Librarians reveal their personal bests

No, not that kind of personal best! The best books they read in 2010, by some of Auckland Libraries' most assiduous readers.

Finishing the hat : collected lyrics (1954-1981) with attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines and anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim 
     -- Rex McGregor

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Much has been written about the era of King Henry VIII but I found this a fascinating account through the character of Thomas Cromwell. I was fully emersed in the physical, social and political environment of that time because of the tremendous research and narrative skill of Hilary Mantel.
     -- Susan Jenkins

So much for that by Lionel Shriver
It is a terrible indictment of the US health care system, plus a great story about love, marriage and how illness affects an entire family. It has a subplot that would scare any reader off having elective cosmetic surgery too.
     -- Alison Fitzpatrick

The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection by Martin Page
I'd go for  this humorous little novella  with its very Morrissey-esque sounding title. Protagonist Virgil is the new anti-hero who goes into a existential tail spin of self-analysis and navel gazing into past relationships. Best read in one sitting.

and
Fever, How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind For 500,000 Years by Sonia Shah
Interesting read looking at the insect that kills one million a year.
     -- Barry O'Callaghan

Room by Emma Donoghue
The perception and psychology of this story that is portrayed through the eyes of the five year old is no less than stunning. Harrowing and tragic, yet softened by the boy's voice and the love from the mother while they endure life locked in an 11 sq foot room.
     -- Di Stodart

Sydney Bridge upside down by David Ballantyne
I totally agreed with Kate de Goldi's opinion in the foreword that this book is an underestimated New Zealand masterpiece. A  surreal vision of an isolated New Zealand coastal settlement, seen through the eyes of a troubled boy.  Sydney Bridge Upside Down is a horse, who figures menacingly in the narrator's nightmares. Strange and creepy stuff!
    -- Robin Whitworth


Hand me Down World by Lloyd Jones
Simplicity of prose, stunningly crafted, yet so much depth.

and
Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall
Quirky tale of polygamist sect leader's bumbling humanity and the pitfalls of living amongst so much oestrogen and warring factions within his harem of women
     --Sue Wilkinson


The Help by Kathryn  Stockett 
An  unputdownable story of the real lives of  black women who serve as domestics in white households in the 1960’s in Mississippi.

and
U is for Undertow  by Sue Grafton
This writer just gets better and better. Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator, is hired to discover what happened to a four year old child some twenty years ago.

and
Every Last One by Anna Quindlen
Beautifully paced family centred novel about what happens when even the most devoted mother plays down her son’s isolation and low self esteem.

and
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonsen
I loved this book from the start to the finish! Life in a typical English village – much divided and completely believable.

and
The Nobodies’ Album by Carolyn Parkhurst
Well told story that keeps you with her all the way. Mother and son fiction.

and
The Misogynist by Piers Paul Read
Funny and plausible story  of retired Jomier who falls in love late in life but can’t lose the habits that got him divorced and single  the last time round.

and
Eleven by Mark Watson
Cleverly written -  focusing on the ways in which a single event or decision not to intervene in a random act affects a group  of people who unknowingly connect with each other.
     -- Hilary Arrowsmith

Literary doppelgangers

New Year's Resolution: Resolve those literary mix-ups 

Does this happen to everyone to have authors you always mix up with another author? Let me say without shame that until just recently I was forever confusing the poets John Berryman and John Ashbery. "What? How can he have a new book of poetry? Didn't he kill himself?" Actually, if it comes to that, at one point I used to get James Merrill mixed up with both of them -- that "err" again, and a long-term partner named David like Ashbery's.

James Merrill got out of the mix when I read about him and David and the Ouija board when Alison Lurie's memoir about them came out -- five hundred pages of poetry dictated by a Ouija board was definitely madness enough to distinguish him forever. My problems with the other two persisted until a friend of mine declared John Berryman to be his favourite poet, which astounded me since of course I confused him with the long-winded, dare I say pompous (just my opinion) John Ashbery.

"No!" said my friend. "He's the womanizing alcoholic who wrote brilliant poetry and killed himself by jumping off a bridge." So then I got a book of his poetry, and it was brilliant (see bottom of post) and guess what, I've got it now! I am even picturing his kind of nerdy specs, his grizzled beard, his amused but world-weary eye, as I write.

It feels so good that I've resolved that the first literary thing I'm going to do in 2011 is to clear up the other cases of literary doppelgangerism which I find so annoying, which would be:

1. Richard Wilbur and Richard Howard

Richard Wilbur:
born 1921
Poet, translator of French literature (Moliere, Racine, Mallarmé)
US Poet Laureate
Pulitzer prize winner

Richard Howard:
born 1929
Poet, translator of French literature (Camus, Baudelaire)
Poet laureate of New York
Pulitzer prize winner

Which one has a French bulldog named Gide, wore capes and hung out with Edmund White?

2. Geoff Dyer and Geoff Nicholson

Geoff Dyer:
born 1958 lives in London
clever British author of both fiction and non-fiction

Geoff Nicholson:
born 1953 divides his time between London and Los Angeles
clever British author of both fiction and non-fiction

Which one wrote Paris Trance and which one wrote Bleeding London? Which one wrote The lost art of walking and which one wrote Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It? 


3. WD Snodgrass and WS Merwin

WD Snodgrass:
American poet, born 1926
wrote a beautiful poem with a lute in it

WS Merwin:
American poet, born 1927
wrote a beautiful poem with a flute in it

Which one looked like an elf, was married to Dido and they were friends of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes?

Answers:

1. Richard Howard

2. Geoff Dyer wrote Paris Trance and Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It and Geoff Nicholson wrote Bleeding London and The lost art of walking

3. WS Merwin

I've definitely got the Richards and the Ws straight now, but I still had to look back at the catalogue for the Geoffs. They're going to take some more work. Maybe someone out there has already devised a system? Please let me know!

In the meantime,here's a modern Inferno from the brilliant John Berryman:

Parting as descent

The sun rushed up the sky; the taxi flew;

There was a kind of fever on the clock

That morning. We arrived at Waterloo

With time to spare and couldn't find my track.

The bitter coffee in a small cafe

Gave us our conversation. When the train

Began to move, I saw you turn away

And vanish, and the vessels in my brain

Burst, the train roared, the other travellers

In flames leapt, burning on the tilted air

Che si cruccia, I heard the devils curse

And shriek with joy in the place beyond prayer.

What I'm reading

Last great reads of 2010

I've just finished off a stack of books (one of those people who read their stacks simultaneously rather than consecutively) in time to collect a new stack for summer and hey, a new year! Hope they'll be as good as these. I loved them all.


Straight life by Art Pepper

The autobiography of a jazz star who was a white man when jazz musicians were black and a drug addict all his life. I had read an excerpt from it when it first came out and was amazed at how powerful a charge this man transmits, this man who was not a writer and in fact did not write the book -- it was born in the form of stories that his second wife (met in rehab) convinced him to tell her while she kept a tape recorder running. This year it occurred to me to suggest the library purchase it so I could finally read the whole thing. What a narrative! I know there are people out there disagreeing with this fact or another, but I say who cares about the facts. Find a more truthful description, if you can, of how you can find yourself taking the wrong turn with no good reason at all, just driving home with the radio playing. As someone in the book notes about his playing, Art Pepper never 'coasts'.


The People’s Act of Love by James Meek

An unidentified male I found myself in a cluster with at the Book Design Awards said he was loving reading this novel about a Czech battalion stranded in wintertime in some far outpost of northern Russia during the Russian civil war. I can’t remember if he mentioned the cannibalism, perhaps he thought it would be out of place as we munched our canapé‎s, or maybe it just didn’t catch my imagination (hard to believe). At any rate, the idea of the lost battalion, desperate to get home, their mad Captain -- a sort of cold-weather Kurtz -- that by itself sounded like a good story. As it turned out to be! A Russian novel sort of good story, in fact, without ever being obsequious to that great genre. Let's say, a kindred spirit.


Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S Thompson

My favourite was the interview by PJ O’Rourke from 1996, because PJ O’Rourke is smart and funny, and because HST comes across best when interviewed by people who are smart and funny.

“What was the first book, the first whole book, you read?”
“Good lord, man – anybody who would remember that is probably in some kind of trouble or lying.”
“No, they say that drug addicts always remember the very first time they had the drug, or alcoholics remember the first drink.”
“Jesus, I think you’re right.”

I remembered the same book from my childhood. You might too. Read the book and find out what it was.

Ask Dr. Mueller by Cookie Mueller

I knew about Cookie Mueller, who had that crazy feeling, from Nan Goldin’s photographs and her cameo appearances in various stories from the New York art and drug scene of the seventies, but I didn’t realize we had her book in the library until I came across it by chance. It collects various pieces of writing by Cookie which she wouldn’t be surprised to learn have dated – she was not someone who was trying to write for posterity.
The sad thing is that there are no later and thus less-dated pieces, because of her early death from AIDS. She certainly went down with banners flying, as befits someone who, as John Waters pointed out in his introduction, didn’t comb her hair for 25 years and still looked beautiful.

Swish:  my quest to become the gayest person ever  by Joel Derfner

This book, besides being really fun to read, taught me an important lesson. I had always thought that cheerleaders were destined to be cheerleaders from birth, that it was not a learnable art. But apparently you can practice yourself into becoming a cheerleader, flips and everything, if you really want to. The other thing this book was notable for was a passage about pain and vulnerability which yes, was his viewpoint from a gay perspective, but which, like all deep insights, will say something to just about everyone. At least it did to me.


Riding toward everywhere by William T Vollman

I was seventeen, the age for dares, and on the return leg of a hitchhiking trip that was somewhat of a dare already (California to Canada and back in a four-day break from University) with a friend, when we met a Gary Snyder-type in Eugene, Oregon who filled us in on how to hop a freight. Did we do it? Of course!

And that was how I came to ride the rails from Eugene to Portland, over the mountains, at night, in an empty boxcar with a wooden floor. I remember this detail because my friend had a new and expensive ski jacket on, a present from a guilt-burdened absentee father, and she kept worrying, as we huddled and hugged on the floor while the wind chill took the temperature down to zero and then below, that a splinter would get into the jacket and ruin it. My teeth were so gritted I couldn’t even say “Your jacket? Our lives! I think we might be going to die of the cold!"

It was thrilling and the view of the dawn over the Portland train yard was thrilling, but it turned out not to be a lark at all. It was life-and-death.

William T Vollman has written a book about trainhopping as the ultimate underground lifestyle. This is the dedication:

This book is dedicated to STEVE JONES,

who never pretended

that he or I were hobos

and who therefore coined the word fauxbeaux,

who turned fifty riding the rails with me,

who was riding the rails with me as I turned forty-seven,

who never made me feel guilty for saying

that this or that train was too fast for me,

and who is the finest Christian

who ever bought me a cigar,

drank my booze

or shouted fuck!

into the diesel-scented night.

Fleeting Rome by Carlo Levi

Memories of Rome in the years of La Dolce Vita, when Vespas roared through the city by day and sheep were herded through at night, by the author of Christ stopped at Eboli. The osteria where Levi ate lunch had seasonal wild asparagus, much better than the market variety. Where did they get it? From an employee of the Ministry of Finance who every day, after clocking in, would head off on his bicycle to hunt asparagus, which he would trade for dinner or wine. One year there was no more. The man had reached compulsory retirement age at the Ministry, and had promptly stopped his true job as well.

Fifty years on: sad literary anniversaries

Books in the City looks back at two sad literary anniversaries of the departing year



The death of Albert Camus 

Camus in 1957

It's fifty years this year since Albert Camus was killed in an automobile accident while travelling from Provence to Paris. He was 46, the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, at the peak of his fame and – see photo – charisma. He had accepted a ride in his publisher’s Facel Vega, a high-speed luxury sports car, a light rain was falling, the car skidded off the road and hit a tree. Camus died instantly, although it took the rescue workers two hours to extricate him from the wreck.

In his briefcase they found his diary, a book of Nietzsche and a copy of Othello, and the manuscript of Le Premier Homme (The First Man). His unused train ticket was in his pocket. I can’t remember seeing it in print myself, so take it for what it’s worth, but I’ve been told that Camus once said that the most meaningless of deaths would be to die in a car accident.


Richard Wright, too 

Fifty years ago, too, and again in France, but this time in a Parisian clinic, the American writer Richard Wright died after being in poor health for years. His body was cremated and the ashes mixed with the ashes of a copy of his novel Black boy, as he had wanted. He was only 52, he was nearly penniless and had spent the last year of his life writing haiku. As an expatriate he escaped the prejudice he experienced back home, but it was one hassle after another and the fire just seemed to dwindle and go out.

You need to read Wright's great novels, Native son and the autobiographical Black boy, to see why this is so sad. In Black boy he tells about how in order to get a library card he had to forge the application using the name of a white co-worker. He was fifteen. The minute he started reading (it was a book by HL Mencken, he of the slashing wit) he was consumed by the desire to be a writer, but immediately as he sat down with pen and paper, he found that the constrictions of his Jim Crow upbringing meant he didn't know what to write.

 He says "I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there were feelings denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger."

Joseph Brodsky's Christmas Poem

I first encountered the poet Joseph Brodsky in the pages of The New York Review of Books, it would have been something to do with St. Petersburg, the city where he was born and raised and which in many ways defined him -- the city where, as he used to say, everything can change (including its name, twice) except its weather and its light.

Even after serving 18 months at hard labour for the crime of "social parasitism" (ie being a poet), and when that didn't deter him from writing poetry, seeing himself diagnosed as schizophrenic by a medical expert of the regime, clearly a menacing development, and despite repeated invitations to emigrate to Israel, Brodsky didn't want to leave St. Petersburg. They had to break into his apartment and get him and put him on a plane; he didn't even know where it was going.

It went to Vienna, and after that he went on to America, became an American citizen and, like his city, changed his name. Fifteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. I happened to visit New York that year, and that was where I encountered him again, in the Strand Bookstore, under the guise of his book of essays, Less than one, which I bought and still treasure. And then, just a few years ago, I found his grave in the beautiful cemetery of San Martino in Venice, near those of Ezra Pound and Diaghilev.

Brodksy ended Less than one with a piece which is a tender eulogy to St Petersburg and a brave one to the memory of his parents. He called it In a room and a half, that being the size of the apartment his family was allotted by the communist officials. And now, the director Andrey Khrzhanovskiy has made a film with this name, based on Brodsky's life and poetry.

I haven't been able to see the movie yet but I found the theatrical trailer on youtube and it looks wonderful. It opens magnificently with the old slave spiritual Go down Moses as the soundtrack, an impeccable choice given how Brodsky described his parents' greatest failure: they weren't able to raise their son to be a slave.

Joseph Brodsky, who would have turned 70 this year, used to write a poem every Christmas. Here is one of them I particularly like, written during his time at hard labour in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia. It surprised me to realise, as I was writing this, that he was only 24 when he composed it. My first thought was that the tone is that of a much older man, which would have been more than understandable, but then I re-read it and thought, well, no, actually. For my money, that's defiance there in the last line.

January 1, 1965

The kings will lose your old address.
No star will flare up to impress.
The ear may yield, under duress,
to blizzards' nagging roar.
The shadows falling off your back,
you'd snuff the candle, hit the sack,
for calendars more nights can pack
than there are candles for.

What is this? Sadness? Yes, perhaps.
A little tune that never stops.
One knows by heart its downs and ups.
May it be played on par
with things to come, with one's eclipse,
as gratefulness of eyes and lips
for what occasionally keeps
them trained on something far.

And staring up where no cloud drifts
because your sock's devoid of gifts
you'll understand this thrift: it fits
your age; it's not a slight.
It is too late for some breakthrough,
for miracles, for Santa's crew.
And suddenly you'll realize that you
yourself are a gift outright.

-- translated by the author

Iain Sharp's favourite beat poem

Iain Sharp couldn't make it to our Day of the Dead Beat Poets, and although his presence was missed I have to say that part of me is glad, because of how he wrote these things down for me instead, meaning I could read them and then read them again, as you will also want to:


Hi Karen

It occurred to me after we spoke that my all-time favourite beat poem is an untitled little one by Lew Welch that goes like this:

Step out onto the planet.
Draw a circle 100 feet round.
Inside the circle are 300 things
nobody understands and,
maybe, nobody’s ever seen.

How many can you find?

Poor Lew Welch! He seems, at heart, to have been such a nice man, but he was plagued throughout his short life by mental problems as well as alcoholism. In May 1971, while staying with Gary Snyder in a remote part of northeast California, he walked into the woods one day with a 303 rifle and killed himself. His body was never found. He left behind a heartbreaking note:

"I never could make anything work out right and now I'm betraying my friends. I can't make anything out of it - never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It's all gone. Don Allen is to be my literary executor- use MSS at Gary's and at Grove Press. I have $2,000 in Nevada City Bank of America - use it to cover my affairs and debts. I don't owe Allen G. anything yet nor my Mother. I went Southwest.
Goodbye. Lew Welch."

Another of my favourite beat poems is the elegy Snyder wrote a couple of years later:

For/From Lew

Lew Welch just turned up one day,
live as you and me. "Damn, Lew" I said,
"you didn't shoot yourself after all."
"Yes I did" he said,
and even then I felt the tingling down my back.
"Yes you did, too" I said—"I can feel it now."
"Yeah" he said,
"There's a basic fear between your world and
mine.  I don't know why.
What I came to say was,
teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles.  All other cycles.
That's what it's all about, and it's all forgot."

A footnote: the birth name of Huey Lewis (of "Hip to be Square" fame) was Hugh Anthony Cregg. He changed his surname to Lewis as a tribute to the stepfather who helped raise him -- Lew Welch.

Cheers,
Iain

Day of the Dead Beat Poets

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..."


Do you need a reason to celebrate the great Beat poets? Well no, but anyway we had one. It's 55 years since Allen Ginsberg gave his first impassioned public reading of "Howl", the poem which "knocked the sides out of things", in the words of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was there to hear it and the first to publish it, the next year. Last week we honoured the occasion at Central Library with the first antipodean "Day of the Dead Beat Poets", an inebriating evening of readings from the work of the dead (and some still-living) Beat poets.

Besides us hip librarians, we had that born-to-be-a-beat poet Bob Orr who, in the vein of Dean Moriarty travelling 3000 miles just to see me, took the day off work to be able to come in and gave a transcendental reading which included his fabulous poem -- which I was going to read if he didn't -- about panel-beating Neal Cassady's car, we had Michele Leggott and Jack Ross, among the public we had an American who grew up across the river from Paterson NJ and gave us a poem full of Beats and William Carlos Williams who had once treated his father which blew us away, we had a truck-farmer from San Jose California, we had Mel with burgundy hair, we had a guerrilla poet. We even had a drifter, whom I thought we might have group-hallucinated into being, so much did his appearance suggest a down-at-heel Dennis Hopper (who, aficionados will know, used to hang out with Allen Ginsberg).

It would have made Allen Ginsberg happy to know he was the catalyst for such a great evening. In the build-up to the event I read a few of the many books which have been written about him, or the Beats in general, since his death; I can recommend I Celebrate Myself: the somewhat private life of Allen Ginsberg, a thick biography by Bill Morgan, who knew Ginsberg from having worked on his archives with him, Beat, by Christopher Felver - more style than content but fun to look through and also it's pleasurably brand-new and shiny -- and The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963 by Barry Miles, long-time chronicler of the Beats, which has a wonderful story about Ginsberg and Corso, stoned out of their minds, listening to a tape-recording of a performance by Antonin Artaud, the avant-garde actor/playwright/director, and being so deeply moved by its newness and strangeness they went to replay it, only to realise that they had been listening to it backwards, by mistake.

But my favourite of all the Ginsberg stories I read, the one which for me expresses the essence of the Ginsberg I love, comes from the website of Larry Keenan, a student of Michael McClure's who became a photo-documenter of the Beats. It goes like this:

"Once when I was visiting Allen in his apartment he asked me if I would like some coffee. Having said "Yes," he presented me with a metal bowl with coffee in it. The bowl seemed strange (like a dog dish) and I nursed the coffee to cool it down. Soon he started asking "Are you finished with that, man?" I would say "No, not yet" and after awhile I started to feel uncomfortable because the bowl seemed important to him. When I finally said "Yes," he grabbed the bowl away -- threw the remaining coffee in the sink and sat down with the bowl for his breakfast cereal. I was using his only bowl."

-- "Breakfast in his apartment" by Larry Keenan

one brown box

Unlike the way it always seems to happen in fairy tales, I was not heading off to market to sell the family cow when I stumbled onto good fortune the other day, but walking home from a K Rd art gallery. Feeling a bit disjunctive in the bright sun after emerging from the cool shadows of the Michael Lett Gallery where I had been watching four green-hued videos involving night, dark water and saturation at Campbell Patterson’s “Orewa” show, I went right past an open doorway beyond which stood a big empty brown box before the feeling of intrigue a big empty brown box still manages to inspire in me, even if with a bit of a delay compared to once upon a time, made me stop, turn around, go back and peer inside.

The open door was that of the objectspace gallery and the big brown box was part of an exhibition by Bronwyn Lloyd and Karl Chitham called “one brown box”, all about storybooks and fairy tales.

Everyone whose heart stirs at the thought of fairy tales should go see this marvellous exhibition. Starting from the plainest structure with the most unlimited imaginative potential, the brown box, “one brown box” illustrates five classic fairy tales with sculptures and models made entirely from boxes and paper, such as a tiny canopy bed made by Bronwen Lloyd with a real pea (I asked Bronwen) on the pillow, an entire castle for the Steadfast Tin Soldier and, most amazing of all, Karl Chitham’s “King’s Tower” from the “Twelve Dancing Princesses”, which is a tower and a King’s face, too, perched high on a wall for all the world like a cardboard version of a river god grotesque in one of those mannerist stone grottoes in the gardens of old Italian villas.
There are also fairy tales retold from the point of view of minor characters (eg "Snow White: The Mirror’s Story”), an I Spy Cabinet and a Cabinet of Curiosities, and a wonderful display of Jack Ross’s collection of fairy tale books, with one of the nicest signs I have ever seen in an art show letting you know that you are welcome to pick them up and look at them, along with a written piece by Jack called “A Short History of Fairytales”.

I was happy to see Jack mention Italo Calvino’s book of traditional Italian fairy tales, which I was given as a child and read many times over, with no knowledge of Calvino’s literary status but a keen appreciation for their whimsy -- I remember chick peas which turned into children -- and for the figs, dates and pomegranates with which the stories were festooned, so … southern compared to those tales with little match girls freezing to death or bears bursting into houses to get out of the torment of snow.

Jack’s piece is reprinted in the brown paper-covered exhibition ‘catalogue’, which makes it possible for me to end with this wonderful quote from Dr. Johnson with which Jack introduces it:

“Memory once interrupted is not to be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.”

-- Dr. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775).

The show is open until December 18th, at object space, 8 Ponsonby Road.

A glossary of hard-boiled slang

Last month the mouthpiece I got taking care of business for me out in California, he lets me know we’re behind the eight-ball. “You got to be straight with me, Vinny.” I tell him. “What does it mean? Are we jake or are we in a jam?”

Actually what I said was “Vinny, every time someone says ‘we’re behind the eight-ball’, I never know, is that good or bad?”  Sadly un-hardboiled, but what’s a girl to do?

Well. Not long after that, compiling a hard-boiled crime bookmark for our Libraries guys promotion, what did I come across but “Twists, slugs and roscoes: a glossary of hard-boiled slang” by William Denton, a web librarian in Toronto (hey, isn't that the same place the guy was from who made the list of Captain Haddock’s curses? Is this something to do with weather?). There it was, "behind the eight-ball", right between “beezer” (nose) and “bent car” (stolen car). If only I'd have known, it would have been eggs in the coffee.

According to Erle Stanley Gardner, in "Getting away with murder", a piece he wrote for The Atlantic which Denton reprints, that genius Dashiell Hammett’s dazzling command of criminalese was gained not so much from his time as a Pinkerton op, as we all thought, but from slang dictionaries. Apparently he even got the quintessential “shamus” from a dictionary, and here’s the startling claim: it’s not Irish, from Seamus, the cop on the beat, as I always thought, just as everyone did who’d ever seen a James Cagney movie or read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but Jewish-American, although the precise origin escaped Gardner, to his frustration.

What? Shamus is Jewish?

I did some sleuthing around and it looks as though it might be true. An article published a few years back in the Jewish Daily Forward, “Bogie speaks Yiddish”, makes a convincing case that 'shamus’ comes from the Yiddish word for the synagogue beadle, “shammes”,  the person who knows everyone’s business, or, as the proverb has it, "I don’t need to know him," Ikh ken dem shammes un der shammes ken di gantze shtot, “I know the shammes and the shammes knows the whole town.”

An Irish version of  'shammes', pronounced with a long 'a' like the ubiquitous Seamus, did sprout on the streets of New York. But, reports the article (whereby its endearing title), in the great Howard Hawks film version of  Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, when Humphrey Bogart is asked what he does and replies “I’m a shamus”, he gives it the Yiddish pronunciation, rhyming it with Thomas. Always a class act, Bogie.

In the book, although Eddie’s “pug” calls Philip Marlowe a shamus, Marlowe never calls himself one. What he says is “I’m a sleuth”. Raymond Chandler is one of my favourite writers, and I've read everything he ever wrote. He spent his final years in my home town of La Jolla, which he called 'Esmeralda' in the book he set there, Playback. It's not a good book, but then he was in bad shape, adrift on a sea of alcoholism, having found no anchor to replace his beloved Cissy, pink-rinsed curls and all.

My mother reiterated this when I checked the address and found out it was next door to our dentist (a sort of Chandlerian character with a mustache who would be smoking a cigar as you settled into the chair, although he wasn't illegally dispensing drugs ending in -caine as Chandler's dentists do, at least as far as I know), and asked if she'd ever seen him. "I know he didn't go out much, but you might have caught sight of him through the window". "I don't think so dear, in those years he was really always horizontal" she replied.

*     *     *

'Tall, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘I didn’t mean to be.’

Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

'Handsome too,’ she said, ‘And I bet you know it.'

I grunted.

'What’s your name?’

‘Reilly,’ I said. ‘Doghouse Reilly’.

‘That’s a funny name.’ She bit her lip and turned her head a little and looked at me along her eyes. Then she lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.

‘Are you a prizefighter?’ she asked, when I didn’t.

‘Not exactly. I’m a sleuth.’

-- from The Big Sleep, first published 1939

Galileo's finger points at the heavens

Four hundred years ago this year Galileo Galilei published his Sidereus Nuncius, The Starry Messenger, described by him on its title page as "revealing great, unusual, and remarkable spectacles, opening these to the consideration of every man, and especially of philosophers and astronomers, as observed by Galileo Galilei, Gentleman of Florence, with the aid of a spyglass lately invented by him".

Or, as Bertolt Brecht put it in his play The Life of Galileo, "Today is the tenth of January, sixteen hundred and ten. Mankind will write in its journal: Heaven abolished."

An exciting event marks this anniversary. The Museum of the History of Science in Florence has long been the proud owner of one of Galileo's fingers, the third finger, to be exact. During the transfer of Galileo's body to the Church of Santa Croce after his supporters had finally gotten permission, something like 100 years after his death, for him to be buried on consecrated ground, one of the eminent intellectuals, aristocrats and freemasons who was present had sliced off three of Galileo's fingers. Two went missing (my uncle, who once worked for NASA, suggested that they had them) but the third was right there on display in the Museum, in a glass chalice.

www.atlasobscura.com

I tried to go see it last year when I was in Florence but every time I tried to get there the Museum was closed. As all kinds of museums seem to be closed all the time in Italy, I didn't dwell too much on it. But it turns out it was closed because it was undergoing renovations in order to reemerge for the 400th anniversary of The Starry Messenger, newly renamed the Galileo Museum, now the proud owner of - get this - all three fingers! Yes, the other two fingers have been found!

Two new biographies of Galileo have come out to coincide with the 400th anniversary of The Starry Messenger.

Galileo by JL Heilbron, from Oxford University Press, is a major new biography which captures Galileo the humanist, passionate reader of Ariosto and defender of Dante, as well as Galileo the mathematician and scientist.

Always surprising when this happens after so many years. In Galileo: watcher of the skies (Yale University Press) David Wootton draws on Galileo's at times "self-censored and sly" letters to reveal such things as a previously unknown illegitimate daughter and evidence refuting the idea that Galileo was ever a good Catholic.

And finally, if you love beautiful illustrations, get The Starry Messenger , a picture book for all ages by the fabulous author/illustrator Peter Sis.

A final note. This is about Galileo, not Brecht, but I have to say that The Life of Galileo is a great read, full of Brechtian wit, intellect and revolutionary spirit (no pun intended). I've just been down to the basement to get our copy (noting that we have it in both German and English, even) and I've been sitting here reading it instead of finishing this.

First scholar: Signor Galileo, you have dropped something on the floor.
Galileo: No, Monsignor, it fell up to me.
Fat prelate: Impudent rascal.

If you don't like reading plays, you can get it from the library on DVD, directed by Joseph Losey or as an e audiobook with Stacy Keach.

Interview with the Sheehan Bros.

Jo Lo from our web team recently interviewed Kelly and Darren Sheehan, authors of The Inhabitants, a superhero/fantasy series about a boy who discovers he has magical powers, and travels to another universe full of hipsters and slackers, pit stops and digressions.  The Inhabitants picked up the Best Writing honour at the 2010 Eric Awards for New Zealand comics in March.


What inspired The Inhabitants?


Kelly: Lots of things. The original idea for The Inhabitants was that everything in it would be ‘stolen’. Samples culled from whatever we thought was cool. It didn't quite work out like that, but a list of inspirational sources would include Zenith (a superhero comic by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell), England’s Dreaming by John Savage, SJD, Dimmer, Wilco, Alan Moore and Alan Davis's Captain Britain, Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising series, Philip K Dick, Warren Ellis's brainstorming about comics in various essays and reviews he has written (most of which are online), The Matrix, Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, Akira, Joss Whedon's Buffyverse, the sense of place in any novel by Robert Stone, William Gibson's crystalline writing and loads of coffee. Oh, a retrospective inspiration, if I had read it before I started the series, was Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. It's the best book I've read in the last 10 years. It's so digressive that it makes The Inhabitants straightforward and to the point.

Darren: I wanted to tackle a more ambitious project on a wider scope at the time I was reading England’s dreaming by Jon Savage. It's a book stuffed full of ideas and history and it really fuelled the initial charge at The Inhabitants.

How did you get started in the graphic novel world?


Kelly: Darren and I started work on our first comic around 1996. It was a short mini-comic called The Long Man. We went on to complete six Long Man comics before we started The Inhabitants.

Does your job at the libraries help with graphic novel work?


Kelly: It helps in that you work in an environment where you see inspiring things – novels, DVDs, CDs – on a regular basis. However it sometimes works the other way around, in that there is a danger that you become overwhelmed by 'stuff' and part of you begins to think why bother adding to it?

Do you have a writing process or routine?

Kelly: Unfortunately I don't. I'd like to be a disciplined, methodical person, but I'm not. The writing of The Inhabitants was a piecemeal process with time grabbed here and there. That's part of why it took so long to finish. Being a husband and a dad only intensified this personal shortcoming though my wife is very supportive in helping me find time.

What's the history and inpiration behind all the pictures in Inhabitants, Longman, Go Gorillas?

Darren: The Longman was the first comic Kelly and I attempted together so we were finding our style and working out how to tell a story and create a world and populate it with characters. Go Gorillas was a way of doing one-page stories and experimenting with form. I was thinking Spy vs Spy with evolution thrown in the mix as a backbone. Those strips are really inspired by the work of Martin F Edmond. The Inhabitants was Kelly and me taking on a more ambitious scope of storytelling and really rolling up our sleeves and do some hard-out worldbuilding.

Any favourite comic books/series?

Kelly: Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, Zenith, Bible John, JLA-Rock of Ages, Seven Soldiers, All Star Superman and most of Final Crisis. Alan Moore's Captain Britain, From Hell, Promethea, V for Vendetta. Akira and Domo by Katsuhiro Ōtomo. Jamie Hernandez's Locas. Anything by Taiyo Matsumoto, Timothy Kidd or Sophie Mcmillan. Mike Mignola's Hellboy. Jim Woodring’s Frank stories. Tintin. Bone by Jeff Smith. 2000ad. Charley's War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun. Jared Lane's Progress.

Darren: Too many, but off the top of my head, anything by Frank Quietly eg All Star Superman, The Authority, Flex Mentello, We 3 etc.  The Invisibles, Zenith, The Biologic Show by Al Columbia, Crickets and Poor Sailor by Sammy Harkhem, Progress by Jared Lane, a New Zealand comics artist based in Christchurch. Anything by Tim Kidd, another great New Zealand artist.

Does winning make you think of making the series into an animated feature/TV series?


Kelly: The thing I like about doing comics is that you can get it done and finished and out there. Filmmaking is such an expensive and complex process that anyone I know who wants to make movies is still waiting to be given the chance. If someone was interested I'd take their cash, but I'd probably stand waaaayyyy back from the production process.
What do you think of the recent spate of comic-based films out there e.g. Iron Man, Watchmen, Batman, Spiderman?
Kelly: Some are good, most are bad. I really like both Hellboy movies and the first two Spiderman movies are almost perfect. I refused to see Watchmen.

Working on anything new at the moment?

Kelly: Yeah, mostly short things and one longer piece. We might put out an anthology next. We have also started on a weird-dreamy-fantasy series.  The idea is that we will work on it slowly over a couple of years, perhaps putting one out each year-as a kind of break from the anthology.

Darren: I’m just finishing work on a set of illustrations for a novel by Mike Johnson called Travesty. It’s being published later in the year by Titus books.

Any pearls of wisdom for the budding comic writer/graphic artist?


Kelly: Just do it! Remember you don't need someone else's permission. Nothing’s going to happen if you sit around waiting for someone to ask you to produce your masterpiece. If you want to approach publishers overseas, you’re better off having something in your hand than just telling them about your really, really good idea.  
 
Darren: Always keep a sketchbook to record those stray thoughts or inspirations.
How does the comic book publishing world work in NZ? Or is self-publishing the norm in NZ?

Kelly: Self-publishing is the norm. There are some exceptions to the rule. Everyone pretty much makes it up as they go along with varying degrees of support from New Zealand’s eccentric comics community.

I see Central City Library in Volume 1. Are there other buildings in the city you've included in The Inhabitants? E.g. I thought I recognised the Carlisle building on Richmond Rd in it? (I could be wrong).


Darren: Yeah, the whole series is really informed by old buildings in Auckland as a backdrop, when I was initially coming up with sketches for the Great old city nothing was really working so I started taking photos of old building and chopping and dropping them in as the street scapes. There are a lot of buildings on Symonds street, the inner city, Mt Eden Road, parts of Albert Park, the Art Gallery interiors and exteriors, a wrought iron fence here, an abandoned staircase there. I think some of it harks back to growing up in Auckland and coming across to the central city on the ferry from Devonport in the weekend  when everything was closed on a Sunday. That deserted empty feeling.

Do you base the characters/character names on people you know? E.g. I know an TV editor called Tibor, and the Tibor character shows up in Volume 3.


Kelly: There are some real people in our cast of thousands (well, actually, more like dozens). The Auckland graffiti artist Deus plays himself in one scene, (and then we kill him), also Auckland band Golden Axe are the inspiration for the mostly robot band in the background of the party scene. There are characters who are sampled from other strips and sources (mostly with permission). Tibor and his crew are taken from MF Joyce and Dominic Correy's 'I Agree 49%'. There are also a couple of Timothy Kidd and Sophie McMillan's characters here and there, and one of Karl Wills's anti-social school girls. And we  also sampled the Jimmy Dynamite character (and in another story the character the Glasgow Pixie) from a couple of Playstation '3rd Place' ads (can be found here and here).

Charlotte says "We're on the edge of something that consumes worlds and suns, whole places and times, whole dimensions" - is this some sort of metaphor?


Kelly: It's as close as I get to a metaphor, but since it’s a superhero comic it’s mostly just a cosmically omnivorous, sentient universe.

-- Jo Lo, Online content editor, Auckland City Libraries

Talking Poetry

The launch of 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry

Paula Green and Harry Ricketts have been incubating this wonderful book for a long time and on September 17th ten invited poets, plus Paula and Harry, very good poets themselves, spent an evening at the library to celebrate its arrival by talking poetry and reading poetry for an assorted public of fans and friends (also fans).

I am rarely able to truly take in poems I hear being read (an exception might be the old recordings of Yeats sonorously tolling his beautiful lines, one by one, like majestic breakers rolling in, not to mention the dramatic rolling of the r's) because I’m one of those people who has to see the poem on the page. I need to be able to gaze at the whole as I zoom in on the part, visualize the verses and slip from one to the next rather the way falling leaves descend floating first to one side then to the other, to finally catch and hold perfectly still for a fraction of a second before landing just there and nowhere else.

But Paula’s genial idea of having everyone mix talk and poetry unexpectedly made it work for me. It should be de rigueur for readings – although I suppose you’d need to  have poets who are interesting talkers, like Sonja Yelich, whose chosen topic was erotica (I loved it and I bought her book Get Some, the only book of poetry I’ve ever owned with a US Marine on the cover), or Anna Jackson, offbeat and tender, or Robert Sullivan being wry about our setting, Central Library, where he once worked, and offering up several surprising poems, including this one which stole my heart, from his new book Cassino City of Martyrs / Città Martire:

The Dalai Lama’s Smile
brings one to me when I think about him

99 Ways is a gorgeous book, thick and heavy, a bright orange cover pleasingly devoid of rural highways and sombre beaches – against that orange? -- nothing figurative at all, in fact, just giant white handwriting as if a mad housepainter suddenly decided to write a scrap of poetry on the wall with his huge whitewash brush (the lettering is the work of Athena Sommerfeld, who designed one of my favourite last year's book covers, the little book from AUP of 50 James K. Baxter poems selected by Sam Hunt). When you open it, the paper is sweet-smelling and shiny, a photograph-type quality which amazingly doesn't glare at me when I put the book on my kitchen table under the old hanging lamp we keep meaning to replace. It is dense with text in a small but classic font, poems in a more rarified and artful font which slows your reading down just the right amount, and photos of poets and their books.

As I skip around in it – the only way most of us can approach a book like this -- I keep encountering the moments which have marked the chapters of my New Zealand life.

“Oh look, there’s CK Stead’s book with the writing in the shape of a dog that I always chose for the new books display."

“Oh look, The loop in Lone Kauri Road, that I photocopied the poem from, when Jen was living on Lone Kauri Road...”

“Oh look, Rain, the first New Zealand poem I read which took my breath away.” 

“Oh look, The Long Road to Tea Time”, that had the poem about Ursula and Gudrun in their Minnie Cooper shoes which had just been used for a poetry display when I came to work at Central, and I was wearing Minnie Cooper shoes at the time, and I pinned the poem up on the wall by my desk.”

“Oh look, a photo of Bob Orr without his cap. And look at this poem from Valparaiso, watermelons cut in half revealing ‘the cool pink of dawn and small dark boats a long way out to sea’!  I have to get Valparaiso!” 

Here is how Paula opens the last chapter of the book, which she calls "Ways into Writing (New Zealand) Poetry". I like it because I have something like this too, mine is when I'm driving home and cross the Ponsonby ridge at sunset, heading down into Grey Lynn, and suddenly see the view out over the water towards Te Atatu, every day a free show, unexpected and utterly unlike the one of the day before.

“Whenever I leave home I have to drive along a ridge with Auckland City and the Sky Tower visible in the distance on one side and a smidgeon of Tasman Sea on the other. My eyes are always drawn to the ocean because it seems like two tablespoons of poetry on the horizon. Like a poem, this visual magnet depends upon set ingredients (water, salt, sky) and then transforms them to strikingly different effect each day. And like so many poets facing something utterly magnificent, I wonder how words can do justice when the view itself seems to be poetry enough. My body tingles, my breath catches and I feel moved as I absorb the ocean, yet I have never written a Tasman Sea poem."

"Each day I pass this sea view, I choose a single word that captures its essence: bloated, translucent, smudged, skinny, gone, swollen, blue. How then does the world become poetry? How do we face the unsayable – the world’s largenesses (love, death, beauty, truth, tragedy (and the world’s particulars (things, daily routines, daily relations) – and produce poems? Trawling through the writings of poets, it is clear that the ways into writing are as rich and varied as the ways into reading poetry.”

Although the back of the book says the 100th way is “your own unique take” on appreciating poetry, I like what Elizabeth Smither said in the Sunday Star Times:

“Inspiration is unconfined. You write with all you’ve got in order to find out what it is you’ve seen or felt or experienced… New Zealand needs poets and this book leaves a gap for you. You could be the 100th.”