Showing posts with label brief. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brief. Show all posts

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Some Ads:


[Rubble Emits Light]

RUBBLE EMITS LIGHT
The Film Archive presents films by Richard von Sturmer

Where:
The Film Archive, Auckland
When:
Wednesday 14th July 2010 - Friday 13th August 2010


I went to the opening of this limited season of Richard von Sturmer films (curated by Gabriel White) the other night, and I definitely think it's worth making the effort to check it out when you're next on K Rd. There are three films, The Search for Otto (1985), Aquavera (1988) and 26 Tanka Films (2007), all on continuous loop. There are also a lot of other bits and pieces of footage taken at various times to sample.

Von Sturmer is (I think) one of our most interesting poets, and these films form an essential part of his work to date. Gabriel's essay in the exhibition catalogue is also well worth reading.





[John Dickson & Ted Jenner, “After Hours Return"]

brief the fortieth
Editor: Ted Jenner
Number 40 (July 2010)


The latest issue of New Zealand's longest-running avant-garde literary magazine (1995-2010) is now out, and can be ordered from the Titus Books website here.

Guest editor Ted Jenner has assembled a rather modified assemblage of whacked-out freaks for this special anniversary issue - not just your old favourites but some newcomers too ...





[bravado 19 (July, 2010)]


The latest issue of Tauranga's literary magazine bravado is also now out, with the fiction guest-selected by yours truly, and the poetry chosen by Majella Cullinane.

I would have liked to include quite a few more of the stories which were sent in, I must admit, but the ones that did make the cut certainly constitute a pretty strong group, I reckon.





[Jack Ross: Kingdom of Alt]

This is Brett Cross's rather elegant ad for my forthcoming book of short stories, Kingdom of Alt. The image comes from Bronwyn Lloyd's pop-up version of the Wolfman story "Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret". The basic idea of the collection is storytelling through unusual means: notes written in the margins of other texts, in course journals and private diaries and even email exchanges ...

Just to give you an idea of what to expect, here are some of the reactions I got to my previous collection of short fiction, Monkey Miss Her Now, in 2004:

Original, dense, musical; and … erm … confusing. … Reading this book is like a wild lunge in the dark – you just never know what you’re going to find.
– Sue Emms, Bravado

As postmodern as it is parochial, Monkey Miss Her Now drags a venerable tradition into the strange new worlds of twenty-first century New Zealand.
– Scott Hamilton, brief

Woody Allen sometimes springs to mind, but so equally do the Surrealists.
– Roger Horrocks

Nobody else in New Zealand writes quite like Ross …
– Mark Houlahan, NZ Books

Outside of literati farm, this sort of thing has a very limited life expectancy.
– Joe Wylie, Takahe




Oh, and last but definitely not least, Mike Johnson's eagerly-awaited new graphic novel Travesty is due out from Titus Books next month. The book will be launched by Dylan Horrocks at the AUT Centre for Creative Writing on Thursday August 5, at 6.00pm:

"Mike's thirteenth published book, it's also a graphic novel in several senses of the word - including more than 30 striking panels drawn by comics artist Darren Sheehan.

To attend Thurs August 5 @ 6.00pm please RSVP Helen HuiQun Xue - HXue@aut.ac.nz - by Friday 30 July."






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.

Friday, March 16, 2007

Scott Free

[Ellen Portch, front cover image for brief #34: War]


The Arts journal brief was founded by Alan Loney in 1995 under the title A Brief Description of the Whole World. In those days it was a quarterly, with a certain number of pages reserved for each of a small number of contributors. The first ten issues of the magazine appeared between December 1995 and October 1998 (a double issue: 10/11).

John Geraets revived it in mid-1999. His first issue was a reprint of Leigh Davis's Willy's Gazette (1983), but he went on to edit eleven more issues, taking the magazine through at least three more name changes (ABDOTWW / Ab.WW & AbdotWW) before settling on the more succinct appellation brief which it retains today.

Geraets asked me to take over as editor in 2002, and I edited the magazine for the next three years, from July 2002 until May 2005, approximately nine issues (depending on whether you count the immense #30/31: Kunst-Kultur issue as one or two). In my time brief moved from being a quarterly to appearing three times a year.

I also followed John Geraets' lead in trying to develop brief's publishing arm, the Writers Group, which issued two titles under his editorship and three under mine. They are, in order:

- Alan Loney’s Reading / Saying / Making: Selected Essays (2001)
- Sugu Pillay’s The Chandrasekhar Limit and other stories (2002)
- Jack Ross's A brief Index: 1995-2003 [Supplemental Index: 2003-2005] (2003/2005)
- Kendrick Smithyman’s Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian (2004)
- K. M. Ross’s novel Falling through the Architect (2005)

Throughout the first ten years (and 32 issues) of its existence, brief's format remained relatively consistent: A4 sheets, copied – so far as possible – exactly as their authors wrote them, ordered, bound, then distributed with bio-notes and a cover. The magazine has always had a commitment to publishing technically adventurous literary and graphic work, by acknowledged (and newly discovered) innovators. Pageworks, critical articles, poems and fictional texts were equally prominent in most issues. The Writers Group, and brief, have never received any official funding beyond subscriptions and donations, so all but occasional guest contributors have had to be subscribers.

Scott Hamilton took over as managing editor late in 2005. He now cedes that role to Brett Cross of Titus Books, who will be editing the next issue, no. 35.

What can one say about Scott as editor? An immensely inspiring and stimulating writer, and generous supporter of other people's work, Scott, I think, has done fine things with the two issues of brief he's edited. His intense political consciousness also gave the magazine a new relevance. All of that is on the plus side.

On the minus side, it's true that it's taken a very long time for those two issues to appear, and that in the process our original commitment to producing three issues a year has rather gone by the board. That's the only negative aspect I can see about his incumbency at brief.

Where the magazine goes to from here I'm not really sure. We've had to scale its size down from the original A4 format to A5 mainly for reasons of cost, but there doesn't seem to be any diminution in the quality -- or quantity -- of material in each issue.

Nor do I get any sense of growing indifference to the concept of an avant-garde literary magazine committed to representing the kinds of material which you won't see in the other journals.

Anyway, once again the managing editor is gone, long live the managing editor! Good luck to Brett in his new role. I hope you continue to support him. Maybe, with your help, this most maverick of literary magazines can continue for another decade or so ...

Here's a summary of the issues to date:

A Brief Description of the Whole World
Editor: Alan Loney
No 1, December 1995: 70 pp.
No 2, March 1996: 52 pp.
No 3, June 1996: 67 pp.
No 4, November 1996: 82 pp.
No 5, May 1997: 58 pp.
No 6, July 1997: 56 pp.
No 7, September 1997: 66 pp.
No 8, December 1997: 76 pp.
No 9, April 1998: 55 pp.
Nos 10 & 11, October 1998: 47 pp.
[629 pages overall]

A Brief Description of the Whole World
Editor: John Geraets
No 12, June 1999:
Leigh Davis: Willy’s Gazette (1983) [vii + 111 pp.]
ABDOTWW
No 13, September 1999: 93 pp.
No 14, December 1999: 110 pp.
ABDOTWW / description
No 15, March 2000: 86 pp.
Ab.WW / AbdotWW
No 16, June 2000: 85 pp.
Ab.ww / Loney
No 17, September 2000: 96 pp.
brief.
No 18, December 2000: 100 pp.
No 19, March 2001: 80 pp.
No 20, June 2001: 68 pp.
No 21, September 2001: 93 pp.
No 22, December 2001: 100 pp.
No 23, March 2002: 100 pp.
[1011 pages overall]

brief
Editor: Jack Ross
No 24, July 2002: 84 pp.
No 25, October 2002: 111 pp.
No 26, January 2003: 118 pp.
No 27, June 2003: 104 pp.
No 28, October 2003: 126 pp.
No 29, March 2004: 102 pp.
Nos 30/31, October 2004: 120/120 pp.
No 32, May 2005: 120 pp.
[1005 pages overall]

brief
Editor: Scott Hamilton
No 33, March 2006: 150 pp.
No 34, February 2007: 188 pp.
[338 pages overall]

[Ellen Portch, back cover image for brief #34: War]