Friday, October 10, 2008

A Town Like Parataxis




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

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

A Town Like Parataxis (3)






Contents


Swallows and Amazons

Cheating Heart

A Town Like Parataxis:
1 – Winter’s Tale
2 – Walking Home on a Clear Evening
3 – Wysiwyg

At the Warhol Look Exhibition

Stories We Tell Ourselves:
At the Richard Killeen Retrospective

A Town Like Parataxis (4)






Swallows and Amazons



Man is a printing animal
born of opposableto study collagen
typecull phrases – cerebralGreen-backdon’t drop those
excesseggs (I’ve used that phrase
before
That was your truest voice
you never saw yourselfA Hitchcock hero
in ermine – TsarWar is badStop biting them
of all the rushesWar is bad becauseadminister a
swimming Nor’-nor’-westWar is bad because itslapStop touching it
kills the innocentadminister a
totStop
Forget
sequencesis
rememberasratfaced
nothingnothingcloud
doesabove
the
motorboat

A Town Like Parataxis (5)






Cheating Heart
(Between Greymouth and Westport, February ’99)


BUS-DRIVERGIRLRADIO


D’you remember the Kobe earthquake?
Your cheatin’ heart
You must sleep soundly
You must have been really tired
will make you weep
D’you wave to each other in Japan?
You’ll cry and cry
D’you drink green tea?
and try to sleep
Does the gold-mine sign say “Open”?
but sleep won’t come
If they want a day off, they take it
the whole night through
You can go in there and watch them
If you want to
Your cheatin’ heart
I’ve been to Australia six times
will tell on you
We keep them in a cage up there
in Auckland

A Town Like Parataxis (6)




MIRACLE OF LIFE





A Town Like Parataxis


ChristI – WINTER’S
perfumeTALE
headturn
hurry to the escalator
stop

I don’t have much
have much of a sense
of a sense of direction

Blue scarf
side glance
umbrella
point back
necklace

go home & come back
yeah
have something to eat
go home & come back
yeah



A creaking signII – WALKING
& wind-chimesHOME
& OrionON A
CLEAR
shoes impactstaccatoEVENING

I remember they drove us
crazy, summer nights

got them … fifteen years ago?

what’s with them?
never used to
twinkle

kept now for tango

wood, with dates of
services, the daily vigil
no wonder neighbours curse
every light



Louise SwarbrickIII – WYSIWYG
the senior
flight attendant

LIFE VEST UNDER
YOUR SEAT

It’s grey outside

a pearl-grey day
Who ordered
dates for lunch?

Time for a change

A Town Like Parataxis (7)






At the Warhol Look Exhibition


According to … legend, Andy’s first words were
‘Look at the sunlight! Look at the sun! Look at the light!’
– Victor Bockris, Warhol (1989)


Does it interest me? Does anything
interest anyone, in the
abstract? Meeting Vanessa there (turning
to finish her conversation), and to Chantal:
“Will you give me a mustardy
kiss?” “Not
in front of people.”


Around me images of thirty years:
Marilyn pouting, Liz, Yves
Saint-Laurent – garish flocks of
red (something rather sad
in aping such profusion),
the ‘compilator’
– finally, who’s fooled?


Not ‘fooled,’ exactly … fiddled?
“His great, great flower paintings
of the seventies”“Controversial
popCelebrated decade’s
glamour, style and fashion
ability
It includes 500”

icon out of time

A Town Like Parataxis (8)






Stories we tell ourselves:
At the Richard Killeen Retrospective

I didn’t think ‘triangle good, rabbit bad’
– Richard Killeen, New Gallery (2/10/99)


Im AxaduUdax am I
Life begins with qualitybuying up earlier works to burn them
Max a dudI’ve got a terrible tongue on meThe bus-driver’s fearDud ax am
C shows me negatives(jet-stream overhead)I M A X A D Uof the open road. Stop,chairs – and Ben, her ex – in bed
Ax a dudapissing in the – Armitage Shanks –M A X A D U Dscrabble in the cashbox,Adu Daxa
I can’t forget they’re everywherewind, behind a briar hedgeA X A D U D Ascratch your balding headpeur contre peur
Xadu daxX A D U D A XXadu dax
I’d rather unknow than not knowWill it stay there till the end of theA D U D A X AIf I could say thatI don’t really care if you get it or not
Adu Daxaworld – that spearmint lifesaverD U D A X A M I could say anything:Ax a duda
Converting the light to pixelsI dropped behind the signal boxU D A X A M Ithat look, glance, glimpse, stare,digitally enhanced
Dud ax amon Hobson Street?œillade, scrutinyMax a dud
Anything is good“boat” = drowning / sailing
Udax am IIm Axadu

A Town Like Parataxis (9)






păratăx’ĭs, n. (gram.). Placing of clauses
etc. one after another, without words to
indicate co-ordination or subordination.
So păratăc’tIC a., păratăc’tICALLY adv.
[f.Gk PARA (taxis arrangement f. tassō)]
Concise Oxford Dictionary, ed. H. W. & F. G. Fowler (1911)

A Town Like Parataxis (10)





Perdrix Press
6a Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
Auckland 1310
Phone: (+64-9) 479-2870
Fax: (+64-9) 478-5828
E-mail: jack.ross@xtra.co.nz

© Jack Ross & Gabriel White, 2000
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-473-07104-5




WHAT WOULD YOU PAY
FOR THIS VIEW?


You are cordially invited to a Garden Party
at 23 Maxwell Ave, Westmere,
on Sunday, October 1st, from 2 pm onwards
to celebrate the publication of

A TOWN LIKE PARATAXIS

A COLOURING-IN BOOK


Text by Jack RossPhotos by Gabriel White




A Town Like Parataxis

Poems by Jack Ross
Photos by Gabriel White

păratăx’ĭs, n. (gram.). Placing of clauses
etc. one after another, without words to
indicate co-ordination or subordination.
So păratăc’tIC a., păratăc’tICALLY adv.
[f.Gk PARA (taxis arrangement f. tassō)]

Took a walk around the old neighbourhood
- Margaret Urlich


Maybe you too live in a town like Parataxis - it's just around the corner, in the texture of a brick wall, a goal post against the sky. No coordination, no subordination: the sacred sites in your memory theatre.

is
rememberas
nothingnothing
does


A Town Like Parataxis combines image and poetry to articulate this sense of places somehow exempt from "our monotonous sublime."

_________________________________________________

I would like to ordercopies of Jack Ross & Gabriel White's A Town Like Parataxis
at $NZ 10 each.Your address & contact details:

Publisher:Perdrix PressPhn: (+64-9) 479-2870
6a Hastings RdFax: (+64-9) 478-5828
Mairangi Bay
Auckland 1310, NZ