Jackie Kay at AWRF 2013

Jackie Kay is a poet and author who was born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She and her brother were adopted by a couple of Scottish communists (who had met in New Zealand of all places) and raised in Glasgow. "My parents were very open about us being adopted," she tells us. "Well, they'd have to be, because we were a different colour."

Spirit and humour is something Jackie Kay seems to brim over with. Arriving on stage together with Stephanie Johnson (who chaired beautifully), she announces that she's going to read us a poem, but that rather than do it from one of the twin armchairs, she has decided to stand at the lectern because she'd noticed while listening to other speakers that "at the lectern you're framed by these nice flowers" -- breezily waving her hand at the two green giant palmettos rearing up behind her.

But the stories she tells are poignant. She goes to the town in Nigeria where her birth father came from and feels she recognises it. "I believe we can carry other people's memories in our DNA", she says, but then a minute later she is saying "Perhaps it was just me wanting to belong to that land which was my father's who had abandoned me".

Still later, she says "We can be defined by our losses, our griefs," she says. "People can be haunted by absences. To the point that an absence can be a sort of presence".

And one more thing is there along with the wit and wistfulness: courage. She talks about growing up in Britain in the '60s, being called a "darkie" even by a friend, and then about being a black, lesbian poet in Britain during the early '90s, a very strange time, she says, a time of extreme politics. "You had to hold your nerve". A white supremacist poster went up declaring Jackie Kay a "degenerate Irish Catholic wog", with razor blades concealed behind it so that if you tried to pull it down you'd get your fingers sliced.

She laughs. "I don't know where they got Irish Catholic from!"

In her latest book, she tells us, she had felt like creating interesting older women characters, as too often "they tend to disappear". She reads us a piece which is about an old woman in a nursing home. "These are not my clothes." the woman tells the attendant when she is helped to dress in the morning, when she is taken to a lounge and parked by the window, when she is taken to the dining room. I thought I was listening to a poem, quite a long one, I remember thinking, but I liked it. It turned out that I had missed the fact that the book Reality, reality was a collection of short stories, not of poems, which says something about the expressiveness of Kay's writing.

At question time, someone asks her to name her favourite poet. "Robert Burns", she responds immediately, and then adds Pablo Neruda, contemporary Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie and the last century Scottish poet Hugh Macdiarmid. "I like New Zealand poetry too", she says. "Fleur Adcock, Bill Manhire, Lauris Edmond."

She had started the hour with a poem about friendship (poems are often written about love, she says, but not often about friendship) which she introduced by saying that she had read it "at the Robert Burns Supper in Sri Lanka". Everyone laughed to hear this, including Jackie. "The haggis was flown in", she said.

Here's the poem. it's called "Fiere", a Scottish word meaning "friend".

Fiere

    If ye went tae the tapmost hill, Fiere,
    Whaur we used tae clamb as girls,
    Ye'd see the snow the day, Fiere,
    Settling on the hills.
    You'd mind o' anither day, mibbe,
    We ran doon the hill in the snow,
    Sliding and singing oor way tae the foot,
    Lassies laughing thegither - how braw.
    The years slipping awa; oot in the weather.

    And noo we're suddenly auld, Fiere,
    Oor friendship's ne'er been weary.
    We've aye seen the wurld differently.
    Whaur would I hae been weyoot my jo,
    My fiere, my fiercy, my dearie O?
    Oor hair micht be silver noo,
    Oor walk a wee bit doddery,
    But we've had a whirl and a blast, girl,
    Thru' the cauld blast winter, thru spring, summer.

    O'er a lifetime, my fiere, my bonnie lassie,
    I'd defend you - you, me; blithe and blatter,
    Here we gang doon the hill, nae matter,
    past the bracken, bothy, bonny braes, barley.
    Oot by the roaring Sea, still havin a blether.
    We who loved sincerely; we who loved sae fiercely.
    The snow ne'er looked sae barrie,
    Nor the winter trees sae pretty.
    C'mon, c'mon my dearie - tak my hand, my fiere!


What a great line that is, "My fiere, my fiercy, my dearie O".  Jackie Kay didn't translate "fiercy" for us, but I think we can guess.

I wanted to buy one of her books, but the line was long and I was in a hurry, so I gave up the idea. Later, coming out of another session and stopping for a moment in the midst of the crowd to think about where I needed to be next, I saw a familiar face right in front of me: it was Jackie Kay, in the act of signing a book for someone. A disappointed "Oh!" escaped me as I realised what a missed opportunity it was,

She turned and smiled at me. "Did you want me to sign a book ?" I explained my predicament -- the store was halfway across the foyer and I could see a ring of customers around it two or three deep. "Oh go and get it!" she said. "I'll wait!" And she did. On my return, I passed the PR homing in to take her to wherever she had to be next. But first she signed my copy of Red Dust Road, her memoir about looking for her birth inheritance.

Not just with her signature. She also put "To Karen", which I didn't tell her but she read off my lanyard, and "All best to you". And then this fiere, this fiercy, was off.

Wayne Macauley at AWRF 2013

Sue from Central Library went to hear Australian novelist Wayne Macauley talk with Simon Wilson about his work.  Here's what she learned:
 

I was curious to meet the author behind the darkly humorous novel The Cook. Are authors ever as we imagined they would be in the flesh? Do we read the blurb of the book then flick to the back inside cover of the dust jacket to see the face behind the words, returning again once we have finished the book, to see if their image somehow matches what we imagined it would?

Wayne Macauley is a well-established writer and, it has to be said, his writing style is dark and sardonic, examining the subtle cruelties of human nature that will emerge given the right circumstance of emotional duress. I've only encountered Macauley's one novel The Cook prior to attending this session at the Writers and Readers Festival, so I am curious to learn a little more about him. Especially given that the aforementioned work, published in 2011, satirises the cult of celebrity chefs and the burgeoning mass of reality television, tracking the trials and tribulations of wannabe "master chefs" as they slavishly compete against one another to be the surviving contender.

The first most fundamental fact about Macauley is that he has absolutely no culinary interest whatsoever, really that was just a vehicle for him to explore the murky underbelly of the 'dream' of fame and fortune open to those who want it badly enough. Certainly I didn't find my digestive juices stirred about reading The Cook, in fact vegetarianism seemed like quite an attractive option for some time afterwards.

Macauley acknowledges that there is a common thread of subverting dominant myths of our society that runs through all his work. His inspiration is triggered by prising apart the rhetoric of the working class hero, and imagining what other realities might exist behind the surface layer of rhetoric that is endlessly reproduced by society. This lends a subversive feel to Macauley's writing and a playful yet increasingly ominous feel as the text progresses, revealing motivations and desires, whether individually or corporately drive, that are less than pure.

I learn that Macauley keeps within his sight line a quote about "setting the bar too high" which drives his work. In adopting this ethos, Macauley believes his work exceeds mediocrity, as a more modest goal might produce less engaging work. In the process of setting himself challenges in his writing practice, Macauley keeps himself mentally focused, keeping boredom, which he believes is every writer's archnemesis, at bay.

Within the hour session we are treated to a brief synopsis of his two other novels, and I find myself thinking that if you were emotionally fragile it would surely be masochistic to read all three back to back. One should perhaps clear the literary palate between texts. Given that it has been a good two years since I read The Cook, I feel I am ready to look up his earlier books, to be sandwiched in between something a little more upbeat.

-- Sue, Central Library

Jane Tolerton and the "Boys at War" at AWRF 2013

Fiona Martin, Libraries Advisor, Service Development, went to hear journalist Jane Tolerton, author of a new book which draws on her first-hand interviews with veterans of the Great War.

A collection of oral histories recorded 33 years ago by Jane Tolerton for the Stout Collection at Victoria University and the Turnbull Archive was aching to be made into a book, particularly with the World War I centenary falling next year.  She has revisited those recordings and the photographs of the contributors, the result being the wonderful ‘An awfully big adventure:  New Zealand World War One veterans tell their stories.’

With an average age of 90 at the time of being interviewed, the veterans were at a point in their lives when they wanted to tell their stories, not to just anyone who would listen, only to anyone who was really interested.  For many of them, this was the first time they had explained what their war experience was actually like, having maintained a stoic silence to family and friends since their return.  The stories, illustrated by photographs of them as soldiers, and again as old men, ranged from the horrific, a man who was injured and left to die among a pile of corpses at Gallipoli until a family friend saw his foot twitch and rescued him, to the bittersweet, “All I thought was, I’m going to die, and I’ve never slept with a woman.”  

All the interviewees had volunteered to fight -- conscription only began in 1916 -- as at the time New Zealand saw itself as a vital part of the Empire, determined to punch above its weight.  This was evidenced by the huge numbers of ‘our boys’ who died either on the field, or of their injuries once the war was over.  The friendly banter between Australian and New Zealand soldiers was reinforced by mutual respect, camaraderie and an independent streak, particularly towards authority, each considering the other as ‘tough’, both mentally and physically, as opposed to the English soldiers who were young, weaker and unquestioningly obedient to their superiors. 

The author takes us to the Sinai-Palestine campaign, Chunuk Bair, Armentières and of course Gallipoli and Passchendaele.  The duplicity of the New Zealand media is exposed – newspapers reported only positive news, implying that the boys were having a jolly good time ‘over there’.  New Zealand and Australia remained in blissful ignorance of the trauma and deprivation experienced by everyone in Europe, so when they returned home, the men could not share their experiences with family and friends as they would not understand, and quite possibly, would prefer not to know.   

Jane Tolerton allowed the men to talk for themselves during the session, and it felt as though we were with each of them in their sitting room, hearing first-hand about the pranks, the lice, the trenches, the laughter and the tears.   

-- Fiona Martin

Opening night at AWRF 2013: Great show!

New Zealand Listener Gala Night is the official name of the event which launched a thousand AWRF sessions -- well, maybe not a thousand exactly but lots, plenty for everyone, I'd say, even with two superstar events, the lunch with Sir Max Hastings and the concert by Leonard Cohen biographer, journalist and rock chick Sylvie Simmons plus New Zealand's own Don McGlashan, sold out. At the Opening Night party a number of tales were being told of the machinations and subterfuges being used by frustrated Cohen-Simmons-McGlashan fans attempting to procure a place at the latter. I'm not sure if Max Hastings fans were doing the same; they might be thinking of just walking on in, as Sir Max famously walked on in to Argentine-occupied Port Stanley ahead of the British troops during the Falklands war.

The Book Council's True Stories Told Live format was reprised for this AWRF 2013 Gala Night, an infinitely superior choice to those serial 10 minute readings which were always so unsatisfying. The storytelling is... I was about to start hunting for a suitably enthusiastic word when I remembered that tonight they had actually all been used by Carol Hirschfeld. Wild, wooly, serious, frivolous, entertaining, provoking ... and that was just during her introduction -- her wrap up had again as many. The adjective which at least for me was the most significant of all, she practically threw away. "Eight writers are here to share a personal story -- " pause, reload -- "personal and true, inspired by the theme An Open Book."

And they were all true, you could tell, while at the same time being such stories, which has to be different than being true, although not exclusively so, of course.

Scottish poet Jackie Kay's story was about meeting her Nigerian, bible-toting (in a plastic bag!) biological father for the first time and realising that the only thing they had in common was their toes.

Peter Bland told of living for years with a father who existed only in a photo, taken in Africa, showing a strapping young man with his foot on an elephant, presumably dead, and then one day coming home to find "an old, fat, bald man sitting there -- my Dad".

Shehan Karunatilaka was an unknown to me, a Sri Lankan novelist who landed in Whanganui with his family as a boy. It wasn't easy being a Sri Lankan in Whanganui twenty years ago. His story took place in 1990, when he was 15, depressed and despondent, spending his time alternately crying and masturbating. Send me a sign, he asked God, who dropped a copy of Mayfair magazine in his path in reply. In the magazine, as well as the girlie photo stuff there was an article about the Police, his favourite rock group, which sent him off to Whanganui Library for a biography of Sting mentioned in the article. And what followed that was Lolita, The Sheltering Sky and the rest is history, as they say. "The book that changes your life doesn't have to be Moby Dick", he said. "It can be an old Mayfair magazine, stuck-together pages and all."

 Demonstrating a flair for the obsessive, Carlos Ruiz Zafón had hunted down a bookstore called "Acres of Books" in his adopted city of Los Angeles, because it had been recommended by Ray Bradbury. It contained a place called The Fiction Annex where you needed a flashlight just to find your way. Was it the Cemetery of Forgotten Books? Who knows...

And that fantastic Fast talking PI poet, Selina Tusitala Marsh, was as always sharp, funny and loving: "I didn't grow up in a house with books", she began. "The Bible, the phone book... but the first open book in my parent's house was my PhD thesis -- being used as a doorstop".

Everyone will have had their favourite line, of course, and mine was Stephanie Johnson's almost Raymond Chandleresque opener (her hair style very Lauren Bacall to boot), "You reach an age when you are to yourself an open book".

An auspicious start to a long weekend full of good stories about books. Festival Director Anne O'Brien calculates that there are 150 "writers and thinkers" appearing, and not all at a cost. The Festival has way more free events than ever before, including readings sessions every afternoon. The full programme is here. Auckland Libraries staff will be out in force at the Festival of course, and giving you the lowdown here on Books in the City.

However you decide to do it, if you're a reader you owe it to yourself to sample the wares. As Anne O'Brien promised the faithful tonight, "Seduction is waiting for you around every corner". Or was that what Sylvie Simmons said when she was talking about her days as a rock journalist in the '70s, adding, "Not going to happen, you knew where it'd been".

Two American classics hit the screen

What I'd be doing right now if I lived in San Francisco:  I'd be heading off to The San Francisco International Film Festival to see "Big Sur", the film version of Jack Kerouac's later autobiographical novel, the one set not in the fired-up we'll be young forever days of On the road, but when the road of excess was leading, more than to the palace of wisdom, to the palace of misery and delirium tremens, in this case a lonely cabin in Big Sur.

I should say here that I haven't seen last year's film version of On the Road, even though there are lots of copies at the library. I just assumed -- because I've seen it happen so often -- that no actor of this period could be Dean Moriarty or Sal Paradise for me, that they would always look like models for The Gap, which actually did use that famous photo of Jack Kerouac in Greenwich Village for one of their ads.



(thanks to Dan Colman on the Open Culture website for this, and for the great line "As for what happened in Kerouac’s grave, we can only conjecture".)

And then, how to ignore the warning in Andrew O'Hagan's recent and very interesting piece "Jack Kerouac: Crossing the line"  in The New York Review of Books about Kerouac-inspired movies  (and about Joyce Johnson's book The voice is all: the lonely victory of Jack Kerouac), which compares the movie "On the Road", for depth of spiritual involvement, to "The Real Housewives of Orange County"? The truth is, the "On the Road" movie I'd like to see is the one Jack Kerouac wanted to see made, with Marlon Brando -- and this was Brando in his "Wild One" period -- as Dean Moriarty, and Jack himself, who was Sal Paradise, as Sal Paradise.

"Big Sur" has a fantastic trailer and I can't swear to it from seeing a trailer but I get the feeling that Jack Kerouac would not be turning in his grave, and might even have liked it. The San Francisco website sfist named it one of their top festival picks and said "[director] Polish’s seventh collaboration with cinematographer M. David Mullen yields spectacular results both in the paradise on earth that is Big Sur and in San Francisco where locations include Tenderloin tenements, City Lights Bookstore and Tosca in only the third screen adaptation of one of Kerouac's books and one that proves that the writer's dense, language-driven novels can, indeed, be gloriously cinematic."

Gloriously cinematic, that's for me. Not to mention the effect of hearing the names of all those places of the heart.

Here's the trailer:






There's another work by a great American writer, one who, like Kerouac, became himself a story as important as any of the stories he wrote, which has also just been turned into a movie. Did you guess it? It's F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I say "Did you guess it?" as a bit of a disclaimer, as I'm sure everyone knows about this movie, if only because it stars two famous actors, neither of whom look like Gap ads and both of whom are favourites of mine, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. Here's the trailer for it, with a non-jazz age soundtrack which is outrageously suited, and Leonardo in great Gatsby-esque form:







“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

If you love great last lines in literature, add this one from The Great Gatsby to your collection, if it's not already there.


And for anyone who enjoys book cover art from the past...

A set of Big Sur covers on flickr  
A set of  Great Gatsby covers from Paste magazine


From the library:

The Great Gatsby  the book, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Big Sur    the book, by Jack Kerouac

On the Road    the book, by Jack Kerouac
On the Road    the movie, by Walter Salles

Bill Murray and Billy Collins party with Emily Dickinson

Echoing one of the world's greatest poems, 'The Waste Land', in which "Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee/with a shower of rain", World Poetry Day surprised me, coming over the Twitscape with a shower of verse. I didn't even know that World Poetry Day had been taking place every March 21 for the past 13 years, proclaimed by UNESCO and having as its main objective, in a very UNESCO sort of way, "to support linguistic diversity through poetic expression" with a special tick if endangered languages are involved.

The general public didn't seem to be particularly aware of the linguistic aspect, and spent the day happily sharing favourite poems, or lines thereof, from poets as diverse as the Earl of Rochester (a poem of his on the subject of premature ejaculation was offered up by Neil Gaiman) and John Donne. The only writing in an endangered language -- well, "potentially endangered" according to UNESCO -- I saw go by was a poem by Robert Burns, the Bard of the Scots language, long may it live on.

Emily Dickinson was the poet I noticed being quoted most frequently, which made me glad (to use a word from the ED lexicon), as one poet you can never have a surfeit of is Emily Dickinson.

I don't know about now, but when I was little this strange and audacious poet was sneaked into children's anthologies with her poems amputated of their 'difficult' quatrains. I still remember my surprise years later at discovering that "A bird came down the walk" did not end when the bird met the beetle, but when it "unrolled his feathers/And rowed him softer home/Than Oars divide the Ocean/Too silver for a seam".

So I sometimes wonder how many people were left thinking of Dickinson as someone forever writing about bobolinks, dew, daisies and death in a still room?

Bring it on, "My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun" !

Bring it on, "Big my Secret but it's bandaged --" !

Here's a piece of Dickinsonia you're going to love: a video of Bill Murray reading an Emily Dickinson poem to the construction workers who had just finished building the new Poets House in Battery Park, New York City. Poets House (no apostrophe -- "some things must never be possessed but shared" is the idea) is a New York institution where anyone can go and read or listen to poetry for free. When its collection (all donated books and recordings) passed the 50,000 mark and it couldn't fit anymore in its humble Soho loft, generous donors, among whom Bill Murray, made it possible to build the new space you see being inaugurated in the video (produced for Poets House by Limey Films, inc.).






And to finish off, here's "Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes", by the American poet Billy Collins. Interviewed by NPR, he explained that the poem was inspired by the eternal curiosity and speculation around one of the biggest mysteries in literature: did Emily Dickinson ever make love? "I attempted to put the matter at rest in a playful way", he tells the interviewer, "by having sex with her". More than playful -- I found myself holding my breath along with Emily, she who confessed in one of her most famous poems, "I never hear the word escape/without a quicker blood..."


 “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes”

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

From the book  Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes by Billy Collins.

-- Karen

The Diagram Prize: hunting the oddest book title

Every year at this time, in a little island kingdom far to the North, as the crocuses start poking through the snow, Horace Bent of The Bookseller announces his shortlist for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title and opens the voting, regaling the literary scene with a bright and eagerly anticipated annual recurrence of its own.

And yet, and yet.

For many years, Mr. Bent could do no wrong in my eyes. How could he, the man who brought to our attention Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, the first-ever Diagram Prize winner (35 years ago, when the prize originated as a way of staving off boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair), and went on to select such gems as Highlights in the History of Concrete, How to Avoid Huge Ships, Reusing Old Graves, Bondage for Beginners and my favourite, Greek Postmen and their cancellation numbers.

I loved the way Mr Bent disdained the odd title for odd title's sake, or as he saw it, just for the sake of winning his "prestigious award", or even, perhaps, although this doesn't seem to be part of Mr. Bent's mindset (curious perhaps for one employed by the UK's definitive book industry publication), or maybe he's too polite to mention it, to sell more books. And then last year, an about-face as Cooking with Poo took the prize. So attention-grabbing, so obvious, compared to the multinuanced, admirably earnest Designing High Performance Stiffened Structures from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.

Over the last few years I've watched the deliberately odd title proliferate ever more among each succeeding year's offerings, to the point that this year they make up 2/3 of the offering. And let's face it, even the earnestly odd titles, all two of them, are not show-stoppers.

Here is the shortlist:

Was Hitler Ill? by Henrik Eberle and Hans-Joachim Neumann (Polity)

Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts by Jerry Gagne (Foy’s Pet Supplies)  

How to Sharpen Pencils by David Rees (Melville House)

God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis by Tom Hickman (Square Peg)

Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop by Reginald Bakeley (Conari)

How Tea Cosies Changed the World by Loani Prior (Murdoch).


Was Hitler Ill? I'm not sure I'd call this title odd at all, except for how, depending on your font of choice, it can look as if it's about Hitler's grandson, Hitler III. I know about this because it used to always happen to me with North Korean dictators, eg Kim Jong Ill. Oops, Il.

Actually, with many dictators, although not with Hitler, there comes a moment when people start asking not if they are ill, but if they are actually dead, and just stuffed and propped up in the reviewing box for picture-taking on important occasions.

The library catalogue gives the original German title, which is a fascinating case of a phrase almost making sense in two different languages:

War Hitler Crank?

I think we can answer a resounding yes to that.

Lofts of North America: Pigeon lofts. There is a Yiddish expression for what I want to say here, but I don't know how to write it. There's also an Italian hand gesture, the one where you put out your hand palm down and wiggle it as if you were playing the piano. But I actually voted for this one, just to remind Mr Bent that there are some purists still around. (I note that the North American pigeons have not arrived in the Southern hemisphere yet so no book about their lofts at Auckland Libraries. When I see a flock of pigeons in spanking new trainers, ankle socks, and tucked-in t-shirts I'll yell out.)


How to Sharpen Pencils.  Similar to the above. The author is an ex-political cartoonist who had himself photographed in a white shirt a la Anthony Bourdain, but lacking his Hell's Kitchen carnality. On the other hand, let's not forget we're talking comics here.

God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis. Maybe we could make one good title out of two: Was Hitler's penis ill?

Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop. Mr Bent, leave chickens alone. You will never surpass The joy of chickens which you gave us a few years back.  

How Tea Cosies Changed the World. My case rests. Blatantly cashing in on the current trendiness of tea cosies.

Obviously I need to find out how to nominate titles. I think this one is a good candidate, for example:

Canine Body Language: A Photographic Guide: Interpreting the Native Language of the Domestic Dog by Brenda Aloff

I don't say dogs don't have a language - of a type - but don't you have to speak to have a Native Language? Plus, you've got to love the way the colons turn the title into a series of yips. Yip yip yip: yip yip yip: yip yip yip yip yip.

And how about The Little Book of Slugs, ed. by Allan Shepherd and Suzanne Gallant?

The description of this book contains further gems, such as that you'll find details of "slug lifestyles". I'm guessing the couch potato slug, the gym bunny slug...

Mathematics forums, conferences, catalogues etc. offer a fertile hunting ground as well. Right off my first click I found an excellent Degenerate Diffusions, which included a discussion of the controlled martingale problem, and of which I can't remember the author's name, unlike the next one I came across, a case of a normal title (Mathematics for the millions) boasting an excellent odd author name, Lancelot Hogben.

And then, lo, my best find yet! Title and author both odd:

Mathematical Cranks
by Underwood Dudley

I see myself meeting this author one day on some North American --not loft, let's say a university campus, in a faculty lounge smelling of percolated coffee. I spy him dabbing at his nose with a crumpled tissue and I call out "War crank, Dudley?"

Read more about the Diagram Prize at The Bookseller.

And do this: vote for your favourite title at We Love This Book. Winner announced 22 March.

George Orwell gets a day!

By now he's gotten it, actually, but I've been away in California where among the many memorable experiences California always offers, I had not one but two that were distinctly Orwellian.

The first involved a menu where grilled veggies tacos were dubbed "no-blame", or maybe it was "no-crime", anyway an irksome example of groupthink, a term directly inspired by the newspeak vocabulary of Orwell's 1984; and the second was being threatened with a $285 jaywalking ticket by a policeman strangely reminiscent of Richard Burton as O'Brien in the film version of 1984, pockmarked complexion and all, who, just like O'Brien, came on bland and friendly at first, only to unexpectedly reveal a dark and dangerous side when I didn't seem to appreciate the seriousness of my position, suddenly spewing out a stream of incensed resentment towards all the people, including me, who had ever jaywalked across "his" street, as he called it -- one of the reasons I hadn't understood I was supposed to be taking it seriously.

So yes, George Orwell is as timely as ever, and now the Orwell Estate, The Orwell Prize and Penguin Books have launched an annual "Orwell Day" to recognise him as one of Britain's greatest writers ("of the 20th century" the Estate specified with what might be exaggerated modesty) and to "celebrate his writing in all its forms and explore the profound influence he has had on the media and discourse of the modern world".

The date chosen was January 21st, the anniversary of Orwell's death in 1950, aged just 47, from tuberculosis. I confess to wondering why, with the moving forces behind Orwell Day all being based in Britain, they didn't pick the date of his birth, June 25th, instead of that of his death, so that the celebrations could take place in summer, something British royalty finds so desirable as to institutionalise fictional summer birthdays for their monarchs. Not to mention that January 21 already has a celebration tied to it, namely, Squirrel Appreciation Day.

Of course, if it had been Toad Appreciation Day, that would have been apt for the author of "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad", one of my favourite Orwell essays, the one where he describes the toad emerging from the hole where he has been hibernating all winter like this:

At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.

It had not, on the other hand, occurred to me to conjecture about whether crass marketing was behind the date or indeed the whole initiative, until I read this comment on The Guardian's piece on the inaugural Orwell Day:

 I can see the PR people at penguin rubbing their hands with glee. "Oh look Caroline, golly gosh, what a super wheeze. An Orwell day. Lovely." It is so obviously a crass marketing ploy. Why not a Shakespeare Day, a Chaucer day, Dickens day, Waugh day, Kipling day, Conrad day, Greene day, Larkin day, Austin day, Conan Doyle day, an agatha christie day etc.

I can't help considering a point made that wittily. And there is something to it: Orwell Day is different from say, Bloomsday, or Alice's Day, the first started by Joyce aficionados and the second by a Museum (the Story Museum in Oxford), in being "unilaterally" declared by enterprises who stand to make money by it.

So perhaps instead of lingering on the Orwell Prize website, where a big deal is made out of making one of George Orwell's essays, "Politics and the English Language", available for free when, as another Guardian reader pointed out, since Orwell's books are out of copyright in Australia, you can read all of Orwell's essays for free on Project Gutenberg Australia (I used it just now to get my Toad Appreciation quote), I could highlight the month-long "The Real George Orwell" programme being run by BBC Radio 4, with biographical dramas, serialisations of the novels, and someone reading Orwell's letters aloud with an old-style English accent which nearly had me jumping out of my chair and to attention when it came at me out of my computer. (Orwell's voice was never recorded. In fact, it was deemed unsuitable for broadcast in a 1943 memo included in the BBC Archives' George Orwell collection, where however it was acknowledged that his name "is of some value in quite important Indian circles".)

Penguin Books, on its part, has contributed a clever new cover for 1984:

which you can compare to other 1984 covers from around the world on goodread's 401 editions of 1984.

Guardian Books celebrated the first Orwell Day by starting an Orwell fest on Twitter, getting people to join an #orwellquotes hashtag with their favourite Orwell quotes. This didn't work for me, as my favourite Orwell quote is too long for Twitter, plus it's not a quote from Orwell but from Joan Didion about Orwell. Actually, about Homage to Catalonia, his book about the Spanish Civil War, during which he joined and fought with an anti-fascist militia because, as he explains at the start of the book, what he saw in Spain seemed a "state of affairs worth fighting for". It appears in her novel Democracy, a tour-de-force of writerly skill in which she is able to make an aging CIA agent a plausible love interest even for the young leftie I was when I read it, many years ago. I still have my copy, and although I had to hunt around a bit I eventually found the passage so I can share it at least on Books in the City and pay my own "Homage to George Orwell".

The CIA agent has given Inez, the heroine of the book and his lover on those rare occasions when their paths cross, the key to an apartment in Hong Kong where she can wait for him to get back from Saigon where he has gone to find her missing daughter. The apartment is pretty much empty, the closet containing only a macintosh and some galoshes. She asks the CIA agent who it belongs to. "Somebody in Vientiane" is all he has to say.

She presumed it was a woman because the galoshes and macintosh were small. She presumed the woman was an American because the only object in the medicine cabinet, a plastic botttle of aspirin tablets, was the house brand of a drugstore she knew to be in New York. She presumed that the American woman was a reporter because there was a standard Smith-Corona typewriter and a copy of Modern English Usage on the kitchen table, and a paperback copy of Homage to Catalonia in the drawer of the bed table. In Inez's experience all reporters had paperback copies of Homage to Catalonia, and kept them in the same place where they kept the matches and the candle and the notebook, for when the hotel was bombed.

Homage paid, I leave you with a trailer for the film version of 1984, made in 1984 with Richard Burton as O'Brien (his last role) and John Hurt, looking a lot like George Orwell, as Winston.

Sic Transit Gloria Romance Novels

Did you know that the Vauxhalls and Pandas going down the M6 Toll Rd in Britain's West Midlands are rolling along on top of Mills & Boon romance novels? Yes, after some concerted googling inspired by an offhand reference to the "romance motorway" I came across in the TLS, I can confirm that 2.5 million Mills & Boon romances were pulped and mixed in with the tarmac to create the surface of the M6 Toll. That works out to 45,000 happy endings per mile.

Interviewed by BBC news at the time, the Project Manager hastened to assure Mills & Boon readers that it was only the physical properties of the books, not their content, which had determined their fate. Still, especially at this time of heightened sensitivity to the march of time as one year gives way to another, it's hard for the imagination not to be caught by the "golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust" aspect of this story.

I couldn't help hearing in my head an echo of the poem which opens that classic work of American Literature, Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, which starts like this:

Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith?

The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?

All, all are sleeping on the hill.

Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley

The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter? 

All, all are sleeping on the hill...

The hill being the location of the town cemetery, whose inhabitants, it turns out, are not sleeping peacefully. Frustrated by the pious, hypocritical epitaphs on their graves, one after another they give it to us straight, what their lives were really like, the struggles, the iniquities, the violence and senselessness. It's a great, energising read. In fact, even with it being poetry, I don't remember any of us being bored by it when we were assigned it at school (an American rite of passage, I believe), although maybe that was because a lot of the struggles were about sex -- for the author as well as for his characters, I later learned.

Here's my Mills & Boonified version:

Where are Mary Belle, Toy, Skye, Tansi and Capri?
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?
All, all are pulped...

Where are Nacho, Mace, Bear, Chase and Reed?
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all are pulped...


Sic transit gloria romance novels is not Latin for "Thus do romance novels become transit lanes" although I like the way it sounds as if it is.

What Sic transit gloria means is "Thus passes glory". If you've seen the very funny Wes Anderson film Rushmore (and if you haven't, you should) you may remember Jason Schwartzman as Max making impressive use of it as a conversation opener.

Max:   Sic transit gloria. Glory fades. I'm Max Fischer.

Rosemary Cross:   Hi.

Max:   Hi.


Its other famous incarnation is in the phrase Sic transit gloria mundi -- "Thus passes the glory of the world" -- which used to be intoned at Papal coronations to remind the new Pope of the impermanence of earthly honours.

So there you have it. Thus passes the glory of 2.5 million romance novels, turned into a relief road for Birmingham.

All names of Romance novel characters taken from actual Mills & Boon novels.
No Romance novels were hurt in the writing of this post.

A Christmas Memory

If what you think about when you think about Truman Capote is Philip Seymour Hoffman's virtuoso turn as Capote hot on the trail of a story about murder in cold blood on the Kansas plains, or old black and white Life magazine shots of New York's famous Studio 54 where he's seen hanging out with Andy Warhol or Bianca Jagger, or maybe even the scandalous "come hither" photo of 23 year old Truman reclining on a second empire couch which appeared on the back cover of his first novel Other voices, other rooms, you might be surprised to know that he is the author of a beautifully warm and tender Christmas story.

A Christmas memory originally appeared in the collection to which Breakfast at Tiffany's gave the title, way back in 1958, but Modern Library reprinted it as the title piece of a trilogy of Capote stories about childhood, which is the copy I found in the Central City Library basement when I decided on Christmas Eve that I'd like to re-read it. I was well into it by the time I hit the stairs, but luckily not yet at the end, because I surely would have tripped from the sudden blurring of my vision. The story is not sad, or at least not just sad, but the last page and a half is one of the saddest pieces of writing you'll find anywhere, and it always makes me cry.

It's a semi-autobiographical story which draws on a time in Capote's childhood when he was packed off to stay with relatives in Alabama. It's about a boy and a much-older distant cousin: he by circumstance motherless and fatherless; she a "childlike" spinster, crippled from a childhood illness, with a face -- lest you think we are getting soppy here -- like Abraham Lincoln's. It's about their Christmas ritual of making fruitcakes together. It's about love and friendship and, in that way that really good writing has, where you find something new every time you read it because of how it invites you to bring things of your own to it, this time I realised that it's also about how a tradition, to be important, doesn't need to exist over such a long time as you might think. It only takes one time around, and two hearts, when that's all you've got.

I have to say that in this sense, Modern Library should be reprimanded for their dismal cover flap blurb, which sums up the story like this: "In A Christmas Memory, Miss Sook, Buddy (the narrator) and their dog, Queenie, celebrate the yuletide in a hilariously tipsy state." Is this the Walt Disney version or what? In A Christmas Memory the scene where Sook and Buddy get tipsy finishing off the whiskey left over from their fruitcakes is 1 1/2 pages out of 27. The other 25 1/2 pages are filled with things like Sook and Buddy going out with an old baby carriage to gather windfall pecans and the long evening they spend shelling them, "scraps of miniature thunder" crackling through the air, or the counting of the pennies they have been saving all year to buy the other ingredients, earned by killing flies for the "others" of the house (25 flies = one penny), or, my favourite, when they go over the list of people they send fruitcakes to every year, a list which includes Pres. Roosevelt and a couple from California with whom they once passed an enjoyable hour on the porch when the couple's car broke down near the house.

And the last of the things that happen in the other 25 1/2 pages is that the boy gets sent off to military school, and the cousin, already elderly when the story begins, ages and grows weaker, until finally one winter when the fruitcake weather arrives she cannot rouse herself to greet it. And when that happens, says the boy, "A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken sting. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven."


Harper Lee's friendship with Truman Capote goes back to the time of A Christmas Memory. Monroeville, Alabama, the town Capote's relatives lived in, was her home town and the model for Maycomb, the fictional setting for To Kill a Mockingbird. She put him in To Kill a Mockingbird as Dill, or so he proudly claimed. You can read about their friendship on the website Southern Literary Trail.

Have a look at the Truman Capote page on pinterest by Diane Wiggins, where you can see a photo of the real-life Sook, with Capote as a boy, and another of little Truman in a white suit, hands in pockets, looking exactly as you would expect Dill to look.

You can read the first pages of the story on the Auckland Libraries online catalogue record for the book. Don't worry, it's easier than you think to get used to the lack of paragraph formatting!

And to finish off, here's a very short, very beautiful (appropriately) videoclip made at the Kite Festival in Cervia, Italy:

What I'm reading

What the library, that great book dealer, has lately dealt me: a diamond, a spade, a heart, and a club.

Diamond, the hard guy

Fat City by Leonard Gardner
I had seen and not forgotten the movie John Huston made from this book (screenplay by Gardner, it turns out), starring one of my favourite actors, Stacy Keach, and a very young Jeff Bridges, and one day I saw that the book was back in print and put in a suggestion for purchase. It’s about the world of the boxers who never make it big, the tanktown circuit, as they call it, small matches for small money. Fundamental for me was the setting, a part of California that I find incredibly suggestive, Joan Didion country, the delta fields of the Central Valley, the deep water channels, the levees, the orchards, the heat, the small towns where the air smells like diesel.


Spade: one-eyed jacks

Syncopations: beats, New Yorkers and writers in the dark by James Campbell
A book I picked up by chance, the keywords jumping out at me, and took out, although that  "syncopations" worried me a bit, which turned out to be a bit of an omen. It's a collection of pieces of literary criticism, with all the good and bad that entails. I skipped the piece about Toni Morrison, and a few others I can’t recall right now, but learned some interesting things about Art Spiegelman, Richard Wright, and Alexander Trocchi as cartographer.


Heart: Edmund Valentine White

The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White
At this point in Edmund White’s series of autobiographical novels he is growing up, ie at that stage where you become what White in a stroke of genius calls "a provisional equal”. In his last year of boarding school in Chicago he starts haunting a bookstore run or owned by a gay guy named Tex, who soon cottons on to what it is he’s wanting as much or more as a good book. Tex lets him know about the man in the corner who owns several bookstores and is married, but might make a nice date (he says something like, “He’s here without his wife and you’re a not uncomely ephebe”). Young White has a brush cut his father has chosen and thick black glasses. When he finally gets up the courage to say something to the man, what comes out is “What do you think of the Kierkegaard boom?”


Club (soda): I know he liked Gin tonics, but would he have said no to a Gin fizz?

The Paris Review interviews Vol. II
The highlight of this volume for me was an erratic, and often droll, interview with Philip Larkin, who agreed to be interviewed but only by mail and took five months to answer the first set of questions because “It has taken rather a long time because, to my surprise, I found writing it suffocatingly boring.”

Interviewer: Can you describe the genesis and working out of a poem based upon an image that most people would simply pass by? (A clear road between neighbors, an ambulance in city traffic?)

Larkin: If I could answer this sort of question, I’d be a professor rather than a librarian. And in any case, I shouldn’t want to. It’s a thing you don’t want to think about. It happens, or happened, and if it’s something to be grateful for, you’re grateful.
I remember saying once, I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. Whoever I was talking to said, They’d do that too, if their agents could fix it.

To Albert Wendt, congratulations and fa'afetai

To my great pleasure, and that of everyone who knows him, Albert Wendt has just been announced the winner of the 2012 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Achievement in Fiction. The Prime Minister's awards for literary achievement are New Zealand's highest literary awards. The other two awards are for poetry, which went to Sam Hunt, and for non-fiction, which went to Greg O'Brien -- all three impeccable choices.

Albert Wendt is one of the most magic people I know. Like that, immediately you meet him. Immediately your eyes meet his unclouded, intelligent gaze; immediately you hear his slow-cadenced, musical voice, at once amused and profound.

The award is for fiction so I've been looking through a few of his novels and short-story collections I've grabbed off the library shelves to see if I could find a passage I could excerpt here, and I can't! They are just not excerptable. They come on like those long Pacific swells, unassumingly, the narrative gathering strength almost stealthily until it carries you -- by now weightless -- with it on its journey.

In other words, if you want to enjoy reading say, Sons for the return home, one of the books I'm looking at, I think you need to go for the whole ride.

So I've opted instead for my favourite poem from Albert Wendt's latest book of poetry, From Mānoa to a Ponsonby garden.

Used-by Date

We are programmed with used-by dates but so far 

I've outlived mine using pills and other remedies

But when the time comes I want it to be a summer morning 

of cool temperatures and mellow sighs

of the sun enjoying the full spread of Ponsonby 

oblivious to how I am snaring and using it

to illuminate this poem's way towards 

understanding and completing itself

of the smell of toast and hot coffee nosing its way down O'Neill Street 

without knowing it is entering my house at number 63 

and meeting the well-tended memories that people 

wall    floor    carpet    and hold up the ceilings

of the full horde of hungry sparrows in my back yard feasting 

as usual on the bread I tossed out the previous night

of my children and mokopuna snug in their alofa for one another 

and the other people I love will forgive me for leaving

a slow unassuming morning that will swing open -- 

it won't know it is a door -- and I'll slip through it

into the endless summer light that won't know I'm leaving 

the body that is unaware it is bone and pain

to be part of that which connects all things to all things 

and right back again to the dark and the first spark

that set me alight and this poem that is struggling to become 

that morning of my going away

to be all that was now and will be 

in the stretch of Tagaloaalagi's breath     

Fa'afetai lava Al! For the talent and the alofa you have shared with us all.  

Here is Albert Wendt reading a poem from the anthology Mauri Ola, which he co-edited with his wife Reina and Robert Sullivan, taped at a Central City Library Pasifika celebration.