critic Prof Michele Leggott, it seemed best to go for an online format, rather than a more conventional mode of publication, given her longtime involvement as co-founder and editor of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre, or nzepc.
While it might have seemed more appropriate to house it on that website, for secrecy's sake it seemed better to construct my own festschrift site in private. I don't know if we were successful in keeping it entirely confidential before it was revealed and made public on her 65th birthday on October 18th, 2021. I certainly hope so.
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2022:
You are a male Scheherazade! ('Talking against death'! yep that sums our craft up in three brutal words...)
- Tracey Slaughter. "Email to Jack Ross" (14/2/2024)
While I was in the early stages of compiling the pieces which would eventually turn into my latest book of short stories, Haunts, I decided to try to straighten out all the myriad drafts I'd accumulated by pasting them up online. As it turned out, that didn't help me much, but it did provide the kernel for a larger Stories site which has now grown to include the texts of all my published fiction to date - with the exception of the three novels in my R.E.M. trilogy, each of which already has one (or more) websites dedicated to it:
I ended up with 59 stories, ranging in length from novellas to flash fictions, from seven different publications:
Along with my Opinions site ("Essays, Interviews, Introductions & Reviews - 1987 to the present"), and the Poems site listed below, this collects pretty much everything I've written (or rather, published) to date which I want to preserve.
NB: When you visit this site, the warning above is the first thing you'll see (the same applies to the Poems and EMO sites listed below).
The reason for this is because some of my poems and stories contain swear words and bad language of various types, and I've noticed in the past that this tends to get flagged by roving web editors.
I therefore decided to mark these three sites (along with the other novel sites, Nights with Giordano Bruno and The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis as containing "Adult content", which means that this warning will be shown to all potential blog readers, who will then be forced to log in with their Google ID to verify their age and status.
True, this will certainly have the result of reducing the number of clicks on each website, but it will also make it harder for the idle and unmotivated to reach these works - not necessarily a bad thing. After all, I don't want to make things too easy for potential hackers. Bona fide readers remain more than welcome, though.
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2023:
I love all three poems! Love so much - but I especially love ‘Experimental’. i will post that.
- Paula Green. "Email to Jack Ross" (12/4/2024)
Like the Stories site listed above, this one began as a repository of a large group of 101 linked poems I was working on as a sequence. Once again, putting them up online did not prove particularly helpful to the process of revising and making sense of them, but it did give me the idea of supplementing them with the texts of the six full-length - but now mostly, alas, out-of-print - poetry collections I've published over the years:
While I was at it, I thought that it might be a good idea to add some of the chapbooks I'd published over the same period:
There turned out to be quite a few other poems I'd written and published during these decades, though, so I thought for the sake of utility I should probably include those, too:
Which left me with a final grab-bag category of published but uncollected poems, which I decided to group chronologically:
I'm not sure I'd recommend this approach to anyone else. I was inspired by Peter Simpson and Margaret Edgcumbe's online edition of Kendrick Smithyman's Collected Poems 1943-1995. If I'd had any idea of just how much work it would be, though, I'd probably have contented myself with my old MSWord files.
NB: When you visit this site, the warning above is the first thing you'll see (the same applies to the Stories site above and the EMO site below).
The reason for this is because some of my poems and stories contain swear words and bad language of various types, and I've noticed in the past that this tends to get flagged by roving web editors.
I therefore decided to mark these three sites (along with the other novel sites as containing "Adult content", which means that this warning will be shown to all potential blog readers, who will then be forced to log in with their Google ID to verify their age and status.
True, this will certainly have the result of reducing the number of clicks on each website, but it will also make it harder for the idle and unmotivated to reach these works - not necessarily a bad thing. After all, I don't want to make things too easy for potential hackers. Bona fide readers remain more than welcome, though.
... this is a book which isn’t satisfied with being self-contained. It reaches beyond its own covers, beyond its author, inviting you into one of the great endangered pleasures of literature – which is the sense of its endlessness, the way one book can open another book for you, like a friend giving you a private gift; perhaps the key to a room you can now share – a room, of course, which would have many other doors.The original idea of writing a novel in blog form came to me shortly after I started The Imaginary Museum in mid-2006. E M O, a novel consisting of three self-contained blogs, and eventually printed in palimpsest form, with other texts printed faintly underneath, was the result of this train of thought.
- Jen Crawford. "Launch speech at Alleluya cafe" (19/6/2008)
The three original blogs are (at present, at least) still extant on the internet, but I no longer have any access to them. My passwords no longer work, so they remain there as untouchable fossils.
With this in mind, it occurred to me that it might be as well to copy them to a more manageable site, which I do have access to, as part of the larger exercise of straightening out the fiction and poetry I've put up online at various times, in various places. This new site, E M O, is more or less a simulacrum of the original sites, but with the addition of a bibliography and chronology of the original publication.
When you visit the new site, this warning is the first thing you'll see. The same applies to the Stories and Poems sites listed above.
The reason for this is because a number of my poems and stories contain swear words and bad language of various types, and I've noticed in the past that this tends to get flagged by roving web editors.
I therefore decided to mark these three sites (along with the other novel sites, Nights with Giordano Bruno and The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis as containing "Adult content", which means that this warning will be shown to all potential blog readers, who will then be forced to log in with their Google ID to verify their age and status.
True, this will certainly have the result of reducing the number of clicks on each website, but it will also make it harder for the idle and unmotivated to reach these works - not necessarily a bad thing. After all, I don't want to make things too easy for potential hackers. Bona fide readers remain more than welcome, though.
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2025:
A marvellous post Jack, and one I am sharing. Your comments about Waley made me think, as I had later dismissed his translations. I shouldn’t have. There are two aims in translation, (1) being as true as possible to the original text and (2) capturing the intent/essence. The two are often in conflict. I like what Eco said about contemporary translation. It should be a negotiation between author and translator, producing two books. The Nobel winner Olga Tokzrczuk said the same, refusing to accept her Booker and Nobel unless her Flights translator was a co-recipient. There’s lots to dig into with The Monkey King - thank you for the prompt and for finding those threads.
- John Fenton. "Comment on Acquisitions (95): Journey to the West" (9/7/2023)
Since June 2010, I've maintained an online catalogue of my book collection called A Gentle Madness. It provides details of each book I own, as well as a note of its location. A couple of years in, I decided I needed a space for short bibliographical essays on some of my more interesting purchases. At first it was a single webpage, entitled "Acquisitions", but eventually it grew far beyond those bounds. I only made 11 entries in the first two years I had it, 2012-13, but after that it was 2016 before I revived it again. Since January 2018, though, I've put up 127 separate posts on subjects ranging from World War I poets to my favourite Bibles. Each one is suggested by a particular title or author I've been reading (or collecting).
It's a more bibliographically focussed set of essays than the more journalistic ones that appear on this site, The Imaginary Museum. There's a certain amount of overlap between the subjects treated on the two websites, though. You can find a convenient index of all the authors and subjects dealt with (to date) on one or other of these sites on this Bibliography page.
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I guess I've rather given up on prognostications for the future of this blog - or any other literary enterprises I'm presently engaged in. Sleepwalking seems the best description of the way we're all forced to be these days. Perhaps we'll come through the present set of crises substantially intact; perhaps we won't.
The job remains the same, though - as the great cosmologist Johannes Kepler put it in the middle of the Thirty Years War:
While the storm rages and the state is threatened by shipwreck, let us lower the anchor of our peaceful studies into the ground of eternity.
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