The EMO Interview

[Jack Ross: "Hotel, Frankfurt" (2005)]

Well, you'll recall about a month ago I put up a post with links to my interview with Gabriel White about his film Tongdo Fantasia and his interview with me about the REM trilogy.

Well, since then there have been two further developments. John Radford has done an interview with Gabriel about his film Aucklantis, and Gabriel has posted a second and final part of the interview with me (we only managed to get through two volumes of the trilogy in the first conversation).

So here goes:

The REM trilogy interview part two, focusing on the final volume EMO. (Sunday, December 21, 2008). Gabriel White – The World Blank and Other Projects. 8 video clips:

• [1/8] What is ‘Emo’?
• [2/8] 3’s / Eva Ave / Althusser.
• [3/8] Eva Braun’s Diary / vivisection / cloning.
• [4/8] Story frames – The Arabian Nights / Moons of Mars / characters / genre fictions / Bataille.
• [5/8] Movements and motivations – Perec / patterns / surrealism / settings.
• [6/8] Settings / images, words and sounds.
• [7/8] The blind creator / textual processes – the internet.
• [8/8] Ovid in Otherworld / the nurse / Ovid / otherness.

[Ivan Corsa: Lafayette Street Girl (2005)]

Come on, you know you're dying to have a listen! Who knows, it might change your life ...

Anyway, there it all is. The only thing is that you'll probably have to download the latest version of Quicktime in order to see and hear us properly. Free, though, and the gateway to lots of other exciting stuff on Gabriel's website.

A New Translation of the Arabian Nights

[Malcolm & Ursula Lyons (2008)]

A couple of months ago my friend Derek Gordon (aka Bringwonder the Storyteller) asked me which was the best translation of the Arabian Nights. The situation, I had to tell him, was a complex one.

The short answer is that there isn't any completely satisfactory translation of the Nights into English, despite the bewildering number of selections, retellings, adaptations and other attempts at a solution to the problematic nature of the book itself which have appeared over the past couple of centuries. Ridiculous, isn't it?

With the appearance of this new, complete Penguin translation by Malcolm C. Lyons - introduced and partially annotated by Robert Irwin, author of The Arabian Nights: A Companion, and with new translations of "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba" from the French by Ursula Lyons - the situation suddenly looks much brighter. That is if, like me - and, I guess, professional storytellers such as Derek - you're a fanatic for everything to do with the (so-called) Arabian Nights (or Kitab Alf Layla wa Layla [Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night]).

I suppose, though, it was only a matter of time. No-one could seriously question the need for it. There's a brand-new translation in French, just out from the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade; thorough, reliable versions in German and Italian - even in Russian and Czech. So why has English been lagging behind?

Well, the first reason stems from the fact that there are actually two very different manuscript traditions of the Nights.

1. On the one hand, there's the 14th-century Syrian Ms. Galland, which the Frenchman Antoine Galland used for his pioneering multi-volumed translation of 1704-1717. This was the form in which the collection first reached Europe, and the choices Galland made in making his rather free adaptation of the materials available to him have had a huge influence ever since. It was he, for example, who chose to incorporate Sinbad the Sailor (originally from a quite different text) into the Thousand and One Nights. It was he who, forced to supply the insatiable demand of his public for more volumes of stories (rather like an eighteenth-century J. K. Rowling), collected "Ali Baba," "Aladdin" and various other stories from the oral recitations of a visiting Lebanese Christian, Hanna Diyab (the Arabic texts of the stories discovered later turned out to have been adapted from Galland's French, rather than the other way round).


2. On the other hand, there's Z.E.R. [Zotenberg's Egyptian Recension - named for the German scholar who first identified this separate manuscript tradition in the late 1880s]. This forms the basis of most of the "complete" versions of the Nights - i.e. containing 1001 actual nights of storytelling. It was once thought to be the original from which Galland's incomplete version was extracted, but unfortunately it turns out that the traffic was actually the other way. Z.E.R. arose in Egypt largely as a result of the demands of Westerners, brought up on Galland's elegant fairy-tale version of the Arabic tales, for a fuller and more comprehensively "Oriental" version of the whole collection. The 1835 Bulaq edition (printed in Cairo), and the 1839-42 Macnaghten edition (printed in Calcutta by the British East India Company) are the two essential versions of this text. Opinions differ greatly on which of the two is preferable - Macnaghten is fuller, but also contains a lot more editorial interference (though probably not by William Hay Macnaghten himself, who was killed in the British retreat from Kabul in 1841).

So which of all these competing Arabic versions should one translate? Which represents the genuine 1001 Nights? The answer is (unfortunately) that there is no "genuine" text of the Nights. The medieval Arabic encyclopedists who mention the collection say that it was originally translated from Persian into Arabic (and the names Sharazad and Shahryar only make sense in Persian, which tends to substantiate the claim). The Persians may (or may not) have derived the frame-story of the Nights from a lost Sanskrit version - opinions differ on that point. In any case, none of these earlier texts survive, but enough information about them remains to convince us that they can have contained only a very few (if any) even of the stories which have come down to us as the solid core of the collection: "The Merchant and the Jinni," "The Fisherman and the Jinni," "The three Ladies of Baghdad" and (of course) the immortal "Tale of the Hunchback."

The collection as we have it seems imbued with the spirit of Islam, and myriad everyday details of life in Baghdad and Cairo. The Persian Thousand Nights, however, certainly predated the Arabic conquest, and some critics have suggested that this pre-Islamic strand is still discernible in the independent wilfulness displayed by the various Jinnis and supernatural creatures in the first few stories of the Nights. Possibly. Who knows?

What is clear is that there has been a story-collection with a title something like The Thousand and One Nights, with a frame-story something like the Scheherazade-Shahryar one we're all familiar with, extant in the Arabic language since at least the ninth century. The earliest substantial manuscript of this collection is, however, the 14th-century Ms. Galland (it seems a pleasing coincidence that the first translation into a European language turns out to have been made from the oldest extant manuscript). But by far the fullest collection of stories available under the title of The 1001 Nights is represented by the various texts of Z.E.R.

So do you want the oldest and most elaborate version: the sadly truncated and incomplete Ms. Galland? Or would you prefer the hybrid, textually dubious, but incredibly capacious Z.E.R.? As Winnie the Pooh put it, when asked to choose between having jam and honey on his bread, "Both, please, but forget about the bread." Husain Haddawy gave us a beautiful and elegant translation of Muhsin Mahdi's critical edition of the Ms. Galland in 1990. Malcolm Lyons now supplies us with the missing part of the puzzle: a complete and accurate version of the Macnaghten edition into clear, current English.

By my count, then, Malcolm Lyons' new 3-volumed, 2,700-page chef-d'oeuvre is the seventh substantial translation into English - leaving aside for a moment all the innumerable abridgements and retellings. I thought I might list them below, along with any currently-available editions of them in print, in order to underline the significance and timeliness of Lyons' achievement.

[Antoine Galland, ed. Robert L. Mack (1998)]

1. Antoine Galland, 12 vols (1704-17)



Arabian Nights Entertainments: Consisting of One Thousand and One Stories, Told by the Sultaness of the Indies, to divert the Sultan from the Execution of a bloody Vow he had made to marry a Lady every day, and have her cut off next Morning, to avenge himself for the Disloyalty of his first Sultaness, &c. Containing a better Account of the Customs, Manners, and Religion of the Eastern Nations, viz. Tartars, Persians, and Indians, than is to be met with in any Author hitherto published. Translated into French from the Arabian Mss. by M. Galland of the Royal Academy, and now done into English from the last Paris Edition. London: Andrew Bell, 1706-17. 16th ed. 4 vols. London & Edinburgh: C. Elliot, 1781.


We begin at the beginning, with the first introduction of the Nights into Europe, Galland's maddeningly elegant, terrifyingly eclectic French adaptation / translation / transformation, which came out in 12 volumes between 1704 and 1717.

Galland was translated, anonymously, into English almost as soon as his volumes started to appear, and (variously supplemented) his translation provided the basis for all subsequent English versions until Lane's translation began to appear in 1838.

It's no exaggeration to call Galland a storytelling genius. The influence his work has had on European culture is incalculable (whether or not it's true that French guttersnipes used to gather under his bedroom window at night and yell out "Please, my sister, if the Sultan pleases, tell me another one of those tales of which you possess such a great store" until he gave in and cranked out another volume for them, I'll leave you to determine).

The liberties he took with the text were considerable - some would say unforgiveable - but the fact that the various textually-unwarranted additions he made to the "pure" Ms. Galland, have come to be seen as the core of what most characterizes the Nights as a whole (Aladdin, Ali Baba, even Sindbad himself), might lead us to call him more their creator than their translator.

The earliest English translation of Galland (by the so-called "Anonymous Grub-Street Hack": rather a strange name under which to achieve immortal fame) is now fortunately available in its entirety in the Oxford World's Classics series. I've provided a link to it below:


Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Ed. Robert L. Mack. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.




[Lane (1995)]


2. Edward William Lane, 3 vols (1838-41)



The Thousand and One Nights, Commonly Called, in England, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. A New Translation from the Arabic, with Copious Notes. 3 vols. London: Charles Knight, 1839-41.


Edward William Lane was a great Arabist, long resident in Cairo, and famous for his book The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). As a supplement to this work, he undertook a translation of the Bulaq edition of the Nights (or rather the Z.E.R., Cairene text of the Nights rather than Galland's earlier, Syrian text) soon after its publication in 1835.

The translation was wildly popular, partially because of the stunningly beautiful engravings and textual ornaments provided for it by William Knight, but also because it supplied a great many new stories to supplement those familiar from reprints of Galland and his followers.

Lane's extensive annotations about Muslim life were subsequently extracted and published as a separate volume, Arabian Society in the Middle Ages, still in print today (as you can see from the illustration above). Burton, no great fan of the prudish reserve of Lane's translation, put their value more simply: "The traveller who adds Lane's notes to mine will know more about the Moslem East than many a man who has spent half his life there ..."

On the minus side of the exchequer, Lane's prose is rather Latinate and heavy, and he does leave out a vast amount of material - sometimes because he considered it too risque, but other tales were dropped simply because he regarded them as repetitive or tedious: subjective judgements at the best of times.

For this reason, his text is little read today, though it has had almost as great an influence as Galland's on subsequent bowdlerised retellings for children (Andrew Lang's included). Lane's is the last version of the Nights which could be called at all suitable for children.

The last substantial revision and reediting of it was by Lane's nephew Stanley Lane-Poole in the early twentieth century, once available in a beautiful little pocket edition from Bohn's Library:


Lane, Edward William, trans. The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Ed. Stanley Lane-Poole. 4 vols. 1906. Bohn’s Popular Library. London: G. Bell, 1925.




[John Payne (2008)]


3. John Payne, 13 vols (1882-89)



The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night; Now First Completely Done into English Prose and Verse, from the Original Arabic. 9 vols. London: Villon Society, 1882-84.

Tales from the Arabic of the Breslau and Calcutta (1814-’18) Editions of the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Not Occurring in the Other Printed Texts of the Work; Now First Done into English. 3 vols. London: Villon Society, 1884.

Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp; Zein ul Asnam and the King of the Jinn: Two Stories Done into English from the Recently Discovered Arabic Text. London: Villon Society, 1889.


Nearly fifty years after Lane had completed his work, the scholar and linguist John Payne decided to translate a complete and faithful version of the Nights (conflated from the Bulaq and Macnaghten texts) for private circulation only.

It's alleged that he did most of his work whilst travelling around London on the roof of a horse-drawn bus, glancing up from time to time to make sure that the weather wasn't going to damage his precious dictionaries and manuscripts. It seems a little hard to believe, but so the story goes, at any rate.

Payne was a devotee of high-flown Wardour-Street English, and his prose is ornate and florid in the extreme, but the sheer magnitude of his achievement is difficult to exaggerate. He and he alone put into English the whole of the 1001 Nights, in their most complete form, and he did it with self-taught Arabic, having never travelled in the East.

He went on, in subsequent years, to translate four supplementary volumes of tales from the other manuscript traditions of the Nights: a magnificent example of scholarly acumen and dedication.

His fatal error was to issue his translation in 500 copies only, with a pledge (presumably for leagal reasons) never to reproduce it in any way. As a result, his work exerted very little influence over the reading public, and the field was left open for his great friend (= rival) Sir Richard Francis Burton, who thus was able to scoop the pool.

His translation has recently been reissued by Borders Classics (details below). Copies of the original edition are understandably somewhat rare, though it has been reissued complete in various clandestine forms over the past hundred years or so, as well as providing the text for Joseph Campbell's Portable Arabian nights.


Payne, John, trans. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. Publisher's Note by Steven Moore. 3 vols. Ann Arbor, MI: Borders Classics, 2007.




[Burton / Zipes (1991)]


4. Richard F. Burton, 16 vols (1885-88)



A Plain and Literal Translation of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: With Introduction, Explanatory Notes on the Manners and Customs of Moslem Men and a Terminal Essay upon the History of the Nights. 10 vols. Benares [= Stoke-Newington]: Kamashastra Society, 1885.

Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night with Notes Anthropological and Explanatory. 6 vols. Benares [= Stoke-Newington]: Kamashastra Society, 1886-88.


"Galland for the nursery; Lane for the library; Payne for the study; and Burton for the gutter," said one of the first reviewers of Burton's immense, frustrating, multifaceted masterpiece (according to Burton himself , anyway - he included a vituperative section entitled "The Reviewers Review'd" in one of the later volumes of this library masquerading as a single book).

What can one say about his translation? Well, Burton was indisputably a great linguist and traveller, and his knowledge of the East was unrivalled. All this erudition is on display in the copious notes to his many volumes.

He was also a cranky eccentric, obsessed with "unmentionable" subjects such as female circumcision, castration, bestiality and (above all) male homosexuality, and lavished information on these topics through his notes and the immense "Terminal Essay" which occupies most of the tenth volume of his immense work. These matters seemed far more shocking to the Victorians than they do to most of us, though, and it's increasingly difficult to see much distinction between the professional curiosity of the modern anthropologist and Burton's omnivorous zeal for collecting of information on all aspects of the societies he travelled through and studied.

The immense, ill-assorted detail displayed in his own books of travel and adventure tends to make them very difficult to read. Not so his Nights, where the genius of the original storyteller enables us to travel with far more ease and pleasure through the strange thickets of Burtonian erudition.

Racist, yes; Imperialist, undoubtedly (though in an unorthodox and complex way) - but, like Burton himself, his Nights are a mine of quaint and curious lore. This is probably the fullest version of the Nights which will ever appear, and (till the Lyons translation was published) it still had to be regarded as the standard text in English.

Burton's honesty may be doubted, true. He undoubtedly plagiarised from Payne's preexisting translation (allegedly with the latter's permission, but actually - as Payne subsequently revealed - to his considerable irritation). The real problem with Burton's 16 volumes, though, is the bizarre pseudo-English in which his translation was composed.

If a word had ever appeared in English - in Elizabethan thieves' jargon, in translations of Cervantes or Rabelais, in the obscurer pages of his namesake's seventeenth-century Anatomy of Melancholy - that was sufficient reason for Burton to revive it. He attempted to reproduce all aspects of the Arabic text: the passages in rhyming prose, the long poems in monorhyme (a single rhyme sufficing for up to forty verses). Nor did he hesitate to coin new words whenever he thought he needed them.

The result is fascinating, but harder syntactically than Milton, and every bit as linguistically florid as Spenser. One almost has to learn a new language in order to read it. To be sure, if you persevere, the variety and flexibility of Burton's vocabulary impresses you more and more, and the sheer energy of his diction comes to beguile and enchant as much as it initially frustrated you, but it's a hard row to hoe, and not everyone can be bothered.

A recent attempt to keep these virtues of Burton's translation whilst modernising his English can be found Jack Zipes' two paperback volumes of selected Arabian Nights. I'm not a great fan of abridgements and retellings, myself - better, I think, to spend your time grappling with the original, but I guess these toned-down versions will continue to appear:


Zipes, Jack, ed. Arabian Nights: The Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights, Adapted from Richard F. Burton’s Unexpurgated Translation. Signet Classic. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Zipes, Jack, ed. Arabian Nights, Volume II: More Marvels and Wonders of the Thousand and One Nights, Adapted from Sir Richard F. Burton’s Unexpurgated Translation. Signet Classic. New York: New American Library, 1999.




[Mardrus / Mathers (1986)]


5. Edward Powys Mathers, 8 vols (1923)



The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night: Rendered from the Literal and Complete Version of Dr. J. C. Mardrus; and Collated with Other Sources. 1923. 8 vols. London: The Casanova Society, 1929.


Now this one really is a lot of fun. A purist would probably ignore it altogether, given that it's an English translation made directly from the French rather than from any Arabic text. What's more, it was made from possibly the least accurate "complete" translation ever to appear - that of Joseph Charles Mardrus, an Egyptian French Doctor whose adherence to the aesthetic of the fin-de-siecle is rather embarrassingly apparent in the liberties he took with the original text.

He had no real original text, in fact. He simply embroidered onto the 1835 Bulaq edition a series of ornamentations and expansions of tales he found too bald, not scrupling to invent entirely new stories at times. But he pretended that all of this was justified by a (mythical) "complete" manuscript whch no-one else was ever permitted to see.

Mardrus was writing in the ambience of Pierre Louys and Pierre Loti, and was encouraged by their example to add a great deal of naughty spice to the somewhat bald eroticism he encountered in Bulaq. His translation, then, as a translation, must be regarded as little better than a hoax.

And yet, he had a natural gift for narrative, and to fans of Loti and Louys (I must confess myself rather a fan of the latter, at any rate), his volumes maintain their charm.

Edward Powys Mathers, working at secondhand, and accordingly unburdened by such questions of authenticity, was thus paradoxically enabled to produce something of a minor masterpiece in English - an achievement which might be seen to parallel Scott Moncrieff's long-superseded (but still immensely influential) version of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past - or Arthur Waley's Proustian expansion of The Tale of Genji, for that matter: another icon of early twentieth-century translation.

Mathers turned Mardrus' prose poetry into beautifully-turned English rhyming verses, wrote clean, crisp sentences where Mardrus had a tendency to drag,and generally created a Nights appropriate to the Ballets Russes generation.

It's no accident that his four thick volumes are still in print after eighty years, despite the number of exposes of Mardrus's deficiencies. From the point of view of pure entertainment, Mather's remains perhaps the best "complete" version to read.


Mathers, E. Powys, trans. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night: Rendered into English from the Literal and Complete French Translation of Dr. J. C. Mardrus. 4 vols. 1949. 2nd ed. 1964. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.




[Husain Haddawy (1990)]


6. Husain Haddawy, 2 vols (1990-95)



The Arabian Nights: Based on the Text of the Fourteenth-Century Syrian Manuscript edited by Muhsin Mahdi. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990.

The Arabian Nights II: Sindbad and Other Popular Stories. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995.


Fun thought it is, though, the Mardrus / Mathers edition could not be left to reign unchallenged (beside unassailable, multi-volumed Burton) forever.

The next major development in Nights scholarship came, serendipitously, from the Arabic scholar Muhsin Mahdi. His re-editing of the Ms. Galland revolutionized ideas of what the Nights were or could be said to be. This, to him, was the true original of the Nights, and all subsequent texts had simply been produced by greater or lesser degrees of prompting by European savants.

Husain Haddawy's timely translation of the text established by Mahdi went a long way towards substantiating this claim. The fullness and elaboration of the versions of the core nights stories made it clear how much had been lost by simply following Galland's lead for almost three centuries.

This is a version which should remain in print as a permanently valuable witness to the character of the earliest (and, in many ways, richest) text of the Nights we are ever likely to possess.

Haddawy slightly weakened the effect of his elegant translation by supplementing it a few years later with some versions of Galland's other, spurious additions to the canon, but it's hard to see this as a serious diminution of the value of his work as a whole. The two together make up a very attractive package.


[Malcolm & Ursula Lyons (2008)]


7. Malcolm & Ursula Lyons, 3 vols (2008)

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights. Introduction by Robert Irwin. 3 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008.

Which brings us full circle back to Malcolm Lyons. After Hadawy had completed his task of presenting Muhsin Mahdi's "purified" text of the Nights, the only job left was to provide a full and faithful picture of the true nature and contents of the Egyptian ms. tradition, Z.E.R.

I suppose my initial impression of his translation is just how bald Lyons' prose sounds beside the florid zaniness of Burton. What struck me most, though, was how beautifully simple the verses now appeared. There's a great deal of poetry in the Nights, most of it of a rather banal nature, but Lyons has done a splendid job of decoding it for the reader. Payne was certainly a better versifier than Burton, but both felt compelled to try and reproduce the strict forms of Arabic versification. Lyons has dispensed with all that, and the result is charming as well as being far easier to read.

The translation is so far only available in a deluxe hardback edition, limited to 3,000 copies, but it will be coming out in full next year as a Penguin Classic. For the moment, though, the only readily available text is the following sampler, available (at a very reasonable price) from Amazon.uk:

Lyons, Malcolm & Ursula, trans. Three Tales from The Arabian Nights. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2008.

[Malcolm & Ursula Lyons (2008)]

To sum up, then, if you want to understand the true nature of the Nights themselves, Lyons and Haddawy together give as complete a picture as most of us would ever need of the two major textual traditions.

If your interest is more in the influence of the Nights on European literature, Galland and Burton are the crucial versions, each more of an addition to the literature of their own country than a faithful mirror of the text they were purporting to translate.

The Lane and Mardrus-Mathers translations are each, in their way, very beautiful books - Lane more for his illustrations than his text, Mathers for the crisp conciseness of his prose, and the elegance of his verses.

We're left with Payne, still unjustly overshadowed by Burton. In a way, though, since he did a good deal of the translation work with which the latter is unjustly credited, I guess he could be said to be as much the architect of those 16 eccentric volumes as Burton himself. His translation remains a curiosity of literature, but his status as the first European scholar to provide a full and unvarnished picture of the whole of Z.E.R. cannot be taken away.

There are (of course) other translations and versions, each with their charms. The earlier Penguin translation of selections from Bulaq by N. J. Dawood is still very readable (it's perhaps best sampled as a talking book, beautifully read by Souad Faress and Raad Rawi). Henry Torrens (1839) and A. J. Arberry (1955) each began complete translations which were abandoned after a single volume. Both remain magnificent fragments.

The story will no doubt continue. For the moment, though, my Christmas plans include a good deal of lying around exploring the intricacies and arabesques of Lyons' Nights.

[Malcolm & Ursula Lyons (2008)]

[NB: If you're curious to know more about the history of the 1001 Nights and their influence in general, I try to maintain an up-to-date series of links on the sidebar of my website Scheherazade's Web, which also includes a number of my own essays on the subject.]

What makes House so darn loveable?

[House, M.D.]

I've been mulling over this one for quite some time now - trying to get the right angle, you understand.

A couple of weeks ago I thought I had it: the resemblance between Dr Gregory House and Mr. Sherlock ["sheer luck"] Holmes - both single-syllabled surnames that begin with "H"; both misanthropic smartarses: one with a sidekick named "Wilson", the other with a sidekick named "Watson"; one inspired (& written by) a Doctor (Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh & Dr Arthur Conan Doyle, his ex-pupil), the other actually working as a Doctor (a diagnostician, no less) ... The list could go on and on.

And in fact it does. Unfortunately, when I keyed this inspired notion into Google, it came up with a number of references to websites spelling out the resemblances in great circumstantial detail. What's more, it turns out that the show's producer has made no secret of the pairing, and has even admitted that Holmes was one of the inspirations for House.

Back to the drawing board, then. Or rather, back to my original thoughts on the subject, back when House was new and the novelty of Hugh Laurie playing someone besides the foppish Bertie Wooster or the even more foppish and imbecilic Prince Regent (in Blackadder III) was the most striking feature about the show.

[Jeeves and Wooster]

I thought then that the sheer rudeness and ruthlessness displayed by House in his day-to-day interactions with patients, subordinates, other staff members, and even the long-suffering Dr Cuddy, the hospital administrator could be explained (or at least motivated) in terms of another British invasion.

In a world where Gordon Ramsay is a celebrity because of his use of the "F" word, and where Simon Cowell can trash one pathetic hopeful after another on American Idol, it's become very apparent that only Brits appear to have the right to act as holy fools or licenced jesters in the USA.

The theory went more or less as follows: although Dr. Greg House is American through and through, everyone knows that he's actually played by a British actor. Therefore a certain licence is extended to him which would not apply to a local playing the same role. As an American-impersonator rather than an echt American, he's subliminally regarded as outspoken rather than downright obnoxious - it's rather like the swishy exaggerated emotionalism of female impersonators (in show-biz, at any rate) as opposed to the complex and nuanced behaviour of actual women ...

Something like that, anyway. That was in the early days of House, though. The phenomenon has continued and grown since then. After that came my id - ego - superego theory of House (or of television drama in general, I guess). Normally the protagonist of each show is intended to act as a kind of centralising ego-projection figure for the audience: like lowest-common-denominator Raymond in Everyone loves Raymond (a show which, incidentally, I loathe), for instance.

Raymond's wife, there, represents the voice of reason and proportion, the parents the unruly, undisciplined forces of the id or unconscious -- no code, no rules, no taboos: nothing but unrestrained, single-minded appetite.

But House is no ego figure. On the contrary, he attracts us simply because he enacts the unthinkable - constantly, on an everyday basis. He doesn't like cops. So when one comes to his office he gets him to bend over and prods around his prostate with a rubber glove.

The cop pursues a vendetta against him, trying (pretty successfully) to get him busted as a junkie. House refuses to apologise - wisecracking his way to the gallows. And so on. House steals his ex-wife's psychological records to see how she's getting on with her new husband, then turns her down when she offers to move in with him again. This is id behaviour.

House's guides and mentors (shifting aspects of the superego), in this reading, are Wilson (the voice of ethos and balance), Cameron (the voice of human feeling), Cuddy (the voice of society and its structures). He ignores them all, but it would be untrue to say that they don't influence him - a little. Their dumb and reductionist remarks generally provide the clue for each episode's conceptual breakthrough, the deus ex machina, the blessed break, which he's counting on to justify his own self-destructive, amoral existence.

So where's the ego in this scenario? Well, in the first place, of course, it's the hapless patients, at the mercy of House's insane whims and fancies, cut open one minute, drugged up the next, finally patched up like Humpty-Dumpty and rolled out in a wheelchair (generally - not always: some of them actually die) at the end of each episode.

In the second place it's us. House could be said to be one long experience in Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt [alienation effect]. How far can you go before you turn your audience off your central character?

If you want to lose sympathy with House -- if his boorish, sexist, misogynist ways are starting to obsess or even influence you too much - I'd recommend the experience of watching it on DVD. Bronwyn and I have now worked our way through series one and two from the local video shop, and I have to say the amusement factor is dying down.

House, in short, doesn't have the depth of a truly great character, such as Deadwood's Al Swearengen (interestingly, another American-accented Brit). Ian McShane, of course, had the great advantage of starring in a show which only lasted for three seasons (though there were apparently plans for a fourth, or possibly a telemovie designed to round off all the plotlines).

Swearengen's coarse and brutal ways thus had the scope to evolve over the arc of the 36 episodes he strutted and schemed through. He was able to avoid the imprisoning ritual of long-running, 24-episode, seasons: protracted for as long as audience and network can sustain it. His character, in short, had a beginning, middle and end, like the series he illuminated.

It's no accident that Conan Doyle threw his hero off a cliff at the end of the second series of short stories he'd been forced to crank out for The Strand magazine. His real interest lay in cooking up rather fustian historical novels. No accident either that his audience, unwilling to accept anything from him but Holmes, eventually compelled him to bring the vampirish junkie back to life.

The vogue for both Holmes and House, then, might be said to stem from our perennial fascination with the Undead: those beings beyond the reach of common human emotions and restraints, free to act on their appetites without fear of the consequences.

Count Dracula, their avatar, is undoubtedly the King of Cool (in more ways than one) - and it's hard not to prefer him to his equally obsessive nemesis, Dr Abraham van Helsing. Readers will always have a natural tendency to root for the white whale over Captain Ahab.

At a certain point, though, the fascination comes back to bite you. Just try one of those House-ian wisecracks at the office, and you'll soon see that most of us inhabit with more ease the skin of Ricky Gervaise's abject, haunted David Brent (a distant descendant of Jonathan Harker?) than the stubbly, Byzantine Christ-like features of Hugh Laurie's House ...

[Cameron as Mina Harker / House as the Count]

Frost / Nixon or Ross / White?

[Alas Smith & Jones]

Yes, well, maybe it is a bit vainglorious to compare me and Gabriel White filming some conversations in his living room in Freemans Bay with that epoch-making set of confrontations between David Frost at the apex of his (bizarre) media career and gloomy, half-mad, exiled ex-US President Richard Nixon. I shouldn't think Ron Howard will be rushing to acquire the rights for another Hollywood blockbuster, though of course you never know ...

Perhaps a more appropriate model would be Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones's incarnations as "Scratch 'n' Sniff", those two bozos who used to conduct pretentiously inane dialogues in Alas Smith & Jones in the 80s and 90s. As Wikipedia so trenchantly puts it: "Smith was the idiot who knew everything, Jones the idiot who knew nothing."

Be that as it may, we remain undaunted. Gabriel has spent a lot of time over the years reading and annotating his copies of my REM trilogy: Nights with Giordano Bruno (Bumper Books, 2000), The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Titus, 2006) and EMO (Titus, 2008), and he had quite a lot of questions to ask me about them. What harm, we thought, in sharing the results with an online audience?

Turnabout is fair play, though. Regular readers of this blog can hardly claim not to have noticed my admiration for Gabriel's films Aucklantis (2006) (reviewed here) and Tongdo Fantasia (2008) (launched earlier this year at OUi boutique in K Rd).

So we decided to do a double interview: I would quiz him on the inspirations and influences behind his Tongdo Fantasia, and then he would ask me questions about the REM novels.

For my money, that's better than either Frost / Nixon or Smith & Jones. I mean, didn't you ever long to see Nixon asking Frost some tough questions about just who precisely he thought he was to be so up on his high horse? And why didn't Smith ever swap places with Jones? That's what I want to know. With us, on the other hand, you get to see us on opposite sides of the table - in itself well worth the price of admission, I'd have thought ...

But seriously, folks, here's a breakdown of both interviews, now up for viewing on Gabriel's website (the clips take a little while to download, but at least that gives you time to mull over the info contained in each). They've also been indexed with themes and topics for your viewing convenience:

Jack Ross interviews Gabriel White on Tongdo Fantasia. (Sunday, November 30, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 5 video clips:

• [1/5] Buddhism / the ‘pedestrian filmmaker.’
• [2/5] The 3-fold approach / photographs / editing.
• [3/5] Themes – natural and unnatural.
• [4/5] The verbal approach / cinematic landscape.
• [5/5] Bashō’s travel diaries.

[Matsuo Bashō]

Gabriel White interviews Jack Ross on his REM trilogy. (Sunday, November 30, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 9 video clips:

• [1/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy.
• [2/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy.
• [3/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy / Nights with Giordano Bruno – layout.
• [4/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy – the fictional creator/s.
• [5/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy / Nights with Giordano Bruno / psychoanalysis.
• [6/9] Nights with Giordano Bruno – Lullism / the Magus / Bruno’s Cena de le ceneri.
• [7/9] Apuleius – influence on Bruno and Jack Ross.
• [8/9] The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis – amnesia / narrative approach / Atlantis.
• [9/9] The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis – two ways of approaching amnesia: cuttings and automatic writing.

[Apuleius: The Golden Ass (as illustrated by Milo Manara)]

Depending on the response to these, there may well be more to come. We didn't have enough time to talk about either Gabriel's Aucklantis or my novel EMO, but there are number of interesting points still to be thrashed out about both, I'd have thought.

Watch this space ...


[Postscript - 10th December]:

There's now a new interview up on Gabriel's site:

John Radford interviews Gabriel White on Aucklantis. (Sunday, December 7, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 5 video clips:

John Radford: "It's like a child's view, or someone from another reality arriving here and looking at this thing which we call a city and the way this thing works and making assumptions ... that are very reasonable assumptions to make ..."

• [1/5] Sleepyhead / stream-of-consciousness city / wandering rocks / the epic.
• [2/5] Mayoral Drive / Atlantis / North pole theory / sacred isles.
• [3/5] The shadow / confusions / characters.
• [4/5] Groundhog Day / references / the car.
• [5/5] En plein air / counterworlds.

[sacred isle]

How many Eskimo words are there for snow?

[Death of a Good Metaphor]

I remember once at a party at Scott Hamilton's having quite an acrimonious exchange with one of my fellow-guests over the number of Eskimo words for snow. For years I'd been reading in virtually every book of pop-etymology I picked up that the Eskimos so lived and breathed snow, that they had 16 different words for it - or 32 different words for it - or 44 different words for it ("falling snow" - "sitting snow" - "impacted snow" - "wet-bad-driving-snow" - "good-dry-building-snow" etc. etc. etc.) Just like we (or some of us) talk about "earth" and "soil" and "loam" and "dirt" and "dust" and "mud" (or even "tilth"), I suppose.

I'd been enlarging on my theory that this was complete bullshit to the assembled company, mainly because each book gave a different number for these alleged words for snow, but also because none of them supplied any source for this information beyond some other piece of journalism by one of their bonehead colleagues. What is an Eskimo, anyway? Nowadays people tend to use the word "Inuit" instead. But of course this piece of facile PC'ness had been added to various versions of the fact (or "factoid").

Scott's friend erupted at this deluge of smartypants scepticism, and claimed that he personally had visited a museum somewhere in the north of Finland (I think it was) - in the Lapp country, at any rate - and had seen inscribed on the wall of the museum a huge plethora of terms which did indeed represent the full range of Eskimo (or Inuit) terms for snow. There it was, in black & white, carved in stone, in the sacred museum of time!

Collapse of stout party. I can't say I was totally convinced by his asseverations, but I was impressed by his vehemence, and he'd certainly succeeded in trumping my own point - which was mainly that people repeat anecdotes rather than checking them, and that they have a tendency to embed themselves in our cultural bedrock like mini-urban legends.

[New Media Lab]

Well, the other day I picked up a very interesting book (at a library sale, for $1), entitled Faking Literature (2001), by no less eminent a personage than Ken Ruthven (late of Canterbury University, author of the controversial Feminist Literary Criticism: An Introduction (1984) among many other weighty tomes). And what did I find on p.89?

Another ineradicable misconception provides the title of Geoffrey K. Pullum's The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (1991), a book which popularised Laura Martin's exposure of the myth that the Inuit and Yukik languages (homogenised as "Eskimo") exhibit scores of words for different types of snow, when in fact 'Eskimo has about as much differentiation as English does for "snow" at the monolexemic level: snow and flake'.

I couldn't help but feel rather vindicated when I saw that (incidentally, isn't that term "monolexemic" great? I guess it just means on the level of single words ...) But I can't claim that it came as any real surprise.

Further investigation online revealed the following, from a site called Language Log:

The story about Inuit (or Inuktitut, or Yup'ik, or more generally, Eskimo) words for snow is completely wrong. People say that speakers of these languages have 23, or 42, or 50, or 100 words for snow - the numbers often seem to have been picked at random. The spread of the myth was tracked in a paper by Laura Martin (American Anthropologist 88 (1986), 418-423), and publicized more widely by a later humorous embroidering of the theme by G. K. Pullum (reprinted as chapter 19 of his 1991 book of essays The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). But the Eskimoan language group uses an extraordinary system of multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation called postbases. The list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn't that long: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others - very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.

So maybe there's a bit more to the misunderstanding than a simple untruth (I still wonder what actually was written up on that museum wall in Lappland. Maybe it's the Lapps who have lots and lots of words for snow. Or for "reindeer," for that matter. Or maybe that friend of Scott's was just totally full of shit ...) The story clearly doesn't mean what most people want it to, though: i.e. that we have lots of words for the things that preoccupy us most. It was, after all, the historian Gibbon who commented (long before Borges popularised the idea in his classic essay "The Argentinean Writer and Tradition" ) that the Koran, the sacred book of the Arabs, contains no references to their principal means of transportation, camels.

[Mush!]

The large number of Eskimo words for snow is, in short, not a fact but a factoid. And what exactly is a "factoid"? Ruthven has some light to shed on that subject also. The word can apparently be traced back to Norman Mailer's 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn: "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or a newspaper." But what began as a word for pieces of pseudo-information about the alleged habits or tastes of celebrities has now had to be extended over the whole field of pseudo-information - the stock-in-trade of Monty Python's immortal Hackenthorpe Book of Lies:

Contains over 60 million untrue facts and figures - Amaze your friends! - Did you know ... that El Greco's real name was E.L. Grecott? ... that Chuck Berry wrote many of Shakespeare's plays? ... that the Everly Brothers turned down a knighthood?

• Did you know that Moslems are forbidden to eat glass?
• Did you know that the oldest rock in the world is the famous Hackenthorpe Rock, in North Ealing, which is 2 trillion years old?
• Did you know that from the top of the Prudential Assurance Building in Bromley you can see 8 continents?
• Did you know that the highest point in the world is only 8 foot?
• Did you know that Milton was a woman?

These are just a few of the totally inaccurate facts in THE HACKENTHORPE BOOK OF LIES - all of them guaranteed false! ...

Well, of course that last one, about Milton being a woman is quite correct. Robert Graves even wrote a novel about his/her cross-dressing ways, Wife to Mr Milton (1943), so it must be true.

[The Situationist]

A propos of Robert Graves, though, he's also the source for one of the most fascinating examples of the evolution from fact to factoid in his WW1 memoir Goodbye to All That (1929):

I was outraged to read of the Germans' cynical violation of Belgian neutrality. Though I discounted perhaps twenty per cent of the atrocity details as wartime exaggeration, that was not, of course. sufficient. Recently I saw the following contemporary newspaper cuttings put in chronological sequence:

When the fall of Antwerp became known, the church bells were rung [i.e. at Cologne and elsewhere in Germany]. - Kölnische Zeitung.

According to the Kölnische Zeitung, the clergy of Antwerp were compelled to ring the church bells when the fortress was taken. - Le Matin.

According to what The Times has heard from Cologne, via Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken, have been sentenced to hard labour. ­- Corriere della Sera.

According to information which has reached the Corriere della Sera from Cologne, via London, it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells with their heads down. - Le Matin.

[Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That. 1929. Rev. ed. 1957. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973): 60-61].

Isn't that great? “Living clappers to the bells"! Especially as Le Matin is actually repeating a distorted version of a rumour it's already passed on once -- kind of like chewing your food twice, before and after digestion.

It's funny, yes, but it’s also kind of pernicious. German soldiers who actually had committed brutal war atrocities in Belgium got off scott-free for the most part because so much media bias and irresponsible rumour-mongering had contaminated the public record.

That’s also (presumably) why Holocaust historians, having watched the ”poor little Belgium" saga unfold (not to mention the collective amnesia which swallowed up the massacre of the Armenians during the same war, for that matter), resolved to be so minutely circumstantial in their documentation of Nazi atrocities.

They were right to be careful. About as many people would believe in the Holocaust as currently believe that NASA landed on the Moon if they hadn’t been so scrupulous.

So what am I suggesting in this somewhat rambling post? I'd like to suggest that a little more attention be paid to the hierarchy of genres: specifically, to the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.

Can anyone think of an occasion where (so-called) faction has actually succeeded in accomplishing anything worthwhile? It’s hard to think of any. "A truth that's told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent" said Blake. A lie (or "fiction") that's mixed in with the truth is even more pernicious, I'd have thought. It's hard enough to get reliable information on any subject without idiots adding in their own fibs or repeating each other's.

Mind you, I have no problem at all with avowed fiction - in any and all of its guises. I'm happy to read historical novels, watch dramatisations, revel in anachronisms, muddy the waters myself with any alleged "fact" (or page reference) in any of my own poems or stories.

I don't have any quarrel with C. K. Stead's editing a selection from Katherine Mansfield's letters and journals, and then following it up with a novel called Mansfield in which he "imaginatively reconstructs" the milieu of Kathy and D. H. Lawrence and all their freaked-out friends. All power to him. That seems a perfectly straightforward procedure to me.

I do have a problem with Lloyd Jones publishing a "travel book" (Biografi, 1993) about Albania which records a fictional quest for a (non-existent) Dentist who was supposed to have spent the latter part of his life masquerading as the Dictator Enver Hoxha's double. Especially when the Albanian part of the book is doubled by an account of an (equally fictional) New Zealand short-wave radio enthusiast called Cliff Dalziel who used to tune in constantly to Radio Tirana.

The furore over this little venture into the postmodern clearly soured him on such exercises, though (see further Chris Else's excellent article on the controversy - 'Fact or Fiction: The Curious Case of Biografi,' in Landfall 189 (1995): 38-65.) When he turned his attentions to the troubled island of Bougainville a few years later (Mr Pip, 2006), it was obvious that he wasn't going to allow any troublesome genre questions to rear their heads this time.

Now, I happen to find the teenage Bougainvillean girl who narrates Mr Pip about as convincing as a member of the Black-and-White Minstrels doing a James Brown impersonation. But that's just a matter of taste. Clearly other people like the book, or it wouldn't have been nominated for so many awards. Personally, I find Biografi a much more beguiling and skilful piece of writing.

But, as Chris Else so cogently points out, if you allow yourself to fictionalise every detail of your allegedly "factual" account so relentlessly as Jones does, you end up serving up a kind of second-hand version of Kafka's Castle instead of conveying anything idiosyncratic about Albania itself. Else had the street-cred to say so, too, as he'd lived and worked there himself for a couple of years in the seventies. It's arrogant and shallow, basically. Readers may not readily detect the difference, but somebody will.

So next time you find yourself spouting off about how many Eskimo words there are for snow, or telling the story about that friend-of-a-friend of yours who got served up a Kentucky Fried Rat, just think for a moment about where you got the information from, and whether it's really worth repeating until you know it's true.

I know it might leave most of us with nothing much to say at the next party we get invited to, but maybe that wouldn't be such a tragedy, either.

Stu Bagby's Auckland in Poetry Anthology

[Cover image: Richard Killeen, "Man, land, sea and sky" (1967)]

Earlier this year I had the good fortune to receive a copy of Stu Bagby's AUP anthology A Good Handful: Great New Zealand Poems about Sex for review in brief. Here's some of what I had to say there:

[Cover image: Dick Frizzell, "Man and Woman Kissing" (1984)]

I confess that my heart sank when I heard about this project. The title, “A good handful” seemed just a bit too much of an obeisance to the nudge-nudge, wink-wink tendencies of Kiwi backroom culture, and the claim that 69 poems (or was it poets?) were to be included didn’t greatly reassure me either.

And yet – there really are an awful lot of poems about sex, or which touch upon it in some way. Let’s face it, it’s on our minds; and it certainly isn’t only male poets who go on about it.

That in itself doesn’t guarantee a good anthology, of course, but one thing about Stu Bagby is that when he takes up a subject he really thinks it through.

If you’re looking for a really sexy book, this isn’t it. There’s no real pornography here, though there are certainly some saucy poems. The more I read in it, though, the more impressed I was by the delicacy and tact with which Stu had negotiated these deep and perplexing waters.

“Sex had a lot to do with it,” the Smithyman quote with which he leads off his preface, does (as Stu says) remain “true of both poetry and life.” Before I read this book I wasn’t sure that such an anthology could be compiled without fatal compromises on some level or other. I admit it. I was wrong. This isn’t just a pillow-book for courting couples. I think anyone could read it with pleasure and profit.

- brief #36 (2008): 114-18.

A lot of what I had to say about that earlier anthology applies equally well to this one, Just Another Fantastic Anthology: Auckland in Poetry (ISBN 978-0-473-13767-0) available from a good bookshop near you, or - more directly - from Antediluvian Press for $29.00 plus postage.

The JAFA gag is a good one, I think. "Just Another Funloving Aucklander," as one of our former mayors put it. It's the choice of cover picture that really nails it for me, though - that marvellous Killeen image of a grim geeky-looking guy with receding hairline and barrier-like newspaper, sedulously ignoring the wild volcanic landscape proliferating behind him.

The theme of Stu's anthology turns out to be something very like Killeen's picture: the contrast between "The farting noise of the trucks that grind their way down Queen Street" and "the song of Tangaroa on a thousand beaches," as Baxter put it in his classic "Ode to Auckland" (pp.47-49). Has the latter really been "drowned forever," though, as Baxter claimed? Our poets seem to be divided over the question.

On the one hand there is Kendrick Smithyman, jolted out of the humdrum of his everyday by the apparition of twin yachts tacking below the bridge:

They were ballet. they were sculpture.
Most, they were poems, formalized speaking
to right order, shaping abstraction,
humanizing commerce
between man and man, man and water.

- "About Setting a Jar on a Hill" (p.20-21)

But there's also the social conscience of Bill Sewell's "Onehunga Wharf, 1971" (pp.94-95):

... on the other harbour,
the turbid one to the south,
the one that confounds sailors
with the teeth at its mouth.

... twenty years on from the confrontation,
and as far away from the truth.

"I have not set out to panegyrize the city," claims Stu in his Editor's Note. "Zig-zagging the isthmus from east to west, this is a 'fantastic' portage in the sene of some of the less commonly used meanings of that word."

That is indeed the strength of the book, I think, the fantastic, proliferating variety of its imaginative worlds, from Sam Hunt's flesh-coloured Castor Bay (p.10) to Karlo Mila's "iridescent / trickster / of a city" ("Octopus Auckland:" pp.96-99). Stu's gone to a lot of trouble to include as many as possible of the city's competing, polyphonous voices.

He himself acknowledges "the fact that I've travelled with the baggage of my gender, cultural background, experiences and age," but then of course the same proviso would apply to any other anthologist just as much. A more complete cross-section of approaches and styles might risk dissolving into cacophony. The strength of Stu's work is this sense of a coherent design behind it.

I'm left with the interesting fact that one of the poets I think significantly (though somewhat predictably) under-represented in this book is Stu Bagby himself. The two poems of his which he does include are among the very strongest in the collection. There doesn't seem any better way of summing up the charm and distinction of Stu's book than by quoting from the first of these, "Thorne Bay" (p.11):

... I look out across
the channel to Rangitoto and back
to the rocks which were once one

with that place. And the small
trajectory of time that is this morning
compels the stranger and me to speak,
and when we have done that

we say: "See you later,"
like saying hello to ourselves.

Whaddaya reckon? A good Chrissie prezzie for the out-of-town rellies? We jafas do tend to get kind of a bad press, after all ...

A Town Like Parataxis

Back in 2000, Gabriel White and I collaborated on a book of poems and photographs called:

A TOWN LIKE PARATAXIS

I guess the idea of the title was to elide Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice (1950) with Wim Wender's Paris Texas (1984), but the real subject matter of the book was Auckland: the "parataxis" of its monotonously repetitive vistas and locales.

It was subtitled "a colouring-in book" because, I suppose, it was up to the reader to bring some colour to it.

We had a big launch at Gabriel's flat in Westmere, and promptly sold out of all the copies we'd laboriously assembled out of crudely-copied xeroxed pages (Gabriel had a very art-brut aesthetic at the time, which meant no frills and no smoothing out of the results of the raw democracy of the photocopy machine).

I too was keen on the idea of a kind of samizdat A4-sized poetry chapbook. Readers seemed to grasp the point of it at once ("Some of them have even said they liked the poems," as Gabriel remarked to me a couple of weeks later).

The main problem is that the book has been pretty much unavailable ever since. I'm not sure we could quite reproduce the spirit in which we made that first collaborative text, so I've decided to compromise by putting the whole text up here online, with all of the images included. You'll have to click on them if you want to see them at anything resembling their proper size, though.

And here we both are in 2000, photographed by one of those odd photo-booths (beloved of adolescent schoolgirls) which add hearts and flowers and comic characters to your strips of passport photos. Don't we look sweet?

Contents:

1. FRONT COVER
   
   
2. TITLE-PAGE
   
   
3. CONTENTS
   
   
4. Swallows and Amazons
   
   
5. Cheating Heart
   
   
6. A Town Like Parataxis
   
   
7. At the Warhol Look Exhibition
   
   
8. Stories We Tell Ourselves: At the Richard Killeen Retrospective
   
   
9. DICTIONARY DEFINITION
   
   
10. BACK COVER & LAUNCH ADVERTISEMENT

© Text: Jack Ross (2000) / Images: Gabriel White (2000)

Oh, and if you're curious to see more in the same vein, I've also posted the entire text of a proposed book version of The Britney Suite which Gabriel and I put together a couple of years later, in 2003, but which never actually ended up seeing the light of day until now.

A Town Like Parataxis (1)

A TOWN LIKE
PARATAXIS

A COLOURING-IN BOOK


Text by Jack Ross

Images by Gabriel White

A TOWN LIKE PARATAXIS

A Town Like Parataxis (2)

A TOWN LIKE
PARATAXIS

A COLOURING-IN BOOK


Text by Jack Ross

Images by Gabriel White


Took a walk around the old neighbourhood
– Margaret Urlich


Auckland: Perdrix Press
2000