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[Rubble Emits Light]

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

•

[bravado 19 (July, 2010)]

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

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

•

[Jack Ross: Kingdom of Alt]

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

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

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

– Sue Emms, Bravado

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

– Scott Hamilton, brief

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

– Roger Horrocks

Nobody else in New Zealand writes quite like Ross …

– Mark Houlahan, NZ Books

Outside of literati farm, this sort of thing has a very limited life expectancy.

– Joe Wylie, Takahe

•

[Travesty]

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

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

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

•

Vampires

Здрач
[Twilight]


So bottled blood is just like bottled V
You can get high on it but you
can overdose as well
– overheard on a bus

So my Mum asks me
Are you going for a run this morning?
I told her yes
then she comes in
It’s 8 am!
You’re obviously not going
I could have gone to work

I was, like
I’m just going now
But she didn’t tell me why
she needed to know
just asked me what
I was going
to do

Then this morning
What are you doing today?
Going to town at 12
I said
which meant that she
had to come back
to look after

you know
my stepbrother
which means that she missed
a half-day at work
But she didn’t tell me that
Just asked what we
were going to do

•
[Chief Joseph]

Chief Joseph:

I have carried a heavy load on my back ever since I was a boy

We were like deer

They were like grizzly bears

We had a small country

Their country was large

We were content to let things remain

They were not

& would change the mountains and rivers

if they did not suit them

You might as well expect all rivers to flow backwards
as that any man who was born a freeman

should be contented

penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases

•

My best friend lives at 106
I live at 6 on the same street
We’ve got almost exactly
the same phone number
Hers is 9
& mine is upside down
6

All the other numbers
are the same
so when I’m trying to think
of her phone number
all I have to do
is think of mine
& sweet

My other friend Rachel
lives at Upland Rd
in Remuera
I live in Upland Rd
in Wellington
It’s really freaky
It’s almost the same address

•
[Richard F. Burton]

Richard F. Burton:

All pilgrims
do not enter
the Ka’abah

Those who tread
the hallowed floor
cannot

walk barefoot
pick up fire
in their fingers

or tell lies
(The list is
numerous

& meaningless)

•

I highly recommend
living in a hotel
$150 for heating
& power
All you have to do
is pay
for your own food

A pool on the roof
& two gyms
lower down
& no travel costs to anywhere!
You can just walk out
to wherever
you want to go

•
[Douglas Mawson]

Douglas Mawson:

Up 8 am, it having been arranged
that we should go on at all cost

I leading and Xavier in his bag on the sledge
Just as I got out at 8 am I found Xavier

in a terrible state, having fouled his pants
I have a long job cleaning him up

then put him in the bag to warm up
I have to turn in again also to kill time & keep warm

for I feel the cold very much now
I hold him down, then he becomes more peaceful

& I put him quietly in the bag
Death due to fever, weather exposure

& want of food

•

I told him I wouldn’t be able
to do the vampire shoot
& he was like
Why not?
so I told him that I didn’t want
to do it now
& he was like

Whatever

•
[16/4/09-12/7/10]

[Mawson on Erebus]

Phillip Mann's Alternative History

[Phillip Mann: A Land fit for Heroes. Vol. 1: Escape to the Wild Wood (1993)]

• Mann, Phillip. A Land Fit for Heroes. Vol 1: Escape to the Wild Wood. 1993. London: VGSF, 1994.


• Mann, Phillip. A Land Fit for Heroes. Vol 2: Stand Alone Stan. London: Victor Gollancz, 1994.


• Mann, Phillip. A Land Fit for Heroes. Vol 3: The Dragon Wakes. London: Victor Gollancz, 1995.


• Mann, Phillip. A Land Fit for Heroes. Vol 4: The Burning Forest. London: Victor Gollancz, 1996.

On the one hand this seems a lot weaker than Phillip Mann's "straight" Science Fiction; on the other hand I find myself compulsively reading and rereading the various volumes in the series as if I were hoping to find some kind of master-key to their meaning.

One reason for this was (I suspect) because they were so difficult to obtain. The first one I bought in paperback quite straightforwardly, but after that copies of each successive volume seemed less and less easily accessible, until I was forced to wait to read the last one of all until it came up in a library sale! This might well have been an accidental impression, but I did get the sense that Mann's publisher was less and less behind him as the series continued.

Which is a pity, really. The division into volumes is actually pretty arbitrary. This is one long novel, divided into four parts, and I can't help wondering if the author wouldn't have preferred to see it that way: combined in one volume. That would be the best way to read it, I feel.

There are two basic aspects to the book. On the one hand it's a kind of British "wood-fantasy", in the vein of Alan Garner, or Ian Watson's Coming of Vertumnus (1994), or (above all) Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood (1984) and its various sequels.

On the other hand, it's an alternative history novel, in the distinguished tradition of predecessors such as Keith Roberts' Pavane (1968), Kingsley Amis's The Alteration (1976), or (more appropriately, in this case) Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna (2003).

As a fantasy work, the comparison with Mythago Wood immediately puts it in its place, I feel. Holdstock's notion of a forest which entraps all past time in a kind of vortex of Jungian archetypes is so compelling that it has even survived a number of increasingly attenuated sequels to this fine first novel (Lavondyss is the worst, The Bone Forest probably the best, but it's hard to see that any of them add much to the power of this original idea). Mann's wild wood, on the other hand, never really seems really out of control, even at the end when supernatural forces somehow take over the defence of the Island of Britain against its rationalist Roman overlords.

His ecological credentials are impeccable, mind you. And I have the greatest sympathy for the set of priorities he's arguing for in this book (as in his work as a whole), but I never feel exactly frightened or threatened by it as I do by Holdstock's Ryhope Wood (or even Old Man Willow in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings).

As a work of science fiction, on the other hand, his conception of a world "12 seconds away" from ours is nicely managed, I think. It's certainly in no way inferior to Silverberg's own version of a Roman Imperium surviving into the modern world. I'm not sure if Silverberg knew that Mann had preceded him with this idea (not that it's a particularly novel one: Brian Aldiss, among others, had used it before either of them), but his own novel definitely made more of a stir.

Why? I think it probably came down to that decision to release the book in four separate parts, again. Silverberg's came in one massive volume: Mann's took me literally years (I'm not exaggerating) to collect together. I'm very proud of my set of Mann-ian Hardbacks, but it's a shame that so many of them appear to be discards from the public library system (albeit pretty well-thumbed ones).

I believe in Mann's Romans as I find it difficult to do with his Woodlanders (let alone his fairies or trees). Nor am I really confident that I understand the meaning of his title: "A Land fit for Heroes". The term, as I understand it, has generally been used ironically - as a contrast between the promised and real futures provided for World War One veterans once they came home from the front. Is that how Mann means it, too? The "heroes" in question must surely be his rather William Morris-like (News from Nowhere) working-class Englishmen. And yet throughout the book they seem more like victims of forces they can't control than intelligent shapers of their own destiny.

There is, finally, a lack of poignancy about the book: a kind of impersonal preachiness which dominates the fates of the individual characters: Coll and Miranda disappear into a kind of mystic haze at the end, and Angus too seems robbed of all revolutionary purpose by the huge black dome which threatens to swallow up his world.

The protagonists of Mann's earlier books - Pawl Paxwax, Jon Wilberfoss, above all Angelo the part-android - had the property of somehow transcending the books they were in. The same might be said of the trio of Angus, Miranda and Viti in the first few volumes of Mann's tetralogy, but not, unfortunately, in the last one.

It is, of course, a very ambitious concept (Perhaps - I'm tempted to speculate - Phillip Mann was finally trying to rival his great namesake's tetralogy of monstrously complex historical novels, Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43) ...). The fact that it doesn't quite satisfy hasn't stopped me - as I mentioned above - reading and rereading it. There's so much to like and admire in Mann's 1,000-odd pages: Ulysses and the Emperor's strange visions in the Great Pyramid, the detailed account of the workings of the Battle Dome, Wildwood electrics as expounded by Angus ...

If it's a failure, it's a magnificent failure: one more on the scale of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables than your average Sci-fi series which fails to live up to the promise of its first volume (Farmer's Riverworld series, Niven's Ringworld, Clarke's Rama novels). I don't really believe it is a failure, though. It may not work quite so well as some of his earlier novels, but it leaves me full of hope for the next Mannian work we encounter.

[Phillip Mann: A Land fit for Heroes. Vol. 2: Stand Alone Stan (1994)]