June 14, 2006, appears to have been the date when I started this blog. I don't want to wax all sentimental about it, but I thought it might be nice to commemorate it somehow - 4 years, 48 months and 233 posts later.
So, to celebrate my fourth anniversary, I thought it might be nice to give something away. I have four books on offer, then - a novel, a book of poems, a book of short stories, and a travel book - each of them absolutely free to the first person who leaves a comment below requesting that specific title (but no fair writing in to demand the whole bunch. You'll have to fabricate a few online alter egos to pull off that one ...)
You'll also need to leave me a smailmail address, but you might prefer to do that privately, by email, so feel free to contact me here.
How about it, then? First in, first served. Apparently only 28 out of 1800 Britons bothered to stop the nice man above to collect their free, no-strings-attached, five-pound note ... The only stipulation I'll make is that I'm not going to pay international postage on the books. They're completely free within New Zealand. Beyond our shores you'll have to reimburse me the cost of a stamp ...
- To Terezín. By Jack Ross, with an Afterword by Martin Edmond. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132. Auckland: Massey University, 2007. ii + 90 pp.
- Monkey Miss Her Now. Stories by Jack Ross. ISBN 0-476-00182-X. Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004. 138 pp.
- Chantal’s Book. ISBN 0-473-08744-8. Wellington: HeadworX, 2002. 112 pp.
- Nights with Giordano Bruno. A Novel by Jack Ross. ISBN 0-9582225-0-9. Wellington: Bumper Books, 2000. [xii] + 224 pp.
If it's not too late, a copy of 'Nights with Giordano Bruno' would be grand!
ReplyDeleteOh - I'd love Nights with Giordano Bruno. I feel a bit bad for already having been the recipient of your esteemed household's largess via a Pania Press giveaway that is looking at me right now from the top of the piano... but not bad enough not to apply, obviously.
ReplyDeleteSince you're both so prompt, I can say with pleasure that shiny (old) copies of Nights with Giordano Bruno will shortly be flying your way ...
ReplyDeleteWhich leaves three titles up there still to claim.
I do need a postal address from you, though, M. Paradox. Giovanni's I can get from Bronwyn, I think.
To Terezin has now been claimed as well, so I'm sorry (or glad) to say that only Chantal's Book and Monkey are left to go ...
ReplyDeleteCome on, you know you want them.
Thank you sir! Very glad I don't have to physically wrestle FP for Nights of Giordano Bruno, I have a feeling I'd come up second.
ReplyDeleteMany thanks! Shall email you my address forthwith...
ReplyDeleteI would love Monkey Miss Her Now- if I'm in time!..mo ah ah ah
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on your anniversary
Jack - how about Monkey Miss Her Now - I always liked that title - but, by the way, To Terezin would have been my first choice...
ReplyDeleteRowan
You most certainly are, Emma. One copy of Monkey coming your way ...
ReplyDeleteWhich leaves only poor Chantal to go.
Ah - it looks like they're being snapped up as I write! or as you moderate!
ReplyDeleteWell, four years of lots of interesting, entertaining and topical stuff... I've enjoyed it. congratulations for the 14th...
Rowan
Well, I'll tell you what, Rowan -- Money's now gone to Emma (she was seven hours ahead of you ...), but I'll send you an extra bonus copy of To Terezin for old times sake. How's that?
ReplyDeleteYou will have to send me a current snail-mail address, though.
I meant "Monkey", not "Money", in the comment above. Freudian slip, I guess ...
ReplyDeleteI'd love to read Chantal's Book as I haven't read that yet :-)
ReplyDeleteCongrats on the blog and all the amazing blogs you run!
Thanks Skyler,
ReplyDeleteOne copy of Chantal coming your way. Which completes the giveaway, I'm afraid, for anyone who didn't get in on time ...
Thanks for all your comments, and here's for another four years! (if you - and I - can stand the strain).
Jack - it's a worry - but I have all those books and I also have "City of Strange Brunettes". I was just perusing that again.
ReplyDeleteUnique work.
All the best, RT
Not too much of a worry, I hope, Richard - after all, there may be more of them to come!
ReplyDeleteBrunettes seems to be quite rate these days. I came across a copy in an antiquarian bookshop a while ago priced at far more than it cost new ...
Hey Jack,
ReplyDeleteLike Richard, I've got all the works you're giving away - but congratulations on four years of blogging. Looking forward to another four years of posting
Well done.
Michael
No Jack I was just using an expression for the sake of it. 'Brunettes' I reviewed for Pander I think, but I see now as usual it is deeply filled with references (overt and covert) to writers and so on I would have no knowledge of...but I for example liked your use of "craquelure" in one poem - that blew me away and sold me!
ReplyDeleteYes book dealers look and see who else is listing it....if I was young and collecting I would add your books (at least two of each)
I started on 'Monkey Miss Her Now' again. The first 'story' is a kind of Robinson Crusoe situation and then the protag. picks up message in bottle (I thought: Scott to me once "It has been said of Celan;s works that they are like (strange) messages in a bottle.." [obscure,enigmatic, tortured, frustrating, fragmented] - your message in bottle is typically inane (the sort of thing one finds in s/h books - and your texts seem to be made of other texts or references so that is appropriate) - and just right for contrast to Celan who you join (in a later work) to pretty dodgy pop star! Then the Crusoe figure goes to the top of a cliff (here 'Lear' by Shakespeare is 'quoted' as indeed Gloucestor, blinded, jumps over (what he thinks is) a cliff [later you invoke Lear in your 'God's Spies"]; like Gloucestor the protag. "survives" the jump. Strange story...then there is the allusion to The Letter by Auden. Now that poem and other Auden's earlier poems has always affected me with a great emotion (I read it first as a teenager in the 60s -now teenagers (introverted as I was then) have this very powerful emotional-metaphysical-erotic response to language and writing. (I didn't know that Auden was gay ('gay' didn't exist as a word meaning "homosexual" in the 60s)...but that is irrelevant perhaps to the poem. In fact that and 'Taller Today' are still 2 of my favourite poems.
But YOUR letter in the bottle speaking of much but not to come is agonizingly banal. And somehow we are even in Auckland. This 'story' presages much of your other work I feel, moving form the profound to the banal [the universal to the local] and finding the profound in the banal and so on...a tour de force of understatement, allusion and resonances.
And Jack - keep up the Blogging. I like it when you pick up - say - that story by Balzac (about Art and Love) and expound on it...I then read the book and several others of Balzac.
ReplyDeleteIs there some other writer you could "zoom in on" - I find that always fascinating and educational. (I cant read French but many books can be found at the Auckland Public Library esp. through interloan)...
I see you quote Stendahl in one of your books -is his work worth pursuing? - blast us away with something about Stendhal! Something we all don't know! (We like Smithyman but Maps is bit relentlessly local!!!)
Lately I'm reading such as W.G. Sebald (his Campo Santo) and I was also by chance deflected to reading 5 intriguing plays by the poet and filmmaker Peter Handke (Sebald discusses 'Kaspar')....[he also talks (posthumously) of Hildesheimer's 'Tynset', Kafka, Nabokov, and Chatwin....etc etc
Giovanni - read my review of Nights and see whether you agree or if you think I wrote a whole lot of cobblers or whatever! I liked the RHS !! But I saw the 'import' of the verso...or LHS (?)
ReplyDeleteIt's a gorgeous book and I'm deeply embarrassed to have omitted it from my PhD.
ReplyDeleteFor the sake of Apples! Giovanni - squeeze Jack's book in! Or do another (an extra) PhD about Jack -come to think of it you could do one on the 'The Wasted Rimbaudian Years of the Salters, Jack Ross, Scott Hamilton, Leicester Kyle, Richard Taylor, Hamish Dewe, Michael Arnold et al and the Climactic Effect on Kiwi and World Lit and philosophy and Soccer with Reference to the Loney Effect...."....and you could add "And my own, and Ross Brighton, and Michael Steven's (and long list of such as Olivia Maccassey and all the Titus writers (squeeze Brett Cross and Direen in here somewhere)) late but Extensive Contributions." It's bound to fit in with your Memory Themes. Throw in some references to De Chirico or whoever.
ReplyDeleteFailing that you could just do another or extra PhD, PhD 2.3, titled "Richard Taylor, the Bastard I came to hate too late to Love" but mainly have Richard Taylor in there. You could talk about the lead soldiers I had when I was 7 I think it was...after all that is something I remembered.
I think you might have to write that PhD yourself, Richard ... the only question is what Department all those miscreants would fit into. Not English, I fear - maybe advanced psychology or psycho-pathology ...
ReplyDeleteJack if I live long enough! I've already lived longer than Balzac and I haven't written one novel.
ReplyDeleteI actually think the "SALT Time" was a serious time - but not serious - if Scott et al had got a wider circulation if could be cited as say like AND or FREED or PARALLAX but at the time a deliberate swerving away from authorship and ISSN numbers etc (on one hand taking postmodernism at it's word which even AND etec failed [attempt to] do fully)) etc meant a fascinating push against the "old rebels" and the "new realists" and so on... we were revolutionary but also rebellious against revolution itself! (I don't mean there was any politics! Politics was an anathema in that time! But Scott and Hamish had a lot of fascinating "discoveries" - it was their great enthusiasm that powered things though. The intensity. I felt young myself.
Then Scott 'discovered' Wittgenstein and "got politics" - rather a shame in many ways. He believes in things now. [ ! ]
Leicester and you were and an interesting add to the mix and I recall David Howard and others -you didn't hold aloof as some academics might...you also took part in live readings. It is only really recently that I really dig or follow your very different style of writing and reading.
Interesting stuff on Mann above -I can see (possible) influences there for EMO etc.
Yes, you're right about EMO, Richard - the "android theme" interests me on a number of levels. In fact, I think a post on the subject might be called for sometime soon.
ReplyDelete