Throwback Thursday: Flaubert in Egypt

When Truman Capote's New York society friends cut him off upon reading the first part of his self-described "Proustian" novel about them, Answered Prayers, he said he couldn't understand why they felt so betrayed. "What did they expect? I'm a writer!" was his line. It's a great line, and it comes back to me now and again, most recently during the reading of a small book with a long title which caught my eye down in the fabled Central City Library basement.

Flaubert in Egypt

A Sensibility on Tour

A Narrative drawn from

Gustave Flaubert's

Travel Notes & Letters 

translated from the French 

& edited by 

Francis Steegmuller

Francis Steegmuller being a noted Flaubert scholar and translator of Madame Bovary, not to mention a friend of Graham Greene and author of a French version of The Owl and the Pussycat, a masterpiece called Le Hibou et la Poussiquette, all of these points featuring in a Books in the City post a few years ago.

The artwork on this jewel was as enticing as the title. The front cover was a plunge into colourful Orientalism, a detail from Delacroix's Women of Algiers, while the back was given over to a period black and white photograph of sunbaked houses, their peeling facades chaotically arrayed with wooden-latticed balconies, a few scruffy acacias in the foreground. Did Flaubert take this photo? I wondered.

To my surprise the jacket flap claimed that it was a photo not by Flaubert, but of Flaubert! Flaubert in garden of the Hotel du Nil, Cairo, photo by Maxime du Camp, it clearly said. But where was he?

The mystery was solved when I got the book home and began reading it. A few pages in, a list of illustrations revealed that Flaubert in the Hotel du Nil garden was also reproduced opposite page 40. And sure enough, there he was -- dressed as a Nubian, yet.

The caption reads: Flaubert in Cairo, 1850. 'I would never allow anyone to photograph me. Max did it once but I was in Nubian costume, standing, and seen from a considerable distance, in a garden.' The garden is that of the Hotel du Nil, the name of one of whose proprietors, Bouvaret, Flaubert did not forget.

Yes, because Madame Bovary was still in Flaubert's future. For now, he was 28 years old, with drawers full of unpublished manuscripts in his study at his mother's house, proclaiming in a letter to her how little that mattered:

"Haven't I everything that's most enviable in the world? Independence, the freedom of my fancy, my two hundred trimmed pens, and the art of using them. And then the Orient, especially Egypt, flattens out all the little worldly vanities... The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame..."

One of my favourite moments is when his mother suggests that on his return he might get "une petite place", a small job. "Frankly, and without deluding yourself," he replies, "is there a single one that I am capable of filling?" And anyway, "Isn't not to be bored one of the principal goals of life?"

The letters are full of experiences which would keep one from being bored. Flaubert sees dervishes stuck through with iron spikes, he visits a Coptic church and thinks of what Voltaire would have said, he observes the ceremony of the Doseh ('Treading') where a sheik rides on horseback over a human plank of 200 prostrate men, he holds a charmed snake, he gallops off to take in the Sphinx, the sight of which nearly makes him giddy.

A high point of the adventure, perhaps the high point, is convincing the famed dancing girl Kuchuk Hanem to dance "the Bee", the most notorious of the oriental dances, banned by the authorities. The door has to be closed, everyone sent away except for the musicians, who are blindfolded. I expected that "the Bee" would be Kuchuk flitting around as if she were a bee, but no, it is Kuchuk pretending to be fighting off a very pesky bee, shedding her clothing piece by piece. "Finally she was naked except for a fichu which she held in her hands and behind which she pretended to hide, and at the very end she threw down the fichu. That was the Bee." And then to bed, together. "She insisted on keeping the outside."

In a note, Steegmuller tells us that Flaubert's mistress read his travel notes and in her jealousy, seized on a mention of Kuchuk's bedbugs, saying they degraded her. Pas de tout, replied Flaubert. The smell of Kuchuk's bedbugs were "the most enchanting touch of all. Their nauseating odor mingled with the scent of her skin, which was dripping with sandalwood oil. I want a touch of bitterness in everything -- always a jeer in the midst of our triumphs, desolation even in the midst of enthusiasm."

What did I say? A writer!

The most striking passage for me is contained in a letter to his dear friend Louis Bouilhet, sent from Cairo, at the end of his trip, June 1850. Perhaps it was a thought which came to him there among the scruffy acacias of the Hotel du Nil.

"Let's not get lost in archeology -- a widespread and fatal tendency, I think, of the coming generation... the world is going to become bloody stupid and from now on will be a very boring place. Max and I talk constantly about the future of society. For me it is almost certain that at some more or less distant time it will be regulated like a college. Teachers will be the law. Everyone will be in uniform. Humanity will no longer commit barbarisms as it writes its insipid theme, but --- what wretched style! What lack of form, of rhythm, of spirit!"

A year after his return to France, he began Madame Bovary, going off in a new direction from all that he had written before, taking literature ("the old whore" as he calls it in one of his letters) in a new direction as well. But as Steegmuller points out, romantic echoes of Egypt still sounded now and again. In The Temptation of Saint Anthony, the Queen of Sheba tempts the saint by telling him "I dance like a bee".


The books:
Flaubert in Egypt ed by Francis Steegmuller
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert
and
Answered prayers by Truman Capote

“Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.”

"What's an envoy?" asks my non-native English speaker husband, busy reading.

"Oh, it's a poem, that in the old days poets used to put at the end of their book, sending it off and hoping people would like it."

Dead silence.

Me, getting suspicious: "Why, what does it say?"

"That the new Italian ambassador was one."

"Oh, that envoy!"

I am not actually so bookish as to think that a now-rare poetic device is more likely to be referred to in today's newspaper than a diplomatic title. But the "Go, little book" type of envoy (from the French envoyer, "to send", same root as the envoy sent by a government) has been on my mind recently, ever since I came across the exhilirating envoy by Russell Banks which I used as the title for this post, and it started me thinking, what better way to follow a post on the art of the dedication than with one on the art of the envoy?

The envoy dates back to classic Roman literature, meaning that it has been around for over 2000 years. Ovid, the greatest poet of the Augustan Age, affixed a touching envoy to his book Tristia (Sorrows), written from exile in what we now call Romania, but the Romans referred to as "beyond the Danube", by which they meant, at the outskirts of the civilised world, where the emperor had sent him for "a poem and a misunderstanding" (said Ovid).

The envoy opens like this (I include the Latin because English translations of Latin poetry always sound too chatty - so just before you read the English, say stirringly aloud "Ibis in urbem!"):

Parue—nec inuideo—sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:
ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!

"Little book -- I won't resent it -- go without me to the city
Where alas, your master is not allowed to go..."

But of course he resented it. A man of culture and refined habits, witty and urbane, Ovid found banishment among the (semi) barbarians -- who didn't even know Latin -- a cruel punishment. Cruellest of all, he never got to follow his book back to Rome, dying in exile.

By the nineteenth century, the envoy had become a trope, its more unexceptional manifestations ripe for mockery, as Lord Byron did with the efforts of the rather paltry poet laureate of his time, Robert Southey.


From Don Juan (1819):

"Go, little book, from this my solitude!
I cast thee on the waters – go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
The world will find thee after many days.

Southey's read, and Wordsworth understood,
I can't help putting in my claim to praise—
The four first rhymes are Southey's every line:
For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine."


The twentieth century! War, carnage, decay, disillusion, experimentation, modernism! If anyone was in the thick of that it was Ezra Pound, and he got it all, and Art too, into his revisitation of Edmund Waller's famous 17th century envoy "Go, Lovely Rose" (set to music by Henry Lawes), a poem firmly in the carpe diem tradition, which began:

Go, lovely Rose—
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be...

Here's Pound's "Envoi" from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1919):

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

Where could one possibly go after that, you might find yourself asking. Well, that's what I'm here for! Here, closing the circle and leading us back to Russell Banks, are two dazzling envoys from the second half of the twentieth century:


William Meredith, "Envoy":

Go, little book. If anybody asks
Why I add poems to a time like this,
Tell how the comeliness I can’t take in
Of ships and other figures of content
Compels me still until I give them names;
And how I give them names impatiently,
As who should pull up roses by the roots
That keep him turning on his empty bed,
The smell intolerable and thick with loss.


Robert Creeley, “Envoi”:

Particulars they want,
particulars they
fucking well will

get, love. For openers,
you—the stars
earth revolves about,

the galaxies their in-
struments neglect. I
walk down a road

you make ahead, not
(no negative) there ex-
cept my body finds

it. Love, love,
love, swirls—myriad
insects hum, the

air softens, the night
is here. So empty
these days with-

out you, a box
with nothing in it. I
am waiting, you

are coming, so what’s
the world but
all of it.


And here we are back at Russell Banks. I don't know if anyone else out there has written an envoy in prose, but this is one it would be tough to compete with. It comes at the end of Banks's novel Continental Drift, a tale of our times which mixes "low comedy and high seriousness" (as someone said about Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood, which it reminded me of), sardonic descriptions of domestic dissatisfaction, low-end jobs, moral corners being cut, and suddenly, apocalypse.

"The world as it is goes on being itself. Books get written -- novels, stories and poems stuffed with particulars that try to tell us what the world is, as if our knowledge of people like Bob Dubois and Vanise and Claude Dorsinville will set people like them free. It will not. Knowledge of the facts of Bob's life and death changes nothing in the world. Our celebrating his life and grieving over his death, however, will. Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives -- no, especially wholly invented lives -- deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book's objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.”


*****
Post script:

The American poet Robert Creeley (of Pound-Olson-Zukofsky-Black Mountain lineage), sojourned in New Zealand in the 1970s (a trip organised by Alistair Paterson), and Auckland Libraries' Sir George Grey Special Collections has a number of books of his poetry relating to that time, including The Dogs of Auckland, a limited edition artist's book by the Holloway Press, which has this note in the catalogue, a poem by itself: "The binding is cloth spine with Canson Mi Teintes paper-covered boards, & the case & casing in are by Bound to Last, Auckland."

I realise that Canson Mi Teintes is just a mezzo-tinto, half-tint, but what it said to me when I first saw it, and what it still wants to say to me, is "Song, you tempt me!"

Dedicated by -- or to -- the Beats

There's nothing quite like a good book dedication, that brush with mystique which you encounter, if you're lucky, opening a new book. And yet, for all the times you come across book lovers exalting the smell of books, the feel of books (I did recently spot one new and genial appreciation of the pleasure of books -- "They don't catch on my braces!"), you rarely encounter celebrations of the well-written dedication. Which, I might point out, is even more valuable for being an attribute any book may boast, no matter its form: print, electronic, or even read aloud.

I've made it a tradition to post, every year, the standouts among the dedications I've discovered at the library over the previous twelve months. They've included one to a typewriter (noir, of course, both the novel being dedicated and the typewriter it was dedicated to) and one to absinthe drinkers, and the authors who composed them have ranged from Edward Gorey to JD Salinger, not forgetting Hunter S Thompson.

There's a Beat theme to this year's finds -- wholly unplanned, I hasten to say, as befits the Beats.

Here they are:

1.  From  Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac

   Dedicated to America, whatever that is

Reading On the Road when I was a teenager rates as one of the most exciting reading experiences of my life, but I'd never tried Visions of Cody, Kerouac's later, posthumously published hymn to Neal Cassady and to those days on the road when the highs were still coming easy, until this year, following a slow, appreciative read of Big Sur. I skipped large swathes which I found too intemperate (who changed more? Jack? me? probably me), but the last 50 pages held, and did they hold.

The Penguin edition I found at the library also includes wonderful, sad, notes provided by Allen Ginsberg, where he calls the book "a dirge for America... for the American Hope that Jack (& his hero Neal) carried so valiantly through the land after Whitman..."

Kerouac himself suggests in his foreword, "This feeling may soon be obsolete as America enters its High Civilization period and no one will get sentimental or poetic any more about trains and dew on fences at dawn in Missouri."

Not yet, though, Jack, not yet!

My sentimental snap of Beat wheels by the Mississippi River
Hannibal, Missouri, 2012

2.  From These are my rivers by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The owner of the fabled City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, the publisher who gave us Howl, the poet who sang of the pennycandy store beyond the El, 95 years old this year, prefaced a collection of almost 40 years of his poetry with these lines:

For 

various brothers & lovers

eternally present

The book's title, These are my rivers, is taken from a bittersweet and nostalgic poem by the Italian modernist poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, Questi sono i miei fiumi, in which he evokes the phases of his life by naming the rivers which flowed through them, the Serchio of his ancestral home in Lucca, the Nile of his childhood, the Seine of his youth, and the Isonzo, the river which runs through the devastated Carso where Italian troops, Ungaretti among them, had fought a series of terrible battles against the Austrians during World War One.

Ferlinghetti quotes the poem in his book's epigraph:

Ho ripassato
le epoche
della mia vita

Questi sono
i miei fiumi...

[I have revisited
the ages
of my life

These are
my rivers...]

(You can read the whole of Ungaretti's poem here.)


3. From Odysseus in Woolloomooloo by Bob Orr

   to the mysteries

Just three words on the otherwise all white third page of this fine new poetry collection, just out this year. 

Bob Orr is the most beat of New Zealand poets, and if you don't believe me, check out this picture.

Bob Orr's Odysseus in Woolloomooloo in the window of  the City Lights Bookstore

The year I moved to New Zealand, I came across Bob Orr's own "The Names of Rivers" in The NZ Listener. I ripped it out (no, it wasn't a library copy) and still have it, over ten years later. Read it and you'll see why.

The Names of Rivers

The names of rivers
suggest them:
The Nile weaving its scaly blue coolness
serpent like from Africa's hot heart.
The Mississippi each syllable a broadening
of its passage to the ocean.
The Amazon hallucinogenic as the zircon flight
of butterflies above its jewelled rain forest.
Those are the big rivers
the ones we all were taught about
but I would like to take you
to a small creek
whose taste I still recall --
a slight rustiness on the tongue
like old steel or blood. The Mangawara.
I would like to be able to say
that this creek runs through my life
runs through my poems. In fact until
the age of twelve it did.
not a river so much as water.
Not water so much as something as simple as time
perhaps even timelessness. Where I live now
the water is salty and it's blue and huge beyond belief
and you would drink of it only to stop

something from within yourself from bleeding.

Bob Orr has a wonderful poem about panel beating Neal Cassady's car, which ends,

Tomorrow with the tiny hammers of a typewriter
I'll make this poem cool again
As if it were a car once stolen in America by Neal Cassady

-- I think it's that one I found in a parking lot along the Mississippi River, panel beaten roof and all.

Comics: Librarians Choice

Comic Book Month wraps up today, though as with all good comics, it's just a matter of waiting for the next issue! As a final treat, here are a few personal recommendations from some of the comics fans who work at Auckland Libraries: Michelle and Blair from the 2014 Comic Book Month team; Baruk, creator of our new Comics NZ blog (check it out); Stanley from Collections, and myself! Enjoy!



Adamtine by Hannah Berry

This is the first horror-themed graphic novel I have read. Although I admire the artists' skill, the violent gore scenes typical of this genre are a bit much for me. But I do enjoy a good scare, and with this graphic novel I wasn’t disappointed. It is horror with a difference, with the artwork creating a sense of foreboding and darkness. In fact, I have become a big Hannah Berry fan. The artwork is clever and emotive, supporting a captivating, frightening story line that really does keep you guessing. This is a graphic novel requiring more than one read, with each reading revealing more of its mysteries – most of which are hidden in plain sight. It is definitely a thinking person’s graphic novel... oh, and beware the last page!

-- Michelle, Titirangi Library


Faction 1  ed. by Damon Keen, Amie Maxwell

Quite simply, I liked this enough to buy my own copy, and that doesn't happen often. Especially not when it is also available for free (legal) download!

Faction 1 is a Kiwi comic anthology, from 14 very different writers/artists. One of the joys of anthologies is the unlikely juxtaposition of very different styles, and Faction does not disappoint. The artwork moves eclectically from Ned Wenlock's bold primary colours, through Damon Keen's delicate shading or Ralphi's yellowish-greenish-brownish and Karl Wills's detailed black-on-white, to Mark Holland's lush, painterly style. The stories very well matched the artistic styles used to tell them.

Faction was created through crowdfunding, and it is nice to see contributors named on the back page (dammit, I missed my chance at fame!). The Faction website has links to individual artist websites, and a free subscription to the (digital) anthology. Auckland Libraries also holds Faction 2 and Faction 3.

If you like anthologies, you may also enjoy Syncopated, an anthology of non-fiction picto-essays. Or not.

And if I sound like a fanboy, that's because I am.

-- Baruk, Digital Services

Shaolin Burning by Ant Sang


Full of graphic martial arts action and mayhem, Shaolin Burning is a thrilling and fast-paced adventure through Qing dynasty China. The plot centres on Deadly Plum Blossum’s journey to challenge The Monk Who Doubts, who has been terrorising China. Events like the destruction of the Shaolin Temple, and the legend of the five surviving elders place this in a time of kung-fu legends and martial arts monks.

The illustrations of BroTown’s Ant Sang skillfully capture the chaos of the combat; the parries and thrusts of the sword, feints and blows of the fighters come through in the black and white shading and ink, and deftly illustrate the action.

I found the characters a highlight. They are unique and intense figures with legendary pasts, and equally awesome names. I also like the subtle humour that runs through the book, with skillful plays on words, quirky names like The Benevolent Laughing Monkey Palm Gang, and the tiger-costumed group The Killer Tongs. Still, the themes running through this work – the need to control desire, the perils of revenge and the sacredness of life – make it more than just an entertaining read.

-- Stanley, Collections



The Sandman (The Absolute Sandman Vol. 1) by Neil Gaiman

Widely considered one of the greatest comic book series of all time, The Sandman tells the story of Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, as he escapes from captivity and seeks to rebuild his realm. Along the way, Morpheus is forced to deal with the enormous changes within both himself and his realm. The Sandman is a wildly imaginative series that manages to be as effortlessly entertaining as it is thought-provoking. Its dark, adult story set the tone for DC Comics’ fledgling Vertigo imprint. The Sandman is a story about stories, and should be read by anyone who loves them.

(This Absolute Edition format collects issues #1-20 of THE SANDMAN and features completely new coloring on the first 18 issues, as well as a host of never-before-seen extra material. It is the first of four volumes.)

-- Blair, Central City Library

Corto Maltese: The Ballad of the Salt Sea by Hugo Pratt 

I was turned on to Corto Maltese long ago when I went to live in his home country of Italy, where the fumetti (Italian for comics) about the sailor with the pierced ear had attained cult status. Fumetti means puffs of smoke, that being what Italians saw where we saw speech bubbles or word balloons, as well as all around themselves. Everyone smoked, and everyone read comics, and Corto Maltese was everyone's favourite. The art work is brilliant -- the scene where an underwater Corto is drawn with squiggly refracted lines which grow ever more boldly abstract as the panels progress leave me in awe -- and the rhythm is intense and filmic. So are the characters. Corto casts a spell over everyone, men and women, in that Humphrey Bogart kind of way.

“Who knows why you make me think of that Arola’s Tango I heard in the Parda Flora Cabaret in Buenos Aires?” “Maybe there was someone there who looked like me?” “No! It’s precisely because you don’t resemble anyone that I would have wanted to meet you anywhere”. Are those tears on Corto’s chiselled face?

The original drawings were all in black and white, while this edition uses colourised drawings which, as with colourised movies, somewhat detracts from the artistry. But Pratt is such a genius that they are still great. If you like comics, you owe yourself a sail with Corto.

-- Karen, Books in the City 

Banned Books Week

My award for Best Headline of Banned Books Week goes to Melville House Publishers for "Texas school district thinks 'Banned Books Week' means they’re supposed to ban books this week", with which they called attention to the decision on the part of a school district in Texas to pull a new crop of books from the school curriculum. In other words, the school board doesn't subscribe to the sentiment voiced by the great, banned-in-his-time writer and philosopher Voltaire: "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too".

I must say it's good to see Banned Books Week getting ever greater, and wittier, attention in the media, as well in that old stalwart, libraries (it is, in fact, an initiative of the American Library Association).

I'm proud to have two personal ties to Banned Books. The first is that it was my 10th great-grandfather, William Pynchon, who wrote the first book to be banned in the New World. It happened in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1650, and the book was called The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, Justification, etc. It refuted the Puritan belief that punishment and suffering were the price of atonement, and as such the order went out for it to be burned -- by the colony's executioner, no less -- the very next day, on the Boston Common.

Its author, perhaps because of his standing as an important businessman (exporter of beaver pelts) and a magistrate, was given time to retract-- or be tried for heresy and receive the same treatment as his book. He wisely precluded the need for either by heading back across the sea to England, where he continued to write tracts until his death 12 years later.

Nine copies of the book survived and here is one of them, held at the Congregational Library in Boston. The blog where I found it, History of Christianity, points out that this is one book which the Puritans could have judged by its cover. Just look at that subtitle: Clearing it from some common Errors. Seriously?

My other claim to banned books fame is having smuggled Henry Miller through US Customs at the tender age of eight. Not Henry Miller in person, but a number of books by him which my father had purchased in Paris (Olympia Press's aptly named "Traveller's Companion" editions, as pictured) while the American courts were still debating whether they were obscene or not, and popped into his daughters' little tote bags for the re-entry onto U.S. soil and into U.S. jurisdiction.

I was just remembering with my sister this weekend the heady moment when, tired out by standing in line at LA airport, and perhaps from lugging her tote bag (no cute little wheeled suitcases back then!), she began feeling faint and our parents were frantically trying to get us through before she keeled over and drew the agents' attention to us. She remembers the books as being by DH Lawrence, so it looks as if each daughter might have carried a different banned author.

It was the attempt by Grove Press to publish Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in the United States which led to the obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography. Witnesses for the defense included a professor of medieval literature at Harvard, who testified (quoted in The Harvard Crimson), about the "meaningless and irrational" social conventions around the use of some words: "Words of Latin and French derivation referring to the sex act and bodily organs are acceptable in English, Bloomfield testified, but words of Anglo-Saxon origin with identical meanings are tabu." Indisputably.

The case was heard by the Superior Court of Suffolk County (Massachusetts, again!), which decided that the book was indeed protected by the First Amendment. I love this passage from the opinion:

That a serious work uses four letter words and has a grossly offensive tone does not mean that the work is not entitled to constitutional protection. Much in modern art, literature, and music is likely to seem ugly and thoroughly objectionable to those who have different standards of taste. It is not the function of judges to serve as arbiters of taste or to say that an author must regard vulgarity as unnecessary to his portrayal of particular scenes or characters or to establish particular ideas. Within broad limits each writer, attempting to be a literary artist, is entitled to determine such matters for himself, even if the result is as dull, dreary, and offensive as the writer of this opinion finds almost all of Tropic. Competent critics assert, and we conclude, that Tropic has serious purpose, even if many will find that purpose obscure.

Personally I prefer Tropic of Capricorn, which was the second of Miller's two autobiographical novels but describes his early days in Brooklyn, to Tropic of Cancer, the one written first, which covers the time after his move to Paris, and is I think the more noted of the two, perhaps because it includes his love affair with cult personage Anaïs Nin. I remember as a teenager devouring the very Tropic of Capricorn I'd sneaked through US customs, a full-immersion in Brooklyn in the twenties, as experienced by an irrepressibly high-energy, high sex-drive, very funny, quixotic genius.

(Genius and lust was the name Norman Mailer gave his book about Henry Miller's works.)

Some past Books in the City posts you might enjoy about banned books and censorship:

Mark Twain on banning Huck Finn

Banned Books Week dinner party

A funny story about censorship

Timothy Kidd's comics choices

The best thing that happened to me this Comic Book Month was reading the piece Kelly Sheehan wrote for Factional, the Faction Comics blog, about the work of Timothy Kidd. For a second I was going to correct that to say 'the best comic-booky thing', but actually I think it was the best thing, period. It's a wonderful, unstinting exposition, absolutely worth reading.

Timothy Kidd is one of my favourite comics artists, as well as being one of my favourite people, unforcedly original and unfeignedly genuine. I still remember that the first time I talked to Tim about his having written a graphic novel, I saw a twinge of discomfort cross his face. Not, as you may be thinking, because he didn't want to talk about his work. It was because of the terminology I used. "People who make comics don't really like the term graphic novel", he said. "We think of all these (gesturing towards Central Library's graphic novel shelves) as comics."

Comics 

It made sense to me. Comics was what I had always called them, too, until I went to work in a library, where the first time I heard someone talking about 'graphic novels' I thought it meant books with explicit sex and violence. What, a whole collection? "No, no, it means comics in book form! You know, when they tell a story!"

Well. Years after this conversation, it's still hard for me to think of the term 'graphic novel' as anything much more than a ploy to convince establishment figures such as book publishers, the compilers of the New York Times 'Books of the year' book lists, school boards, and old-school librarians, that comics can rub elbows with Lit-ra-ture! (Here I need a sound clip of Johnny Angel, creator of Afi, the first Samoan superhero, the time he was pretending to me he didn't know how to pronounce the word.) Comics lovers don't need to be convinced! It reminds me of the episode in the American comic classic Doonesbury where a survivor of Nixon's "secret bombings" of Cambodia says "Secret bombings? There wasn't any secret about them! My wife knew too! She was with me and I remarked on them. 'Here come the bombs!' I said."

There's not much to add to Kelly's appreciation of Tim's talent. Here instead, for your enjoyment and edification, are some of the intriguing comics recommendations he's written for us over the last few years.

Or, "Here come the comics !" I said.


Very Casual by Michael Deforge (2013)


On the cover is a weird deer. Is it a deer? Maybe not. It is deer-shaped, with deer legs, a kind of deer face, and antlers, all in the right deer places. But something tells me that it is not actually a deer. It seems to be made out of some kind of oozing, red substance and its eye is like a big flat dish. And it kind of has a beak.

Something is wrong with something familiar. Or else something weird is treated as if it was the most mundane thing in the world. This is what Deforge plays around with in this collection of short comics. A faux-natural history comic explains that the creature on the cover is actually a common Canadian quadripedal slug. The narrator in another story is a teenage guy who is super-excited to be hanging out with a cool local band. We the readers see that the band is made up of disgusting meaty blob-monsters, but do the characters notice? No one mentions that the singer looks like a piece of fried chicken. Are the kids oblivious? or brainwashed?... or just living in a world where monsters are pretty ordinary?

This weirdness is so underplayed that it seems all the more weird, and Deforge draws it just right-- in a cartoony, clear line style, so that nothing looks exactly normal. Post-Fort Thunder indie-comics weirdness meets twisted body horror meets goofy bigfoot cartooniness. Weirdness aside, these are compelling stories told in an entertaining way. I really liked this book and I look forward to new things from Deforge.


Everything together by Sammy Harkham  (2012)

I always try to read every comic Harkham makes but he doesn't always make it easy to be a completist. Most of his strips are published in obscure places-- small anthologies, niche websites, or his own indie comic book, Crickets. I love his stories so much that I have always made (grainy, pixilated) copies/print-outs of them, then read, and re-read those loose A4 pages until they fall to pieces.

So I am happy to say that those short stories have finally been collected in this shiny new volume-- his first book. And it’s great; I think he is the best new cartoonist to emerge in the last ten years. He has figured out the perfect style for comics-- it can be goofy like Popeye, grown-up like Chris Ware, sweaty like R. Crumb, satirical like Dan Clowes, or exuberant like Roy Crane.

I like the way his characters seem to want to be civilized or act like grown-ups, but really are just at the mercy of the random whims and needs that come over all creatures. At some point in a Sammy Harkham story, the façade will crack and a professor will get punched in the nose for blocking another academic’s ambitions (The New Yorker Story), or teenagers will put rubbish bins on their heads and crash into each other (Somersaulting), or one cartoonist will laugh when his dog bites the other’s drawing hand (Clowes+Huizenga). Heartbreaking and hilarious.


Garden by Yuichi Yokoyama (2011)

It doesn't have a plot exactly. There are just a lot of oddly-dressed guys walking through a huge landscape filled with weird structures and features. One guy's head looks like the front of the space shuttle, another guy is spiky. They look at the weird things, climb over them, swing, jump, crawl through them and narrate as they go-- "Oh look, it's a river filled with giant rubber balls instead of water" or "The walls are suddenly made of concrete”.

All the strangeness is underplayed, though. The drawing is uninflected and spare -- lines ruled, circles stencilled -- there are no faces to get attached to. It is quite stilted but very fascinating. It looks as if the natural world had been remade out of concrete and water by some faceless architect who had never actually seen the natural world. And the way the reader follows the guys from moment to moment reminds me a lot of platform video games. It is pretty engrossing. I’ve never read anything like it.


Wilson by Daniel Clowes (2010)

Wilson is the kind of guy you would hate to sit next to on the bus-- opinionated, obnoxious and quick to take offence, a middle-aged misanthrope who thinks that he is way smarter than you. Fortunately for the reader, Clowes is a good enough cartoonist to find the humanity lurking within this apparently charmless man. About halfway in, Wilson finds himself alone in the world and goes on an odyssey to try to reunite the family that he has alienated. This plan goes about as wrong as possible for him-- with darkly comedic results. The book is made up of a series of self-contained one page strips, each drawn in a different style. Some of these are individually funny or tragic but taken as a whole they add up to a nuanced and touching story. This approach engages the reader, and gives the book the strange liveliness that is in contrast with its surface blankness. This is an odd book and an odd character but it turns out that Wilson is not so bad.


Auckland Libraries holds these works by Timothy Kidd, published by Comic Book Factory,

Came the dawn. Book One

Came the dawn. Book Two

Came the dawn. Book Three

Dorothy Parker, Winnie the Pooh, and a proofreader's Fail

Two recent birthday shout-outs on social media that spoke to me were those for Winnie the Pooh on August 21, the anniversary of the day in 1921 when the real-life Christopher Robin received him as a present, and those for Dorothy Parker, poet, short-story writer, critic and notorious wit, on August 22, she having been born on that day in 1893, across the Atlantic in New Jersey, USA. Not just because I am a fan of both, but because coincidences delight me, and this is a very good one, especially when you add in a third august anniversary: August 25, 1928:  the day Dorothy Parker's famous review of The House at Pooh Corner came out in The New Yorker. The one where she sentenced "Tonstant Weader fwowed up".

Harold Ross had started up The New Yorker in 1925, and Dorothy Parker, a fellow-member of that Algonquin Round Table characterized by liquid lunches and sharp wit, was a contributor from the second issue on. She was perfect for the The New Yorker in its early, non-establishment era, of course, being fresh, urbane, sophisticated, and funny, and within a couple of years had found her niche as the author of the popular Reading and Writing column, signing herself Constant Reader, a term from Victorian times used when writing letters to the editor. Charles Dickens, for example, is noted for having written a Constant Reader letter to the Daily News, complaining about their numerous typos, and also the Editor's reply to the letter.

(Keep in mind: typos.)

Here's the story of Miss Parker's review of The House at Pooh Corner, as told by Marlene Wagman-Geller in  Eureka! : the surprising stories behind the ideas that shaped the world:

The House at Pooh Corner proved to be one pot of honey too many for the acerbic critic. The breaking point for Parker was when Pooh revealed that he added the "tiddely pom" to his Outdoor Song which Has To Be Sung In The Snow "to make it more hummy". Her caustic ink stated, "And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."

Now, here's what Dorothy Parker's obituary in the New York Times, as posted by the Dorothy Parker Society on their website, has to say about the review:

Book Briefly Dismissed
She reduced A.A. Milne's sugary "The House at Pooh Corner" to water by remarking that "Tonstant Weader Fwowed up" after reading one too many of the word "tummy."

Tummy! Tummy!

Can't you just hear the proofreader?  "Hummy! What's a hummy? She can't have said hummy! It must be a ...a... tummy! That'll be it!"

You just know that mistake would not have been in the original obituary, which was written by the legendary Alden Whitman, the man who made an art of the obituary, the inventor of the "Interview with the still-living", the one where he'd meet with the meritorious before they died to get the story for the obituary he would eventually write for them. Apparently they quite welcomed the chance.

I found Alden Whitman's own obituary in the The New York Times, in their archives.You have to wonder if it were one that he wrote for himself. It does sound like it:

Mr. Whitman, short, amiable and professorial, worked 13 years as an editor on metropolitan and national copy desks of The Times. He became something of a clubman and literary figure in his later life, writing book reviews for The Times and other publications and donning a cape to sally from newsroom for luncheons with authors. 

Now, Mr Whitman would have read Dorothy Parker's review. But even if he hadn't, anyone who was a child in the '20s, as he was, and later a father of four children, would know that Winnie the Pooh is full of hums, Good Hums, Hopeful Hums, all sorts of hums, all modified with capitalised adjectives, as was A.A. Milnes's way, and that of any number of writers attempting to emulate the sacred mysteries of childhood, an annoying habit on their part which Miss Parker did not point out but could have.

Whereas 'tummy' not only does not appear in The House at Pooh Corner, but is simply not a word jazz-agers have trouble with, however much the Dorothy Parker Society might think they do. We even have the story of Hemingway on a clothes-buying expedition at Abercrombies exchanging quips with the belt clerk about his "hard tummy" (punching himself in the stomach with the clerk's hand), courtesy of Lillian Ross's Portrait of Hemingway, which first appeared in ... The New Yorker!

Poetry in the City

To celebrate National Poetry Day, this month we took poetry out of the library and into the city streets, or more exactly, onto the city walls. The very cool Phantom Billstickers designed, printed and put up nearly a hundred poetry posters featuring works by Michele Leggott, Robert Sullivan, Selina Tusitala Marsh, John Newton, Murray Edmond, Alice Miller, Jack Ross, Ya-Wen Ho, and Makyla Curtis, stars of this year's Poetry Central, the gig we put on every year with nzepc on Poetry Day.

 

Here's a shot of Rutland St, where I loved seeing the poster of John Newton's poem "Kerouac, somewhere near Billings, Montana" juxtaposed with posters for "Sunset Road".

Summer, 1975. Rotorua, New Zealand … Jimi Hendrix, motorbikes, ika mata and dawn raids… it’s the scene of Tawata Productions’ new play Sunset Road, by Miria George.

is what the show's producers say about "Sunset Road".

Winter, 1949. Billings, Montana... Jack Kerouac, Greyhound bus, the memory of a girl, the night... it's the episode from Kerouac's journals which inspired this poem. 

is how John introduced his poem at Poetry Central.

And here is the poem, of which John gave a masterful reading before dashing out the door -- "Off to Moscow!" I heard someone say, and thought it was a reference to Ferlinghetti's "Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow", a friendly salute to John's artistic prowess, but it turns out he really is going to the white stone city. Still, the metaphor would hardly have been amiss.


Kerouac, somewhere near Billings, Montana

Beneath the outline of his face, in the smoky window
of the Greyhound bus, the atavistic continent,
its pitch-black mountains, its steel-grey rivers,
scrolls by him. Knight of the Dolorous Countenance.
Here is the west of his mislaid connections: neighbourhood
softball games under floodlights, a girl in bright denims
with strawberry hair, a fatherly face among the wind-beaten ranchers
at the card tables back in some beer joint in Butte.
In every valley there's a single light, and every light
is a family's love, and the inky night between them expands
in his chest. With his hand in his trousers
he comforts himself, adrift in the darkness and solitary joy
of an epic grief that could almost be real, that
could almost be something else, minor, too painful to touch.

-- John Newton

The poets with their posters at Poetry Central 2014

You can read about Kerouac's bus trip through Montana in his journals, published as Windblown world : the journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947-1954. Deftly and unobtrusively edited by Douglas Brinkley, they make a great read for Kerouac fans, or, if you're not already a fan, might get you heading down the Kerouac road.

John Newton's books of poetry are Lives of the Poets (2010) and  Family Songbook (2013). He is also the author of  The double rainbow : James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem commune.

nzepc, which celebrated its thirteenth birthday at our Poetry Day gig, is the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre, an electronic gateway to poetry resources in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific region, based at the University of Auckland.

To learn more about the Phantom Billstickers, visit www.0800phantom.

Auckland Writers Festival 2014: Sandi Toksvig's evening

"I find life funny."

"Life is funny."

"Funny things happen."

-- Sandi Toksvig

Once again, the Writers Festival teaches me not to judge people by their book covers. Or maybe even by their books! How many times, as we descended the stairs, the ASB Theatre being packed to the brim for this event, and through to the end of the Festival, did I hear people saying that they had not read Sandi Toksvig's books, and had not even now added them to their must-read lists, while at the same time expressing some variation on what session chair Sean Plunket quoted Festival Director Anne O'Brien as having said about Sandi Toksvig after having heard her at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, "She should rule the world!"

Sandi Toksvig? Who is Sandi Toksvig? Am I the only person who didn't know? Her name is Danish but she's the host of  The News Quiz on BBC, her books have chick lit-type covers and as with chick lit there are many, many of them, yet one of her latest is about the Boer War, hardly a chick lit preferred setting or era. Gleaned from the library shelves and the Writers Festival programme, that's about all I knew about Sandi Toksvig, up to when she bounced out on stage.

Well! There was a lot more. She grew up in New York where her dad was The Foreign Correspondent for Danish TV -- not having the budget to plant correspondents around the world, the intelligent Danes decided to plant just one, at the United Nations. During the course of this growing up, she got thrown out of three schools and "I was bored". But then, sent to boarding school in England, isolated by her differences, she found a bookstore and began reading. Hardy, Dickens, Austen.

And writing? "I'd always scribbled. My whole family writes. I just went into the family business. If my dad had been a butcher, I'd be selling you chops."

When she started her new show on BBC TV, the next day the comment from the organisers was "Good news. No complaints". She points out, "A 56-year-old man -- no one would have had any problems. A 56-year-old woman, they can't believe I'm still breathing".

Which brought her to one of my favourite lines of the evening, probably because I am a woman of a certain age myself. "What I like about women of a certain age is that they can't be bothered to dress things up anymore".

Why the Boer War as a setting for her novel Valentine Grey?

"The Boer war was interesting because 1) it was the first war Britain fought where the average soldier was literate, and 2) it was the end of the British Empire -- people were asking why their boys were dying, for what?"

Also, a lot was happening in terms of women's liberation at the time of the Boer War. Bicycles, for one thing. Women were working, as telephone operators, as typists. They needed to ride bicycles to work, and "you couldn't wear corsets and flounces on bicycles". The protagonist of Valentine Grey is an adventurous woman who changes places with a gay soldier and goes to fight in the war in a bicycling regiment.

Toksvig came out as a lesbian in 1984, the first lesbian in public life to come out, she says. She got death threats, and she and her then-partner having three children, had to get protection, go into hiding.  I choked up when she described her public event wedding (actually a renewal of civil partnership vows, for bureaucratic reasons), on the day same-sex marriage became legal in England and Wales. "I wanted it to be free, not by invitation. Two thousand people came, and when I came in on my daughter's arm they all stood up and cheered."

"What makes you outraged?" Sean Plunket asked.

"Girls in Nigeria. Casual racism. Casual homophobia. Fundamentalism, because it doesn't allow for the diversity of human thought."

"What does the future hold?" (slight editing by me who just doesn't like the term 'bucket list')

"Lose two more stone. Travel more. There's always things I'd like to learn. The most exciting is the thing you didn't expect."

The most exciting event I went to at the Auckland Writers Festival was "An evening with Sandi Toksvig".

Auckland Writers Festival 2014: Alice Walker

Guest post by Ella, Readers Services, Central City Library.

The great author and activist Alice Walker came out on stage to a standing ovation which she received graciously. Alice Walker is clearly used to provoking a strong reaction. She was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, but in her words “not the first to deserve it”. She is a polarising figure, considered by most to be a national treasure, but one whose radical politics and individual worldview challenge the norms of conventional society.

Alice Walker’s most famous novel The Color Purple was much acclaimed, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award in 1983, but has always been controversial and was censored throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. These days the book is a modern classic, but to Walker’s bemusement it is still banned in North Carolina. She suggests she may go down there herself and ask them why. She seems to be joking but she’s a person so strong in her convictions that I wouldn’t be surprised if she really did.

Walker’s powerful stage presence was striking and had me fascinated from the moment the interview began. Selina Tusitala Marsh was a wonderful interviewer and really got a lot out of the author. You could tell that there was a lot of mutual respect between the two women. Their discussion covered a wide range of topics from the writing process and personal growth, to global issues such as the environment and world politics. Feminism, particularly the role of indigenous women, was a key part of the conversation.

Walker is a self-described “democratic womanist” which means that she’s dedicated to making changes for women through government, and by helping people of colour and the poor. Walker thinks that the only way to do this is through the creation of a radically different political system and the inclusion of women in politics. For Walker it is a type of “feminine wisdom” that the world needs to tune in to in order to live on this planet without destroying it. She talked about women’s circles as a mode of engaging with other women and the community to make positive change happen. “Womanism” is Walker’s term for a specifically African-American brand of feminism. The term is related to the word “womanish” that she describes as denoting a kind of “sauciness or bodaciousness”. “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” she says.

Alice Walker has a holistic view of the planet, and Buddhism is very influential on her philosophy. Gardening, walking, silence and contemplation are all important parts of her life and her creative practice. Meditation has become an important part of her writing process, which she recommends to everyone. Walker turned to transcendental meditation after a divorce which she described as a time of “intense suffering” and meditation was something that helped her to “connect with something real”, and gain consciousness, as well as find out what really matters in life. Walker has always had a love of story and believes in the magic of writing and its power. It is through her writing that Walker is able to share this “consciousness”.

Alice Walker is a rebel and Selina Marsh asked her where she got this willingness not to conform. Walker responded that she has always felt that she had a right to be herself. She compares herself to a mango tree. A mango tree cannot bear any other fruit, but why would you want it to? A mango tree can never be anything but a mango tree, why ask it to be anything else? It is this attitude that makes Alice Walker such an inspiring individual. She rounded off the hour by giving the audience some sage advice. “Hard times require furious dancing!”. It was a privilege to hear her speak at the Writer’s Festival!

Further thoughts on "Dear Leader" at Auckland Writers Festival 2014

Honour Zhu emigrated to New Zealand from China, and now works at Northcote Community Library. In this guest post she tells about her reactions to the "Dear Leader" session at Auckland Writers Festival 2014.

The author of the book Dear Leader, Jang Jin-sung, used to be a propagandist for North Korea, but now lives freely in South Korea.From the compulsory three-year mourning period after the death of general Kim Jong-il, to the minister who was executed by a flame thrower during a cabinet meeting, North Korea has always seemed mysterious to others in the world.

Having grown up in mainland China, I had some special reactions to North Korea compared to the rest of the public listening to Jang Jin-sung. Until I was ten, the majority of the films I watched were from North Korea. The films always reflected how miserable the lives of South Koreans were, and advertised the greatness of Kim ll-sung. What was most interesting to me when watching these films was that when people mentioned their great leader, tears would flow from their eyes. As a child, I could not understand why, but accepted it as a fact. 

Interviewing Jang Jin-sung, John Sinclair read the poem “The most delicious food in the world” which he included in his book. It was a beautiful poem which expressed how delicate and helpless the children were when they faced the 1990 famine of North Korea. 

The poem made me think of the book Tombstone which is about a similar disaster which happened around 1960 in mainland China, where the book is still banned today.

Stepping out of the Aotea Centre and enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, I felt a new awareness of the privilege I have as an information worker in New Zealand, able to assist people in expressing, disseminating and finding the information they want without any political or religious restraints.

I requested the book Dear Leader and I'm looking forward to reading it.

My Sunday at the Writers Festival: female voices

Guest post by Ella, Readers Services, Central City Library

My morning began with a thought-provoking hour listening to a discussion between passionate, “radical womanists” Alice Walker and Selina Tusitala Marsh, followed by a talk by the brilliant New Zealand neuropsychologist Jenni Ogden. Already blown away by the strong female presence at this year’s Writers Festival I headed along to “Gender Divides”, a lively discussion of contemporary feminist and gender issues by a panel of fascinating women, led by the multitalented compare Judy McGregor.

Eleanor Catton

Celebrated New Zealand writers Eleanor Catton and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku gave a local and Māori perspective on gender issues, while American entrepreneur Jessica Jackley took things more global, discussing her work with small business owners (primarily women) in the poorer parts of the world. English broadcaster Sandi Toksvig rounded out the group and was a highlight of the event. As a comedian and regular panellist on BBC quiz shows such as QI and The News Quiz Show, Sandi seemed the most at home in the panel style format of the talk. Her humour shone and her “wit, wisdom and naughtiness” kept the crowd chuckling throughout the hour.

Despite all the humour and good cheer there were serious issues on the table. Judy McGregor asked the women whether they agreed with Germaine Greer’s statement that “it’s time to get angry again”. Sandi responded with a call to arms. It’s not enough to be angry, we need to be “enraged”. The talk took on a more serious tone as we were reminded of the dire situation for women in countries like Nigeria, as well as the ingrained sexism closer to home. Air New Zealand’s latest safety video was held up as a “particularly repellent” representation of women, as were some of the billboards on Auckland’s Karangahape Road.

Sandi Toksvig

The point was made that it is time to challenge the patriarchal structures of the culture we live in, rather than making it a simple question of men versus women. Each of the women interviewed has had to deal with her fair share of discrimination. Eleanor Catton has previously spoken out about older male reviewer’s reactions to The Luminaries and their attitudes towards women’s writing in general, and reiterated her point that in our culture there is a structural bias against female artists. These biases tend to exist across the board. Sandi Toksvig recounted similar experiences from within broadcasting; Jessica Jackley spoke about the difficulties for women to get funding for business ventures, due to the fact that most investors are middle aged, Caucasian males who tend to invest in those they can relate to. Ngahuia Te Awekotuku discussed gender equality in a marae context and issues surrounding this. She also brought gasps from the audience when she recounted the story of how racism had her expelled from Rotorua High School at age 12. 

Like much of the festival, the crowd was dominated by women; the group in the packed out ASB theatre was particularly vocal and responsive and the atmosphere was warm and welcoming. Judy McGregor closed the session by asking the women for the advice they would give to a twelve-year-old girl. Ngahuia Te Awekotu began, telling us “Never lose hope, always be hopeful.”. Eleanor Catton followed by asserting “You can do things you’ve never seen done before.” From Jessica Jackley came the advice, “There are very few rules that cannot be broken.”. Sandi Toksvig rounded things off with her two pieces of advice: “Being a grown up is better” and on further reflection “Look to the past and you will have the brightest future”.

My Sunday at the Writers Festival was a day filled with strong female voices that left me feeling inspired, energised and hopeful.