The Intrepid Ghost-Hunters (3): Home Turf

Poltergeist (1982)

There was a lot of noise in the house on Monday night as I was trying to get to sleep. I could hear what sounded like a radio playing a series of emetic pop-songs. I assumed it was coming from the supermarket carpark next door, or possibly from someone parked in the street in front.

Usually such sounds just go away. The truck-driver closes the door of his cab, or the young couple patch up their differences and drive away. Not this time, though: the noise just went on and on. After a while I put in my earplugs and rolled over to leave them to it.

After three or four songs it had woken up Bronwyn, though. She poked me in the ribs, and asked (or so I presume: I couldn't hear past the earplugs): "Do you hear that? Where's it coming from?"

After trying a few mollifying phrases about how it must be coming from next door, and other futile attempts to cling to sleep, I resigned myself to getting up to investigate. And, sure enough, a strange strobe-like light was emanating from the living room.

I went in. The TV was on. The sounds were coming from Free-to-air channel 11, the Edge. I turned it off. End of story.

LED TV screen

But wait, not really end of story. Why did I only become aware of the music after I'd been lying in bed for half an hour or so? It wasn't on very loud, but it was quite perceptible even from the next room. It's true that I was watching that channel briefly before turning the TV off, but I did turn it off. I must have done - the screen was dark when we went to bed, and we'd been talking in the lounge for quite some time after it was turned off.

Is it normal for TVs to come on by themselves? Static electricity? Power-surges? Not this one, at any rate. It's never done it before (so far as I know), and it hasn't shown any signs of abnormality in the couple of days since.

Come to think of it, there have been a couple of other odd things in the house lately. Bronwyn tidied up the kitchen and washed up all the dishes the other day, but when she came back into the room there was a little plastic-handled knife lying in the middle of the bench.

Also, on that same night, the night of the self-turning-on TV, our cat Zero made a loud whimpering meow in the middle of the night - as if she'd just seen something odd, or someone (something?) had ruffled her fur. She's never done that before, not in quite that way.

There've always been quite a lot of strange bumping noises from upstairs in our house. It is quite old, after all - the boards tend to stretch and settle. The hair does occasionally stand up on the back of your neck. But there was no movement to be noted in the trigger object Bronwyn left in the lounge last night.

It's true that we've both been reading an interesting book called The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, by John and Anne Spencer (London: Headline Book Publishing PLC, 1992) which I picked up for a couple of dollars in the Browns Bay market the other day. Perhaps that has made us a bit over-sensitive to things.

But then who knows? Has your television ever come on by itself? We'll keep you posted if anything else happens.

John & Anne Spencer: The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits (1992)

Hamilton Book Month

Hamilton Book Month (2015)

[29/8/15]:

pictures from the Hamilton Book Month facebook page:

Mark Houlahan introduces me

me reading poems

Mark and I talk

•

[21/7/15]:

Well, I'm pleased to announce that I've been asked to take part in two events in this year's Hamilton Book Month.

The first is a poetry workshop for secondary school students at Wintec at Thursday 27th August at 1 pm:

Students from five Hamilton secondary schools have been selected to participate in a two hour writing workshop held at Wintec with Dr Jack Ross. The interactive session will cover a range of writing techniques and expose students to a variety of poems including haiku and tanka and give ideas for creating and developing their work.

Dr Jack Ross is a senior lecturer in creative writing in the School of English and Media Studies on Massey University's Albany Campus. He has written and edited a range of books, magazines and journals including Landfall, Poetry NZ and Spin and his work has appeared both here and overseas.

The second is a poetry reading at Creative Waikato Big Space (131 Alexandra St, Hamilton) on the same day at 6pm:

Jack says, "I once read that more people write poetry in New Zealand than play rugby. Whether or not that's true, the fact remains that it's one of the things we're keenest on (and best at) as a nation".

"For myself, all I can say is that it's the best way of sorting through feelings, thinking things through, and making sense of the universe that I know of. It's not so much that I choose to write it as that I have to".

Quotes on poetry:

Once you’re caught on the plateau of your own “poetic practice” (your “voice,” if you prefer), no further progress is possible. Even Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of secular hymns extolling the cleansing properties of conflict in the opening days of World War I before he came to his senses.

Poetics may sound a bit tedious at times, a distraction from the sheer fun of monkeying around with language. … At its best, though, it is meant to act as an antidote to such systems for normalising the aberrant and abhorrent. In a sense, then, Shelley was quite right when he called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.

— Jack Ross, “Trouble in River City: How I learned to stop worrying and trust poetics." Poetry NZ 47 (2013): 93-103.

Jack will be in conversation with Mark Houlahan about his writing and will read from his work and take questions from those present.

I have to say that I'm immensely chuffed to have been asked. Last year Elizabeth Knox was in this slot, so you can see I have some pretty giant shoes to fill ...

Hamilton (nakedbus.com)

I Love Dick 20 years on

Chris Kraus: I Love Dick (1997 / 2006)

Is Chris Kraus's I Love Dick the great New Zealand novel?

Chris Kraus: I Love Dick (1997)

What an absurd idea! I remember first hearing about the book shortly after it had come out, from Vanessa York, the managing editor of our short-lived local periodical of ideas, The Pander.

Vanessa York, Andrew Forsberg et al., eds.: pander 8 (1999)

Kraus's book is certainly full of great quotes:

[after a description of a small town in New England]: "Don't you see why the people here actually looked forward to dying?" (p.105)

[on the activist Jennifer Harbury] "Hearing her that November in the car made me reflect, however briefly, that perhaps the genocide of the Guatemalan Indians (150,000, in a country of six million, disappeared and tortured in ten years) was an injustice of a higher order than my art career." (p.142)

[on female suicide as opposed to male] "Dear Dick, I want to make the world more interesting than my problems. Therefore, I have to make my problems social." (p.196)

[on the "self-consciously provincial burg" Wellington, where she got her BA]: "Southerly winds and rain pelted Wellington for six months of the year. Winters were gargantuan and mythic. Some years guide-ropes were installed downtown so that the city's lighter residents would not be swept away: thin people in oilskin parkas floating over cars on Taranaki Street, drifing like balloons from the city to the harbor, clear over the Cook Strait to the South Island above the Picton Ferry. Every year or so an article by a distinguished cultural celebrity (a writer or a broadcaster who'd travelled 'overseas') would appear in the New Zealand Listener likening Wellington to London or Manhattan. The whole city was delusional." (p.223)

Sometimes, admittedly, the truth hurts. One can't get away with the usual escape-clauses about how Kraus doesn't know the "real" New Zealand - how she was just a tourist. She wasn't. She may have been born elsewhere, but she grew up here, and her decision to get the hell out in her early twenties doesn't stop the country cropping up almost obsessively in her later writing.

Hang on a sec. Doesn't that sound a bit like someone else who got out? Someone a bit like - Katherine Mansfield (for instance)? And, sure enough, right on cue, here's part of her - quite extensive - riff on Mansfield:

Katherine Mansfield craved a slice of life so badly she invented it as genre. Small countries lend themselves to stories: backwaters where the people stuck there don't have much to do besides watch each other's lives unfold. (p.252).

Virginia Woolf on Katherine Mansfield

The whole of Owen Marshall's career might be summed up by that last sentence. Kraus, however, goes on to compose a whole story in faux-Mansfield style: the romance between the "authentic local" Eric Johnson and "shallow, flighty Constance [Green], still a welter of opinions and hip clothes" (p.253) - this after four pages (242-44) on the larger significance of Mansfield's career. The mini-bio concludes: "It moved me so that tears came in my eyes" (p. 244). The story, by contrast, trails off into the line:

Perhaps the distances between them were not so interesting." (p.254)

You see what I mean about the great New Zealand novel? I Love Dick is not really about here, but the subject keeps coming up. That's almost the definition of a New Zealand writer. You try to write about other things: the world and all the things it contains, but somehow the subject keeps coming up:

There's a lot of madness in New Zealand. A famous poem by Alistair Campbell, Like You I'm Trapped, was written to his unnamed suicidal wife who'd been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Like You I'm Trapped claims the poet's right to project himself into another person's psychic situation. It's a beautiful poem but I don't know if I believe it. There's a lot of madness in New Zealand because it's a mean and isolated little country. Anyone who feels too much or radiates extremity gets very lonely. (p. 227)

It all reminds me a bit of Kendrick Smithyman's poem "Colville." Everyone he met from there told him "Oh, it's not like that now." So much so that he actually retitled the poem "Colville 1964" for Ian Wedde & Harvey McQueen's 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. But, you know, it is still like that. Check out my 2010 blogpost on the subject if you doubt me.

Like Smithyman's poem, Kraus's analysis of New Zealand remains (mostly) valid because it's so dispassionate. She has nothing to gain or lose from placating or offending us. Our cultural gatekeepers and arbiters are not hers. She's succeeded in getting out there, "overseas," and has constructed her own cool hipster universe there.

There are some curious references here and there where one suspects a libel lawyer has gone through the text changing names. The actor "Ian Martinson," with whom Kraus shared a drunken New Year shag in the mid-70s (pp.229-30) - they met at the BLERTA House in Aro Valley - is clearly Martyn Sanderson (the fact that he is described as the star of a TV drama about the "aviator" Douglas Weir makes the identification with Sanderson, star of the 1975 drama Richard Pearse as near certain as anything can be).

Not that it matters particularly. It simply confirms that reading the book as a fairly straight report on experience (to splice in the title of another ambiguously "NZ" classic) is not unreasonable. There's a huge amount there, and it certainly repays reading and rereading.

Given its strict bounds in time (the initial dinner-party between Chris, her husband Sylvère Lotringer, and the eponymous Dick (identified by reviewers as art critic Dick Hebdige takes place on December 3, 1994; "Chris" is identified (then) as a "39-year-old experimental filmmaker"; Dick's final, brutal fax ending the infatuation / stalking is dated September 19 [1995]; the book appeared from Sylvère and Chris's joint publishing house, Semiotext(e) in 1997) twenty years on seems like a pretty good time to revisit: time enough for the dust to settle and the lasting value of Kraus's book to have come into sharper focus.

Nic Amato: Chris Kraus (2012)

Pictures from a Booklaunch

The venue [JR]

Joint Launch of

The Longest Drink in Town
By Tracey Slaughter
(Auckland: Pania Press, 2015)

&

A Clearer View of the Hinterland:
Poems & Sequences 1981-2014
By Jack Ross
(Wellington: HeadworX, 2014)

Monday 25th May at 6.30 pm

At the Art Fusion Gallery
Waikato University
003 Student Centre (Next to the hairstylists)
Gate 5, Hillcrest Road, Hamilton

Photographs by Paul Hinton [PH], Bronwyn Lloyd [BL] & Jack Ross [JR]

Reflections [JR]

Jack, Tracey & Mark Houlahan [PH]

Mark Houlahan MCs [BL]

Tracey speaks [PH]

Tracey reads [PH]

Jack reads [PH]

The Band [JR]

Tracey, Jack & Rachael Elliott [BL]

Mark Houlahan & Terry Locke [BL]

Crowd scene [BL]

Crowd Scene [PH]

Something to Say: i.m. John O'Connor

John O'Connor (d. 12 May, 2015)

all down the Jewish lane children are falling. it’s a game called autumn, a pastiche of drifting leaves and gathering. yet one stays out, has not joined her companions in what they suppose is a fine tumble, quick in the wind, now still.

just one moved towards the vents. a photograph shows them piled in a corner, naked and shaved, almost as if stacked up. yet one figure is in front of the group — as if she had something important to say.

This is the prose-poem "Something to Say," By John O'Connor, included in David Howard's anthology Complete with Instructions. It's always been a favourite of mine - among the very many poems of his I liked.

David Howard, ed.: Complete with Instructions (2001)

It was David Howard who introduced the two of us, in fact. I was going down to Christchurch to teach a weekend writing course, and David suggested that I take the opportunity to interview a bunch of the local poets down there for a possible feature in his new magazine Firebrand (which eventually, after many vicissitudes, turned into the anthology pictured above).

I was happy enough to do it, and had a fascinating time driving round the city and talking to the likes of Julia Allen, John Allison, Kenneth Fea, David Gregory, Rob Jackaman, Graham Lindsay, Mike Minehan, and - John O'Connor (you can find complete texts of the various interviews, which I ended up calling "Imaginary Toads in Real Gardens," on my Opinions blog here.

John O'Connor had recently helped to set up Sudden Valley Press, and was active in the Canterbury Poets Collective, and seemed in many ways a natural organiser. It was quite a surprise to me to find out just how delicate and subtle his poetry could be. He wrote in many voices, some of which appealed to me more than others, but in every one of his many books there was always the chance of turning the page and finding something quite extraordinary - something like that haunting prose-poem I've reprinted above.

Here's a list of his books, as accurate as I can make it from my own notes and reviews of his work over the years. There could well be some missing. These are the main ones, though:

John O’Connor: haiku

1. Laying Autumn’s Dust: Poems and Verse 1974-1983. Concept Publishing, 1983.


2. Citizen of No Mean City: Poems and Verse 1983-1985. Concept Publishing, 1985.


3. [with Bernard Gadd]. Too Right Mate. Hallard Press, 1996.


4. As It Is: Poems 1981-1996. Christchurch: Sudden Valley Press, 1997.


5. A Particular Context. Christchurch: Sudden Valley Press, 1999.


6. [with Eric Mould]. Working Voices. Auckland: Hallard Press, 2003.


7. Home River. Auckland: Hallard Press, 2003.


8. Bright the Harvest Moon. Wellington: HeadworX, 2004.


9. Parts of the Moon: Selected Haiku & Senryu 1988-2007. Teneriffe: Post Pressed, 2007.


10. Cornelius & Co: Collected Working-Class Verse, 1996-2009. Teneriffe, Queensland: Post Pressed, 2009.


11. Aspects of Reality. Wellington: HeadworX, 2013.


12. Whistling in the Dark. Wellington: HeadworX, 2014.

John O’Connor: Whistling in the Dark (2014)

There's a brief bio / bibliography up at the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive, but it dates from 2004, over a decade ago, so is pretty out-of-date. He'd done a great deal since then:

John O’Connor is a past winner of the New Zealand Poetry Society’s International Prize, founding editor of the poetry journal plainwraps and has edited various issues of Takahe, Spin, and the NZPS annual anthology. With David Gregory he founded Poets Group and also Sudden Valley Press of which he is managing editor. John’s haiku have been internationally anthologised on a number of occasions, translated into 6 languages and were recently chosen as “best of issue” in Frogpond International, a special issue of the leading US haiku periodical, Frogpond, featuring haiku from 26 countries. His criticism and non-haiku poetry have been widely published in New Zealand and overseas, and his work has been anthologised by Lauris Edmond and Bill Sewell in Essential New Zealand Poems. His last book, A Particular Context, was chosen by members of the Poetry Society as one of the 5 best books of New Zealand poetry of the 1990s.

John O’Connor: A Particular Context (1999)

I guess one of my own fondest memories of John is the roadtrip we did together out to Banks Peninsula in 2003. The ostensible reason for the jaunt was to look for the grave of D'Arcy Cresswell - in which attempt we were singularly unsuccessful (though we did find the grave of a Douglas Cresswell), but actually it was really just to explore a bit. We ended up at Port Levy, as I recall, and John did a good deal of quoting from Denis Glover's Towards Banks Peninsula along the way - not to mention his own poem "At Port Levy."

I wrote a poem about our trip, in fact: probably too allusive to make much sense without the context of that day out in the hills, but I give it here as a little tribute to that good man and good poet John O'Connor - "A red libation to your good memory, friend":

Towards Banks Peninsula
i.m. John O'Connor (d. 12/5/15)

1 - The Summons

Feed, propagate, be fed on; please someone; die.
– Kendrick Smithyman

Mahogany desk
crybaby
goodness sake

a gobfull
that’s disgusting
sorry

didn’t mean to
sampling
set for

landing
sun breaks through
the clouds

2 - Searching for the Original

DRINK
D R I V E
– road-sign

Dog gobbles up flies
from the floor of the church

Not D’Arcy
Douglas Cresswell

dug in
with his wife

Look up at the hills
stone plugs

the fairies lived there
girl could tell you more

John O’Connor & Eric Mould: Working Voices (2003)

I'm glad I was able to include two beautiful translations by John in the last issue of Poetry NZ, together with a notice of his latest book. I didn't then fully understand the significance of its title, Whistling in the Dark.

John O'Connor is a man who will be sorely missed, and I'm sorry that there won't be any more of his wonderful books to leaf through, with curious surprises lurking behind the most unobtrusive pages.

John O'Connor: As It Is (1997)

Double Booklaunch - Tracey Slaughter / Jack Ross

Booklaunch - Waikato University (25/5/15)

I'm pleased to report that there's going to be a double booklaunch for Tracey Slaughter's latest, the novella The Longest Drink in Town, published by Pania Press, together with my latest, the poetry collection A Clearer View of the Hinterland, publlished by HeadworX of Wellington.

Here are the details of the event:

Joint Launch of



Cover image: Bronwyn Lloyd / Cover design: Ellen Portch & Brett Cross

The Longest Drink in Town
By Tracey Slaughter
(Auckland: Pania Press, 2015)

&


Cover image: Graham Fletcher / Cover design: Ellen Portch & Brett Cross

A Clearer View of the Hinterland:
Poems & Sequences 1981-2014
By Jack Ross
(Wellington: HeadworX, 2014)

Monday 25th May at 6.30 pm

At the Art Fusion Gallery
Waikato University
003 Student Centre (Next to the hairstylists)
Gate 5, Hillcrest Road, Hamilton


The event is co-organised by Mayhem literary journal. You can find further details here.


Jack Ross

See you there!

Tracey Slaughter

Verbivoracious Festschrift 3: The Syllabus

G.N. Forester and M.J. Nicholls, ed.: Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume 3:
The Syllabus (2015)

I was a little surprised, last year, to be invited to contribute a piece to the above festschrift from Singapore-based alternative literature publisher Verbivoracious Press. They appear to specialise principally in the work of British writer Christine Brooke-Rose (1923-2012), many of whose books they have reprinted. The title of the above compilation, "The Syllabus," though, shows that they also aspire to represent a whole universe of experimental writing - what might be called (in Roger Horrocks' phrase) the Kingdom of Alt.

Adam Thirlwell: Miss Herbert: An Essay in Five Parts (2007)

The book Mark Nicholls wanted me to write about was Miss Herbert (2007), by British novelist Adam Thirlwell. The reason this surprised me was that he based the request on the blogpost I'd written about it, a piece which strikes me (in retrospect) as rather unkind - though I certainly don't subscribe there to any of the more ad hominem attacks Thirlwell's book received in the more up-themselves reviews.

We quickly rejected the idea of compiling an essay from the blog itself, and instead I decided to take the licence he offered to compose a more "creative" piece taking off from Thirlwell's book (which rejoices in a number of titles in America and Britain, my favourite being the one on the spine of the paperback edition: Miss Herbert: A book of novels, romances, and their translators, containing ten languages, set on four continents, and accompanied by maps, portraits, squiggles and illustrations ...

Each contributor was limited to 500 words, and it must have been a devil of a job to assemble them all, since it was only last week that I was at last alerted to the appearance of the compilation:

A monument to our insatiable verbivoracity, The Syllabus is an act of humble genuflection before the authors responsible for those texts which have transported us to the peak of readerly nirvana and back. The texts featured, chosen in a rapturous frenzy by editors and contributors alike, represent a broad sweep of the most important exploratory fiction written in the last hundred years (and beyond). Featuring 100 texts from (fewer than) 100 contributors, The Syllabus is a form of religious creed, and should be read primarily as a holy manual from which the reader draws inspiration and hope, helping to shape their intellectual and moral life with greater awareness, and lead them towards those works that offer deep spiritual succour while surviving on a merciless and unkind planet. Readers of this festschrift should expect nothing less than an incontrovertible conversion from reader to insatiable verbivore in 225 pages.

“The Syllabus, as a third volume of Verbivoracious Festschrift, is a celebration of reading. It’s a great literary feast for the true readers, for all the verbivores around the world, a feast consisting of hundred delicious meals. I am honored to be a part of that unforgettable menu.” — Dubravka Ugrešić.

And what exactly is in it? Here's a list of the contents, arranged (as you can see) in chronological order:

Introduction or, The Art of Sillybustering
The Editors
1. Jonathan Swift — A Modest Proposal [1729]
   Scott Beauchamp
2. Laurence Sterne — The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy [1759]
   Silvia Barlaam
3. Xiao Hong (萧红) — The Field of Life and Death [1935]
   Wee Teck Lim
4. Louis-Ferdinand Céline — Death on the Installment Plan [1936]
   Paul John Adams
5. Rayner Heppenstall — The Blaze of Noon [1939]
   Juliet Jacques
6. James Joyce — Finnegans Wake [1939]
   Fionnuala Nic Mheanmán
7. Flann O’Brien — At Swim-Two-Birds [1939]
   Edwin Turner
8. Raymond Queneau — Exercises in Style [1947]
   Geoff Wilt
9. Boris Vian — Foam of the Daze [1947]
   Tosh Berman
10. Douglas Woolf — The Hypocritic Days [1955]
    Ammiel Alcalay
11. Henry Miller — Quiet Days in Clichy [1956]
    G.N. Forester
12. Muriel Spark — The Comforters [1957]
    Kim Fay
13. Alexander Trocchi — Cain’s Book [1960]
    Gill Tasker
14. Michel Butor — Mobile [1962]
    John Trefry
15. Robert Pinget — The Inquisitory [1962]
    ???
16. B.S. Johnson — Omnibus [1964-1971]
    Nicolas Tredell
17. Raymond Queneau — The Blue Flowers [1965]
    Inez Hedges
18. Alan Burns — Celebrations [1967]
    Joseph Andrew Darlington
19. Guillermo Cabrera Infante — Three Trapped Tigers [1967]
    Pablo Medina
20. Macedonia Fernández — The Museum of Eterna’s Novel [1967]
    Steve Penkevich
21. Anna Kavan — Ice [1967]
    Kristine Rabberman
22. J.M.G Le Clézio — Terra Amata [1967]
    Keith Moser
23. Flann O’Brien — The Third Policeman [1967]
    Alex Johnston
24. Ishmael Reed — The Freelance Pallbearers [1967]
    Joseph McGrath
25. Christine Brooke-Rose — Between [1968]
    Katarzyna Bartoszyńska
26. Anthony Earnshaw & Eric Thacker — Musrum [1968]
    Kenneth Cox
27. Nicholas Mosley — Impossible Object [1968]
    Shiva Rahbaran
28. Vladimir Nabokov — Ada or Ardor [1969]
    Rob Friel
29. J.G. Ballard — The Atrocity Exhibition [1970]
    Rick McGrath
30. Pierre Guyotat — Eden Eden Eden [1970]
    Peter Blundell
31. Raymond Federman — Double or Nothing [1971]
    Lance Olsen
32. Hubert Selby Jnr. — The Room [1971]
    Georgina Holland
33. Stanley Crawford — Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine [1972]
    Stephen Sparks
34. Tom Mallin — Erowina [1972]
    Nate Dorr
35. Ann Quin — Tripticks [1972]
    Francis Booth
36. Guy Davenport — Taitlin! [1974]
    Eric Byrd
37. Lawrence Durrell — The Avignon Quintet [1974-1985]
    Nadine Mainard
38. Chrisine Brooke-Rose — Thru [1975]
    David Detrich
39. Georges Perec — An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris [1975]
    Lauren Elkin
40. Fernando del Paso — Palinuro of Mexico [1976]
    Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
41. Coleman Dowell — Island People [1976]
    Eugene H. Hayworth
42. Raymond Federman — Take It or Leave It [1976]
    Steve Katz
43. Italo Calvino — If on a winter’s night a traveller [1979]
    Silvia Barlaam
44. Gilbert Sorrentino — Mulligan Stew [1979]
    M.J. Nicholls
45. Roald Dahl — The Twits [1980]
    Harold Lad
46. Donald Barthelme — Sixty Stories [1981]
    Lee Klein
47. Alexander Theroux — Darconville’s Cat [1981]
    Steven Moore
48. Camilo José Cela — Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son [1982]
    Rosalyn Drexler
49. D. Keith Mano — Take Five [1982]
    Nathan Gaddis
50. Thomas Bernhard — Woodcutters [1984]
    Anonymous
51. Christine Brooke-Rose — Amalgamemnon [1984]
    Ellen G. Friedman
52. Rikki Ducornet — The Stain [1984]
    Michelle Ryan-Sautour
53. Christoph Meckel — The Figure on the Boundary Line [1984]
    Ben Winch
54. Milorad Pavić — Dictionary of the Khazars (Male Edition) [1984]
    Alec Nevala-Lee
55. Milorad Pavić — Dictionary of the Khazars (Female Edition) [1984]
    Silvia Barlaam
56. Don Delillo — White Noise [1985]
    Barbara Melville
57. Gilbert Sorrentino — Pack of Lies Trilogy [1985-1989]
    Dick Witherspoon
58. Ronald Sukenick — In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction [1985]
    Tom Willard
59. Marcel Bénabou — Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books [1986]
    A. Writer
60. Michael Westlake — Imaginary Women [1987]
    Michael Westlake
61. Nicholson Baker — The Mezzanine [1988]
    M.J. Nicholls
62. Italo Calvino — Six Memos for the Next Millennium [1988]
    Daniel Levin Becker
63. David Markson — Wittgenstein’s Mistress [1988]
    Christopher WunderLee
64. Janice Galloway — The Trick is to Keep Breathing [1989]
    Gillian Devine
65. Jacques Roubaud — The Great Fire of London [1989]
    Ian Monk
66. Felipe Alfau — Chromos [1990]
    Sam Moss
67. Robert Alan Jamieson — A Day at the Office [1991]
    Rodge Glass
68. Alasdair Gray — Poor Things [1992]
    Rodge Glass
69. W.G. Sebald — The Emigrants [1992]
    Peter Bebergal
70. William Gaddis — A Frolic of His Own [1994]
    Christopher WunderLee
71. Jáchym Topol — City Sister Silver [1994]
    Alex Zucker
72. Martin Amis — The Information [1995]
    Anthony Vacca
73. William H. Gass — The Tunnel [1995]
    H.L. Hix
74. Gilbert Sorrentino — Red the Fiend [1995]
    Jenny Offill
75. Roberto Bolaño — Nazi Literature in the Americas [1996]
    Adrian Carney
76. Geoff Dyer — Out of Sheer Rage [1997]
    Kathleen Heil
77. Alasdair Brotchie & Harry Mathews (eds.) — Oulipo Compendium [1998]
    Jason Graff
78. Dubravka Ugrešić — The Museum of Unconditional Surrender [1998]
    Jasmina Lukić
79. Percival Everett — Glyph [1999]
    Tom Conoboy
80. Ali Smith — Other Stories and Other Stories [1999]
    M.J. Nicholls
81. Ignácio de Loloya Brandão — Anonymous Celebrity [2002]
    Ricki Aklon
82. Curtis White — Requiem [2002]
    Trevor Dodge
83. Lucy Ellmann — Dot in the Universe [2003]
    Ali Millar
84. Dubravka Ugrešić — Thank You for Not Reading [2003]
    Ana Stanojevic
85. Roberto Bolaño — 2666 [2004]
    Alex Cox
86. Meredith Brosnan — Mr. Dynamite [2004]
    Jarleth L. Prendergast
87. David Mitchell — Cloud Atlas [2004]
    Stephen Mirabito
88. Steve Katz — Antonello’s Lion [2005]
    W.C. Bamberger
89. Graham Rawle — Woman’s World [2005]
    Michael Leong
90. Gilbert Adair — The Evadne Mount Trilogy [2006-2009]
    Manny Rayner
91. Nicola Barker — Darkmans [2007]
    Kinga Burger
92. Lydia Davis — Varieties of Disturbance [2007]
    Ali Millar
93. Lydie Salvayre — Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal [2007]
    Juliet Jacques
94. Adam Thirwell — Miss Herbert [2007]
    Jack Ross
95. Urmuz — Collected Works [2007]
    Eddie Watkins
96. Marilyn Chin — Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen [2009]
    Melanie Ho
97. Gabriel Josipovici — Only Joking [2010]
    Gianni Dane
98. Steven Moore — The Novel: An Alternative History [2010-2013]
    Nathan Gaddis
99. Will Self — Walking to Hollywood [2010]
    Richard Strachan
100. Charles Newman — In Partial Disgrace [2013]
     Eric Lundgren
The Influences of Others
Igo Wodan

What, no Raymond Roussel, you say? No this person, no that? Instead of such carping, let's just celebrate all the weird and wonderful texts they have managed to include in their roll-call of 100+:

Texts:

A Modest Proposal — The Avignon Quintet — The Comforters — Finnegans Wake — In Partial Disgrace — Impossible Object — Wittgenstein’s Mistress — The Freelance Pallbearers — Foam of the Daze — Between — Darconville’s Cat — Thru — Terra Amata — Poor Things — Pack of Lies — Amalgamemnon — Anonymous Celebrity — The Stain — Palinuro of Mexico — Miss Herbert — Tristram Shandy — The Mezzanine — White Noise — Glyph — The Twits — Woodcutters — Erowina — Chromos — A Day at the Office — Darkmans — The Evadne Mount Trilogy — Mobile — An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris — The Trick is to Keep Breathing — The Great Fire of London — Thank You For Not Reading — Exercises in Style — Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books — B.S. Johnson Omnibus — Six Memos for the Next Millennium — Sixty Stories — Requiem — Mrs Caldwell Speaks to Her Son — The Atrocity Exhibition — Walking to Hollywood — At Swim-Two-Birds — The Death of the Author — Dot in the Universe — Eco: On Literature — Dictionary of the Khazars — The Novel: An Alternate History — Varieties of Disturbance — Mr. Dynamite — The Blue Flowers — Portrait of the Artist as a Domesticated Animal  — The Tunnel — Oulipo Compendium — In Form: Digressions in the Art of Fiction — Take it or Leave it — If on a winter’s night a traveller — The Information — Double or Nothing — The Hypocritic Days — Berg — 2666 — The Inquisitory — Woman’s World — Museum of Eterna’s Novel — The Blaze of Noon — Musrum — Island People — Take Five — Death on Credit — Three Trapped Tigers — Cain’s Book — Invisible Cities — Out of Sheer Rage — Log of the S.S. Mrs Unguentine — The Room — Revenge of the Moon Vixen — Mulligan Stew — Ice — Red the Fiend — Urmuz: Complete Works — Ada — Taitlin! — Celebrations — The Figure on the Boundary Line — City Silver Sister — Nazi Literature in the Americas — The Emigrants — Other Stories and Other Stories — The Third Policeman — Antonello’s Lion — Cloud Atlas — Imaginary Women — The Museum of Unconditional Surrender — Eden Eden Eden — Quiet Days in Clichy


Contributors:

Scott Beauchamp — Kim Fay — Igo Wodan — Fionnuala McManamon — Eric Lundgren — Shiva Rahbaran — Joseph McGrath — Tosh Berman — Katarzyna Bartoszyńska — David Detrich — Ellen Friedman — Steven Moore — Keith Moser — Rodge Glass — Michelle Ryan-Santour — Jack Ross — Silvia Barlaam — Tom Conoboy — Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado — M.J. Nicholls — Barbara Melville — Nate Dorr — Sam Moss — Kinga Burger — Manny Rayner — John Trefry — Lauren Elkin — Gillian Devine —Ian Monk — Peter Blundell — Ana Stanojevic — Geoff Wilt — Nicolas Tredell — Daniel Levin Becker — Lee Klein — Lance Olsen — Trevor Dodge — Rosalyn Drexler — Rick McGrath — Richard Strachan — Edwin Turner — Ali Millar — Alec Nevala-Lee — Nathan Gaddis — Alberta Rigid — Jarleth L. Prenderghast —Inez Hedges — Juliet Jacques — H.L. Hix — Jason Graff — Tom Willard — Steve Katz — Anthony Vacca — Ammiel Almacay — Lee Rourke — Alex Cox — Michael Leong — Eric Byrd — Steve Penkevich — Kenneth Cox — Gene Hayworth — Paul John Adams — Pablo Medina — Gill Tasker — Kathleen Heil — Georgina Holland — Stephen Sparks — Anonymous — Melanie Ho — Jenny Offill — Kristine Rabberman — Eddie Watkins — Rob Friel — Joseph Andrew Darlington — Alex Zucker — Ben Winch — Alex Johnston — W.C. Bamberger — Stephen Mirabito — Michael Westlake — Peter Bebergal — Jasmina Lukić — Nadine Mainard — G.N. Forester

Here are the publication details:

Release Date:

May 11th, 2015. ISBN: 9789810935931. 237pp.

Pricing Information:

Paperback: GBP9.99 + postage GBP2.00 within UK, US, AU, CAN, EU, ZA, NZ, IN and SG.

Available from:

all booksellers and usual online retailers, or the Verbivoracious website at sales@verbivoraciouspress.org

I've got a good mind to use it precisely as they suggest: as a syllabus for the new course in "Advanced Fiction" I'm planning (to commence at Massey Albany in 2017). Maybe that's a bit cheeky, but it'll certainly be listing it as a recommended text for the students.

Go on, then, test yourself. Just how many of the above books have you actually read? How many have you even heard of, for that matter? Not even Richard Taylor would score 100% on that one, I suspect. Scott Hamilton, perhaps?

Jack Ross: Kingdom of Alt (2010)

Off the Page Writers Series [17/4/15]

Palmerston North City Library

This Friday I'll be flying down to Palmerston North to chair a session in Massey University's "Off the Page" series of writers events at the City Library from 6.30 pm (there'll also be an open mike reading from 5:45-6:30). These events are jointly sponsored by the School of English and Media Studies and the Palmerston North Public Library.

The panel I'm in charge of will be focussing on short fiction, and includes renowned writers Owen Marshall, Jaspreet Singh, and Tracey Slaughter. Books by all three of the panelists will be available for sale from representatives of local independent bookseller Bruce McKenzie Books.

Owen Marshall
photograph: Liz March

Owen Marshall needs no introduction, I should imagine: he is, after all, probably the most celebrated virtuoso of short fiction in New Zealand. I've never met him before, though, and am greatly looking forward to it.

Jaspreet Singh

The amazing Jaspreet Singh, whom I met for the first time yesterday at the Signalman's House in Devonport (aka The Michael King Writers Centre), where he's staying before flying down to Palmerston North to take up the Massey University writer-in-residence position there for the next ten weeks, is probably better known for his two novels Chef (2010) and Helium (2013), but actually began as a short story writer.

His first book, Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir, published by Véhicule Press of Montreal, won the 2004 QWF McAuslan First Book Award. He tells me he has a number of other short stories in stock, but of course commercial publishers will persist in preferring full-length novels ...

Tracey Slaughter

I have to say that I'll be particularly excited to introduce Tracey Slaughter to the audience, though. Bronwyn and I are both great admirers of her work, and we're therefore very pleased to announce that Pania Press has just published her novella The Longest Drink in Town. You can find out more about this publication here, and if you'd like to order a copy of it, please try here.

Cover image: Bronwyn Lloyd / Cover design: Ellen Portch & Brett Cross

Tracey has a somewhat larger collection, Deleted Scenes for Lovers, due out from Victoria University Press in early 2016, but this is her first stand-alone book since Her Body Rises (Random House, 2005) - though of course her stories have appeared in many, many magazines and anthologies since then.

The Longest Drink in Town is available in an initial print-run of 100 copies.