Being There

Sam Mendes: Empire of Light (UK, 2022)

There's a wonderful scene in Sam Mendes' recent nostalgia-fest Empire of Light where Olivia Colman's character watches a movie for what seems to be the first time in her life. It's at midnight, a private screening hastily set up by her friend, a cinephile projectionist played (inevitably) by Toby Jones. And what does he select to initiate her? Peter Sellers in Being There, of course.

Hal Ashby, dir.: Being There (US, 1979)

It's an inspired choice. Peter Sellers' last great performance, as the hapless Chauncey Gardiner / Chance the Gardener, rhymes perfectly with Colman's character Hilary's struggles with mental health at the old Art Deco cinema she works at, in the coldly perfect seaside town of Margate in the early 1980s.

Sellers, too, was no stranger to such problems. Hhis former wife Britt Ekland recalled:

He obviously suffered from or was bipolar, severely bipolar. He was a very tormented soul who should have had more help. But instead he was unable [to] because he was such a valuable asset.

Interestingly enough, very few of the people who praise the film and Sellers' performance in it make much mention of the screenplay writer, Jerzy Kosiński, who based it on his own 1971 novel.

Eric Koch: Jerzy Kosiński (1969)

And why is that, I wonder? Because he got cancelled, that's why: one of the first examples of this now nearly ubiquitous phenomenon. There can be little doubt that this drying up of attention and acclaim inspired his suicide in 1991. It's not a happy story.

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Let's start with a small parenthesis:

James Thurber: Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (1940)

The very proper gander
by James Thurber

Not so very long ago there was a very fine gander. He was strong and smooth and beautiful and he spent most of his time singing to his wife and children. One day somebody who saw him strutting up and down in his yard and singing remarked, "There is a very proper gander." An old hen overheard this and told her husband about it that night in the roost. "They said something about propaganda," she said. "I have always suspected that," said the rooster, and he went around the barnyard next day telling everybody that the very fine gander was a dangerous bird, more than likely a hawk in gander's clothing. A small brown hen remembered a time when at a great distance she had seen the gander talking with some hawks in the forest. "They were up to no good," she said. A duck remembered that the gander had once told him he did not believe in anything. "He said to hell with the flag, too," said the duck. A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb. Finally everybody snatched up sticks and stones and descended on the gander's house. He was strutting in his front yard, singing to his children and his wife. "There he is!" everybody cried. "Hawk-lover! Unbeliever! Flag-hater! Bomb-thrower!" So they set upon him and drove him out of the country.

Moral: Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

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Jerzy Kosiński: The Painted Bird (1965)

Before we get to The Painted Bird, by far the most famous of his novels, it's probably necessary to begin with some biographical data:

Kosiński was born in 1933 as Józef Nikodem Lewinkopf in Łódź, as the only child of Polish Jews Mieczysław (Mojżesz) Lewinkopf and Elżbieta Liniecka. As a child during World War II, he lived in occupied central Poland under a false identity, Jerzy Kosiński, which his father gave him. Eugeniusz Okoń, a Catholic priest, issued him a forged baptismal certificate, and the Lewinkopf family survived the Holocaust thanks to local villagers who offered assistance to Polish Jews, at grave personal risk.
... After the war, Kosiński's father aligned himself with Poland's communist regime, and the family was relatively well off ... By age 22 [Kosiński] had earned degrees in history and sociology at the University of Łódź ... [he] also studied in the Soviet Union, and served as a sharpshooter in the Polish Army. A biographer writes that Kosinski disliked conformity and therefore the communism that his father had sworn allegiance to, and because of this developed anti-communist views.
In order to emigrate to the United States in 1957, he created a fake foundation which ostensibly sponsored him, and forged letters from prominent communist authorities guaranteeing his return to Poland, which were then required for anyone leaving the country.
Kosiński first worked at odd jobs to get by, including driving a truck, and he managed to graduate from Columbia University. In 1965 he became an American citizen.

Wikipedia: Jerzy Kosiński

Along the way he published, under the pseudonym "Joseph Novak", two non-fiction books containing analysis of Communist ideology and the Eastern Bloc in general.

The Painted Bird, however, written in the form of a childhood memoir, was a success on a far grander scale. It was marketed as a novel, but Kosiński let it be understood in conversation that it was based on his own childhood experiences in war-torn Poland. Certainly the huge attention and fame it eventually accrued was influenced by readers' belief that the events recorded in it were substantially true. Holocaust-survivor Elie Weisel, for instance, described it as "one of the best ... Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity".

Kosiński used it as a springboard to launch his career as a major American novelist, and followed it up with a series of teasing metafictions such as the National Book Award-winning Steps (1968) and the bitingly satirical Being There (1971).

He was, in short, very much a writer of his time, exploring themes and techniques we might tend to associate with fellow magical realists such as Jorge Luis Borges and Milan Kundera.

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Jerzy Kosiński: Steps (1968 / 1983)

In June 1982, a Village Voice report by Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith alleged Kosiński wrote The Painted Bird in Polish, and had it secretly translated into English. The report said that Kosiński's books had been ghost-written by "assistant editors", finding stylistic differences among Kosiński's novels. Kosiński, according to them, had depended upon his freelance editors for "the sort of composition that we usually call writing."

That was the first problem. The second was the question of the book's faithfulness to its author's own experience. Kosiński commented on this in his introduction to a 1976 reissue of the book:

Well-intentioned writers, critics, and readers sought facts to back up their claims that the novel was autobiographical. They wanted to cast me in the role of spokesman for my generation, especially for those who had survived the war; but for me, survival was an individual action that earned the survivor the right to speak only for himself. Facts about my life and my origins, I felt, should not be used to test the book's authenticity, any more than they should be used to encourage readers to read The Painted Bird. Furthermore, I felt then, as I do now, that fiction and autobiography are very different modes.

It was, in short, fiction - a novel by someone who had indeed survived the Holocaust years in Poland, but had not lived through the bizarre events reported by the small boy at the centre of his novel. An academic named D. G. Myers, in his review of a 1996 biography of Kosiński, claimed that the author had passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own life during the Holocaust: "Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry."

But do obscure English Professors from Texas often get invited to such parties? And how likely is it that Myers, a man born in 1952, was an habitué of the New York literary scene in the mid-1960s? So, despite the fact that his claim is pure hearsay, repeated without evidence or even a clear attribution, it's been quoted and requoted ever since.

It seems quite likely that Kosiński did say a lot of things which weren't strictly true whilst partying with the likes of Norman Mailer and Dorothy de Santillana (who happened to be a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin). So what? We should judge people on the claims they make in print, not on the random gossip surrounding them.

It didn't help that there was a concerted campaign to discredit him mounted by the Communist regime in Poland. Alleged "originals" for long passages in The Painted Bird were unearthed by assiduous, state-sponsored critics. It was also claimed that he'd been a C.I.A. plant all along.

In other words, he was either (in Poland) a plagiarist who'd ripped off more valid accounts by actual sufferers, or (in America) a fantasist who'd invented it all out of his own head. He'd either stolen it all from Polish writers and turned it in slick American prose, or written it all in Polish and had a series of shadowy "assistants" translate it for him.

The fact that these two scenarios directly contradicted each other didn't really seem to matter. There was something distinctly fishy about the man. He was just a bit too smug and successful for comfort.

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Vanity Fair: Jerzy Kosiński's Fall from Grace (2023)

So, from being a very proper gander - the darling of the newspapers and the literary set - Kosiński had become a lying fraud. Everything he wrote had (it seemed) been stolen from somebody else: private love letters (in The Devil Tree), the débâcle of his own unsuccessful marriage (in Blind Date).

When he eventually wrote a book, The Hermit of 69th Street, which satirised the impossibility of documenting every assertion in a work of fiction by "inserting footnotes for practically every term in the book", one sneering critic remarked of it: "Ironically, possibly his only true book is about a successful author who is shown to be a fraud."

The New York Times: Sharon Tate Murder (1969)

By now everyone knew he was tainted, but nobody quite knew why. Doesn't a novelist have the right to make things up? Apparently not - if he's called Jerzy Kosiński. It reached such heights of absurdity that his casual remark that he'd just missed being a house guest of his good friend Roman Polanski on the night of the Sharon Tate murders was subjected to merciless ridicule: such a big liar that he even claims acquaintance with the dead! Shame on you, Jerzy! How tasteless to include details of the massacre in Blind Date!

But what are the facts of the matter? Kosiński certainly was friends with Roman Polanski; they met at the National Film School in Łódź:

In 1984, Polanski denied Kosiński's story in his autobiography. Journalist John Taylor of New York Magazine believes Polanski was mistaken. "Although it was a single sentence in a 461-page book, reviewers focused on it. But the accusation was untrue: Jerzy and Kiki had been invited to stay with Tate the night of the Manson murders, and they missed being killed as well only because they stopped in New York en route from Paris because their luggage had been misdirected." The reason why Taylor believes this is that "a friend of Kosiński [Clement Biddle Wood] wrote a letter to the Times, which was published in the Book Review, describing the detailed plans he and Jerzy had made to meet that weekend at Polanski's house on Cielo Drive."

Umberto Eco: Travels in Hyperreality (1967 / 1973)

Eliot Weinberger, in his 2000 book Karmic Traces, dismisses Kosiński as a "genuine fake" - whatever that's supposed to mean. In the era of Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality (retitled in the US Faith in Fakes), it seems astonishing that such clumsy categorisations can still be taken seriously. Kosiński's star remains in eclipse thanks to facile accusations which could be levelled at virtually any writer of the postmodern era.

The obvious - to a contemporary reader, at any rate - magical realist elements of The Painted Bird were not yet as commonplace as they would become after the appearance of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), along with the other great novels of the Latin American Boom. Kosiński was slightly ahead of the curve, as befits a Central European intellectual, and that failure to be ponderous enough for a public accustomed to the weighty tomes of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal proved, in the end, his downfall.

And yes, he did have a collaborator on the Being There screenplay: he was its co-writer, not its sole author. What a scandal! "A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb." Maybe he did get a bit of help from time to time. So did Alexandre Dumas. So did Truman Capote. Does it matter?

A duck remembered that the gander had once told him he did not believe in anything. "He said to hell with the flag, too," said the duck.

Requiescat in Pace, Jerzy Kosiński. And as for the rest of you Cold War morons who hounded him to his death, hang your heads in shame.

Chauncey Gardiner / Chance the Gardener in Being There (1979)

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Jerzy Kosiński (1973)

Józef Nikodem Lewinkopf
[Jerzy Kosiński]
(1933-1991)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Fiction:


1. The Painted Bird (1965
   • The Painted Bird. 1952. 1965. London: W. H. Allen & Company, 1966.
2. Steps (1968)
   • Steps. 1968. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1969.
3. Being There (1971)
4. The Devil Tree (1973)
   • The Devil Tree. Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1973.
5. Cockpit (1975)
6. Blind Date (1977)
7. Passion Play (1979)
8. Pinball (1982)
9. The Hermit of 69th Street (1988)

Non-fiction:


10. [as Joseph Novak] The Future Is Ours, Comrade: Conversations with the Russians (1960)
11. [as Joseph Novak] No Third Path (1962)
12. The Art of the Self: Essays à propos Steps (1968)
13. "Packaged Passion". The American Scholar 42: 2 (Spring, 1973)
14. Passing By: Selected Essays, 1962–1991 (1992)

Cinema

Adaptations:

15. Being There, dir. Hal Ashby, writ. Jerzy Kosiński with Robert C. Jones [based on the former's 1971 novel] (USA, 1979)
16. Nabarvené ptáče [The Painted Bird], dir. & writ. Václav Marhoul [based on Jerzy Kosiński's 1965 novel] (Czechia / Slovakia / Ukraine, 2019)

Actor:

17. Being There [cameo in gala scene] (1979)
18. Reds [as Grigory Zinoviev] (1981)
19. The Statue of Liberty [interview] (1985)
20. Łódź Ghetto [voice of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski] (1989)
21. Religion, Inc. [as beggar] (1989)

Interviews:


22. Conversations with Jerzy Kosinski. Ed. Tom Teicholz (1993)
23. Oral Pleasure: Kosinski as Storyteller (2012)

Secondary:


24. Sloan, James Park. Jerzy Kosinski: a Biography (1996)

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James Park Sloan: Jerzy Kosinski: a Biography (1996)

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Camino Placid

Emilio Estevez, dir. & writ.: The Way (USA, 2010)

The poster was everywhere. I remember finding it exceptionally soppy and sentimental-looking. The Way, indeed! It reminded me of that pseudo-documentary The Secret which was all the rage a couple of decades ago:

Drew Heriot, dir.: The Secret, writ. Rhonda Byrne (Australia / USA, 2006)

However, lacking a convenient alternative, one day we cracked and went off to see it.

It was good. I won't say great, since there's a certain predictability about Emilio Estevez's buddy-movie approach to the subject of walking the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrim way to Compostela through Northern Spain. But there is something genuinely moving about it, even so: the echoes of the actual father-son bond between the director and his star, Martin Sheen, in the intimate story of mourning and loss Estevez's film sets out to tell.

Marly Camino: Camino de Santiago routes

The real star is the landscape, though. It was hypnotic - entrancing. It made even lazy old me want to get on my feet and start trudging those dusty roads. The whole ancient romance of Spain and the Pyrenees came to life in those vistas.

Tourradar: Walking the Camino de Santiago

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Anyway. All that was in 2010. It seems now as if we were inhabiting a different world: pre-Covid, pre-Gaza, pre-Trump. But that's not where the trail stopped, by any means. Having been alerted to the Camino and its significance, I began to run into references to it everywhere.

David Lodge: The Year of Henry James (2006)

The first was in David Lodge's book of essays The Year of Henry James.

Lodge was enraged when his long-meditated novel Author, Author! (2004) - about Henry James's various ill-starred attempts to forge a new career as a playwright in the 1890s - was (slightly) overshadowed by Colm Tóibín's The Master (2004).

The two books are actually very different. Tóibín provides an overview of James's entire career, in a pastiche version of the Master's late prose-style. Lodge, by contrast, focusses on James's horror, in the mid-1890s, at the contrast between the meteoric success of his artist friend George du Maurier's novel Trilby and the almost complete failure of his own highly crafted works of dramatic - and novelistic - art.

George du Maurier: Trilby [Svengali] (1894 / 1982)

Trilby is famous - or should I say notorious - for the creation of the character Svengali, who hypnotises the young orphan girl Trilby O'Ferrall into becoming a great singer. When his influence is finally withdrawn, she subsides into silence. The Henry James of Lodge's novel sees this as a sly reference to his own influence over du Maurier, previously a popular cartoonist, but now one of the most famous novelists of the day - to the Master's own detriment.

There's a very strange section in Lodge's The Year of Henry James where he recounts his first meeting with Colm Tóibín - on the Camino de Santiago - where the latter saw fit to approach him to try and discuss the unfortunate coincidence of their two Henry James novels.

Getty: Colm Tóibín (1955- )

It's a little hard to understand why this should be such a source of indignation to Lodge. The venue was, perhaps, unfortunate. And the two had not been previously introduced. And then there was the fact that Colm Tóibín (as the name would suggest) is Irish. What's more, he's gay - and sported (even at the time) a shaved head. All these factors apparently added up to a feeling of grievance. Who can figure out English etiquette? Not a mere colonial like me, that's for sure ...

I could, admittedly, be misinterpreting the passage. Perhaps it was the implied offense to the spirituality of his pilgrimage by the discussion of "business" in such a setting which really upset Lodge. What it sounds like, though, is something akin to his description of Henry James's reaction to the news that his protégé du Maurier was about to overtake him in popular - and, alas, even critical esteem.

Svengali is stabbed and left to die by one of his accomplices just before Trilby's failure on stage. As the villain of the piece, he can clearly expect no mercy - let alone gratitude - from the friends of the former artist's model Trilby. As for Trilby herself, she dies shortly afterwards.

Wilton Lackaye as Svengali (1905)

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Alan Brunton: Grooves of Glory: Three Performance Texts (2004)

Then there's the long performance piece "Compostela - A Walk" included in New Zealand poet and playwright Alan Brunton's posthumous book Grooves of Glory. Looking at it again, I was a little surprised to discover that I myself was the first to publish it, in brief 25 (2002).

There's a wonderful introduction to the script by Brunton's wife and collaborator Sally Rodwell at the front of the book:

Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port

In 1987 we drove to Spain and Portugal in a red diesel van bought untested from the Utrecht van market. It had poor front tyres. We did a deal in Normany at a fly-by-night wreckers - 'deux pneux'. We were had. They were two sizes too small. So the van bounced through the French countryside like a circus bicycle. With the help of friends in Bourdeaux, we balanced the vehicle once more and set out for the Pyrenees. Ruby, our daughter, was two. We stopped at Lourdes on the way. It was a great holy place, with thousands of pilgrims, some on their knees, making their way to the founts of healing water. There was something going on here - it reminded us of our former home in Chimayo, New Mexico. We had lived close to the Sanctuario, a sacred chapel visited by pilgrims to collect the holy mud that miraculously appeared in the floor, The chapel walls were hung with dsicarded braces and walking sticks, tributes to its healing power. At Easter pilgrims walked to Chimayo in vast numbers along the state highways of the South West. There was also a statue of Santo Niño there, peering serenely at the world above a small mountain of baby shoes, gifts from thankful parents.

El Santuario de Chimayó

Later in Portugal we found the shrine of Fátima, where the blessed Virgin had appeared to three children. Fátima was also teeming with pilgrims seeking relief from illness and troubles. We collected water there too. Leaving Portugal in the North, some weeks later, we entered Galicia. I remember we crossed a stone bridge and were once again in Spain. It was hot. We drove towards Santiago de Compostela (Saint James of the Field of Stars). Nothing prepared us for the beauty of the stone buildings of the city, burnt orange in the evening sun, nor the heartstopping grandeur of the cathedral. Once again there were pilgrims everywhere, shops selling cockle shells, tapes of medieval pilgrim songs, prayer cards, rosaries, postcards, all the trappings of the pilgrim trade. There were guidebooks in Spanish and English. Alan bought one of each. We knew at once that we would follow the pilgrim trail, albeit backwards, from Santiago to St Jean de Pied de Port in France.

The Cathedral of Santiago De Compostela

We were guided by the yellow arrows painted on stone walls and boulders, along a route that was far from the highway, along quiet country roads, through ancient stone towns. We did not enter the modern age, except for brief excursions into the great cities of Burgos and Pamplona. At night we camped, or stayed in small hotels. It was a voyage of discovery, and every few miles we would stop to visit a shrine, a church, a hospice, a convent, a house, a gate, a cross. Later Alan travelled the right way in his performance work Compostela - A Walk, imagining the road that ran all the way from France to Santiago ... The first performance was at Bats Theatre, Wellington on 7 April 2000 ...

Bats Theatre, Wellington

Alan's text is far too long and detailed to do justice to here, so I'll just quote a short piece from near the beginning:

we'll live the life
of the romero
the strangers who always
walk on new roads 
we'll live the life
of the romero
without a job, without a name
with no place to call home
we'll live the life 
of the romero 
the strangers who always 
walk on new roads 
where do you come from, Romero?
Romero, where do you go?
We come from nowhere
But we go to Compostela

Annie Goldson, dir.: Red Mole: A Romance (2023)

Those of you who've watched Annie Goldson's fascinating documentary about Brunton and Rodwell's theatre troupe Red Mole will be familiar with the peripatetic life led by them and their collaborators before returning to Wellington in the 1990s. As he himself explained it to his daughter Ruby in Fq (2002):

you will live in an era of new
proprioception, quatre étoiles, bright
locofocos over Ocean City, leaving me in
my old age growing up again in the fuzzy
town of my childhood where nothing was
original, not even our peccadillos, where I
promised with my hand stuck to a
tree by a knife I’d eat the wind all my life and
ramble from commune to commune ...

There was to be no such old age - but at least we have his body of work to explain that intensely Kiwi desire to escape: to leave "the fuzzy town" of our childhood and eat the wind all our lives ...

Ave atque vale, Alan - till we all meet again.

Alan Brunton (1946-2002)

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1. Lydia Smith, dir.: Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago (USA, 2013)

The avalanche of post-The Way Camino-centred feature films and documentaries began innocuously enough with Lydia Smith's Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago in 2013. This was followed by a film of Hape Kerkeling's bestselling travel book I'm Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago (2006):






2. Julia von Heinz, dir.: Ich bin dann mal weg (Germany, 2015)

Dutch director Martin de Vries took a more direct approach to the subject in his "feature-length selfie" Camino:






3. Martin de Vries: Camino, een feature-length selfie (Holland, 2019)

Our own New Zealand contribution to the genre, Camino Skies, stressed the element of pilgrimage - not so much for religious reasons, but mainly because of some personal tragedy or loss that needed to be addressed somehow, in a way which could not readily be encompassed within everyday life.






4. Noel Smyth & Fergus Grady, dir.: Camino Skies (NZ, 2019)

These moving and, at times, quite beautiful documentaries gave way to fictional buddy-movie narrative again with Birgitte Stærmose's Danish film Camino:






5. Birgitte Stærmose, dir.: Camino (Denmark, 2023)

In the meantime, Australian Bill Bennett decided that a kind of mockumentary might make an agreeable variation on the theme: a portrait of the artist as an irascible, unreasonable old prick ... Despite everything, though, even Bennett's protagonist manages to achieve a reconciliation of sorts with his long-suffering wife at the end of his peregrinations:






6. Bill Bennett, dir. & writ.: The Way, My Way (Australia, 2024)

It's always a bit difficult to fathom the humour of other cultures. The French adore Jerry Lewis and Jacques Tati. Americans find Rodney Dangerfield funny. Italians, it would appear, find atrocious buffoon Checco Zalone rib-ticklingly amusing. It's hard to see why. But he too (inevitably) finds an epiphany of a sort in his enforced sojourn on the Camino.






7. Gennaro Nunziante, dir.: Buen Camino, writ. Checco Zalone (Italy, 2025)

By now, such films needed little introduction beyond the single word "Camino" (for English-speaking viewers) or "Compostela" (for Europeans). Why, then, you may ask, do I keep on watching them?






8. Yann Samuel, dir.: Santiago: The Camino Therapy (France, 2026)

The fact that a subgenre has become predictable and unchallenging is no reason to give up on it altogether. There's such a thing as cinematic comfort food. When my wife's nephew Finn was asked why he insisted on watching rom-coms in preference to anything else on screen, he replied: "Because they're just good movies."

I'm not sure that Camino films are always good movies, but then, I'm not sure that the majority of rom-coms are either. The truth is that, like Finn, I love them. I love the scenery; I like their sense of mission, and the promise they seem to offer of a higher purpose to the everyday lives we live.

I like it that there's almost always a tear-provoking moment when everything seems to come together in the majestic surrounds of Santiago de Compostela - or even on the rugged Atlantic coast which most of our cinematic pilgrims now seem to regard as the rightful conclusion of their journey.

Maybe David Lodge had a point after all. Maybe the road to Compostela is not the place to argue about the timing of your latest book-tour. I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to walk it myself, but I'm pretty sure that I'll keep on enjoying it vicariously through the eyes of more ambitious travellers.

I really can't see much harm in that.






9. Laurent Granier, dir.: Compostela: The road of stars (France, 2026)

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20th Anniversary - China

Chinese Good Luck Dragon

Blogophilia

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.

André Malraux: Le Musée imaginaire. Psychologie de l’art, I (1947)

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.

1. [14/6/2021]: Fifteenth Anniversary (Crystal)
2. [14/6/2016]: Tenth Anniversary (Tin)
3. [15/6/2011]: Fifth Anniversary (Wood)

Here's the latest crop of projects:

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2021:




1. (January 19 - October 18, 2021) Michele 2021: A Birthday Festschrift for Michele Joy Leggott.



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:




2. (June 2, 2022 - October 29, 2023) Jack Ross: Stories.



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:



1. Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000)
2. The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006)
   1. Who am I? Automatic Writing
   2. Where am I? Cuttings
3. E M O (2008)
   1. EVA AVE
   2. Moons of Mars
   3. Ovid in Otherworld


I ended up with 59 stories, ranging in length from novellas to flash fictions, from seven different publications:



1. Monkey Miss Her Now & Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know. ISBN 0-476-00182-X. Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004. [13 short stories]
2. Trouble in Mind. ISBN 0-9582586-1-9. Auckland: Titus Books, 2005. [novella]
3. Kingdom of Alt. ISBN 978-1-877441-15-8. Auckland: Titus Books, 2010. [8 short stories]
4. The Annotated Tree Worship: Draft Research Portfolio. ISBN 978-0-473-41328-6. Auckland: Paper Table, 2017. [novella]
5. The Annotated Tree Worship: List of Topoi. ISBN 978-0-473-41329-3. Auckland: Paper Table, 2017. [novella]
6. Ghost Stories. ISBN 978-0-9951165-5-9. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019. [12 short stories]
7. Haunts. ISBN 978-1-991083-17-3. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2024. [13 short stories]


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:




3. (May 27, 2023-April 2024) Jack Ross: Poems



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:



1. City of Strange Brunettes. ISBN 0-473-05446-9. Auckland: Pohutukawa Press, 1998.
2. Chantal’s Book. ISBN 0-473-08744-8. Wellington: HeadworX, 2002.
3. To Terezín. Afterword by Martin Edmond. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132. Auckland: Massey University, 2007.
4. 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.
5. A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014. ISBN 978-0-473-29640-7. Wellington: HeadworX, 2014.
6. The Oceanic Feeling. Drawings by Katharina Jaeger. Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd. ISBN 978-0-473-55801-7. Auckland: Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021.


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:



1. Ezra Pound’s Fascist Cantos (72 & 73) together with Rimbaud’s “Poets at Seven Years Old.” Translated by Jack Ross. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 1997.
2. A Town Like Parataxis. Photographs by Gabriel White. ISBN 0-473-07104-5. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000.
3. The Perfect Storm. Video by Gabriel White. ISBN 0-473-07350-1. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000.
4. The Britney Suite. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2001.
5. A Bus Called Mr Nice Guy. ISBN 0-473-10526-8. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2005.
6. Love in Wartime. Wellington: Pania Press, 2006.
7. Papyri: Love poems & fragments from Sappho & elsewhere. ISBN 978-0-473-12397-0. Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2007.
8. The Return of the Vanishing New Zealander. ISBN 978-0-9864507-6-1. Dunedin: Kilmog Press, 2009.
9. Scenes from The Puppet Oresteia. Artwork by William T. Ayton. ISBN 978-0-473-18881-8. Rhinebeck, NY: Narcissus Press / Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2011.
10. Fallen Empire: Museum of True History in Collaboration with Karl Chitham and Jack Ross. Dunedin: Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 2012.


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:



1. Collage Poems (1997-2005)
2. Poems from Novels (2000-2008)
3. Poems from Stories (2004-2019)
4. Tree Worship (2011-2012)
5. Tales from the 101 Days (2022-2024)


Which left me with a final grab-bag category of published but uncollected poems, which I decided to group chronologically:



1. Poems: 1981-1999
2. Poems: 2000-2004
3. Poems: 2005-2009
4. Poems: 2010-2015
5. Poems: 2016-2024


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.




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2024:

EVA AVE (2006)


4. (November 27, 2023 - May 2, 2024) E M O: EVA AVE / Moons of Mars / Ovid in Otherworld (27/11/23-2/5/24)

Moons of Mars (2006)




... 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.



- Jen Crawford. "Launch speech at Alleluya cafe" (19/6/2008)

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.



1. EVA AVE (15/8/06-3/9/07)
2. Moons of Mars (16/8/06-3/9/07)
3. Ovid in Otherworld (15/8/06-3/9/07)


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.




Ovid in Otherworld (2006)




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2025:




5. (August 20, 2012 - June 5, 2026) Acquisitions & Discoveries



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.

Matthias Bernegger: Johannes Kepler (1627)

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