Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Michele 2021



Wikipedia informs me that there's now a specific term for a Festschrift compiled and published by electronic means on the internet. It's called a Webfestschrift.

They also state that this German word has been naturalised so thoroughly into English that it no longer requires italics. But what exactly does it mean? I've defined it, in context, as a "write of celebration" - a series of essays or (as in this case) poems and short memoirs designed to mark the retirement of a great writer or scholar.

Since January I've been working - with the help of many friends and contributors - on a Festschrift to celebrate the life and work of New Zealand poet Michele Leggott on the occasion of her retirement from the University of Auckland. That site went live yesterday, on Michele's birthday.

Here's a link to it, along with a table of contents:




Michele Leggott: DIA (1994)

Michele 2021
A Birthday Festschrift for Michele Joy Leggott

(January 19 - October 18, 2021)

    Jack Ross: Preface: October 18, 2021
    About Michele

  1. John Adams: Michele, reading
  2. Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Dateline: Michele, in eight moments
  3. Pam Brown: mezzo cento
  4. Ruby Brunton: And Still the Earth is Round - Poem for Michele
  5. Janet Charman: haiku
  6. Lynley Edmeades: Listening In
  7. Frances Edmond: For Michele’s festschrift
  8. Martin Edmond: Michele Leggott
  9. Murray Edmond: After Gilgamesh: for michele
  10. Sue Fitchett: Homage to Michele Leggott who cured a comma addiction
  11. Paula Green: out of the dark
  12. Bernadette Hall: on adding up the loves of our lives
  13. David Howard: VIEW FINDER
  14. Bronwyn Lloyd: Adventures in the Archives
  15. Therese Lloyd: Regift
  16. Cilla McQueen: Poet-to-Poet
  17. John Newton: Big Projects for Poetry (& Criticism)
  18. Tim Page: Michele Festschrift
  19. Mary Paul: Rā whānau ki a koe, Michele
  20. Chris Price: Works and Days
  21. Jack Ross: The Gulf
  22. Lisa Samuels: Joy Division
  23. Tracey Slaughter: is there a goddess for this?
  24. Penny Somervaille: Dear Michele
  25. Helen Sword: Walking with Michele
  26. Fredrika van Elburg: Working with Michele
  27. Ann Vickery: Floating Largesse
  28. Susannah Whaley: Festschrift
  29. Michael Whittaker: My path to Michele
  30. Joanne Wilkes: Michele Leggott


Michele Leggott: Heartland (2014)



It's been great fun working on this project. By its very nature it had to be hush-hush, and I was very happy to learn from Michele yesterday that we had indeed succeeded in keeping it secret. Even people she was in touch with every day had managed to avoid dropping any hints.

Of course, it contains contributions by only a few of the people who would like to celebrate and remember Michele's influence on them. In that sense it's a start rather than a full-stop to a consideration of her career to date. Now she's retired from Academia, there'll be that much more time to work on her own projects and interests exclusively in future!

I hope you enjoy browsing through the various pieces we've included. The site includes a pictorial breakdown of Michele's publications (both print and online) which may come as quite a surprise to some. She's really had an extraordinary influence on many, many aspects of New Zealand culture over the past three or four decades.

There's certainly space for a more complete listing of her articles and shorter pieces, but I leave that for someone else in the future. This project was intended from the start to be more personal and less academic in focus, and hopefully that will make it more accessible to poetry-lovers everywhere.



Michele Leggott: Mezzaluna: Selected Poems (2020)





Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Jack Ross: Opinions



James Ko: "Jack" (c.1996)


So I've started another blog. You may have noticed that it's crept unobtrusively into the sidebar over there, listed under "Bibliography Sites." This particular one is devoted to providing consistent, accurate texts of all of my published essays, introductions and reviews, together with full details of the journals and books they originally appeared in. Thrilling, no? It's called (for what I suspect will be fairly obvious reasons): Jack Ross: Opinions. NINO: Nothing If Not Opinionated, as they say ...

I suppose that it sounds like a pretty egotistical thing to do (hence reproducing above that caricature of me by my ex-Language School student, James Ko). There have been previous suggestions, from time to time, that I should collect some of these essays - the poetry ones, in particular - in book form, but I have to say that I've always resisted it. It isn't that I don't enjoy reading collections of essays: just that my own ones, on examination, always seemed too clearly connected to particular arguments or controversies (or publishing contexts), and I found it hard to imagine them making much sense in isolation.

I have devoted a good deal of time to working in this form, though. Poetry and fiction remain my areas of predilection, but you don't always find poems and stories to hand when you want them - and editors do often seem to prefer commissioning essays and reviews. Academic committees like them, too.

Anyway, while the site is not yet complete (I've put up a bit over half of the essays I'd like to include on it eventually), I find that there are 125 pieces there already, covering the period from 1987 (when I published my first review, in Scotland) to a piece which appeared in the latest issue of brief [49 (2013): 129-45].

For further details on precisely how to navigate between these various sites, you could do worse than consult the post called Crossroads (listed on the side bar opposite under "Site-map"). It'll give you some idea of the extent of this web-based madness of mine.

I won't say, either, that I haven't blushed from time to time at the silliness and general effrontery of some of the opinions included on the site. But then, you have to start somewhere, and the only way to learn is to fail: again and again, repeatedly. My original plan was to suppress some of the more embarrassing ones (and - who knows - the links may not function quite so well to those ones) ... But I decided finally to throw them all up and let anyone who can be bothered to read them sort them out.

That isn't really the point, anyway: "You can't know where you're going until you know where you've been," as Laurence Olivier sagely informs his big-screen son in the Neil Diamond remake of The Jazz Singer. There are a lot of repetitions, tics of phrasing, favourite quotes which I've begun to notice now I've been forced to trawl through all of these pieces again. I'd like to avoid as many as possible of those in future.

Finally, though, the whole project has been (and continues to be) redolent of the same kind of schadenfreude Kendrick Smithyman so accurately describes in his 1968 poem "Research Project":
I fossick among very minor novelists
of our nineteenth century, ours, by God,
peculiarly by virtue of whatever was
held in common with other colonies.
Or, what held them.
I have picked pockets
of several shrouds and more than one
fashion of shroud, for crummiest of crumbs,
driest fragments, dust of droppings, bone
flakes. A shard flint-sharp at the edges,
that was prematurely aspiring red muscle,
a heart. Pick, and pocket.
Someone knew
an impulse to act, entertained a dream
of action

That "ours, by God" phrase rather sums it up for me: good or bad, these reviews and essays are mine, by God. They were the best I could do at the time, and - with all their obvious imperfections - I simply can't disown them, however much I'd like to sometimes.



Neil Diamond: The Jazz Singer (1980)


Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Roundup of Recent Events


[Gabriel White: The World Blank]

I'm afraid this post is a bit of a grab-bag of unrelated matters. Still, no harm in that, I suppose.

First of all, I want to urge all of you who are loose in Central Auckland any time in the next couple of weeks to check out Gabriel White's retrospective show "The World Blank" at The Film Archive Level 1 / 300 Karangahape Rd (Just above Artspace on the right side of the road heading towards Queen Street). It runs till the 28th of April, so you should have plenty of time.

I was at the opening on Tuesday last week, and heard Gabriel read out the commentary track to his early piece Airpoints, filmed in Melbourne in (I think) 2001. The text is available for free, and is well worth having.

The other works, all in the video-diary form which Gabriel's been experimenting with for the past seven or eight years, include Journey to the West, El Arbol del Tule, Tongdo Fantasia and Aucklantis. All of these are on sale for very reasonable prices (ranging from $15 to $35). I took the opportunity to complete my collection of Gabrieliana to date.

*


Secondly, here are some upcoming readings I'm booked in for in case anyone's curious to check them out:


Guest Reader (with Richard Wasley) at
St. Leonard's Church
Matakana Valley Rd

Friday, 1st May
Start 7.30


One of 10 Readers at the launch of
Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals
ed. Siobhan Harvey (Random House)
Artis Gallery
Parnell

Thursday, 7th May
5.30 - 7.30 pm


One of 8 readers at
LOUNGE #8
Old Government House
Auckland University

Wednesday, 27th May
5.30-7.00 pm



*


Finally, kudos to Scott Hamilton for knowing a rockstar when he sees one. In one of his most recent posts on Reading the Maps, he listed The Imaginary Museum as #5 in his top ten indie blogs:

... when the poets, short story writers, novelists, and essayists of twenty-first century New Zealand sit down at their desks and put pen to paper or finger to keyboard, who are they writing to? Who, I mean, is their ideal reader - the person who knows what they're getting at, wants them to get there, but won't tolerate any easy shortcuts or self-indulgent detours? I suspect I'm not the only Kiwi scribbler who would name Jack Ross as my ideal reader, and the assured, intelligent exercises in literary criticism on this blog will show you why.

Pretty good, eh? If you go to the comments after the post, you'll find me writing something almost equally fulsome about Scott's blog. There's a man with a lot of time on his hands who actually manages to spend it usefully by combing the net for bloody interesting stuff which I for one would never find out about otherwise ...

Of course, nobody's infallible.

Not that Jack's perfect - in his latest post he neglects to mention that he acquired his cat 'Zero' from me, and that shortly after doing so disposed of the perfectly good name I had given the creature.

"The creature," indeed! I ask you, does that cat look discontented to you? She loves her name, takes a fierce pride in it, actually. Trying calling her "Nui" and you'll find a set of razor-sharp claws flying in your direction ...

Thursday, March 12, 2009

M. Edmond & the Marti-verse


[Martin Edmond: The Supply Party (2009)]

You know how it is with some writers - as time goes by, and you read more and more of their books, something in them begins to add up to more than the sum of their parts? It's as if the worlds of their imagination have undergone some kind of Hegelian change into a universe - even, in certain select cases, a multi-verse (to borrow a bit of phraseology from DC comics).

I guess that's what's started to happen to me with Martin Edmond. One of the most entertaining aspects of being a magazine editor for me - first brief (2002-5), then my guest issue of Landfall (2007) - has been the chance to see (& publish) new pieces of work by Martin.

Extracts from both Chronicle of the Unsung (issues 21 (2001): 69-74 & 22 (2001): 82-88) and Luca Antara (issues 29 (2004): 33-41 & 30 (2004): 21-26) appeared in brief long before the two of them came out as books.

More to the point, though, I was privileged to include a piece from Martin's as-yet-unpublished short novel Terminus Motel in brief 27 (2003): 32-36; extracts from his White City: The Autobiography of Ernest Lalor Malley first saw the light of day in Landfall 214 - "Open House" (2007): 54-66; and Tina Shaw and I included Martin's short story 'The Temple of Baal' in our anthology of new fiction Myth of the 21st Century (Reed, 2006).

Here's a quick rundown of his work to date (or the pieces I've come across, at any rate):

Bibliography:

[Martin Edmond: The Big O Revisited (2008)]

Poetry:

  • Streets of Music (1980) - winner, Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry
  • Houses, Days, Skies (1988)
  • The Big O revisited b/w Providence (Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2008)



[Leon Narbey, dir: Illustrious Energy (1988)]

Screenplays:

  • Illustrious Energy (1988) [feature]
  • The Footstep Man (1992) [feature]
  • Philosophy (1997) - winner, Best Short Film, New Zealand Film Awards 1999
  • Terra Nova (1998) [feature] - winner, best first film at the Montreal World Film Festival, 1998
  • Earth Angel (2002) - winner, Best Screenplay at the Breakfast Film and Music Festival, 2003



[Martin Edmond: The Evolution of Mirrors (2008)]

Prose:

  • The Autobiography of My Father (AUP, 1992)
  • Chemical Evolution: Drugs & Art Production 1970-80 (Bumper Books, 1997)
  • The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont (AUP, 1999) - finalist in the 2000 Montana Book Awards
  • Fenua Imi: the Pacific in History & Imaginary (Bumper Books, 2002)
  • Chronicle of the Unsung (AUP, 2004) - winner, biography category in the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Awards
  • Ghost Who Writes. Montana Estates Essay Series. (Four Winds Press, 2004)
  • Luca Antara: Passages in search of Australia (East Street Publications, 2006)
  • Waimarino County & other excursions (AUP, 2007)
  • The Evolution of Mirrors (Otoliths Press, 2008)


I guess the easiest way for me to summarise my views on Martin's oeuvre is simply to reprint the review I did of Waimarino County in Landfall 214:

[Martin Edmond: Waimarino County (2007)]

At the Revival Meeting



  • Martin Edmond, Waimarino County and Other Excursions. Auckland: AUP, 2007. ISBN 978 1 86940 391, 240 pages, RRP $40.


I first met Martin Edmond in Devonport, on the night of Alan Brunton’s memorial concert in December 2002. A group of us were booked to do a cabaret-style performance at a café as part of the Massey Gothic Conference (also on that weekend). We were planning to speed on over the bridge afterwards to catch the dying minutes of the concert. As it turned out, the venue we’d been booked to perform in had – quite unexpectedly – gone out of business, so we ended up being able to attend the whole of that baroque, extraordinary, farewell celebration.

From the moment we met, I felt as if I’d known Martin for years. It’s true that we’d been corresponding for a while – over his contributions to brief magazine, which I was then editing, and also various matters to do with Brunton’s Bumper Books, the publishing arm of Red Mole. Meeting people you feel you know through letters is not always entirely satisfactory, though. All sorts of things you hardly notice on paper can suddenly rear up when print converts to flesh.

Which is a rather roundabout way of saying that we got on well, and have continued to get on well. What’s more, the manner of our meeting was a characteristic serendipity. I’ve never had a conversation with Martin Edmond which hasn’t involved him filling me in on some piece of arcane lore about a little-known writer, or place, or iconic event.

In one sense, then, I’m the ideal reader for Martin’s collection of essays, Waimarino County & Other Excursions. Leafing through it is a lot like the experience of meeting the man himself. Witty, urbane, well-informed – but not in the distant, old-world way that those words would appear to imply. No, Martin’s writing never eschews emotional involvement with the matters he is describing. There’s hardly an essay here which sounds as if it was constructed to order. The subject matter is always close to his heart.

I guess, for me, the most striking example is “The Hallelujah Chorus.” At the centre of this essay there’s a terrifying account of his visit to a revival meeting:

And as these sinners declared themselves, the chanting in the theatre rose in pitch and fervour and intensity until there came above the thunderous chorus a weird, high ululation from the stalls on the front left-hand side. I had never heard people speaking in tongues before. Glossolalia sounds like someone yodelling so hard their uvula goes into spasm. It reminded me of a time I heard a flock of sheep mustering at dusk on a Lands and Survey block out the back of Stratford ... [20]

I was there! Not at that particular meeting, of course, but many similar ones (Billy Graham, the Church of Christ, the Assembly of God). The only difference is that I would have been part of that flock yodelling strangely as the spirit of Pentecost came down on us …

Praise the Lord the Holy Ghost has descended upon us in Tongues of Flame! the Preacher screeched above the clamour of the Believers, doubling and redoubling their efforts. Then he began to call particular people out of the crowd. Suddenly I heard him say: There is a young man of sixteen or seventeen years (I had just turned seventeen) and he is sitting on the right-hand side of the cinema (I was) two thirds of the way towards the back (exactly!) and be is wondering whether to come forward now and give his soul to Jesus (I wasn’t, but, hell …). Let us all now raise our voices to the heavens and ask the Lord to give strength to this young man so that be may come and join us...

That’s precisely it. He’s put his finger on the mastery of it, the curious effectiveness of those techniques of mass persuasion. How many times have I sat fidgeting in the middle row, sure that I was the one who was being singled out for attention, sure that this was it, that tonight was the only chance I would ever have to escape perdition?

And I did feel a powerful force calling me. I was young and uncertain and the exorcism of possible demons from the chaos of my awakening mind did for a moment seem desirable, even seductive. Surely there was no harm in it? It was certainly impressive to see old people getting out of their wheelchairs and tottering forward to lean on the edge of the stage.

An opportune bit of squabbling saves Martin in the nick of time – “Any chance I would go forward to be saved blew away in that poor kid’s outraged, helpless sobbing” [21]. What impresses me, though, is that he is prepared to admit that the opportunity was there, that he might have given in.

Mind you, I doubt it would have taken. Martin Edmond was born to be a flâneur, a Baudelairean dandy exploring the byways of the metropolis (whether it be Auckland, Wellington or Sydney). There’s another part of him that is in deadly earnest, though. The strength of his writing is that he is able to give equal weight to both sides.

Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde named the two warring impulses within his hero after the two dominant intellectual influences of that time, the late nineteenth century: on the one hand, the amoral aestheticism of Walter Pater, on the other, the moral earnestness of John Ruskin. In Martin’s case I’d be tempted to call the two Ohakune and Alan Brunton.

Does that sound frivolous? It isn’t meant to. The Martin Edmond of Autobiography of My Father, of the childhood portions of Chronicle of the Unsung, of the “Autobiographies” section of the book we’re examining here, is a man profoundly, wistfully in love with his own past – with the complex intensities of youth and adolescence in that little town on the Grand Trunk Line. He’s the poet of that region, in fact – more alert to its contradictions and diversities even than that near neighbour of his, the Gothic novelist Ronald Hugh Morriesson.

And yet there’s also the Martin who ran away – almost literally – to join the circus, who followed the mercurial Alan Brunton on tour with Red Mole, abandoning the academic gravy train of Victoria University to do so. This is the Martin who writes so lovingly about Cavafy and Pessoa, who understands the attraction of that shifting signifier of international modernism, the heteronym.

Why are Martin’s books so challenging in form? Why does he resist easy genre identification, that secure place in the bookshop racks? It’s cost him, that’s for sure. Anyone straddling the uneasy frontiers of fiction and non-fiction, whose work might equally well be shelved under autobiography, travel writing or cultural commentary is liable to the suspicion of lazy readers. Praise, yes – there’s been a lot of praise of the originality of Martin’s work., but it’s usually (paradoxically) coupled with the name of some other writer whose example he is implied to be imitating: W. G. Sebald is the most obvious example, but recently Thomas de Quincey has been cited as a strong precedent (this despite the fact that Martin assures me that he has only the most tangential familiarity even with the original Opium Eater essays).

It’s hard for me to imagine any reader not finding something to their liking in the four sections of this book: ‘Autobiographies’; ‘Meditations’ (on subjects ranging from the Rosetta Stone to Alan Brunton); ‘Illusions’ (prose poems and dreams, mostly from his online blog); and ‘Voices’, published previously under the title Ghost Who Writes in Lloyd Jones’s excellent little Montana essay Series. Nor do I think I’m unique in finding virtually all of it to my liking. In fact, I can’t think of a book which has beguiled me as much since I first picked up Borges’ Labyrinths when I was a teenager.

The idea of the blog, the online diary, is another important component of Martin’s collection. He began (as I understand it) with the idea of starting a new blog for each new book project, but they appear to have evolved into a more complex symmetry.

There’s Luca Antara (“... who knows what other travellers might not have set out with a wild surmise for these shores? Looking perhaps for Luca Antara; perhaps just for the day after tomorrow”), described as being the work of a “schizoid antipodean.” That one has been running since 2004.

Then there’s dérives (started in 2005), which began with prose poems and reflections, but has now settled down to a portrait of the seedier side of cab driving in Sydney.

White City (begun in 2006), now a compendium of dreams and dream essays, was presumably intended to accompany Martin’s Ern Malley memoir / novel (accessible, so far, only in extracts such as the one included in this issue of Landfall).

No doubt Martin foresees a date at which he can move over to the new blog, Fetchers (started in July 2007) At present it’s confined to the single optimistic statement: “It’s a happy day today,” but there’s no doubt a lot more to come.

[The funny thing for me about this particular paragraph from the review is that "Fetchers" turned out to be the name of an imaginary dog, whose adventures in various parts of the world are being charted online by Martin's kids. I did think at the time the tone of some of the entries was a little outré even for him ...]

Raw material for the books? Undoubtedly. But the mere fact of being able to make your random jottings available online within minutes of writing them has an inevitable influence of the nature of that writing. It’s hard to see how writers can continue to ignore the possibilities of instantaneous communication – the barrage of comments and cross-references possible through hypertext.

In the present case, it’s fascinating to see how they’ve stolen into the texture of Martin’s book, along with more considered pieces from the nzepc, brief, and various other anthologies and projects, to give us the closest thing to an anatomy of the life of a twenty-first century writer I can readily imagine.

So I guess the reason I’d really advise to buy this book is not simply as an entry pass to the world of Martin Edmond, but also as a cartography of where we are, right now, at the bottom of the world, in the complex of world culture.

[Landfall 214 (2007): 187-90.]

Now there's a new addition to the canon, and thus to the labyrinthine complexities - already, one would have thought, quite sufficiently baroque and strange - of what I'd like to refer to from now on as the "Marti-verse."

Martin's new book The Supply Party, which has just appeared from East Street Publications, the publishers of Luca Antara, charts the adventures of the German scholar and naturalist Ludwig Becker, whose twin careers - as a contributor to Shakespeare iconography, and official artist on the ill-fated Burke & Wills expedition - have never really been clearly juxtaposed before.

I'm looking forward to reading it just the moment I can lay my hands on a copy. Now that Philip K. Dick is well and truly dead, and there doesn't seem much hope of more posthumous books to flesh out his bizarre, prolific cosmos, who else is left to feed my addiction to the strange new worlds of cold hard print?

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Crossroads



It's almost exactly two years since I started up this blog. I was trying to explain what I hope to accomplish with it the other day to my Massey colleagues at the School of Social and Cultural Studies, but since we were all going round in a big circle spending five minutes each talking about our current research projects, it wasn't possible to go into much detail.

Just as well, really. I could see their eyes glazing over even after that much discussion.

I suppose the normal convention for an author's homepage is to have an entry point with hyperlinks to a comprehensive bibliography, critical comments, a portrait gallery and various works-in-progress. Sometimes there's a blog linked to it as well.

That was my original plan, also. However, since I started my experiments with free blog space, I've realised that a lot can be accomplished with the internet equivalent of a pair of old hedgeclippers and a bottle of glue:


Bibliography sites [10]

Writing sites [13]

X

Research sites [10]
Teaching sites [13]


Let's take them in order:


Bibliography sites
[10]:

  1. A Gentle Madness [2009- ] (1/6/09-4/7/10)
  2. A catalogue of my Book Collection: Geographical by Locations & Indexed by Categories.

  3. Pania Press [2006- ]:
    • Pania Press (Blog) (25/9/06- )
      bijou publisher of original literary & artistic works, in small editions.
    • Pania Press (Business) (14/11/12- )
      A catalogue of the publications of this small press, from 2006 to the present day.

  4. Paper Table [2017- ] (19/9/17- )
  5. A catalogue of the publications of this small press, dedicated to publishing contemporary New Zealand fiction, particularly novellas.

  6. Perdrix Press [1997- ] (16/4/11- )
  7. A catalogue of the publications of this small press, dedicated to publishing artistic and poetic collaborations of various kinds, with various people, from 1997 to the present day.

  8. Poetry NZ [2014-2020]:

  9. Works & Days [1981- ] (18/10/07- )
  10. Curriculum Vitae: Biography - Bibliography - Chronology - Papers - Performances & Reviews.

  11. Jack Ross: Showcase [2016- ] (2/12/16- )
  12. Selected publications, print and online.


Writing sites
[13]:

  1. Jack Ross: Poems [1981- ] (27/5/23- )
  2. Collected Poetry, published in books, chapbooks, periodicals and online.

  3. Jack Ross: Opinions [1987- ] (18/8/13- )
  4. Published Essays, Interviews, Introductions & Reviews.

  5. Jack Ross: Stories [1996- ] (2/6/22-29/10/23)
  6. Collected short fiction and novellas.

  7. The R.E.M. [Random Excess Memory] Trilogy [1997-2008]:
    1. Nights with Giordano Bruno [2000] (19-30/1/08)
      A Novel + Game for One Player.
    2. The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis [2006]:
    3. E M O [2008]:
      • EVA AVE (15/8/06-3/9/07)
        Inheritor of silence / shall I be? / Black mass below us / above us / only sky …
      • Moons of Mars (16/8/06-3/9/07)
        Welcome / to the new reality / Nothing’s stranger / than the will / to survive …
      • Ovid in Otherworld (15/8/06-3/9/07)
        Wild geese draw lines / across an amber sky / fish bask / in frozen rivers / generators die …

  8. Coursebook found in a Warzone [from Kingdom of Alt (2010)]:
    • Banned Books [2009] (19/10-13/12/08)
      Censored & Restricted 20th-Century Fiction: Administration - Assignments - Author Pages - Lecture Notes - Forum for Discussion (English 2: 666).
    • Crisis Diaries [2009] (19/10/08-3/1/09)
      Chronicles of Heartbreak, Illness, Madness, Plague & Civil War: Special Topic in Comparative Literature - School of Society & Culture - Radial Campus - Semester One.

  9. Papyri [2007- ] (3/10/06- )
  10. Love-poems & fragments from Sappho & elsewhere.

  11. Tree Worship [2011-12] (6/1/11-14/8/12)
  12. Poems & fragments.


Gateway site
:

  • The Imaginary Museum [2006- ] (14/6/06- )
  • Adventures in Writing, Publishing, Book Collecting & Other Pursuits.


Research sites
[10]:

  1. John Masefield [1984-1985] (14/4-22/8/09)
  2. The Early Novels, 1908-1911. MA Thesis (University of Auckland, 1986).

  3. Versions of South America [1986-1990] (14/4-22/7/09)
  4. An Elusive Identity: Versions of South America in English Literature from Aphra Behn to the Present Day. PhD Thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1990).

  5. Scheherazade's Web [1991-1995] (22/8/06-26/9/07)
  6. The Thousand and One Nights and Comparative Literature.

  7. An index to brief magazine [1995- ] (11/12/07- )
  8. Listings & Statistics for the Magazine formerly known as A Brief Description of The Whole World / ABDOTWW / Description / Abdotww / Ab.Ww / Brief. &c.

  9. Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive [2002-2004] (6/11-3/12/07)
  10. Bibliographical Aids for the Use of Those Consulting the Waiata Archive (1974) and AoNZPSA (2002-2004) – Audio Recordings available in Special Collections, University of Auckland Library and in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

  11. Social and Cultural Studies [2009- ] (27/8/09- )
  12. Monograph Series – School of Social and Cultural Studies – Albany Campus – Massey University.

  13. Leicester Kyle [2011]:
    • Leicester Kyle (17/2-14/3/11)
      An Index to the Collected Poems of Leicester Hugo Kyle (1937-2006).
    • Leicester Kyle: Texts (18/2-14/3/11)
      The Collected Poetry Books of Leicester Hugo Kyle (1937-2006).

  14. NZSF [2018-2020] (1/1/18-4/9/20)
  15. The Psychogeography of New Zealand Speculative Fiction.

  16. Michele 2021 [2021] (19/1-18/10/21)
  17. A Birthday Festschrift for Michele Joy Leggott.


Teaching sites
[13]:

  1. Creative Writing [2009- ] (14/4/08- )
    139.123 – College of Humanities and Social Sciences – School of English and Media Studies – Albany Campus – Massey University.

  2. Life Writing [2008- ] (14/4/08- )
    139.226 – College of Humanities and Social Sciences – School of English and Media Studies – Albany Campus – Massey University.

  3. Advanced Fiction Writing [2017- ] (25/2/15- )
    139.329 – College of Humanities and Social Sciences – School of English and Media Studies – Massey University.

  4. Travel Writing [2009- ] (14/4/08- )
    139.326 – College of Humanities and Social Sciences – School of English and Media Studies – Albany Campus – Massey University.

  5. Contemporary NZ Writers in an International Context [2010- ] (28/3/09- )
    139.750 – College of Humanities and Social Sciences – School of English and Media Studies – Albany Campus – Massey University.

  6. Lectures [2011- ] (1/4/11- )
  7. College of Humanities and Social Sciences – School of English and Media Studies – Albany Campus – Massey University: Miscellaneous Guest Lectures.

  8. Writers Read Series [2011- ] (27/6/12- )
  9. College of Humanities and Social Sciences – School of English and Media Studies – Albany Campus – Massey University: Guest Readers.

  10. Novels since 1900 [2008] (12/4-11/10/08)
  11. English 220 / 356 (University of Auckland): Lecture Notes – Assignments – Author Pages – Forum for Discussion.


No doubt further refinements on this set-up will be added over time, but for the moment, that's the system.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

brief note






















"Your industriousness is a little frightening," says Brett.

Yes, well, I'm just trying to get a lot of things tied away and sorted out before the end of the year. Next year I'm planning to spend a lot more time pursuing my own projects, and a lot less time on editing and bureaucracy generally.

So with that in mind, I've put up a companion to the Poetry Archive website. This one serves a similar indexing function for brief magazine (originally A Brief Description of the Whole World), which I edited between 2002 and 2005.

The longevity of brief is becoming a bit of a phenomenon in itself. It was founded by Alan Loney in December 1995, so with the latest issue, #35 (edited by Brett Cross), it's now reached its twelfth anniversary. (I tried to embed that information in the "profile" page of the new blog, but they informed me that you have to be over thirteen years old to use blogger, so I'll have to wait till next year before fessing up to the magazine's true age.)

I put out a brief index in 2003, shortly after taking over the editorship from John Geraets, and then a short supplementary index in 2005, before handing responsibility for the journal over to Scott Hamilton. So it wasn't all that much trouble to update it, since all that information was still floating around on my computer.

I've put in links to various of the articles which have been reprinted online, notably in the three feature issues - Smithymania (2003), Alan Brunton (2003) and Joanna Margaret Paul (2005) - published as joint ventures with the nzepc, but also to the brief section of the Titus Books website. Other than that, though, the site is really just a big hyperlinked contents list to the issues and authors published by the magazine to date.

Check it out., Hopefully it'll be useful to someone, at any rate.

*

Oh, and by the by, I'm tendering a bit of an apology to the New Zealand Herald. I was extremely scornful about them in my last post, so I was pleasantly surprised when they named Louise Nicholas as their New Zealander of the year for 2007.

I've just been reading her book, and I have to agree that there doesn't seem to be much serious doubt that the cops she describes did indeed regard themselves as above the law when it came to pressuring young girls into having sex with them (for more thoughts on the whole subject of what constitutes "Consent," see Tracey Slaughter's story of that title. It appears as the opening salvo of my "Open House" issue of Landfall.) The sooner that kind of crap goes out the window, the better. Apparently it was more or less up to individual policemen what "moral standards" they wished to apply in such circumstances. Cops have too much power in the community generally not to be subject to the same rules as teachers and doctors in that respect, I think myself.

So good on you, New Zealand Herald. Maybe you're not so subhuman after all. Though I still think you could break an intellectual sweat from time to time without completely alienating your fan-base, I have to admit that the choice of Louise Nicholas runs precisely that risk, so I do think you deserve hearty congratulations on this one.

Saturday, December 01, 2007

With a single bound Jack was free ...


New Zealand Poets Read Their Work (1974). [Image: Pat Hanly]


You all know the story. The hack who usually wrote each instalment of the weekly magazine's adventure serial was off on holiday, but at the end of the previous episode he'd provided a true cliffhanger: his hero was bound to the stake, surrounded by hostile tribesmen, with a fire being kindled under his feet, dozens of rifles trained on him, and an erupting volcano in the background.

Nobody in the office could think of any conceivable way of getting him out of this tight fix, so they had to summon the writer back from his vacation with the lure of extra cash in order to extricate them from this embarrassment.

He walked in, sat down at the desk, took a look at the last page he'd written - and then scrawled: "With a single bound Jack was free."

You may have noticed I haven't been doing a whole lot of blogging on this site lately. It's not been through idleness, I assure you - nosiree. "With a single bound Jack was free." Or at any rate that was the plan.


Jan Kemp & Jack Ross (2004)


The thing I was trying to get shot of was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive. For those of you who don't know, this is a collection of recordings of 171 New Zealand poets, on 40 audio CDs (with two CDs of texts and bio/bibliographical information) which was compiled between 2002 and 2004.

As you can imagine, there's a certain amount of staff work involved in setting up recordings in the four major centres (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin), and then at least as much again in tidying up all the tapes, and texts, and photos and other impedimenta.


Jan Kemp & Alan Smythe (1974)


It started off as the brainchild of Jan Kemp and Alan Smythe, who'd collaborated on a similar venture in 1974 (resulting in a set of 3 LP records: New Zealand Poets Read Their Work). Smythe was then (2002) the head of SCAPA, the Performing Arts centre at the University of Auckland, so he seemed well-placed to facilitate the collection of materials. When he left that position in 2003, the archive shifted to Special Collections in the University Library, with the help of funds from Creative New Zealand and from the University of Auckland English Department (then headed by Ken Larsen).


Jan Kemp & Alan Smythe (2004)


There were many, many other people involved, though, and I was one of them. My particular responsibility was getting all the texts in order. When I say that this involved sorting out more than 2,000 tracks on over 3,000 pages of A4, I think you may get some idea of the scope of the project.

For various copyright reasons, the eventual electronic archive can - at present - only be accessed in two places: University of Auckland's Special Collections (which also has all the raw data from which the 42 Cds were distilled); and the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.

So what's actually in the archive? Well, a list of the 171 poets, together with sample tracks from 12 of them, has been available as a feature at the nzepc since 2004. But up until now it wasn't actually possible to know which tracks had actually been recorded by each one of them unless you visited one of the two institutions mentioned above, and sat down in front of a monitor with the CDs.

I thought that was a shame. It seems foolish to go to all that trouble, and then end up with an artefact no-one can really use. And some of the poets involved let me know as much in no uncertain terms.

(And while we're on the subject, d'you feel like modifying your tone a bit when you send me emails out of the blue, guys? I mean, I don't actually spend my life plotting ways to derail your literary career ... There is in fact a certain amount of idealism involved in putting together these huge compilations - and that applies not just to me and Jan (and Mark King, who made order out of the chaos of all the different recordings), but also to the people who organised the recordings in the four centres. Elizabeth Alley in Wellington, David Howard & Morrin Rout in Christchurch, and Nick Ascroft & Richard Reeve in Dunedin did a great deal of work for a not conspicuous amount of reward).

So what I've been doing over the past month is compiling an index to the whole kit and kaboodle. It takes the form of an immense interconnected and hyperlinked blog, because that was the only way I could think of to do it which didn't involve further requests for funding from the various agencies who've already sunk so much into this project. You'll find a link to it at the side of this page.

It includes:

* an alphabetical index of all 171 poets included in the 2002-2004 AoNZPSA (Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive), with a list of the poems they recorded, a picture (where one was avaialble), biographical and bibliographical information.

* an alphabetical index of all 52 poets included in the Waiata Archive of recordings compiled for the 3 1974 LPs. I've included photos and bio / bibliographical information with these where it was readily available, but should note that collecting such details was not part of the original brief 30 years ago. I don't even have dates of birth for some of the poets included.

* Contents lists for all four publications which have come from these two archives: the 3-LP set New Zealand Poets Read Their Work and New Zealand Poets Read Their Work for Children (Waiata Records, 1974); and the set of three chronological audio / text anthologies Classic, Contemporary and New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, 2006-8) edited by myself and Jan.

Useful? I certainly hope so. I should note that it contains no actual copyright materials: no recordings, and no texts of poems. Those are all reserved for the archive itself. I have, however, tried to link to homepages or websites which do include such features.

The selection of poems was, in each case, the poet's responsibility. So, generally, was the format of their bio / bibliography (in the few cases where this was missing, these were compiled by me or by Edmund King). I'm perfectly happy to update them, but to start with I've just posted what we collected in 2002-2004. I'd also like to receive more pictures (jpegs under 50 kb in size are ideal) for those 73 (of 196) poets we don't have photographs of.

To my mind, this puts at least a provisional full stop to the whole project. To my involvement with it, at any rate. If you're interested in a particular poet or poets, you can now easily see which poems of theirs are included in the archive, and then go and listen to them either in Wellington or Auckland (and, yes, I wish the materials were available elsewhere - all I can say is that we tried very hard to arrange it, and will continue to do so).

Beyond that, I can only refer you to the three chronological volumes of recordings (one of which, New NZ Poets in Performance is still in production at present: due out on Poetry Day next year) now available through AUP. I'd rather, myself, that the whole collection could be up on the internet, but that's a project far beyond my resources and technological expertise.

This could be seen as the beginning of such an online digital archive, perhaps, but we aren't quite there yet. Certainly, in the future, the internet will be the place for such extensive collections.

Friday, September 28, 2007

Scheherazade's Web:





Between 1991 and 1995, I spent a huge amount of my time reading and collecting different editions and translations of the Arabian Nights.

It's a bit hard to say why, in retrospect. I guess it might have been a reaction against the brain-strain of finishing my dreadful Doctoral thesis - An Elusive Identity: Versions of South America in English Literature from Aphra Behn to the Present Day (University of Edinburgh, 1990). At the end of all that labour I seemed to have lost the ability to take any pleasure at all in reading or writing, so I tried to recover by making a beeline for my ultimate fantasy book, the ubiquitous yet strangely invisible Nights, with all its proliferating texts and versions, all its competing codes and overlapping cultural frames.

The plan was always, eventually, to write a book on the subject. But it soon became obvious to me that I lacked the learning to produce anything really scholarly. I can read a few languages, but Arabic isn't one of them - let alone Persian - and there's no longer all that much room for amateurs in these fields of study.

So I compromised by trying to compose a series of very limited vignettes on particular aspects of the influence of the Nights, within the larger field of Comparative Literature.

After that, though, I shifted my attention out of the academic area altogether, back to fiction and poetry, so the Arabian Nights stuff got sidelined until now.

This set of essays is to be considered as a work-in-progress, then. There are many adjustments still to be made, and the fact that it's been ten years or so since I last looked at most of it means that there's a lot of more recent work in the field which I haven't been able to take account of. For what it's worth, though, here's a set of links to the various sections of my projected critical opus on one of the most fascinating, mysterious and least-understood books in world literature ...



Preface

Scheherazades

Introduction: Redu ‘92

The School for Paradox

Chapter 1: Malory and Scheherazade

Malory

Scheherazade

Chapter 2: Europe, Christianity and the Crusades

Plot Summaries

Chapter 3: Voyage en Orient

Chapter 4: Parodies of the Arabian Nights

Chapter 5: The Poetics of Stasis

J. L. Borges: Metaphors of the 1001 Nights

Bibliography

Chronology

Concordance

A List of the Stories in the 1001 Nights

Textual Notes

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Restart button


I've been meditating for some time posting some work online, and had a website all planned -- pictures, internal links, the whole nine yards. I even went to a community education course at the local high school to find out how to do it (it always seemed to be raining on those nights ... I'd walk up through the football fields and see the other poor sods all processing around the visitors' parking area trying vainly to find a space ... even finding the right classroom was a bit of a chore. I went to that school when I was a kid, but it's grown monstrously since then ... the numbers tailed off gradually till there were only really two or three of us stalwarts left, determined to get our 49 dollars' worth).

The idea of paying further for the privilege of having my own domain name and having piles of crap hosted by some faceless provider didn't really appeal to me all that much, though, so I'm now hoping to accomplish much the same thing with this blog.

So it'll be a bit erratic, and intensely inter-connected. There'll be single entries, longer pieces, and ongoing raves. I don't know if anyone (except me) is going to like it, but hey, that's not my problem ("Hey," indeed -- why does one go all Californian the moment one logs onto a website?) ...