The Imaginary Museum

Monday, May 18, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home River. Auckland: Hallard Press, 2003.

Bright the Harvest Moon. Wellington: HeadworX, 2004.

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

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

Aspects of Reality. Wellington: HeadworX, 2013.

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

Monday, May 11, 2015

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

Jonathan Swift — A Modest Proposal [1729]
Laurence Sterne — The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy [1759]
Xiao Hong (萧红) — The Field of Life and Death [1935]
Louis-Ferdinand Céline — Death on the Installment Plan [1936]
Rayner Heppenstall — The Blaze of Noon [1939]
James Joyce — Finnegans Wake [1939]
Flann O’Brien — At Swim-Two-Birds [1939]
Raymond Queneau — Exercises in Style [1947]
Boris Vian — Foam of the Daze [1947]
Douglas Woolf — The Hypocritic Days [1955]
Henry Miller — Quiet Days in Clichy [1956]
Muriel Spark — The Comforters [1957]
Alexander Trocchi — Cain’s Book [1960]
Michel Butor — Mobile [1962]
Robert Pinget — The Inquisitory [1962]
B.S. Johnson — Omnibus [1964-1971]
Raymond Queneau — The Blue Flowers [1965]
Alan Burns — Celebrations [1967]
Guillermo Cabrera Infante — Three Trapped Tigers [1967]
Macedonia Fernández — The Museum of Eterna’s Novel [1967]
Anna Kavan — Ice [1967]
J.M.G Le Clézio — Terra Amata [1967]
Flann O’Brien — The Third Policeman [1967]
Ishmael Reed — The Freelance Pallbearers [1967]
Christine Brooke-Rose — Between [1968]
Anthony Earnshaw & Eric Thacker — Musrum [1968]
Nicholas Mosley — Impossible Object [1968]
Vladimir Nabokov — Ada or Ardor [1969]
J.G. Ballard — The Atrocity Exhibition [1970]
Pierre Guyotat — Eden Eden Eden [1970]
Raymond Federman — Double or Nothing [1971]
Hubert Selby Jnr. — The Room [1971]
Stanley Crawford — Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine [1972]
Tom Mallin — Erowina [1972]
Ann Quin — Tripticks [1972]
Guy Davenport — Taitlin! [1974]
Lawrence Durrell — The Avignon Quintet [1974-1985]
Chrisine Brooke-Rose — Thru [1975]
Georges Perec — An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris [1975]
Fernando del Paso — Palinuro of Mexico [1976]
Coleman Dowell — Island People [1976]
Raymond Federman — Take It or Leave It [1976]
Italo Calvino — If on a winter’s night a traveller [1979]
Gilbert Sorrentino — Mulligan Stew [1979]
Roald Dahl — The Twits [1980]
Donald Barthelme — Sixty Stories [1981]
Alexander Theroux — Darconville’s Cat [1981]
Camilo José Cela — Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son [1982]
D. Keith Mano — Take Five [1982]
Thomas Bernhard — Woodcutters [1984]
Christine Brooke-Rose — Amalgamemnon [1984]
Rikki Ducornet — The Stain [1984]
Christoph Meckel — The Figure on the Boundary Line [1984]
Milorad Pavić — Dictionary of the Khazars (Male Edition) [1984]
Milorad Pavić — Dictionary of the Khazars (Female Edition) [1984]
Don Delillo — White Noise [1985]
Gilbert Sorrentino — Pack of Lies Trilogy [1985-1989]
Ronald Sukenick — In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction [1985]
Marcel Bénabou — Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books [1986]
Michael Westlake — Imaginary Women [1987]
Nicholson Baker — The Mezzanine [1988]
Italo Calvino — Six Memos for the Next Millennium [1988]
David Markson — Wittgenstein’s Mistress [1988]
Janice Galloway — The Trick is to Keep Breathing [1989]
Jacques Roubaud — The Great Fire of London [1989]
Felipe Alfau — Chromos [1990]
Robert Alan Jamieson — A Day at the Office [1991]
Alasdair Gray — Poor Things [1992]
W.G. Sebald — The Emigrants [1992]
William Gaddis — A Frolic of His Own [1994]
Jáchym Topol — City Sister Silver [1994]
Martin Amis — The Information [1995]
William H. Gass — The Tunnel [1995]
Gilbert Sorrentino — Red the Fiend [1995]
Roberto Bolaño — Nazi Literature in the Americas [1996]
Geoff Dyer — Out of Sheer Rage [1997]
Alasdair Brotchie & Harry Mathews (eds.) — Oulipo Compendium [1998]
Dubravka Ugrešić — The Museum of Unconditional Surrender [1998]
Percival Everett — Glyph [1999]
Ali Smith — Other Stories and Other Stories [1999]
Ignácio de Loloya Brandão — Anonymous Celebrity [2002]
Curtis White — Requiem [2002]
Lucy Ellmann — Dot in the Universe [2003]
Dubravka Ugrešić — Thank You for Not Reading [2003]
Roberto Bolaño — 2666 [2004]
Meredith Brosnan — Mr. Dynamite [2004]
David Mitchell — Cloud Atlas [2004]
Steve Katz — Antonello’s Lion [2005]
Graham Rawle — Woman’s World [2005]
Gilbert Adair — The Evadne Mount Trilogy [2006-2009]
Nicola Barker — Darkmans [2007]
Lydia Davis — Varieties of Disturbance [2007]
Lydie Salvayre — Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal [2007]
Adam Thirwell — Miss Herbert [2007]
Urmuz — Collected Works [2007]
Marilyn Chin — Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen [2009]
Gabriel Josipovici — Only Joking [2010]
Steven Moore — The Novel: An Alternative History [2010-2013]
Will Self — Walking to Hollywood [2010]
Charles Newman — In Partial Disgrace [2013]

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)

Monday, April 13, 2015

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.

Friday, March 13, 2015

Ramon Llull and Curriculum Mapping

Ramon Llull: Ars magna (1305)

Yesterday I went to an interesting meeting where it was explained to us just how the - relatively new - concept of curriculum mapping could help us improve our teaching programme. There are many forms that this can take, but the one which was explained to us consisted of a listing of the "graduate attributes" considered essential for students in particular degrees or subject areas within degrees, together with a list of the papers we teach, and a series of boxes to fill in confirming that we do indeed teach those particular things.

So far, so harmless: useful, even (perhaps). I note in particular the following passage from the wikipedia article on curriculum mapping, which concludes:

The curriculum needs to be perceived as a 'work-in-progress', a 'living and breathing' document, whose ultimate owners are students. Curriculum mapping is a 'process', not a one-time initiative. Traditional curriculum mapping software are just tools available to make the review process easier.

There's no doubt that obtaining an overview of something as complex as a major within a degree can be very difficult - and hence an impressionistic sense that "we must talk about that somewhere" often stands in for certainty that we really do cover things with the requisite detail and emphasis.

DePiep: Periodic table (polyatomic)

One example of a dynamic system which functions extremely well would be the periodic table of the elements. Dmitri Mendelev originally lined up the elements (on little cards) according to their atomic weights as a kind of after-dinner parlour game. He observed that at a certain point he needed to start a new row in order to match up the same kinds of elements with one another: in his system there were six rows, but this has been subsequently enlarged to fit in hydrogen and helium.

The point is that it wasn't till some time afterwards that the reasons for this periodicity were discovered: the fact that it was the number of protons in each nucleus that dictated their place in the scheme. The atomic weight, the factor he was using, was a far cruder indicator. Nevertheless, the whole system - with certain modifications - worked, and enabled him to predict the existence of various new elements which were subsequently discovered in nature (or, in some cases, fabricated in the laboratory).

Ramon Llull: Tree and Wheel (1305)

I guess the other thing curriculum mapping reminds me of, though, is the Catalan polymath Ramon Llull's wheels (and trees) of science from his 1305 work the Ars Magna (or Great Art). Basically his idea was that if one could summarise all the attributes of God - which come down to Goodness, Greatness, Duration, Power, Wisdom, Will, Virtue, Truth, and Glory - into one wheel, which interlocked with other wheels of natural elements, planetary influences, and bodily humours, it should be possible to make a kind of machine for generating knowledge.

Any question (theoretically) could be coded onto the wheels and receive a satisfactory answer which must be demonstrably true, since these things were guaranteed to be so by the very nature of the First Cause.

I suppose it's apparent at once how much information theory and digital computers owe to Llull's pioneering work (not dissimilar, in its way, to that of Alan Turing: at any rate in the over-simplified form portrayed in The Imitation Game, the recent film about him).

The Imitation Game (2014)

I guess the main problem with Llull's system, from a modern point of view, is the arbitrariness of the terms he was using. How, for instance, does God's Glory differ from his Virtue? Llull could no doubt have explained the distinction with great cogency, basing it on the best models of theological commentary available to him, but the results might still be a bit unconvincing.

He himself felt no doubts, however. When he visited Tunis in 1314 and tried to explain to a crowd of Muslims that the logic of his system demanded that they all immediately renounce their beliefs and convert to Christianity, he was greeted with a volley of stones. Though rescued by a group of Genoese merchants, he died the next year, probably as a result (though he was in his 80s, so it may not have been).

His other model for generating truth from interlocking ideas is the Tree of Knowledge (L'arbre de ciència). This, too, suffers from the lack of an empirical basis for the words and concepts he regarded as primary and undeniable.

Curriculum Mapping (civil engineering) (University of Hawai'i at Manoa)

Now my own feeling about all such exercises in codification is that they tend to promote uniformity and lessen creativity and originality. It isn't that I think that either of these aspects should predominate in any course design: institutions must maintain some control over just what is being taught in its classrooms, and how that ties in with other classes in the same discipline. By the same token, though, teachers are individuals, and teach in their own ways - and have to teach differently according to the particular students they're faced with.

There's no reason per se why a system such as curriculum mapping should interfere with that necessary freedom a teacher must feel to temper their teaching style to particular complex circumstances. That is what we're hired to do, after all. But (as a colleague of mine has put it): "templates control pedagogy." Once you have a particular model, there's a tendency to see everything in terms of that set of predetermined categories.

Nor is it enough to ask teachers to list all the possible variations from the existing curriculum categories and try to revise them accordingly. The mere fact of having to list such categories puts the assumptions behind them further and further off the agenda. The categories become real. Departures from them have to be justified and explained. What began as mapping has become prescription.

In this particular case, the battle is already lost (or won: depending on how you look at it). The curriculum mapping exercise will go ahead, and we're all soon going to be spending a good deal of time debating just how the projected learning outcomes of our courses match up with the graduate profiles of our degrees. And it's hard to argue against that process - in the abstract, at any rate.

I do feel a niggling doubt when I think of Ramon Llull, however. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that disorder always increases. While there can be local exceptions to that rule (the entire evolution of life on earth, from less to more complex organisms, might be seen as one such exception), it's beyond doubt that chaos tends to increase, and that attempts to arrest it in its tracks can have strange consequences.

For myself, I would predict that the more regimented course content and course outcomes become, the more creative classroom practice will become. If one wished to draw an analogy with poetry (as I so often do), it's just as futile to privilege content over form as it is to prefer form over content. Neither can function without the other, and it's only the proportions and relationship between the two which is really worthy of debate.

Our accountability as teachers to the students we teach must be taken very seriously: this does entail looking carefully at what we cover and how. On the other hand, bored, unmotivated students learn little. Nor do they rejoice at the idea of being cogs in some giant wheel of information. The best way to convince students that you really have something of value to teach them is to invoke your own creativity by learning along with them.

For Llull, the universe was sewn up. Everything that needed to be known was already known - it was just a matter of explaining that clearly, in words of one syllable, to potential dissenters, and then the millennium could be proclaimed!

That's not how knowledge works, though. Ideas change. Models shift. What we teach in 2015 is very different from what we were teaching even a couple of decades ago. Who would ever have though of demanding "digital literacy" from students then? We have to leave some space to react to changes when it comes, and any new mapping systems we devise must start with that very firmly in mind.

Llull in North Africa (1314)

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

When Love Comes to Town (14 Feb 15)

Brydee Rood: Accumulation (2004)

Well, for anyone who's curious to hear four weird old geeks reading out love poetry of their own composition, fear not & say no more: here's the event for you!

When Love Comes to Town:
Poetry Reading by David Howard, Michele Leggott,
Jack Ross & Fredrika van Elburg

14 February 2015, 1.30pm, Drawing Room

Michele Leggott (Poet Laureate 2008/2009), Jack Ross (editor Poetry New Zealand), and Fredrika van Elburg (Dutch poet) will join the current Otago Wallace Resident David Howard to celebrate St Valentine's Day by reading love poetry.

This event is free to attend however seats are limited, please RSVP to enquiries@wallaceartstrust.org.nz.

For more, and for bios of all the participants, please visit the webpage here.

And if you don't know where the Pah Homestead is, here's the address:

The Pah Homestead, TSB Wallace Arts Centre
72 Hillsborough Rd, Hillsborough, Auckland
Open Tues to Fri, 10am – 3pm
Sat & Sun 10am – 5pm
T 09 639 2010

Midworlder: Pah Homestead (2010)

Looks like the kind of place you could film The Shining, doesn't it? It's certainly a beautiful old building: a great place to give a reading, in fact.

Poetry at Pah (14/2/15)

Monday, January 19, 2015

Finds: Hone's Christmas Gift

Dick Scott: Inheritors of a Dream (1962)

I found a copy of this old coffee-table book by Dick Scott in Greg Brimblecombe's little boutique secondhand bookshop "Dustjackets" in Thames the other day. It's a 1969 Reed reprint of the original 1962 edition, published by a certain Ronald Riddell (any relation of Ron Riddell the poet, I wonder?)

Dick Scott bio-note (1969)

Since this blurb was first written in 1962, of course, Dick Scott has published quite a lot more. You can find a good discussion of his work here. The most famous one is, I suppose, Ask That Mountain (1975), about Parihaka. My personal favourite, though, is Seven Lives on Salt River (1979), about the Kaipara harbour and its curious highways and byways.

Inscription in Inheritors of a Dream

On getting home and looking through the book a bit more thoroughly, I found the above inscription written on the half-title.

But is this our Hone? Hone Tuwhare? And who's Lindsay? Lindsay Rabbitt, the poet? Someone else? None of my business, of course, but one does feel a bit curious.

My inscribed copy of Mihi (1987)

To check, I went to my own copy of Mihi, signed for me by Hone on a rainy day in 1998.

So let's compare them:

1972 signature (detail)

1998 signature (detail)

I don't think there's much doubt that the "Hone" in question is definitely Hone Tuwhare. The elaborate "H" is enough to give it away even if there weren't so many other similarities.

That's not all there is in the book, though. Here's Dick Scott's introduction:

But then, on turning to p.29, I found an old letter nestled in beside the image below (ignore the rubric on the left, which refers to another image on the same page which I haven't reproduced):

Fern Tree Cottage

Here's the letter:

letter (page 1)

letter (page 2)

Fern Tree Cottage (detail)

A bit of rummaging around on the internet an Otago Daily Times article about the fact that "Fern Tree Cottage," now renamed "Ferntree Lodge" and described as "Dunedin's oldest house," is not only still standing, but was sold a couple of years ago after having belonged to "convicted fraudster Michael Swann." Here's a picture of it now, more than fifty years after Dick Scott's book first appeared:

Ferntree Lodge

So there you go, a Christmas gift that keeps on giving, forty years down the track …

Ans Westra: Hone Tuwhare at the side of James K. Baxter's grave (Hiruharama, October 1972)

Monday, January 12, 2015

Why I Like Tom Holland

Tom Holland

While I was in Wellington at the end of last year, I bought a copy of Persian Fire by Tom Holland. I knew I’d like it, as I’ve liked each of his previous books – sure enough, it proved ideal holiday reading: exciting, dramatic, well-researched and elegantly phrased.

Tom Holland

Holland, Tom. Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic. 2003. Abacus. London: Time Warner Book Group UK, 2006.
Holland, Tom. Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West. 2005. Abacus. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2006.
Holland, Tom. Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom. Little, Brown. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2008.
Holland, Tom. In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World. 2012. Little, Brown. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2012.

I Claudius (1976)

Holland, as I understand it, began as a fiction writer (Attis (1995), The Bonehunter (2001), etc. etc.) then branched into popular history with his best-selling book Rubicon, about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. For a long time I resisted reading this book. Talk about a hackneyed subject! As well as all the books, there have even been numerous television series about the period! I Claudius, Rome: Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavian, it’s all been done.

Rome (2005-7)

But then, as I started to read, I began to realise why this one stood out from the ruck.

For a start Holland is clearly very well grounded in classics: he’s no journalistic opportunist, and he keeps up with the latest research, both historical and archaeological.

Above all, though, he’s an expert storyteller. I know that that sounds almost like an insult to most historians: it’s analytical ability and archive-hunting they prize, not the ability to turn a rattling good yarn.

But then, the art of the narrative historian is neither as easy nor as intellectually negligible as it may seem. Telling the story in a new way can bring out new connections and encourage a new overview. Nor should the art of bringing to life some period in the past ever be disprized as an objective. Holland is expert at assembling telling details which transform one’s understanding of some shopworn subject.

We know some things so well, or think that we know them so well, that we’ve stopped looking at them clearly. Persian Fire, for example, works mainly as a commentary on and (at times) paraphrase of Herodotus. I’ve read Herodotus many times, in various different translations, with varying degrees of annotation and commentary (Holland himself has just published his own translation, in fact).

Herodotus [Hēródotos]

Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. 1954. Ed. A. R. Burn. 1972. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. 1954. Rev. John Marincola. 1996. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. Trans. Andrea L. Purvis. Introduction by Rosalind Thomas. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 2007.
Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Tom Holland. 2013. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2014.
de Selincourt, Aubrey. The World of Herodotus. London: Secker & Warburg, 1962.

300 (2006)

I literally had no idea that so much remained to be said on the subject! How complex and nuanced a discussion Holland could make of each of the three major battles, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea (now familiar to filmgoers in somewhat caricatured form – though not so much as one might think - through Frank Miller’s big-screen epics 300 and 300: Rise of an Empire (2014))

300: Rise of an Empire (2014)

What of his other books? Well, Millennium was thought-provoking but (I felt) a little tendentious in its attempt to discuss the long and complex story of the growth of the Christian Church at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire through a few key figures and occurrences. Interesting, but not finally entirely convincing.

In the Shadow of the Sword, by contrast, would be my pick for Holland’s masterpiece (to date, at any rate). It’s quite simply one of the most illuminating works of popular historiography I’ve ever read.

The initial contention, that we know far less about the life of Muhammad and the early days of Islam than we once thought we did, is surprising enough to anyone reasonably well read in the field. But Holland’s reconstruction of the intellectual world of the Middle East at the time of the Hegira was – to me, at least – completely new. I didn’t know so much could be known about a period so remote from us. And the painstaking work of recent scholars, admirably condensed by Holland into a simple and comprehensible narrative, results in a whole new understanding of the history of one of the world’s great religions.

I don’t feel this book has received anything like the notice it deserves. It will not “explain” recent events in the Middle East to you, or even feed into our simplistic notions of “East” and “West” – the unsubtle Orientalism that undermines most of our thinking about the region. But it will remind you of just why disinterested scholarship is valuable.

Holland is not an Orientalist – not is he an Academic. He’s just a very clever and empathetic person with a gift for retelling the past and an insatiable appetite for information. He’s the closest thing to an Edward Gibbon (in my humble opinion) the modern age has produced. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

Tom Holland: In the Shadow of the Sword (2012)