A 'Report from the Bibliographic Bunker' on Realitystudio.org this month begins: “On Christmas Day, 1990, Charles Bukowski received a Macintosh IIsi computer and a laser printer from his wife, Linda. The computer utilized the 6.0.7 operating system and was installed with the MacWrite II word processing program. By January 18 of the next year, the computer was up and running and so, after a brief period of fumbling and stumbling, was Bukowski.”
How amazing is that! Two hours away down the California coast, I too was receiving a Mac for Christmas! Well, maybe two years and two hours away, I’m not really sure, it might have been 1988, but what are a couple of years in the cosmic scheme of things? I had it up and running the same day. It wasn’t hard, you just read the little book – what was it called again, oh yes, the manual - which came with it, and then you could put the manual on your rug and use it as a mouse pad for your one-click mouse.
The old Macs were so cool. I don't think anything else as cool was ever invented during my lifetime, or at least that portion of my lifetime since I've known about cool. I can think of handy things like suitcases with wheels or cell phones, even notably crazy things like the Concorde, but nothing as cool as the Mac. The two major coolnesses were 1) the way they looked and 2) they were absolutely incompatible with Windows which, having just been purchased by IBM, was pretty clearly going to be the industry standard, so if you chose the Mac you were happy to be completely cut off from mainstream America. I’m sure Linda was on to that.
Despite the fact - a bit mysterious - that it took 24 days to get Bukowski’s Mac up and running, it appears that he took happily to the new technology, writing a poem to the Intel chip (it’s reprinted in the Report) and musing that “There is something about seeing your words on a screen before you that makes you send the word with a better bite, sighted in closer to the target. I know a computer can’t make a writer but I think it makes a writer better. Simplicity in writing and simplicity in getting it down, hot and real.”
This is just the opposite of what I’d always assumed, which was that computers were to blame for the way some authors of the last 20 years have driven me crazy recently by including in their books what appears to be every single thing that passes through their heads. That would be Rick Moody (everything after The Ice Storm, a very good book rife with exhiliration and pain), Dave Eggers (everything), and Jonathan Franzen (I only ever tried The Corrections and when the daughter’s second or third long story started up I had to fast forward to the end, which made me cry -- the ending, not the fast-forwarding). Maybe I’m wrong, and this lack of discrimination is about temperament, and not operational at all.
The 'Report from the BB' goes on to contrast Bukowski’s interest in new technology with William S. Burroughs’s point of view, expressed in an interview in 1987, that you know, it just didn’t seem worth the trouble to figure out how to use a computer, although apparently he had one in the house. This inspired someone named Egil (a real name?) to comment that in his old age Burroughs may have preferred “something reliable like a gun.” I mentally shrieked. Egil, are you sure that “reliable” is the right choice of word? You mean like that thing made of steel which if you’re not careful you can kill someone with? What, he did?
Now, for a genius take on the problems of adjusting to new technology, watch this gem from the show "Øystein og jeg" on Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK), "The Medieval Help Desk". Don't worry, it's subtitled!
September 29, 2009
Bukowski's Christmas present
September 25, 2009
Library Quiz
"For the winter's rains and ruins are over
And all the season of snow and sins..."
-- Swinburne
Yes, it's Spring, and with Spring comes the Library Quiz. My team picked “Authors” for its double-points round. This had seemed a good choice for our group of inveterate readers, but we hadn’t reckoned with just how much information is contained in the fine mind of Iain Sharp, esteemed man of letters and composer of the Authors round questions, and furthermore, we carelessly neglected to consider the factor of the Gaelic impishness. We managed half. See how you do:
1. This woman was Sir Edmund Hillary’s favourite author. She is also mentioned in Maurice Gee’s new novel, Access Road. Who is she?
2. The cousin of which renowned novelist was among the victims of English serial killers Fred and Rose West?
3. The soundtrack for the Wim Wenders film “The Million Dollar Hotel” features a song by U2 with lyrics credited to which Booker Prize-winning author?
4. There’s no prize for knowing that Pride and Prejudice was written by Jane Austen, but which renowned novelist helped write the script for the 1940 movie version starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier?
6. Which three early 19th-century authors did Douglas Walton, Elsa Lanchester and Gavin Gordon portray in a 1935 film classic?
Answers
1. Georgette Heyer
2. Martin Amis
3. Salman Rushdie
4. Aldous Huxley
5. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
6. Respectively, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. The film was James Whale’s camp classic The Bride of Frankenstein.
September 16, 2009
Strange language
From our guest blogger, Nick:
This from the New York Times, via Ed Park’s blog, via Jenny Davidson’s blog, via probably someone else:
“It’s hard to say why I like walking backwards,” said Yang De Fu, 60, who does it for an hour in the morning and again in the evening. “It can exercise muscles you don’t use when you walk forward. And it just makes me comfortable. I’ve been doing it 20 years.” He explained that walking backward forces the tummy in and the back straight. Then he walked away, backward. He did not have to turn around to wave.
This scenario is a concrete example of the concept I always heard at art school of “making the familiar unfamiliar”. Experiencing something you think you know in an unexpected way is something that art, literature, physical activity, funnily allows. It sometimes happens when English is used by people for whom it is not their first language, like when Javier Bardem likens John Malkovich to a big Pizza Hut (favourably).
In an article about quitting a habit, David Sedaris has written this:
When it came to verb conjugation, she was beyond reproach, but every so often she’d get a word wrong. The effect was not a loss of meaning but a heightening of it. I once asked if her neighbor smoked, and she thought for a moment before saying, “Karl has . . . finished with his smoking.”
And here is a story by Lydia Davis, from her collection Samuel Johnson is indignant:
Happiest Moment
If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.
September 01, 2009
Naked Lunch's anniversary
Never mind. I think it’s right in the spirit of Burroughs to just read bits and pieces, my own personal cut-up, you might say. The official caretaker of the Burroughs house in Lawrence, Kansas cheerfully admits to never having gotten through Naked Lunch either. In fact, I could even have read less of it, and still appreciated it just as much. These lines alone, just at the start, when he has run into the subway fleeing from a narc and is racing for the train, would have sufficed for me to unreservedly call it a great book:
"Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type: comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, calls the counterman in Nedick’s by his first name. A real asshole."
How do I know the track record of the official caretaker of the Burroughs house? Because it’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of Naked Lunch this year, and that intrigues me, so I've been reading up. Of the many, the one I liked the best was the one Duncan Fallowell wrote in the New Statesman in July. He had some interesting things to say about Naked Lunch. First he amazed me by calling it the last of the landmark modern novels. What? It’s revolutionary. How can it be the last of something?
So I asked myself, well, what does Fallowell probably think the first modern novel is? And I realised it would probably be Ulysses. And then it made sense. I had a sudden vision of all these grand old men of modernity, in those black and white photos we see of them, aged, ravaged, intense: Joyce, Beckett, Orwell. W.H. Auden. Ezra Pound. Burroughs. It’s like The Wild Bunch, and he is definitely one of them, and yeah, probably the last.
At the end, this stabbing observation: 'His essential message – escape the machine – could well be more relevant, and difficult to emulate, than ever.'
You can read the article online.
When Burroughs died in 1997, salon.com phoned J.G.Ballard and asked him what Burroughs had meant to him. Absolute honesty, he said:
"Burroughs called his greatest novel "Naked Lunch," by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine."
You can read all the interview on salon.com. It's good to remember J.G. Ballard, who departed from this world he believed so strongly in seeing and writing about from "both sides of my retina", as he used to say, earlier this year.
Some other things I found:
A website with the covers of all of Burroughs’s novels, and their translations, through the years. Really fun to look at. Syringes of all shapes and sizes of course, but also serious attempts to depict a hallucinating eye, and even a naked… woman for the Yugoslavs. I see that the French translator, rather than Dejeuner Nu, which would have seemed the obvious choice, with its echo of Dejeuner sur l’herbe -- what more naked lunch than that? some say it was Burroughs’s inspiration -- chose Festin Nu, or Naked Banquet, as in Cezanne’s great painting Le Festin, the Banquet, quite energetically Nu itself.
On Nakedlunch.org you can read about the anniversary celebrations around the world. I quote from the Parisian symposium programme “The session before lunch makes connections between Burroughs, French culture, and traditions of drug-taking through three very different approaches". No mention of what happens at lunch. Aperitif hour, however, offers “Fiona Paton focuses on the spiritual dimension in Naked Lunch by focusing on recurrent imagery of ectoplasm”.
Lawrence Kansas was the one I liked the most, for the photo of Burroughs they chose, for having a show of WSB’s art called “Naked leftovers”, for putting on the program (have to spell it this way) an accordion serenade and “some of the Old Man’s favorite songs on the iPod”.
Lawrence Kansas reminds me of a good book: Driving Mr. Albert by Michael Paterniti – it’s actually Albert Einstein’s brain which he is driving across the US (it's a true story), together with the pathologist who had kept it after the autopsy. This pathologist happened to have lived next door to WSB in Lawrence and they stop in to visit him. I drove through Kansas once and I am sure we stopped in Lawrence for either the world’s deepest well, or the world’s best catfish. Unfortunately it wasn’t when Burroughs was living there. I checked. What do I remember about Kansas? The wind, the cowboy boots, and the way the natives threw around names like "Dodge City", as in "There's a great shopping mall up in Dodge City."
Other things that 1959 brought the world besides Naked Lunch:
1. Picasso was working on the sketches for his "Dejeuner sur l’herbe". He didn’t actually put his brush to the canvas until 1960 but I had to put this in anyway. The Musee d’Orsay had an exhibition this year on the Picasso- Manet Dejeuners.
2. Asterix
3. The first Barbie doll
4. The first Mini
5. The first Aluminum Beer Can
6. The Historic Monkey flight, ie the first time a living being (actually 2) went into space and came back alive. You just know this had to have influenced Burroughs.
Two recommended online reads
And a book to get from the library:
Last words : the final journals of William S. Burroughs
Best books about boxing
When I was growing up I always thought of my father as someone who looked down on sports, but later I realised that it was just team sports he didn’t like. He loved top performers. He watched Wimbledon. He watched the Olympic divers and sprinters and skiers. And he watched boxing. He saw Sonny Liston lose the heavyweight championship of the world to Cassius Clay, and I remember overhearing him say that Sonny Liston had thrown the fight. I wanted to know what it meant, and I guess once I knew that I asked why. Never one to underestimate children, he would not only have mentioned organised crime, but probably attempted an exposition of the Faustian bargain as well.
Well, it was a fascinating riddle to me and it must have lodged itself inside my brain, so that last week, when I was looking up a biography of Jerry Lee Lewis by Nick Tosches on the library catalogue and discovered that he had written a book about Sonny Liston, I found myself rushing upstairs to grab it off the shelf, like the brainwashed agents in that old Charles Bronson spy movie who twenty years later are reawakened by a line of poetry and compelled to go and blow up missile sites.
Nick Tosches is a writer I’ve always liked. In the first photo I saw of him he looked a bit like John Cassavetes (though he doesn’t really) and the first book of his I picked up had a great dedication, with lines like “to those who broke and entered with me / into the cathedral of the heart, / to those who took my back / in right and in wrong.” That’s what his prose is like, Little Italy tough-guy with moments of sentiment but not sentimentalism, and an echo of Dante, except that Dante was never brutal, and he rhymed.
The book is called Night train, after the song Liston liked to work out to, and I read it in two nights. I would have read it in one if I hadn't had to go to work the next day. It’s dark and disturbing, like Sonny Liston, who turns out to have been the archetype of “bad”. I didn't know. The book quotes Liston comparing boxing to a cowboy movie, with the good guys and the bad guys. “’The bad guys are supposed to lose. I change that,’ he had said. ‘I win’.” But Tosches's take is, “He rode a fast dark train from nowhere, and it dumped him at that falling-off place at the end of the line.”
Vice versa, here’s a book I've read which everyone should read: The fight, the book Norman Mailer wrote about the Rumble in the Jungle -- the famous match held in Zaire with which Muhammad Ali won his world championship back from George Foreman. Boxing fans have deemed it the best book ever about boxing, but I just love it for how convulsively funny it is, not to mention exceedingly sharp, and, just often enough, from-the-heart eloquent. It's Mailer totally in command. Here he is on George Foreman:
And lastly, there's Hemingway’s classic, great story about the shadowy world of boxing and the mob, “The killers”, which you can now read online -- hard to believe, if you are acquainted with the Hemingway family’s possessiveness with regard to their precious “brand”, including their attempt to stop the Hemingway look-alike contest in Key West from proceeding as not being respectful enough (or not having paid them enough).
This from the family that had the bad taste to bring us the Ernest Hemingway line of rifles! I saw the advertisement in an U.S. magazine with my own eyes.
Read "The Killers"
And get from the library
Night train by Nick Tosches
Fight club (DVD)
Fight club (the novel)
The fight by Norman Mailer
August 31, 2009
Dedications, again
Happy Anniversary!
Books in the City made its debut one year ago with a post called “Dedicated to the one I love”, honouring the well-written book dedication. Since then I’ve run into a few more good ones and here they are, in celebration of a year in which I’ve really enjoyed the blog! and hope all of you out there reading have too.
A book called 20th century ghosts caught my eye because the author was named Joe Hill, as in “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night”, an old song my father used to sing (as did Joan Baez) about the ghost of a slain union organizer. I flipped through the first pages to see if maybe it was a pen name – and found instead this dedication.
For the pen name, I still don’t know, but think probably so: our very knowledgeable fiction selector told me he is Stephen King’s son. I’m tempted to read the whole book, or at least the story “Pop Art” which Christopher Golden in his introduction says is his favourite, and which opens with these lines: “My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. His name was Arthur Roth, which also made him an inflatable Hebrew, although in our now-and-then talks about the afterlife, I don't remember that he took an especially Jewish perspective."
Cornell Woolrich, author of Rear window, father of noir fiction, alcoholic recluse and tortured soul, dedicated The Bride Wore Black to his typewriter.
3.
Tad Williams, "To my father..."
Tad Williams dedicated the four volumes of his “Otherland” science fiction series like this:
Book 1:
"This Book is dedicated to my father Joseph Hill Evans with love.
Actually Dad doesn’t read fiction, so if someone doesn’t tell him about this, he’ll never know."
Book 3:
"This is still dedicated to you-know-who, even if he doesn’t.
Maybe we can keep this a secret all the way to the final volume."
Book 4:
"My father still hasn't actually cracked any of the books – so, no, he still hasn't noticed. I think I’m just going to have to tell him. Maybe I should break it to him gently. 'Everyone here who hasn't had a book dedicated to them, take three steps forward. Whoops, Dad, hang on there for a second...' "
-- Michael King, in Tread softly for you tread on my life.
Thanks to Steve Braunias for this one.
5.
For H. Rider Haggard fan Kelly (my dedication):
The Faithful but Unpretending Record of A Remarkable Adventure is Hereby Respectfully Dedicated by the Narrator ALLAN QUATERMAIN to All The Big and Little Boys Who Read It
-- H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s mines.
Stephenie's choice
Chalk one up for New Zealand, even if she didn’t know it! From the August 17th entry on the website of Stephenie Meyer, yes, the Stephenie Meyer, the only author to merit her own voice on Auckland City Libraries’ book-buying budget for 2009-2010:
"I didn't have a ton of time to read this summer, but I did discover one really wonderful two-book series. Dreamhunter and Dreamquake by Elizabeth Knox. It is like nothing else I've ever read. The characters are so real, you'll feel like you know exactly what they look like and how their voices sound and what they would say or do in any given situation. More than that, you'll want to hang out with them. Then the world is so amazing and unique. You will want to go there. You will want to walk into "the Place." And you will want to sleep in a dream opera."
I was surprised that with all that gush she wasn’t struck at all by the uncommon New Zealand component, whether of the author or the place. It’s not yelled about, in fact on the first book the publishers didn’t see fit to mention it, but the back cover flap of number 2, Dreamquake, definitely states that Elizabeth Knox lives in Wellington, New Zealand. And as for the setting, an island republic called Southland, settled by the English, with a capital city called Founderston, where there are “bush bees” buzzing around, mossy forests and waterfalls, well, you can see why Wikipedia’s entry for Elizabeth Knox calls it an”alternate New Zealand-like republic”, expanded in the entry on Dreamhunter to “an alternate universe Edwardian version of a New Zealand or Tasmania-like island republic” (I'm guessing that would be the Dream component).
But when we move to the teens, somehow, New Zealand disappears: Teenreads.com unquestioningly declares that Dreamhunter is "set in the beginning of 20th-century Australia”. I’ll refrain from being pedantic about the syntax, but I can’t help wondering if this teen reviewer learned geography at that superb piece of Americana which is the International House of Pancakes restaurant chain (International = 100 American pancake-types plus Swedish pancakes), at one of which a few years back I overheard a vacationing Kiwi family commenting on how New Zealand had been left off the colour-in map of the world on the back of the kiddie menu.
Or was it from one of the many boardgames included in the list “Oh my god, we have fallen off the map OR New Zealand, the amazing disappearing country” on “boardgamegeek.com” which was started by an Aucklander (I am loathe to give the name as I am sure I will do something uncool like think it’s his name when it is actually his cyber persona) noticing that there’s no New Zealand on the Risk gameboard.
I think I only played Risk once or twice in my life, we didn't have it in our house as my parents didn’t see the point of buying any board game more modern than Scrabble, but the little girl next door did, just one of many typical Southern California things she had and we didn’t, come to think of it, such as toy ponies, Dr. Suess books, a television and divorced parents. I didn’t show any talent for it anyway, so thought it a better investment to spend my time lobbying for a Clue game. However Risk appears to have been so popular as to have inspired many more world-map games, involving also timely things like pandemics and historical things like exploration, all bearing the gene for No-New Zealandness, including, ironically, one about 18th century exploration called Endeavour.
Is this the other side of the coin of that comment by someone named Eric Korn in the TLS, who, reviewing the book Spike and Co, related how he had learned with horror that the BBC had inadvertently wiped eighty of the first hundred Goon shows:
“The Saga of the HMS Aldgate, Operation Bagpipes, and The Building of Britain’s First Atomic Cannon, all gone into the dark, unless some Goonophile in Wellington or Ouagadougou has a tape.” (TLS, Feb. 23 2007)
Now what do Wellington and Ouagadougou have in common, you might ask? All I found, in a quick browse of traveler feedback on the internet, is no noted tourist traps.
August 01, 2009
The Price of the Man Booker
The Longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2009 was announced on July 28th. If you haven't already seen it, here it is, including the book which, rumour has it, hasn’t even appeared in print yet -- that would be JM Coetzee's Summertime, which makes it on by droit de seigneur, or, as they call it, fishing a title.
AS Byatt The Children's Book
JM Coetzee Summertime
Adam Foulds The Quickening Maze
Sarah Hall How to paint a dead man
Samantha Harvey The Wilderness
James Lever Me Cheeta
Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer The Glass Room
Ed O'Loughlin Not Untrue & Not Unkind
James Scudamore Heliopolis
Colm Toibin Brooklyn
William Trevor Love and Summer
Sarah Waters The Little Stranger
Here’s what I’ve been doing since I got the news:
1. I put my foot in my mouth in front of Carole Beu of the Women's Bookshop (yes Carole I saw your look, even if I could also see that a minute later you had forgiven me) by saying that I always get Sarah Hall and Sarah Waters mixed up and now it was going to be worse than ever.
2. I had a quick look at the US Indie bestsellers list, the only list I trust, and …unbelievable! – one of the books is on it! That would be… Brooklyn, home to a great bridge, some great Spike Lee movies, and an interesting indie bookstore or two, I’m sure.
3. I had a good chuckle reading the opinion of a British author named Damien G. Walter, writer of weird and speculative fiction (as his blog announces), in a piece he titled “The Booker longlist is ignorant and bigoted". It begins:
In previous years I have compared the Booker judges to the organising committee of a village fete. This year I think it would be fairer to ditch the metaphors and out them as the ethnicaly pure, upper middle class cartel they are. The only praise I can think to heap upon The Booker is that it is at least open in its utter class snobbery and borderline bigotry.
And lets be clear, the reason names such as China Mieville, Ian McDonald, Iain Banks, M John Harrison, Neil Gaiman, Jon Courtney Grimwood or any of the other superlative British authors of speculative fiction are excluded without consideration from The Booker, is nothing to do with quality of writing and everything to do with social discrimination. The Booker Prize and the literary fiction it rewards are the province of a small minded and ignorant cultural elite who are desperate to cling onto status and power.
The phrase “ethnically pure, upper middle class cartel” linked to the Man Booker website where the judges were presented thusly:
“An eclectic line-up of judges was announced on Tuesday 16th December for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction."
Damien G. Walter has a point. Eclectic, you say? Hmm, let’s see:
James Naughtie – BBC broadcaster and academic ;
Lucasta Miller - author of a book about the Brontes;
John Mullan – broadcaster and academic;
Michael Prodger – literary editor and judge of a BBC literary prize;
Sue Perkins – broadcaster and “is filming a BBC show” where she eats offal and cow brains in restrictive corsetry.
Sue would definitely be their only hope to gain eclecticism standing, I say, although I think eclecticism might actually have to be a plural thing.
4. I discovered on speedy.com:
The Price of the Two Nest-eggs:
A Literary prize French, created in 1933 - the very same day of the handing-over of the Prix Goncourt with André Malraux - with the terrace of the coffee the Two Nest eggs by the writer Roger Vitrac and a Bibliothécaire (nb from Karen: means Librarian). They joined together at once a jury of thirteen Auteurs which brought each one 100 francs and selected the Grass of Raymond Queneau.
Raymond Queneau, an Auteur who was obsessed with experimenting with language, would have loved this marvelous piece of writing, created perhaps by automatic online translation, our century’s version of the automatic writing his surrealist friends practiced, or maybe by a modern incarnation of Zazie, the heroine of his most famous, wonderful and funny book Zazie in the metro, about a girl from the provinces who comes to Paris to ride the metro, and can't because there was a strike, and engages with this problem -- and with life in general -- in a slang all her own.
The “Price of the Two Nest-eggs” is actually a certain “Prix des Deux Magots”, a prize sponsored by the famous sidewalk café ("the terrace of the coffee" above) in Saint-Germain-des-Pres where half of literary Paris hung out during the past century, from Hemingway down through Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The other half were at the Café de Flore. Of one of the two, I can never remember which, it was said that if you sat there long enough everyone you knew would walk by. Deux magots does not mean two nest-eggs, or even two maggots; it means the Café's two wooden statues of Chinese merchants.
I hope no one is offended by my laughing at bad Franglais. I mean, if you can't laugh at Franglais, well, what can you laugh at?
And finally... The Price of the Man Booker?
That would be L.50,000, I think. Give or take a sou.
Remembering James K. Baxter
I didn’t make it to Jerusalem
but I heard midsummer thunder shake the weatherboards
of a run-down villa in Grafton.
Once in Vulcan Lane he came toward me
a familiar stranger in the rain
a poet of Aotearoa
he fixed me with the obsidian eye of a leathery tuatara.
His beard was a worn-out broom that had cleared the road to
Jerusalem.
The day I heard he died I flew my heart like a flag at half-mast
With no other way to grieve walked suddenly alone and desolate
beneath the Moreton Bay figs of Albert Park.
This is the start of Bob Orr’s poem “Jerusalem”, from his book Calypso. He's one of my favourite poets (I love the mix of somewhat stoned imagery and straight shots of emotion) and people (though I have only talked to him twice), and he came to read this poem at Poetry Central, our Montana Poetry Day event, where this year we were celebrating James K. Baxter with two brand-new books to hand.
I find it a remarkable book, not just for how much I learned about people and times still largely unknown to me, but for how John’s driving desire to draw insight from “the vast reservoir of memory” out there is permeated by such absolutely genuine modesty. His one theoretical imperative, he says, is “that I should try to write a book that reads truly to the people represented in it.” And finally, “I hope it’s only a first telling of the story rather than a final one.”
When I did get to reading it the other night, the book kept me up until all hours, reading just one more and just one more, until there were no more to read. I turned off the light and had that same feeling that you get after a long journey with train rides, plane rides, all sorts of rides, vending machines, hard benches, watching someone who reminds you of someone, lots of coffees, magazines, finally you’re home, you take off your clothes with the stain from two cities ago, you climb into bed and close your eyes, but the thoughts keep whirling in your head. Who was that person? How did it go again what she said?
In his very, very good introduction, with its few, choice, simply told stories to laugh and cry about, Sam Hunt says that he picked only the poems which really work, the high-octane, read-aloud ones. The ones he can’t forget. Like this one:
Ferry from Lyttelton (1972)
These bare hills have their own non-human beauty,
A country made for angels, not for men.
And the slow bow wash of the ferry
Covers and uncovers the rocks
At the bottom of the cliffs. Always the feeling comes
That one might leap over the side
And sink in the cold water. Not, I think
A desire to kill oneself
But a longing to go back and rest
In the waters of the womb. So, brother,
Button up your coat against the night breeze
Or come and have some toast and coffee
At the curved bar in swivel chairs
Where the waiter is a friend of a friend of a friend.
James K. Baxter poems selected and introduced by Sam Hunt
The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem commune by John Newton
Calypso by Bob Orr
You can read the complete version of Bob Orr's “Jerusalem” on the AUP website
Two Sarahs for the Man Booker
Mrs. Waters is the woman Tom rescues when he comes across her being attacked on a country highway. He offers her his coat, as her dress is all torn away from her extremely white breasts (I went and reread the scene just now), but she refuses it. Tom walks back to town with her, declaring he will walk in front “for I would not have my eyes offend you and I could not answer for my power of resisting the attractive charms of so much beauty”. Then she keeps needing help to get over the stiles, and before long, it’s the “amorous battle”, as the chapter title has it. The dinner they share became, in Tony Richardson's hands, one of the most famous eating scenes in the history of movies. You can see it, entitled "Lusty eating scene" on the food blog Feeding groom, along with the recipe, should you wish to try this yourself.
I loved Tom Jones. STYLO QUO NON ALIUS UNQUAM INTIMA QUI POTUIT CORDIS reads the inscription on Fielding’s tomb: "No other man was so able to unlock with his pen the recesses of the human heart". Apparently it’s poor Latin, written by a British chaplain in Lisbon, where Fielding died, having gone there to recover from indulging too much in food, drink and the labour of literature.
Sarah Waters’s new book, which I have just gotten out, is not a romp but a ghost story. The Little Stranger, it’s called, and it’s an early favourite for winning the Booker Prize. The Literary Review made it sound really good, in the vein of The Turn of the Screw, once again an “only” for me, the only Henry James novel I’ve read all the way through -- I’ve got his other novels in yet another of Calvino's categories: Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First. I just reread The Turn of the Screw this year when we got new copies at the library. What a perfect book! It would suck me in between its covers, I’d get off at my usual bus stop and think for a second something was wrong, all that asphalt and sun glinting on car roofs. It was supposed to be gravel paths, where you would dread to hear a footstep crunch behind you.
The Little Stranger has a great opening line: “I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old.” It promises to be very scary. I'm seeing the narrator as a bit of a William H. Macy. I count the first crunching gravel on page 5.
Julian Dashper 29 Feb 1960 - 30 July 2009
New Zealand is smaller now, the world is smaller.
When we launched our new website, I asked Julian to contribute a book list with some of his favourite books. He had it back to me the very next day. That's what Julian was like.
Divesting herself of her golden shift, and so
Emerging white and exquisite; and I in amaze
See in the sky before me, a woman I did not know I loved,
but there she goes, and her beauty hurts my heart;
I follow her down the night, begging her not to depart.
-- DH Lawrence, Amaze
July 01, 2009
Spunge or sieve? Types of readers
"I like the idea of the Diagram Prize" began the comment from Moocho, who read up on it after my Kafka post in which I made a quip about this award for Oddest Title of the Year. He went on, "My favourite was How to avoid huge ships, something that keeps me up at night." At first glance, the lack of formatting made it seem as though the entire sentence was the title, a very good one at that. Or maybe "How to avoid huge ships, something that keeps me up at night" is really better for a song title, along the lines of "I've got the you don't know the half of it, dearie blues" (the great Gershwin).
"Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers" is the metaphysical-sounding winner of last year's The Diagram of Diagrams, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the prize and inspired by the Booker of Bookers. Or was that the Best of Booker? Anyway, more people voted for the Diagram of Diagrams than the Booker maxima, as it turns out, 8000 something to 7000 something.
I also liked last year's shortlisted "The large sieve and its applications", described as a 350 pg book with many tables and exercises. It's already a Google book (they work fast!) so you can further enjoy such gems among its chapters as "Explicit bounds" and "Random Walks in Discrete Groups".
Among applications for the sieve, we might remember Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was not only the great romantic poet of the dreamy, druggy "Kubla Khan" and the demented and terrifying "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" but an astute social and political commentator as well, who applied it to reading, or rather, to a type of reader. In all he identified four kinds of readers, beginning with the spunge, which I'm pretty sure would be me:
"1. Spunges that suck up every thing and, when pressed give it out in the same state, only perhaps somewhat dirtier.
2. Sand Glasses -- or rather the upper Half of the Sand Glass which in a brief hour assurdely lets out what it has received -- & whose reading is only a profitless measurement and dozeing away of Time.
3. Straining Bags, who get rid of whatever is good & pure, and retain the Dregs
4. and lastly, the Great-Moguls Diamond Sieve -- which is perhaps going farther for a Simile than its superior Dignity can repay, inasmuch as a common Cullender whould have ben equally symbolic. But Imperial or culinary, these are the only good, & I fear the least numerous, who assuredly retain the good while the superfluous or impure passes away and leaves no trace."
(From his 1808 lecture series on Poetry and the principles of taste)
Try Coleridge's Biographia Literaria or Biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions in two volumes from the Central City Library basement stacks.
