Fifteenth Anniversary (Crystal)

Crystal

I started this blog on the 14th of June, 2006, so this is the fifteenth anniversary of The Imaginary Museum. Ten years ago I put up a post which listed five major web projects I'd undertaken in the first five years of the blog's existence, and five years ago I published a follow-up, with five more projects undertaken between 2011 and 2016.

The statistics on the blog are interesting. It took till December 2018 for it to break the "Million-hit Barrier", and another two years after that to reap another quarter million hits, so I guess I must be averaging a fairly consistent 125,000 per year (10,400 per month / 2,400 per week / 340 per day). I only have 100-odd followers, so there must be a pretty consistent number of returns on online searches to build up that amount of traffic.

Pageviews (6/12/2018)

Comments are way down from what they used to be. I don't take that too personally, as that seems to be the case for most blogs nowadays - certainly ones that include moderation. I get a large number of comments from spammers pretending to be successful members of the Illuminati every since I put up a mildly sarcastic post on the subject a few years ago now ("Worried about the Illuminati?"). You'd think that the date it was posted - April 1, 2016 - would offer some clue to its nature, but apparently not.

My web-based endeavours do seem to have slowed down a bit, but there are still some reasonably substantial ones to list below. Here they are, then, in (rough) chronological order:

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2016:




1. (December 2, 2016- ) Jack Ross: Showcase.



This ... is meant more as a vitrine than a catalogue: the closest simulacrum I can achieve online to my own personal cabinet of curiosities.

- Jack Ross. "Site-map" (2016)

For a long time now I've maintained a large, quite complex site called Works and Days as a combination curriculum vitae / comprehensive list of publications (and reviews of same). Even I find it a bit difficult to navigate at times, though, so I decided to make a more streamlined showcase site where I could display my major publications in a convenient, easy-to-reference style.

The idea is to maintain both sites in tandem: to put everything of interest on the first site, and to select only those few details likely to concern others on the second. It's a bit difficult to gauge the success of the endeavour so far, but I do feel the medley of covers and titles combine to make an attractive design.




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2017:




2. (September 19, 2017- ) Paper Table.



A few years ago I participated in a fairly haphazard and poorly organised book fair ... The book table that I was helping out at was decorated with a selection of paper models I had made, designed to catch people’s attention, make our table seem more welcoming, and hopefully generate a few sales as a result ...
At a certain point in the day, a little girl approached us. She was about eight years old and she asked if she could buy the paper table from our display. She held out $15.00 to pay for it. Of course, I gladly gave her the table for free, and for some time afterwards I glimpsed her walking around the large room, the paper table carefully balanced on the palm of her hand, staring at it with an expression of utter delight.

- Bronwyn Lloyd. "Mission Statement" (2017)

Having published a number of books through our Arts-oriented small publisher Pania Press, Bronwyn Lloyd and I decided to move into fiction publishing with this new endeavour. Specifically, we hoped to put out a series of novellas which could contribute to the richness of this form in New Zealand writing.

Unfortunately the costs and organisation involved proved more than anticipated, and we were forced to suspend the series after the first three volumes had appeared. It was a nice idea while it lasted, though, and we may well return to it at some point in the future if the commercial balance of such initiatives tips our way again.

The three books that did appear were as follows:



• Leicester Kyle. Letters to a Psychiatrist. Afterword by Jack Ross. Paper Table Novellas, 1. Auckland: Paper Table, 2017.
• Jack Ross. The Annotated Tree Worship: Draft Research Portfolio. Paper Table Novellas, 2 (i). Auckland: Paper Table, 2017.
• Jack Ross. The Annotated Tree Worship: List of Topoi. Paper Table Novellas, 2 (ii). Auckland: Paper Table, 2017.




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2018:




3. (September 20, 2017-March 2019) Poetry NZ Review: Local Poetry Books in Review.



As in the print edition of the magazine, there are a lot of opinions on display in the Poetry New Zealand Review. Some of them the editors may happen to agree with, others not. A well-argued point merits its own space, however, and we see our function on this site more as curators than as advocates of particular views.

- Jack Ross. "Guiding Principles" (2017)

I had hoped to make this a more substantial site, featuring year-round reviews of poetry books which weren't able to be fitted in the annual volumes of Poetry New Zealand Yearbook. However, my interest in the project began to wane after I decided to give up the managing editorship of the magazine after six years and six issues (five edited by me directly, one edited by Dr Jo Emeney).

It's a shame, as I think it could have been a useful resource for recording the immense stream of published poetry - much of it of high quality - which appears each year in New Zealand from small presses as well as established publishers. Now that Poetry New Zealand has moved to Waikato under Tracey Slaughter's editorship, I feel that I might just leave the site as it is for the present. Who knows? The time may come to revive it in one form or another.




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2019:




4. (October, 2019) The Lonesome Death of Brigid Furey. Ka Mate Ka Ora 17: 62-79.



It is some years now since I tried to contact Bridget Furey, the elusive and enigmatic poet whom Jack Ross discusses in his beguilingly performative essay ‘The Lonesome Death of Bridget Furey or: Pessoa Down Under.’ The nearest I got, when I wrote to the only and clearly out-of-date address I had, was to reach Bridget’s older, doting sister, Maud (Maudlin) Furey. Maud replied to me by snail mail (as I had written to Bridget). She explained that her brilliant, but implicitly erratic, sister had long since done with poetry. And the next sentence hinted that she might have long since done with life itself, too. But Maud did not elaborate or unpick her dark hints. All she added was: “I wish she hadn’t!” Then Maud had copied out by hand into the letter a text message, which she said was the last communication she had received, quite a while ago now, from her sister, and that she feared that would be the final: “Out on the margins the oddballs bounce the highest.” And that was all. Except for a PS added in tiny letters (Maud’s hand-writing was very neat and small) beneath her signature: “My sister overdosed on life – I wish I had.”
Bridget Furey’s characteristically enigmatic text comes into sharp and meaningful focus when applied to this issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora. This is an issue of high-bouncing oddballs ...

- Murray Edmond, "Editorial Notes: Out on the Margins the Oddballs Bounce Highest." Ka Mate Ka Ora 17 (October 2019)

This article - in full: "The Lonesome Death of Bridget Furey, Or: Pessoa Down Under,” & (ed.) ‘The Complete Poetical Works of Bridget Furey (1966-c.1997)'" - started off as a paper on the influence of Portuguese Modernist poet Fernando Pessoa on a number of Antipodean writers, which I delivered in mid-2018 at the 15th International Conference on the Short Story in English in Lisbon, Portugal.

I had originally intended to write it up for the Conference Proceedings, but the editors felt (not unreasonably) that it was more focussed on poetry than short fiction. I therefore rewrote it substantially for our local New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Ka Mate Ka Ora, based at my old alma mater the University of Auckland.




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2020:




5. (January 1, 2018 - September 4, 2020) NZSF: The Psychogeography of New Zealand Speculative Fiction.



George Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster were great admirers of the later Samuel Butler, who brought a new tone into Victorian literature and began a long tradition of New Zealand utopian/dystopian literature that would culminate in works by Jack Ross, William Direen, Alan Marshall and Scott Hamilton.

- "Samuel Butler (novelist)." Wikipedia (accessed 17 August 2020)

I originally planned to collect all the various articles and reviews I've written about NZSF between covers as a rather discursive history of the topic, but the publishers I submitted it to seemed to feel that it fell between two stools: two nerdy to appeal to "general readers" (whoever they may be), and too anecdotal and personal to please an Academic public.

However, I think they might have done me a favour, as I feel far more comfortable with this online version of the project. It has the great virtue of being able to be expanded and revised continuously, and it's also far more colourful and image-rich than anything short of a coffee-table book would have allowed me to be.

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So what does the future hold for this blog - and for the bloggy empire to which it constitutes the gateway (38 at last count)? Who can truly say? These are deep waters, Watson.

More of the same, no doubt, but perhaps it might be a good idea to learn to expend my energy in ways which make more sense to the Academic authorities presiding over my professional development: PBRF [Performance-Based Research Funding, for those of you lucky enough not to be in the know], for instance ...

Nah, just kidding.

Geoff Murphy, dir. The Quiet Earth (1985)

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Leicester Kyle & Paul Celan: 2 Corrections

K. J. Walker: Powelliphanta augusta (2005)

Quite some time ago now (in April 2014), I published an article [“Paul Celan & Leicester Kyle: The Zone & the Plateau,” Ka Mate Ka Ora 13 (2014): 54-71] on New Zealand poet Leicester Kyle, attempting to link some of his attitudes towards place with similar ideas in the work of Paul Celan.

Some time later I received two emails which offered corrections to some of the information in the essay. I had (as I thought) arranged with the editor for portions of these to appear in the next issue of the journal, but given that has taken over two years to appear, I imagine these details must have got lost in translation.

In any case, it's perhaps better that I put them on record here instead. The above preamble is simply intended to explain why this process of correction has taken so long.

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The first letter, from Dave Johnson, Leicester Kyle's brother-in-law, concerns the precise circumstances of Kyle's father’s suicide. The passage in my essay reads:

His father, a journalist with some literary ambitions (he worked with Allen Curnow on the Christchurch Press) came from a well-established Greymouth family, but found it difficult to adjust to life in the city. He committed suicide when Leicester was still in his teens. [60-61]

Mr Johnson, in his email of 29th October 2014, makes these adjustments: “Cecil committed suicide (without meaning to) as he rang Helga [Leicester’s mother – JR] on the day of his death asking when she would be home. She was delayed by well over an hour and when she found him after he had swallowed his pills and binged it was too late to save him. Leicester was 29, not a teenager.”

He goes on to comment:

The snail Millertonii you mentioned is not the one from Mt. Augusta (now strip mined) I actually found the first specimen when we tramped up to the old Rainbow mine while botanising. Leicester thought the shell looked different and sent it off to Ch.Ch. It was eventually given the specific name Augusta.

This refers to the passage in pp. 62-64 of my essay about the discovery of the rare “Millerton snail,” which I have unfortunately confused with another, even rarer snail discovered on Mt. Augusta.

K. J. Walker: Powelliphanta lignaria (1993)

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Kath Walker (2011)

The second letter, received 9 April 2015, from Kath Walker of the Department of Conservation, has provided a good deal more detail on the distinction between these two snails:

I just thought I’d get in touch to clarify some confusion in your essay around the snail Leicester found at Millerton township, which we initially thought a newly discovered subspecies of the species Powelliphanta lignaria (we dubbed it Powelliphanta lignaria “Millertoni”) and the famous one which was found higher up on the Plateau on the Mt Augustus ridgeline (now described as Powelliphanta augusta). Your essay has them as one and the same but they are actually 2 separate very different entities, & they suffered different fates.

I don’t think Leicester ever saw the famous snail, Powelliphanta augusta, whose only habitat high up on Mt Augustus ended up being mined by Solid Energy, with the snails being held in DoC coolstores, tho I certainly had him searching for it for me back in late 2003/early 2004.

Coincidentally, just as I was trying to find the Mt Augustus snail, Leicester contacted me regarding the much bigger snail he’d seen in the Millerton township. We (Dept of Conservation) ran an intensive programme of rat control around the colony of the Millerton snail (P. l. “millertoni”) for several years to protect it while we investigated its origins using genetics. Not surprisingly, given its very limited distribution, very close to human settlement, this Millerton snail turned out not to be something different after all, but rather a population of P. l. lignaria (found north of the Mokihinui River mouth) looking a bit odd as it had been founded from only 1 or 2 individuals artificially transferred there, presumably by a resident in Millerton’s heyday.

None of this changes the theme of your essay – but it would be good to untangle the MAPPs reserve story – in the immediate vicinity of Millerton, which still exists, along with its annoyingly translocated population of P. l. lignaria (biogeographic patterns are important to retain in nature), and the P. augusta story with its much more sombre ending.

I’ve spent a decade trying to protect the Great Buller Sandstone Plateaux and its inhabitants via Environment Court appeals & always felt that Leicester’s poems cut to the chase & were worth far more than all the careful scientific evidence I prepared (“It’s the loss. Not protest notes to the CEO, or grumpy barricades …“). I agree with your thesis – the only chance of protecting a resource rich place is if many people love it for its own sake, and Leicester’s poetry could help that. In the end I wondered if his poetry spoke more to those who already loved and knew the landscape, both the geographical and the political landscape of the Plateaux.

While I hope that it’s true, as Kath Walker is kind enough to say, that this confusion between the two snails and their respective fates does not affect “the theme of [my] essay,” I am nevertheless very anxious to correct any misinformation I’ve unwittingly perpetrated.

Both Paul Celan and Leicester Kyle were poets who were exceptionally careful to get their facts straight, and I would be doing no service to their memory if I didn’t make every effort to alter these details in my essay.

Mea culpa, then: please bear these facts in mind if you ever feel tempted to revisit the original essay!

J. Ross: Leicester Kyle (2000)

Hooked on Classics

Recently I was invited to a poetry gathering up north where I read out some of my versions from Sappho. Afterwards a rather indignant-looking elderly lady came up to me, introducing herself as a former Latin teacher:

“What you read – that was all right, that wasn’t too bad … but some of those poets are just filthy, complete degenerates. Catullus, for instance. In one of his poems he actually encourages another man to go to bed with his girlfriend! Three of them, all together! It’s depraved …”

I agreed that he was a bit of a one (actually I was secretly relieved that she wasn’t intent on criticising some of my more daring translation choices), whilst congratulating myself inwardly that I hadn’t chosen anything raunchy from Ovid or Anakreon or any of the less respectable Greek or Latin poets.

Eventually I managed to escape without committing myself to any too quotable opinions about the morals of the ancient world.

It got me thinking, though. What is it with the Classics? "Reams of ancient filth," as my father used to put it (apparently the editions of Latin authors they used at school had all the "adult" bits taken out and printed at the back in an appendix for scholarly reference; I think you can guess which parts of the book were most thumbed and dog-eared ...)

Anyway, the latest issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora includes some more of my reflections on the subject in the form of a review-essay of Ted Jenner's recent Titus Books collection Writers in Residence ...

Ted Jenner is perhaps unusual among modern writers in being a Greek scholar as well as a poet. Most other venturers into the field of classical translation nowadays (myself included) seem content with a Loeb dual-text and a lot of - possibly unmerited - self-confidence.

You don't really learn anything new that way, though. What's fascinating about Ted's work is the precision and finesse with which he reconstructs these fragments of the past, some of them literally combed out of the rubbish-dumps of Egypt (it's amazing how long papyrus can survive in a really dry climate).

Obviously I have a good deal more to say about that in my piece over at the nzepc. For the moment, however, here's a brief listing of Ted's publications to date (I've also included a few illustrations so you can appreciate what beautiful pieces of bookmaking many of them are):

• A Memorial Brass. Eastbourne, Wellington: Hawk Press, 1980.
• Dedications. Auckland: Omphalos Press, 1991.
• The Love-Songs of Ibykos: 22 Fragments. Auckland: Holloway Press, 1997.
• Sappho Triptych. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2007.
• Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna. Auckland: Titus Books, 2009.

You can hear more of Ted's own views in the online interview with Brett Cross and Scott Hamilton available here.

And if your curiosity extends even beyond that, why not have a look at the pages on Anne Carson and Michael Harlow which I'm gradually building up for our new Massey MA course Contemporary New Zealand Writers in an International Context?

Carson is herself a very considerable scholar (witness her fascinating 1999 book Economy of the Unlost, which daringly juxtaposes the poetry of Paul Celan with the surviving lyric fragments of Simonides of Ceos) ...

But that's more than enough self-advertising from me for the moment. Do check out the new (James K. Baxter-themed) issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora if you have a moment, though.