Showing posts with label Auckland University. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Auckland University. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Memories of Don Smith


D. I. B. Smith (1934-2023)
[photograph courtesy of Caitlin Smith]

i. m. Emeritus Professor Donal Ian Brice Smith
(4/2/1934 - 27/9/2023)


I don't think I ever had a conversation with Don Smith which didn't end in some interesting book recommendation - or else a new insight into a long-beloved classic. He was the first Academic I ever met who seemed to be driven solely by a love for books and reading in general. "Great stuff!" he would intone, as he leafed through another shabby-looking prize from the second-hand bookshops downtown.

I was somewhat in awe of him to start with - and for quite a long time after that. I had, for some unaccountable reason, decided in the early 1980s that it was up to me to reclaim from oblivion the long-neglected novels of British Poet Laureate John Masefield by composing a Master's thesis about them.


Constance Babington Smith: John Masefield: A Life (1978)


"How many novels did he actually write?" asked one of the prospective supervisors I approached. "Twenty-three," I replied. "And how many of them have you read?" "Twenty-three." [1] Strangely enough, that particular prospect discovered he had urgent duties elsewhere and could not accept a new research student at that time ...

Don - or 'Professor Smith', as I continued to address him till long after I had ceased to be his student - actually was far too busy to take me on. He was, after all, Head of Department at the time. But when I went to see him about it, he said that he would do it - but only if nobody else was able to.

Which left me with the somewhat invidious task of visiting each and every one of the Academics in the of the University of Auckland English Department who might conceivably be interested in such a project. It was certainly very educational to sample the variety of excuses they came up with - from the straight 'no' to the 'maybe some other time' to the 'perhaps if you changed it to ... [something quite unrelated].'

But no, I was - no doubt foolishly - quite determined, so I eventually made my way back to Don's door, and to his somewhat reluctant oversight ...

How did he approach it? He sat there and talked, while I took notes. His talk ranged over many subjects, some relevant and others perhaps not quite so relevant. At the time I recall he was reading the work of Anglo-Irish writer Shane Leslie - who was pretty obscure even by my standards - as well as working on some of the lesser known novels of Ezra Pound's early mentor (and Joseph Conrad's collaborator) Ford Madox Ford.

Was any of this relevant to Masefield? Well, in a curious way, as it turned out, yes. The interface between the 'commercial' and the 'literary' faces of Edwardian literature fitted rather nicely into studying the work of a poet, Masefield, who was publishing at the same time as Eliot and Pound, but inhabited a world almost literally invisible to their admirers. Ford was a good example of the same phenomenon, though in a rather different way.


Andrew Marvell: The Rehearsal Transpros'd, ed. D. I. B. Smith (1971)


Don's original field of specialisation had been seventeenth century literature. He'd published an edition of Andrew Marvell's satirical prose work The Rehearsal Transpros'd in the Oxford English Texts series. When I asked him about this, he said, "Well, it got me this job." What he seemed to like most, though, was exploring the more offbeat byways of Anglo-Irish literature - not to mention New Zealand writers such as Robin Hyde: far less well-known then than she is now.


Robin Hyde: Passport to Hell, ed. D. I. B. Smith (1986)


The more I heard from him, the more I liked it. I'd been trained in my undergraduate career to admire such extreme Modernists as Eliot and Joyce, and this (still) makes perfect sense to me. On the other hand, there was a rich penumbra of weirdos such as Chesterton and de la Mare, whom I liked just as much, but whom I'd been encouraged to dismiss as dead ends in the grand obstacle race of literary innovation.

Don wasn't interested in any of that survival-of-the-fittest nonsense. Is it enjoyable? was his central criterion for a book. Yes, he was certainly interested in the finesse and skill behind particular pieces of writing, but he still seemed to steer instinctively towards the anecdotal and - above all - towards enthusiasm in his approach to what he read.

I resolved to do likewise, and so, much later, when I in my turn became an English Academic with my own graduate students, I tried to give them as much as possible of the same formula: Read the book, not - till much later - the secondary literature about it. If you don't like it, acknowledge the fact - but then try and work out why.

It is, I suppose, an approach designed to produce readers, not students or teachers of literature. But then, if you don't actually get a kick out of the stuff you read, you probably shouldn't be teaching the subject in the first place.

That was the first - and probably the most important - of my many, many debts to Don.

Most prominent among the others would have to be the innumerable letters of recommendation he wrote for me while I was undertaking my long and arduous quest for an actual job in the fields of Academia. Once again, I've tried to follow his good example when asked to do the same thing for my ex-students.

But then I could never have got that far in the first place if I hadn't got a scholarship to study overseas, and I doubt very much that that would have happened without his powerful advocacy.


Roger Elwood, ed.: The Many Worlds of Andre Norton (1974)


What else? Well, after he retired, I visited him a few times at his wonderful house in Mission Bay, and admired the cupboard where he kept his very extensive collection of Sci-fi and Fantasy literature. That was another subject on which we saw eye to eye (for the most part). He had what seemed to me an inexplicable enthusiasm for Andre Norton, whereas I was more attuned to Philip K. Dick and Samuel R. Delany, but there was generally some new fantasy epic he'd been reading which I ended up making a mental note to get hold of as soon as I could.

He made all them sound like so much fun - though he did stray into heresy on one occasion, I recall, by claiming to prefer Tad Williams to J. R. R. Tolkien as a writer of epic fantasy. This was, as I solemnly informed him, a little like preferring some latter-day SF luminary to Arthur C. Clarke - if they're able to see further, it's because they're standing on giant shoulders ...


Kendrick Smithyman: Campana to Montale, ed. Jack Ross (2004)


He knew I was passionate about the poetry of our Auckland University colleague Kendrick Smithyman, and since Don and I could both read Italian, he lent me the typescript of some versions the monolingual Smithyman had concocted of certain modern Italian poets through the medium of other people's translations.

That, too, was a precious gift. I ended up editing and publishing the entire collection, which still seems to me - like Pound's Cathay - to prove that the end result of a process of translation counts for far more than the way that a writer actually gets there. Kendrick's versions from Italian have a supple ease and charm which far better linguists than he have tried in vain to achieve - and, in the process, he found in the poet Salvatore Quasimodo a virtual alter ego.


Kendrick Smithyman: Campana to Montale, ed. Jack Ross & Marco Sonzogni (2010)


I was also presumptuous enough to ask Don to launch my first novel, Nights with Giordano Bruno, which he did with great style and panache. I remember he compared it to Mario Praz's famous critical book The Romantic Agony, which is, I'm sure, far more credit than it deserved. It was characteristic of his ready wit as well as his charity, though.

Another of my favourite memories of him is the time he hunted me down at my student lodgings in Edinburgh and took me out to dinner at a local tratteria called Pinocchio's. It was wonderful to see him en famille, with his wife Jill and daughter Caitlin, and - as I recall - a great deal of red wine was drunk and pasta eaten in the course of the evening!

As Stephen King's writer hero says of his friend in the movie Stand by Me: "I'll miss him forever." That's certainly true. I'd love to have another of those wonderful, unexpected conversations where Don Smith turned all my prejudices and presuppositions on their heads. But in another, realer sense he's not dead - he'll never be dead.

I can hear him now saying "Great stuff" and reading out another passage from his latest essay, where he juxtaposes a quote from Ford Madox Ford about his latest drivelly historical romance The Young Lovell with another precisely contemporary set of Fordian instructions on how to be absolutely modern to his errant young protégé Ezra Pound ... [2]




Notes:


2. Arthur Rimbaud, "Il faut être absolument moderne." Une Saison en enfer (1873). Pound said of Ford Madox Ford in his 1939 obituary:
[H]e felt the errors of contemporary style to the point of rolling (physically, and if you look at it as mere snob, ridiculously) on the floor of his temporary quarters in Giessen when my third volume displayed me trapped, fly-papered, gummed and strapped down in a jejune provincial effort to learn ... the stilted language that then passed for 'good English' ...
And that roll saved me two years, perhaps more. It sent me back to my own proper effort, namely, toward using the living tongue ... though none of us has found a more natural language than Ford did.


Don, Caitlin, & Jill Smith
[photograph courtesy of Caitlin Smith]




Sunday, October 01, 2017

Allen Curnow Symposium



Allen Curnow: Collected Poems (2017)


A Symposium on the Life and Works of
Allen Curnow


30 September 2017
University of Auckland, Arts 1: Room 220


9.30 – 10.45
Panel One: Remembering Allen Curnow (I).

Chair, Alex Calder


C. K. Stead
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


  • C. K. Stead: ‘AC: informal recollections’
  • Elizabeth Smither: ‘Allen & Jeny: a tribute’
  • Wystan Curnow: ‘Venice’

10.45 - 11.00: Morning tea

11.00 - 12.35
Panel two: New Zealand Perspectives
Chair, Tom Bishop
  • Hugh Roberts: Unsettler Poetry: Curnow’s Literary Nationalism Revisited
  • John Newton, ‘All the History that Did Not Happen’
  • Paul Millar: Curnow and Pearson
  • Philip Steer: Curnow and Environmentalism

12.35 - 1.15 Lunch

1.15 – 2.50
Panel three: Poetry and Poetics
Chair, Erin Carlson


Roger Horrocks
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


  • Roger Horrocks: ‘Trying to save poetry from poetry’
  • Dougal McNeill: ‘Abominable Tempers, Magic Makers: Allen Curnow, Earle Birney and Mid-Century Modernism’
  • Harry Ricketts: ‘Allen Curnow: A post-Christian Poet’
  • John Geraets: ‘Show and Tell: Curnow’s Stealth’



Dougal McNeill
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


Afternoon tea: 2.50 – 3.10

3.10 - 4.25
Panel four: Early days, Latter days.
Chair, Alex Calder
  • Mark Houlahan: Curnow at Sonnets
  • Peter Simpson: 'Contraries in two late Curnow poems: “A Busy Port” and “Looking West, Late Afternoon, Low Water”’.
  • Jack Ross: ‘Teaching Late Curnow’.

Short break

4.30 – 5.45
Panel five: Remembering Allen Curnow (II)
Chair, Alex Calder
  • Michael Hulse: ‘That can’t be it!’
  • Jan Kemp: Poems for Allen Curnow






Terry Sturm: Simply by Sailing in a New Direction (2017)


So guess where I was yesterday ... One always approaches these events with a certain trepidation, I fear. I think you'll agree that the above list represents a pretty packed programme, but - as the prime mover of the whole affair, Alex Calder, remarked at the end - all the presenters "brought their A-game," and there was really never a dull moment in the whole day (not to mention an excellent lunch, which is more important than one might think for morale on such occasions).

There were numerous biographical revelations: Curnow's defiant contempt for homophobia, marching down Princes Street arm in arm with his theatre producer, who'd just been convicted of 'lewd acts,' in full sight of Auckland University's powers-that-were, was a particular high point (thanks for that detail, Paul Millar); and many of C. K. Stead's points about the 'authorised' nature of the biography were also shrewd and to-the-point. Michael Hulse, Jan Kemp and Elizabeth Smither contributed fascinating accounts of their very different friendships with both Allen and Jeny Curnow.



Roger Horrocks, Jan Kemp, Mac Jackson, Michael Morrissey
[photograph courtesy of Jan Kemp]


The Academic papers were uniformly excellent. I particularly enjoyed the focus on his earlier work provided by Hugh Roberts, John Newton, Dougal McNeill and Mark Houlahan. At times they overlapped, at other times disagreed, but the combined picture they presented certainly helped me to understand a lot of aspects of his poetry which had hitherto been quite opaque to me.



My paper
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


It's the later poetry, from the 1970s onwards, for which I myself feel a real enthusiasm (as I hope I revealed in my own paper on my strategies for teaching some of these poems to local students). Even here, though, there was much to learn. Roger Horrocks' ringing defence of the first book Curnow published after his long silence throughout the 1960s, Tree, Effigies, Moving Objects (1972), from the various accusations of 'roughness' and 'excessive obscurity' which bedevilled it at the time, was very persuasive, and Peter Simpson's analysis of two of these later poems both informative and charming. It tied in very well with Wystan Curnow's account of his father's long love affair with Italy, and - in particular - la città del sogno [dream city] itself, Venice, which Wystan interestingly contrasted with the Lyttelton of his childhood.



The perils of explaining all the references as you go along ...
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


What else? My Massey Palmerston North colleague Philip Steer had many interesting things to say about the environmental concerns of the 1930s, and the ways in which they manifest in Curnow's early poetry; Harry Ricketts analysed the 'coldness' many have claimed to detect in Curnow's 'post-Christian' poetry - which (I guess) places it alongside the work of such precursors as Eliot and Montale, as well as the more overtly present Wallace Stevens. John Geraets contributed a condensed overview of his thinking about Curnow over the years, grouped around certain predominant themes.



Harry Ricketts
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


There were some other voices I would have liked to hear. I would have liked Elizabeth Caffin and Linda Cassells to talk some more about their work on (respectively) the new collected poems and the biography. But since I was unfortunately unable to attend the booklaunch on Friday night, I suspect that they may have already discussed the subject there. It would have been interesting to hear some more details about it, though.



Harry Ricketts
[photograph: Jan Kemp]


All in all, it was a great day out, and a very fitting tribute to one of our most important and (I suspect) enduring poets.

Another important presence there (albeit in absentia) was that of the late Professor Terry Sturm, whom I knew pretty well when I used to work in the English Department. He was a very kind as well as a very brilliant man, and I have nothing but good memories of him (including a rather surprising speech in the Senior Common Room one day, after probably all of us had had a bit too much to drink, on the improbability of some of the more surprising claims made routinely in Penthouse forum ...). He was a good boss and a straight-shooting talker. I greatly enjoyed reading his biography of pioneering novelist Edith Lyttleton, and anticipate the same enjoyment from his work on Allen Curnow.



Dieter Riemenschneider & Jan Riemenschneider-Kemp
[photograph courtesy of Jan Kemp]






Mangroves, Little Shoal Bay
[Photograph: Ray Tomes (2009)]


from A Small Room with Large Windows (1957)

Comfortable
To creak in tune, comfortable to damn
Slime-suckled mangrove for its muddy truckling
With time and tide, knotted to the vein it leeches.

- Allen Curnow

New Zealand is a very small country, still. It's strange how many connections you can find with people you hardly know at all (except by reputation). Does it matter? I guess not really. It's fun to table a few of them, though:

My father told me that as kids they stayed in a boarding house in Akaroa where the Curnow family were also guests. They didn't much take to Allen, he said, but they had a great time playing with his brother Tony (this must have been sometime in the late 20s, I imagine, when my grandfather was working as a teacher in Templeton, on the outskirts of Christchurch).

Then my English teacher at Rangitoto College, Mr. Lamb, had many reminiscences of Allen Curnow as a lecturer. He retired from Auckland University a few years before I got there, though. In fact the only time I ever spoke to him was one day in (I think) 1986, when I was in the English Department mailroom and he asked me for help with the fax machine. I had to admit that it was a mystery to me, too, so there went my chance of making a good impression.

The next time I remember seeing him was at a poetry booklaunch in the late 1990s, where my friend Leicester Kyle finally gave into our persuasions that he go over and speak to the great man. Leicester's father, Cecil, who also had poetic ambitions, had been a fellow reporter of Curnow's on the Press in Christchurch in the 1930s, and they had some nice chat about it. There was a suggestion that Allen might write a preface to a collection of Leicester's own poems, but nothing ever came of that.

Connections: I know that Shoal Bay seascape of "A Small Room with Large Windows" very well. My grandmother lived in Ngataringa Bay, just around the headland, and we grew up sailing around on boats and wading over the mudflats. I don't know the West Coast beaches nearly as intimately as Curnow did, mind you. Of course I've been to Karekare many times, but have only stayed overnight there once. Muriwai is my favourite of those wonderfully evocative beaches, perhaps because it's really just round the corner from Mairangi Bay.


Karekare
[Photograph: Brad's pictures]


from A Dead Lamb (1972)

Never turn your back on the sea.
The mumble of the fall of time is continuous.

A billion billion broken waves deliver
a coloured glass globe at your feet, intact.

You say it is a Japanese fisherman's float.
It is a Japanese fisherman's float.

- Allen Curnow






[Photograph: Marti Friedlander]

Allen Curnow (1911-2001)


Poetry:

  • Valley of Decision: Poems. Auckland: Auckland University College Students' Association, 1933.
  • Enemies: Poems 1934-36. Christchurch: Caxton Press,1937.
  • Not in Narrow Seas: Poems with Prose. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1939.
  • Island and Time. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1941
  • Sailing or Drowning: Poems. Wellington: Progressive Publishing Society, [1946?]
  • Jack Without Magic: Poems. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1946.
  • At Dead Low Water, and Sonnets. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1949.
  • Poems 1949-57. Wellington: Mermaid Press, 1957.
  • A Small Room With Large Windows. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
  • Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects: A Sequence. Wellington: Catspaw Press, 1972.
  • An Abominable Temper, and Other Poems. Wellington: Catspaw Press, 1973.
  • Collected Poems 1933-1973. Wellington: A.W. and A.H. Reed, 1974.
  • An Incorrigible Music. Dunedin: Auckland University Press, 1979.
  • Selected Poems. Auckland: Penguin, 1982.
  • You Will Know When You Get There: Poems 1979. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1982.
  • The Loop in Lone Kauri Road. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986.
  • Continuum: New and Later Poems 1972-1988. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988.
  • Selected Poems 1940-1989. London: Viking, 1990.
  • Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems 1941-1997. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1997.
  • The Bells of Saint Babel’s. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001.
  • Sturm, Terry, ed. Whim Wham’s New Zealand: The Best of Whim Wham, 1937-1988. A Vintage Book. Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2005.
  • Collected Poems. Ed. Elizabeth Caffin & Terry Sturm. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017.
  • [Appendix to Allen Curnow: Collected Poems. Ed. Elizabeth Caffin & Terry Sturm. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017. Available at: http://www.press.auckland.ac.nz/en/curnow-collected-appendix.html].

Plays:

  • The Axe: a Verse Tragedy. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1949.
  • Four Plays: The Axe, The Overseas Expert, The Duke’s Miracle, Resident of Nowhere. Wellington: A.W. and A.H. Reed, 1972.

Prose:

  • Look Back Harder: Critical Writings 1935-1984. Edited by Peter Simpson. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1987.

Edited:

  • Book of New Zealand Verse: 1923-45. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1945.
  • A Book of New Zealand Verse: 1923-50. Christchurch: The Caxton Press, 1951.
  • Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960.

Secondary:

  • Simpson, Peter. Allen Curnow: The Loop in Lone Kauri Road. Titirangi: Lopdell House Gallery, 1995.
  • Sturm, Terry. Simply by Sailing in a New Direction. Allen Curnow: A Biography. Ed. Linda Cassells. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017.

Webpages:




Tuesday, May 17, 2011

The Cricket in the Lecture Room



My colleague Mary Paul forwarded me this invitation to a public lecture at Auckland University the other day. I suppose I should try to get back on their mailing list myself, but so much random spam seems to come in every morning already that I no longer sign up to anything if I can help it. It does mean you sometimes miss out on hearing about quite interesting events, though:

Fairy Tales in an Age of Electronic Entertainments
Professor Maria Tatar, Harvard University

Can fairy tales survive in the age of Kindle, Twitter, and Facebook? How have stories from times past, once told around the communal hearth, managed the transition into an age of electronic entertainments? Professor Tatar will turn to "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Bluebeard" to explore how tales with a whiff of the archaic have been revitalised with expressive intensity, even in cultural spaces that have been secularised and disenchanted.

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard, where she chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology and teaches courses in German Studies, Folklore, and Children's Literature.

  • Tuesday 29 March, 6pm
  • Library Theatre B10
    The University of Auckland

Kind regards,
Faculty of Arts

I don't know quite what I expected of the event: something about the digital frontier, perhaps: video games and virtual reality worlds. It's a subject that interests me a good deal, as I think I've made clear in previous posts.

That wasn't quite what happened, though.


The name "Maria Tatar" was not unfamiliar to me. I have a number of her books, not just the beautiful editions of "annotated" fairy tales she's been putting out through W. W. Norton (I've got the Classic Fairy Tales, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Andersen volumes), but also some of her more scholarly works.

Her analyses are not exactly world-shaking, but she's undoubtedly well-informed. She certainly makes a nice change from Jack Zipes, whose books used to dominate the field in the eighties and nineties of last century: his doctrinaire denunciations of patriarchal and bourgeois values now sound a bit quaint, curious relics of a revolution that never quite happened. Sometimes a little bit boring is not the worst thing to be.


So anyway, Bronwyn and I dutifully trooped into town and got to the university wildly early and sneaked into the lecture theatre with the film crew way ahead of time to make sure of getting good seats where we could actually see the speaker.

This seems a bit weird, in retrospect, as the room was only ever about half full, but we were motivated by having heard how Tariq Ali had packed out three whole lecture theatres a week or so before - his words of wisdom being beamed from auditorium to auditorium by video link. I suppose that fairy tale experts are somewhat less topical, but then we New Zealanders are such slaves to the overseas reputation ...

In any case, there we sat, two rows from the front, like a couple of nerds, notebooks and pens at the ready, as Maria and her Auckland Uni minders swept in to check out the room and test the sound system.

That's when I first saw the cricket.


I should explain that we were in one of the big lecture theatres under the university library, dug deep under ground, with no actual exits to the open air. The only way in and out was through the doors at the back - though there must be some service doors down at the front of the auditorium, since that's where it was.

Where he or she was, rather. I immediately conceived a fellow feeling for that cricket. He (or she) looked lost. And, really, one can hardly think of a worse place for a cricket to be than at the front of a concrete room full of hard-booted humans.

He was moving slowly, but with a certain determination, towards the podium, "as if he had something to say" (to quote from a poem by my old friend John O'Connor). Maria hadn't yet started to talk, but zero hour was imminent.

"Should we go down and rescue him?" muttered Bronwyn. (We generally know what the other one is thinking on these occasions).

"I don't think we've got time ... And what if he runs away?" I answered timorously. I guess I was afraid of being tackled to the ground by Auckland Uni security if I made what seemed like an unmotivated dash for the front of the room. Mainly, though, I didn't want to look like a fool in front of an entire audience of Auckland culture-vultures ... "Where would I take him, anyway?"

"You could carry him out to Albert Park," she persisted, but I think we both knew that it wasn't going to happen.

In any case, Misha Kavka had now stood up to make her introduction, and the event was underway ...

I hadn't seen the cricket for quite some time, so I'd begun to hope that he'd found some microscopic egress, invisible to mere humans. Now, though, he hove back into view, limping manfully past the podium in the opposite direction from the one he'd been going in before.

Maria was going on about how beautiful New Zealand was, how the air smelt so much better than the air in Boston, how friendly and welcoming everyone was (especially her hosts, whom she repeatedly invoked by name, as if to convince them that they really must have her to stay again ...)

After these polite opening noises, she swung into her real subject, which appeared to be (somewhat disappointingly) various recent literary and cinematic retellings of classical fairy tales - particularly Little Red Riding Hood.

From where I was sitting, to the right of the lectern, quite a bit of the stage was blocked from me, but now, suddenly, I saw the cricket again. Having traversed the room twice, first left, then right, he'd apparently decided that there was no escape this way. Instead he'd started on the long perilous journey to the exits at the back of the room, over all those leagues of carpet and dozens of stairs. He at least had the sense to cling to the wall, and it was there I saw him, climbing step after step, the little cricket that could.

Then he disappeared again. By now I'd lost any concentration I'd ever had for Maria Tatar's lecture (which was winding to a close, in any case). Instead I was lost in memories of singing, dancing Jiminy Cricket ("Always let your conscience be your guide") from the Disney version of Pinocchio ... In Carlo Collodi's original book there is a talking cricket, but it gets sconed by the terrifyingly amoral wooden puppet pretty early in the piece. It seems characteristic of contemporary sentimentality that his Disney avatar ended up as a kind of ubiquitous talking head for public service cartoons ...

As we filed out of the auditorium to the waiting "reception" (a bunch of tables laden with glasses of wine and nibbles, positioned to one side of the library foyer) I kept my eyes open for the cricket, but I couldn't see him.

"Let's get out of here," said Bronwyn. And that was that.


Kan Muftic: Her Scent

I think about that cricket sometimes. I hope he managed to get out too. But I suspect he didn't.


Manuel Augusto Dischinger Moura: The Wolf