Upcoming Titus Booklaunch (19/6)

[cover image: Emma Smith / cover design: Brett Cross]

Yes, it's that time again - booklaunch season!

The latest Titus Books extravaganza will be at the Alleluya Cafe, St Kevin's Arcade, Karangahape Rd, on Thursday 19th June from 6.30 pm onwards.

The three books are:

Jen Crawford, Bad Appendix (poetry)

Bill Direen, Enclosures (novel)

Jack Ross, EMO (novel)

I'm very happy to be in such distinguished company. Bill and I had a launch together in 2006 for our previous two Titus titles: my The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis and his Song of the Brakeman. Jen Crawford is a friend I've met more recently, and whose poetry I was proud to include in Landfall 214 (2007): 41-44. MC Scott Hamilton has already put up an interesting post about the event at Reading the Maps.

We'll all be doing our thing on the night: I'll be performing some dialogue from my novel with the lovely Bronwyn Lloyd, Jen will read some poems, and (probably the most potent lure) as well as giving a reading from his novel, Bill will also be playing songs from his latest album Songs for Mickey Joe in the course of the evening.

*

What can I say about EMO?

The original idea was to compile a blog-novel in the form of three sets of diary entries available online. The concept has grown a bit since then, though. Each page of text has ghost pages underneath it (still legible to the determined), as well as a main narrative by one of my three protagonists: Eva, Marlow and Ovid.

Does that sound complicated? I don't think it will present any real obstacles to readers of the two previous volumes in my R.E.M. [Random Excess memory] trilogy: Nights with Giordano Bruno (Bumper Books, 2000) or The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Titus Books, 2006).

I should emphasise, though, that EMO is an entirely stand-alone story, and does not require any knowledge of the other books in the series. I have to admit that parts of it have shocked some readers, but I don't think any of them have found it difficult to get into. On the contrary, it's only too compulsively - and disreputably - readable, as one of them remarked to me ...

20 Favourite 20th-Century Novels

[Craig Thompson, Blankets (2003)]

I guess this is a recipe for disaster, really. Once you get going it's very difficult to confine yourself to just twenty. The idea was prompted by looking at the line-up in the Auckland University English course "Novels since 1900," formerly convened and taught by the late David Wright. His list of eight - or nine, depending on whether you count John Barth as one or two books - was as follows:

• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918)
• E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
• John Barth, The Floating Opera / The End of the Road (1957/1958)
• Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966)
• Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
• Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
• Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

It sure got me thinking, though. I've had to settle on a couple of lists (I'm sorry to say, since the point was supposed to be conciseness): one of English-language novels, one of foreign-language novels I've only read in translation. It's a desperately subjective list. See what additions (and subtractions) you'd like to make yourself:

1. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1904)
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
4. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
5. Mervyn Peake, The Gormenghast Trilogy (1946-59)
6. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
7. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
8. Janet Frame, Owls Do Cry (1957)
9. Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60)
10. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)
11. Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969)
12. Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann (1972)
13. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)
14. Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves (1976)
15. Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (1978)
16. David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (1978)
17. Troy Kennedy Martin, Edge of Darkness (1985)
18. Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective (1986)
19. Alan Moore, Watchmen (1986-87)
20. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

I've cheated by putting in some trilogies and quartets of novels, but I guess I could settle on just one from each series if you want to get really purist about it. Obviously I had the advantage of being able to leave out all of David Wright's authors, also.

There are other features which some might find unusual: two TV-series, each of which seems to me every bit as complex and "written" as a great novel; two Sci-Fi novels; two Fantasy novels; one graphic novel; Australian and NZ authors jostling with the Americans and Brits ... Anyway, there it is.

If I could have, I'd have liked to fit in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954); Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962); Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966); William Golding's Pincher Martin (1956); Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter (1947); C. S. Lewis's Perelandra (1943); Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947); Gerald Murnane's The Plains (1982); John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance (1932); Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958); Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1994) -- something by Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms (1929) is probably my favourite), Kerouac (of course On the Road (1957)); D. H. Lawrence (perhaps Women in Love (1920)?); Wyndham Lewis (The Childermass (1928)); Norman Mailer (Ancient Evenings (1983)?); Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (1934)?); Steinbeck (I guess it would have to be The Grapes of Wrath (1939)); Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)?); Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited (1945)?); and lots more graphic novels (including Blankets (2003), pictured above) but everything you put in means that something else has to come out. That's how I understand the rules of the game, at any rate.

Here's my companion list of foreign language novels (equally contentious, I hope):

1. Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk (1912-23)
2. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27)
3. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
4. Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926)
5. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1928-40)
6. Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943)
7. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (1943-48)
8. Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors (1952-59)
9. Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy (1956-57)
10. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (1957)
11. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961)
12. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Green House (1965)
13. Milan Kundera, The Joke (1967)
14. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
15. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle (1968)
16. Augusto Roa Bastos, I, the Supreme (1974)
17. Gunter Grass, The Flounder (1978)
18. Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual (1978)
19. Marguerite Duras, La Douleur (1985)
20. Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1992-95)

No Brazilian writers there, I'm afraid: Jorge Amado or Clarice Lispector. No Chinese novelists either: I simply don't know their work well enough.

Screening on Saturday

Well, there are a couple of reasons for putting up this post.

The first is to publicise the screening, on Saturday 2nd December, of Gabriel White's new film Aucklantis (you can read my review of the parts I'd then seen here.) Full details of the screening can be found on his website here, but I'll just mention that it's at 3 pm, in lecture theatre WE240, AUT, Auckland (signs around St. Paul Street will direct you).

The second is to mention Gabriel's set of digital essays "The ABC of XY and Z," which are also now available on his website. Modesty forbids me from saying too much about these pieces, since the first, "Planet Atlantis" is an analysis of my novel The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. The second, however, "Music Word Fire" (much longer) concerns the work of the composer Robert Ashley, and the third, "The Avoriginal" gives an account of Gabriel's own practice as a filmmaker. I'd certainly recommend giving them a look, especially (but certainly not exclusively) if you're thinking of coming along to the screening.

Further reports on that later ...

Aucklantis

[Gabriel White - photo by Lies Vandesande]

I remember back in the late seventies there was a lot of controversy because Richard Ellmann’s edition of the Selected Letters of James Joyce made public a few of the rather frank epistles he’d written to his wife Nora. I seem to recall a passage along the lines of how much he wanted to “fuck his little fuckbird’s cunt,” but it’s been a while since I checked them out.

An article I read at the time by some American smartarse began by debating the matter fairly solemnly before concluding that all obligations of decency and respect to the departed had to bow down before the sacred duty of giving the rest of us a good laugh. The author then went on to fabricate a series of similar letters by similarly grand men and women of letters (Hemingway, Faulkner, Gertrude Stein etc.)

Gabriel White’s latest video project Aucklantis is a fucking good laugh. That’s not all it is, of course, but isn’t that enough to be going along with? I mean, how many successful pisstakes are there out there that one can afford to neglect one?

If you don’t believe me, check out the sample here.

Gabriel’s been back in Auckland now for almost a year. He brought back a lot of video footage and a lot of interesting ideas. Some of those ideas will see solid form soon (hopefully) in a DVD / book called Tongdo Fantasia, part of which is already available on his new trial website. It takes the form of a talking-head travelogue filmed in Korea, but the setting could really be anywhere. Gabriel’s method is to weave strange thoughts and associations around everyday objects as he talks to camera – banality is his domain, unexpectedness his stock-in-trade. He stalks the city like a latter-day Baudelairean flâneur, weaving a complex meditation on the bizarrerie of the ordinary lives and landscapes we take for granted.

The packaging and the ideas have evolved somewhat, but one can still see a definite continuity with the two projects we worked on together:

A Town like Parataxis: A Colouring-in Book (Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000)

was a collection of poems by me with photos by Gabriel. It’s now almost unobtainable, as we only banged out a hundred or so copies on some institutional xerox machine before we got caught. The pictures, though, are still a miracle. Gabriel had a theory at the time that simple colour snapshots blown up to A4-sized black-and-white would show strange complexities of texture and design. The results certainly bear him out. That carwash looks like the gates of hell to me.

The Perfect Storm (Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000)

was an extension of the method to video. [That one I do have some copies of, if anyone’s interested (price $NZ10 plus $5 postage & packing)]. The Public Library catalogue described it as “poems read by Jack Ross set against Auckland landscapes” which about sums it up. I remember viewers tended to spend their time speculating where we’d shot particular bits of film, rather than noticing the strange dance of the cars around the roundabout, or the peculiar costumes of the boys crossing the street outside McDonalds. In a sense it was too obvious for anyone to see it. Once they’d worked out that there was no real continuity between the text and the pictures, they lost the ability to see what we wanted to point out: the hauntedness of the everyday.

Aucklantis seems to me a step beyond anything Gabriel has done before because the tone has shifted just a notch. His decision to look at Auckland as a tabula rasa, a blank slate literally anything can be written on, works because it’s so hysterically funny. It’s hard to imagine anyone taking seriously Gabriel’s descriptions of how to paint a rock grey or how to open a blank account, and yet – like the best stand-up – they make you see things, all of a sudden, in a new light.

Gabriel’s work is reactive, in the best sense. He takes the place he lives in and interrogates its peculiarities. His formidable erudition comes down, in these latest works, to one man talking on a moving screen – somehow he succeeds in making this the Platonic essence of cinema.

Of course I can’t help but see some connections between these ideas and my amnesia-novel The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, which Gabriel helped launch earlier this year (I’m actually a bit peeved at not having thought of that “Aucklantis” portmanteau-word myself). What mainly strikes me about it, though, is the elegant simplicity of Gabriel’s solution to problems I could only approach by wrapping them in layers of crabbed discordant text. (For a video-clip of part of Gabriel's launch-speech -- filmed by my friend Rowan McCormick -- click here).

His latest work is so brilliant it can’t help but make the rest of us feel a little jealous. I take some pride, though, in having had some part in stimulating him to make this quantum leap. I think anyone who watches the finished work will see just what I mean.

Happy Birthday, Gabriel!


Gabriel White: Select CV

Shows and Performances:

· Sep 5, 2006: Video work “Aucklantis” included in Lazy Susan and Smelly John (St Paul St Gallery, AUT, Auckland). Curator: Mark Harvey. Artists: Sean Curham, Alex Monteith, Tessa Laird, Brydee Rood, Cat Gwynne, Linda T, Susie Pratt, Cushla Donaldson, Ben Holmes, Melissa Durbin, Aaron Hurley, Gabriel White, Mark Harvey.
· Aug-Sep, 2001: Video work for Adrift – Nomadic Art from New Zealand (Conical Gallery Fitzroy, Melbourne). Curator: Emily Cormack. Artists: Richard Lewer, Caroline Rothwell, Patrick Pound, John Pule, Mark Braunias, Brielle Hansen and Anushka Akel.
· Feb-Nov, 2000: Senior Tutor, Studio One Elam School of Fine Art.
· 1999-2000: Member of Rotaction, sound performance group, directed by James McCarthy. Performances at Lopdell House Gallery, La Mata theatre and the Adam Gallery. Awarded best multimedia performance at the Wellington Fringe Festival 2000.
· 1998-2000: Stop Gap, Auckland based poster installation project. Curator and artist.

Published Work:

· “I for an I,” Landfall 200 (2000): 187 [article]
· Review of Tessa Mitchell and Ben Holmes, "I am a Dark River." Pander 9 (1999): 40
· Review of Ronnie van Hout and Mike Stevenson, "Premillennial: Signs of the Soon Coming Storm." Pander 8 (1999): 36-37
· Review of Ross T. Smith, "Hokianga." Pander 6/7 (1999): 54-55
· Forgiven by the Moon, CD with Steve Abel, (self-released, 1998)
· Spacesuit, self-titled CD (released nationally, 1997)

The 13 Book-launches of Dr J.

[Chris Cole Catley, Jack Ross & guest at Golden Weather launch, Takapuna Public Library]

"There's no such thing as a free launch"

-- Murray Edmond (attrib.)

I guess it's probably one of those old adages like "prise the gun from my cold, dead fingers" which endlessly migrates from speaker to speaker, but there's nevertheless a fair amount of truth in it.

As time goes by, you begin to learn the rules, however idealistic you were going in: always site the book-table near the exit (so that no-one can escape bookless without running the gauntlet of your reproachful gaze); never stint on food and drink (especially the latter-- you want to induce a false sense of euphoria in your guests); don't let the speeches go on too long; and (if possible) include a musician or a juggler or something novel to liven things up; only invite people who are likely to buy the book (that rules out the very rich and the very poor: too canny and too needy respectively).

It's with a certain amount of horror that I realise that the recent Classic Poets booklaunch was actually my thirteenth -- hence the melodramatic title of this post (I guess I was thinking of that old Dr Seuss film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T; or else maybe The Nine Gates of the Land of Shadow, that Satanic tract in the Roman Polanski film The Ninth Gate, which damns everyone who looks at it to eternal perdition ...)

So here they are, in reverse order of occurrence:

1. 2006 (20 July) -- Peter Simpson & Elizabeth Caffin launch Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance, edited by Jack Ross & Jan Kemp (Auckland: AUP), in the Hobson Room, Jubilee Hall, Parnell. MC: Jack Ross. Readers: Riemke Ensing, Anne Kennedy, Alistair Paterson, Jack Ross, C K Stead, Richard von Sturmer & Sonja Yelich.
2. 2006 (15 June) -- Gabriel White, Scott Hamilton & Brett Cross launch The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, by Jack Ross, & Bill Direen’s Song of the Brakeman (Auckland: Titus Books), at the University of Auckland English Department Common Room.MC: Michele Leggott. Readers: Jack Ross & Olwyn Stewart.
3. 2005 (16 November) -- Mary Paul & Grant Duncan launch Where Will Massey Take You? Life Writing 2, edited by Jack Ross (Massey University: School of Social & Cultural Studies) in the Common Room, Atrium Building, Massey @ Albany.
4. 2005 (21 May) -- Mike Johnson & Brett Cross launch Trouble in Mind , by Jack Ross, Olwyn Stewart’s Curriculum Vitae , & Bill Direen’s Coma (Auckland: Titus Books), at Shanghai Lil’s, corner of Anzac Rd & Customs St.
5. 2004 (24 October) -- Roger Horrocks & Raewyn Alexander launch Monkey Miss Her Now, by Jack Ross (Auckland: Danger Publishing), at the George Fraser Gallery, University of Auckland.
6. 2004 (19 September) -- George Wood, the Mayor of the North Shore, & Chris Cole Catley launch Golden Weather: North Shore Writers Past & Present, edited by Graeme Lay & Jack Ross (Auckland: Cape Catley), at the Takapuna Public Library.
7. 2004 (12 September) -- Jan Kemp & Jack Ross launch the Aotearoa / New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive (Auckland University Library: Special Collections), at the Titirangi Pioneer Hall, Auckland. MC: Jack Ross. Readers: C K Stead, Janet Charman, Stu Bagby, Riemke Ensing, Mike Johnson, Paula Green, Bob Orr , & Sonja Yelich.
8. 2003 (4 June) -- Tina Shaw & A/Prof Mike O’Brien launch [your name here]: Life Writing, edited by Jack Ross (Massey University: School of Social & Cultural Studies) in the Common Room, Atrium Building, Massey @ Albany.
9. 2002 (10 November) -- Alistair Paterson launches Chantal's Book, by Jack Ross (Wellington: HeadworX) at the Birdcage Tavern, 133 Franklin Rd, Ponsonby.
10. 2000 (14 December) -- Alan Brunton launches Nights with Giordano Bruno, by Jack Ross, & Sally Rodwell’s Gonne Strange Charity (Wellington: Bumper Books), at The Space, 146 Riddiford Street, Newtown, Wellington.
11. 2000 (10 December) -- Professor D. I. B. Smith launches Nights with Giordano Bruno, by Jack Ross (Wellington: Bumper Books), at 6 Hastings Rd, Mairangi Bay.
12. 2000 (1 October) -- Jack Ross & Gabriel White launch A Town Like Parataxis, text by Jack Ross, photos by Gabriel White (Auckland: Perdrix Press) at 23 Maxwell Ave, Westmere.
13. 1998 (25 September) -- Theresia Marshall launches City of Strange Brunettes, by Jack Ross, & Lee Dowrick’s That was Then ((Auckland: Pohutukawa Press), at the Takapuna Public Library.

I guess my main impression, looking at this line-up, is to marvel at the number of people who've helped me and my collaborators out over the years. I mean, I have tried to do my bit to reciprocate, but it doesn't make nearly such an impressive list:

1. 2005 (5 December) -- Launched Richard von Sturmer’s Suchness: Zen Poetry and Prose (Wellington: HeadworX), with music by Don McGlashan, at the St Columba Centre, 40 Vermont Street, Ponsonby.
2. 2005 (20 October) -- MC, with Ahmed Esau, introducing Riemke Ensing, Deborah Manning, and Bill Manhire, at the launch of Ahmed Zaoui’s Migrant Birds: 24 Contemplations (Nelson: Craig Potton Books), in the Crypt of St. Benedict’s Church, Newton.
3. 2005 (17 October) -- Launched Bill Direen’s New Sea Land and Stephen Oliver’s Either Side The Horizon , with Alistair Paterson, launching Olivia Macassey’s Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Auckland: Titus Books) at Rakino’s, High Street, Auckland.
4. 2004 (17 July) -- Launch, with Jan Kemp, Olivia Macassey, and Richard von Sturmer, of nzepc feature: 12 Taonga from the Aotearoa / New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, at the Gus Fisher Gallery, Shortland St, Auckland.
5. 2000 (21 July) -- Organised the book-launch of Leicester Kyle’s A Safe House for a Man (Auckland: Polygraphia Press) at the Takapuna Public Library.

I suppose they can be quite fun sometimes -- meeting your pals, scarfing bread & cheese, making sure you're next to the drinks table when the speeches begin ... next time you go to one, though, do remember that you are expected at least to consider buying the book. Otherwise it's a bit like spending all afternoon tasting fine vintages at the vineyard and then rolling off without having purchased a single bottle -- it can be done, but it is a little gauche.

Really, though, I just want to put on record my thanks to all of you excellent people who have taken the trouble to come along on these many, many occasions. I guess your true reward will have to be postponed till you reach the next world, because it's unlikely to come in this one. I hope you take some satisfaction in knowing that you truly are the salt of the earth ...

The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis

[poster design by James Fryer]

It's two days now since that strange booklaunch in the English Department common-room at Auckland University. I've always thought it a pretty odd space, even before the carpets were all dyed slaughterhouse purple. Once we'd turned off all the lights and arranged little lamps around the window-ledges, though, it turned into a kind of Orphic cavern: the temple of the mysteries.

I think there had been a film preview in there before we arrived, so there was still a huge white screen in the middle of the floor. We didn't dare to try and take it down without instructions, so it stayed there behind the podium with the speakers projected onto it, like the chained-up captives in Plato's parable of the cave.

Michele Leggott had kindly agreed to introduce the speakers, and did so valiantly despite having hardly enough light to make out her notes.

Scott Hamilton went first. He's already given a spirited account on is own blog of the talk he gave introducing Bill Direen's J. G. Ballardesque novel / Apocalyptic text Song of the Brakeman. Brett Cross of Titus Books (the publisher of both novels), comments about the reading Olwyn Stewart then went on to give from it, that "it got quite surreal and trancelike there for a while, with hazy music in the background, the low lights, and words tumbling over the top ... I don't think I'll ever get those nodules of Tyrian purple nosing out of thinning fur out of my mind ..."

Then came Gabriel White, introducing my book The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. "Jack has a cold front," he said. "Jack puts his worst foot forward." He went on to compare me to Plato -- or Plato's more subversive side, at any rate. He sure got a laugh at that! I despair of doing justice to all the extravagant stuff Gabriel had to say -- it was a pretty goddamned impressive performance, though, I reckon (though I say it that shouldn't). For a video-clip of part of Gabriel's speech, click here.

The wine flowed freely and bread & cheese went down by bucketloads. Strange shapes loomed up in the semi-darkness, insisting on sharing their own views on Atlantis. "Perhaps some of their descendants are here in this room," speculated one poet. "Perhaps we're all Atlanteans," I riposted.

Andrew McCully's mood music was the other unique feature of the evening. He played on heroically as evening turned into night and the stars and citylights came on. He was still playing when I left. I hope he and all those others got safely home.

If you didn't manage to get there, I'm afraid that you missed an experience. Both books are now on sale, though, and can be ordered from the Titus website. I'll finish with some of the plaudits my own book has earned already:

· The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. ISBN 0-9582586-8-6. Auckland: Titus Books, 2006. RRP $NZ 27.95

"… after having read some of the contents, maybe it just wasn’t meant to be printed …"
– Marian Reeves, Massey Printery

"… rather rude …"
– Bronwyn Lloyd

"… women don’t always respond well to girl-girl erotica written by a bloke."
– Martin Edmond

I think that says it all, really. You owe it to yourself to check this novel out.