Well, for me at least, coffee and 19th century French potboilers. Coffee that he prepared Turkish fashion, but infusing the grounds in cold water first to make it even stronger, and, why not, diminishing the amount of water until the coffee was a thick as soup, to then drink it on an empty stomach.
"And then the mind is aroused, ideas pour out like the regiments of the Grand Armée over the battlefield, and the battle begins. Memories come charging in with flags flying; the light cavalry of comparisons extends itself in a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic hurries along with its ammunition train, and flashes of wit bob up like sharpshooters..." he wrote in his Treatise on Modern Stimulants.
Meanwhile, as his biographer André Maurois put it, "The paper gets covered with ink like the battlefield with black powder, the books get written and the author's heart suffers." This for sixteen hours at a stretch. Balzac seems to have drunk himself to his death on his coffee, dying at only 51, but into those 51 years he packed many lifetimes. Maurois again: "Balzac was by turns a saint, a criminal, an honest judge, a corrupt judge, a minister, a fop, a harlot, a duchess, and always a genius."
Or as another author fascinated by Balzac, V.S. Pritchett, put it in his biography, Balzac was "appetite itself" in an era (post-revolutionary France) in which "appetite was the note of the day".
My appetite for Balzac has been whetted by the work of getting ready for our upcoming Balzac celebration ("Balzac, baguettes and brie" at Central City Library, Wed. Aug. 29, 6:00 pm) and by the enthusiasm of Nicholas Reid, the historian, critic, and passionate Balzac reader and scholar who will be leading the show, assisted by Iain Sharp and, slightly, myself.
I found the Maurois and Pritchett biographies in the fantastic Central City Library basement and have them here on my desk.
The Pritchett is densely illustrated with photos of Balzac's manuscripts, writing sets, dolls (read the book) and coffee pot, also engravings of Parisian soirées and reproductions of Balzac caricatures and portraits, even a statue, but not Rodin's famous bronze which I just last month saw at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where, oddly, it stands in what is basically the approach to the stairwell. People stream by chatting or consulting their maps, paying it no attention. Except me, of course, I was circling it like an alert coyote, trying to capture all its dramatic mass with my iPad's camera and failing, as you can see.
I'm never sure if people read 19th century French authors anymore, Iain Sharp mused to me the other day. Well, when Vintage Classics asked all the Orange Prize winners what book they would pick to pass on to future generations, Rose Tremain picked Balzac's Eugenie Grandet, saying 'This brilliant but devastatingly sad novel moved me so much, I began it again the moment I got to the end'. And when George Plimpton asked John le Carré who his favourite authors were, Balzac topped the list. (A great interview, one of the Paris Review's great "The Art of Fiction" series of author interviews, which you can read in the Review's online archives.)
Nicholas Reid has a case to make for Balzac being the most unknown of the great French novelists, but actually the greatest of them all, the French equivalent of Dickens, and no man could receive higher praise from Nicholas. So if you've already read The Three Musketeers and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, maybe it's time to give Balzac a try. I've picked The Magic Skin, Balzac's precursor to The Portrait of Dorian Gray, as the first Balzac novel I'm going to read. Oh, and I've decided to take Pritchett's Balzac, too. I need to find out if the lady whom Balzac so desired to come "perch" on the fifty-foot divan which was the centrepiece of this huge, extravagant, man's apartment ever did.
Check out Reid's Reader, Nicholas Reid's blog of book reviews and comment.
Thanks to Beattie's Book Blog, the homepage of the New Zealand Book Community, where I encountered both the Rose Tremain and John le Carré testimonies.
August 25, 2012
What's Balzac famous for again?
July 27, 2012
Bob Orr, National Poet
This is one of my favourite Bob Orr poems, from his book Calypso, which we launched a few years back at another Poetry Central:
Samoa
I never did get to visit the grave
of Robert Louis Stevenson.
I wandered aimless about Apia's ramshackle markets
tasted a watermelon sliced open with a warm machete
drank the nectar of a green coconut beneath a pineapple sun
drank Vailima beer with a priest in a park
bought a fish from a boy on the side of the road
drank more beer at Aggie Grey's with the sad ghost of Marlon Brando.
But as for Robert Louis Stevenson
who could tell a palagi tourist about a man who lived on a mountain?
A very puzzled bus driver told me anyway he could be sleeping.
At Papa's fale the kids played outside on family graves
Papa sang away to himself on the porch
across the road a church was asleep until White Sunday
a pig nosed half-heartedly through broken coconut husks
a lizard slipped in and out of a crack in the ceiling's memory.
It kept a count I'm sure of every breath that I was taking
but could not recall for me the man of treasure island.
In the suddenness of the evening
the Pacific Ocean's cool machete split the sun in two
and at the same time just as sharply
divided what I know from what
I thought I knew.
July 16, 2012
Janet Charman, National Poet
Here's one of her poems which I found in that wonderful book Contemporary New Zealand poets in performance, where you can also hear her read it on the accompanying CD.
going to work
darkness dispersing
the sky fills
with light
rain falls
the heavy weight of a hollow boat
leaves my heart
(2007)
July 10, 2012
John Newton, National Poet
John Newton is another of the poets who will be reading at Poetry Central, our annual celebration of National Poetry Day. The appointment is for July 27, at 5:30 pm, at Central City Library.
Here's one of John's poems from his book Lives of the poets:
Townes van Zandt at the Mangy Moose
'Hey Townes, play us something cheerful!" Oh man,
how did it come to this (a restaurant in Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
each night the same bunch of snow-dazzled ski bums
and tourists)? Not that the hecklers mean any harm: he works it
into a small routine ('Hey, these are the cheerful songs --
you don't want to hear the rest of them!'). Fiction, of course.
There are no others. Each song's a miracle that makes him
feel primed like a piston. But once, just once,
he'd like to explain to them (C'mon, stick to the goofy jokes),
tell them the story of Skinny Dennis, dying on Sunset
Beach with his boots on. Or try out his version of Galveston
O Galveston (Damn, he always loved that song!),
how he doesn't remember the sea waves crashing,
only the chlorpromazine and the forked lightning.
July 03, 2012
Murray Edmond, National Poet
Getting the word out about Poetry Central, our upcoming National Poetry Day celebration, taking place at Central City Library on July 27th, at 5:30 pm. Here's a wonderful poem by Murray Edmond, one of the eleven poets who will be reading from their work:.
Rhapsody in pink
all we had was cars
we hopped from foot to foot
rustic rock'n'roll
fever at a puritan wake
fumbling for a kiss
lacking both a capital
or a French letter
nevertheless our imaginary
start
drove us round the lake
drove round and round the lake
and we painted all our nails
kind of low-brow posh
we heaped coals on our lips
and saw the mystic sun
ends of the earth
that place was called
-- from Walls to kick and hills to sing from, a comedy with interruptions by Murray Edmond (2010)
June 19, 2012
Dear Heart: 150 New Zealand Love Poems
Dear Heart is the title of the entrancing and surprising anthology of New Zealand love poems which Paula Green (co-editor with Harry Ricketts of that other fine book, 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry) has put together with her usual keenness and care. I say "entrancing and surprising" because I wasn't expecting -- and was entranced by the idea -- that the love poems would have as their objects, besides the classic beloved, a child, an Auntie, a bicycle.
Paula will be presenting her book in the Whare Wānanga at Central Library tomorrow evening. Twelve special-guest poets will be along to celebrate love poetry and Paula's book by reading their work to us. They are Angela Andrews, Janet Charman, Murray Edmond, Riemke Ensing, Kevin Ireland, Stephanie Johnson, Michele Leggott, Renee Liang, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Kiri Piahana-Wong, John Pule and NZ Poet Laureate Ian Wedde.
As happens with love objects, the form of the book is as bewitching as the contents, with illustrations by New Zealand artists Dick Frizzell, Michael Hight, Gregory O'Brien, John Pule and John Reynolds.
The Bicycle
by James Brown
I have always been lucky.
When I was seven
my parents gave me
a red bicycle.
I rode it every day until
it became a part of me.
It had a basket on the front,
and my father attached a bell
to make doing the deliveries
more noticeable.
Pedalling up hills
pushed me so far inside my head
that only reaching the top
could bring me back out.
Going down, my mouth would open
as the world became flocks
of many-coloured birds
soaring into flight.
I loved that bicycle.
Lying in bed listening
to rain sheet against the window
and knowing that tomorrow
it was Monday,
I would get up and go
into the hall and stare at it,
consoled by the standing
of its beautiful silence.
June 17, 2012
Happy Bloomsday!
Today is June 16th and that means it's Bloomsday, the day people around the world celebrate the author James Joyce and his great novel Ulysses by getting together to read from the book, which follows everyman Leopold Bloom on his wanderings (thus "Ulysses") around Dublin on June 16th, 1904. I'm heading off to a Bloomsday celebration organised by Dean Parker at the Thirsty Dog on K Rd, starting in a few hours, featuring The Jews Brothers, Linn Lorkin and George Henare, with readings by Brian Keegan.
Even if you can't make it to a celebration tonight, you could get out your copy of Ulysses and reread a chapter or two, if you are already one of the converted, or you could check out a copy from the library and have a taste, if you are not. It is a genius book, fantastically comic (perhaps above all comic, something I notice now when I read it, but didn't so much when I first read it as a teenager), poetic, literary, revolutionary, full of humanity, by many considered the greatest novel of the twentieth century.
I'll end with the finale of that feat of writing which has entered literary history as "Molly Bloom's soliloquy"; the long stream-of-consciousness monologue spoken by our everyman's Penelope, sensual, bawdy, rushing like a river.
O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.
May 22, 2012
Post-festival thoughts: what visiting writers take away
“The tumult and the shouting dies, the captains and the kings depart.”
As do the writers. The international stars of AWRF 2012 have departed along with the golden gnomes who flanked their armchairs on the stage of the ASB Theatre, although the loss of these last might be assuaged by the arrival of by a giant gold-trimmed carousel outside in the square, which I only figured out right now might be related to the arrival of Mary Poppins – the show, not the nanny, or, as PL Travers might have said, “the show, not the book” (although I think she didn’t dislike the show based on her book as much as she did the movie).
Speaking of international authors who depart, do you sometimes wonder what image of New Zealand they take away? I remember Christos Tsiolkas telling me at an AWRF a few years back about how he had spotted a sign as he exited his hotel for a place called Café Olympus or Café Zeus or something and, assuming it was a Greek establishment, headed straight there to enjoy a Greek coffee -- only to find a Chinese family behind the counter.“Christos, this is Auckland, not Melbourne!”
The great poet and adventurer Blaise Cendrars (a passion I share with Donald Kerr, Special Collections Librarian at University of Otago) passed through New Zealand at some point between the wars, wild years for him which he spent criss-crossing the world by land and by sea. He wrote about his impressions of New Zealand in his book Dan Yack, published in 1929, a notably modern book for its time with a note on the first page to say that it was not written but dictated entirely into a DICTAPHONE (capitals his). He goes on to say, “What a pity that the pages of a book do not yet have sound. But it will come. Poor poets, let us keep working.”
Dan Yack is Cendrars’s alter ego, and this is what Dan Yack has to say about New Zealand back then:
"If there exists anywhere in this world a Land of Tenderness, it seems at first sight to be New Zealand. On these favoured isles great flocks of pedigree sheep and cattle graze the tender grass in the small valleys. From one end of the year to the other, nothing comes to disturb them. You can travel by car for days, or on horseback for weeks, without ever meeting a living soul: you can cross peaks, descend again into new valleys, without ever leaving the pasture-lands. Apart from a petrified cataract, a wild corner that looks like a miniature Switzerland (and is reserved for newly-weds who come to spend their honeymoon there, or old couples who come to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary), and what little remains of the primitive flora of the country --- a few groves of rare and curious tropical plants, notably the giant cruciferous ferns, which are as flourishing here as in Ceylon – nothing picturesque ever strikes the eye. The whole of the interior of the country is divided into rectangles by high fences, with five strands of barbed wire, which separate the pastures; valley dovetails into valley, hill follows hill, nothing comes to interrupt the uniformity, the monotony of the gleaming grass spread everywhere, this dark-green grass which reflects the sky like water, dominates the landscape and gives it an aspect of calm, repose, peace and a warm silence.
"With a little bit of luck, you might chance to stumble upon a cluster of tall eucalyptus trees full of the cooing of doves, and, sheltering beneath their shade, a farm, if you can call this brand-new bungalow a farm, inhabited as it is by a colonist rather than a peasant, and a middle-class housewife rather than a farmer’s wife; they dress for dinner every evening, he in a dinner jacket, she in an evening gown, to play the pianola together or huddle over the radio.
"This couple is always very young-looking, although it’s often an old established household, where the boys are passionately devoted to sport and the young girls cling superstitiously to the social conventions and to the protocol of French etiquette in the colleges and clubs on the coast. Tens of thousands of similar couples are scattered about the solitude of the country, leading exactly the same respectable and well-to-do life from one year to the another, and no external event ever comes to disturb the monotonous and sublime course of their sentimentality. Time has passed. They have grown old without realizing it. But they have preserved all the illusions of the heart and the vigour of the senses. They live a deux. For themselves. Egotistical and complacent.
"Thus, the mentality of each New Zealander is insular several times over, because each couple is isolated in their own personal feeling of contentment, each farm is a Robinson Crusoe’s island amidst the solitude of the pastures, and the twin islands, which appear like a double oasis on the waters, are not welcoming, but close ranks and defend themselves fiercely against any immigration. New Zealand has broken her moorings and remains in contact with the rest of the world only through a moral link that attaches her to Great Britain, of which country every New Zealander is immeasurably proud to be a distant descendant, thus adding a feeling of pride to his insularity and confirming him in his rejection of all human fraternization.
"… This success, this maintaining of a precarious civilization at the furthest ends of the earth, this specialized and material activity, this total absence of moral grandeur, this lack of ambition, this extravagant practice of sports and games, this cult, this adulation of the body, this voluntarily restricted horizon, this intransigence, this lack of tolerance in the manifestations of social life, these concessions to nothing but well-being and personal comfort, this lack of humanity, these narrow prejudices and this complicated ceremonial which lays down the different degrees of worthiness of human beings, this situation of a group of people at the ends of the earth, this voluntary insularity, exclusive and individual, this optimism a deux, this mutual admiration in the bosom of the family, this complaisance in the face of everything concerning love, this communal salacity, this erotic curiosity which affects the young people very early and which still shakes couples in their extreme old age, this self-satisfaction, this pride, this arrogance, this selectivity, this refusal to cross-breed, this fine health of the body – in brief, all that the New Zealander of today considers to be his conquest and his achievement, the manifest signs of his independence from old Europe, and even this independence itself .. when one looks at all this close to, making allowances for a certain materialistic aspect that modern life tends to take on more and more in every region of the globe, and especially in the most far-flung places, where this contemporary trend towards uniformity and massiveness is increasing day by day; one perceives that nothing has changed in these islands, that New Zealand has made no progress at all, and that life continues as in the time of the cannibals and expresses itself through a whole series of laws, interdictions, repressions and cruel dreams under the aegis of the great god Taboo."
-- from Dan Yack, 1929
May 19, 2012
Writers Festivals Save Lives
We've all heard the phrase “Books save lives", but who knew that Writers Festivals can save lives too?
Actually, when it comes down to it, it's not often literally true that books save lives. I only know of one case, that of the Spanish writer Michel del Castillo. Books saved his life when, aged seventeen, having already spent ten years in concentration camps of one kind or another (from the one for “troublesome foreigners” where he and his mother were interned when they fled to France during the Spanish Civil War, to the forced labour camp in Nazi Germany where the Vichy government saw fit to send him a few years later, and finally the Franchist camp where he was interned as the son of a Red as soon as he was repatriated to Spain at the war's end), alone, penniless, desperate at not being able to get back into France where all his family was, he jumped off a bridge into the River Ebro to put an end to his nightmare.
As it turned out, the fall didn’t kill him, but the double pneumonia he caught from his swim was about to, if not for the fact that the doctor summoned to the squalid pension where he was staying caught sight of two books on his bedside table. They were The Brothers Karamazov -- del Castillo had discovered Dostoevsky, interestingly enough, at the Jesuit college where the Franchist authorities had sent him after his internment -- and Nietzsche’s The gay science.
“Have you read those books?” the doctor asked. And went away. And came back the next day, bringing a new antibiotic he had just been sent a supply of. He had decided this was a person who had the mettle to be a test subject for this unknown drug, called penicillin.
So that’s whose life has been saved by books. And whose life has been saved by a Writers Festival? Well, mine! It happened on the Saturday morning. I so wanted another coffee but realised I could not linger a minute more if I wanted to hear about the future of the novel. I jumped into my car and took off, smiling at our neighbours and their kids heading towards their car as I pulled out.
Three minutes later (so I heard when I got home) my neighbour realised that he had forgotten something in the house and ran in for a moment. Meanwhile, his four year old daughter managed to lean out of her carseat and release the handbrake, sending their large van careening right through the spot where I would have been sitting had the lure of the festival not been so strong. It crashed right through our fence, that's how big and heavy it was, which is why the little girl, thankfully, was not hurt. Looking at the pile of boards and splinters which had been a fence, I realised that my little car, and me inside it, would certainly have been crushed.
So there you have it! Writers Festivals save lives!
Can books take lives as well as save them? I loved this festival exchange between Iain Sharp and Brian Boyd, talking about Prof. Boyd's current project, a life of Karl Popper, which has been a "to do" for him for something like twenty years. You have to imagine Iain's lilting Scots cadence and amused, quizzical tone.
(Iain) Popper had a long life...
(Brian) Yes, damn him!
(Iain) Bartley had started a biography of Popper but died before it was finished.
(Brian, darkly) An omen.
Here's a video from our friends at Electric Literature with yet another idea on how books can save lives:
May 17, 2012
AWRF 2012: Lemon Andersen
I was among the crowd basking in the energy late on the Festival's last day as Lemon Andersen (the source of the energy) was interviewed by Nick Dwyer (who had the good taste to stay true to his quiet, nice guy self). It was the perfect high note to end my festival experience on -- including the moment when Lemon was asked to read from his book, didn't have a copy on him, appealed to the audience, and I saw Chris from the Readers Services team at Central City Library step up to hand him her personal copy. She almost didn't get it back, either, as Lemon somehow managed to feed it into the maw of his armchair when he sat back down. What kind of a cheat would that have been? Luckily persistence and an AWRF stagehand bouncing the chair about were able to get it back to Chris in time for her to get it signed. Here are Chris's observations from her memorable AWRF experience.
I made one selection from this month's Auckland Writers and Readers Festival and this was to see Lemon Andersen, the American poet, spoken word artist and actor live.
He performed some excerpts from County of Kings, his one man show and biographical account of his amazing life story told through urban poetry. It was fabulous to see Lemon perform live and to see that he still burns with a passion to spread the word in his own unique style. It was poignant to hear Lemon talk about his mother Mili and her death, shortly after first reading his poems.
A month ago I had seen the documentary Lemon (USA 2011 Dir Laura Brownson, Beth Levison) which provided a fascinating look at Lemon as he struggled to bring his life story to stage and try and maintain a living for his family and himself.
His life journey reads like a movie – born and raised in Brooklyn, half-Puerto Rican, half-Norwegian. Parents both addicts who met at a methadone clinic and passed away from AIDS. Survived on the streets with his brother, the inevitable run in with authorities, served two prison sentences by the time he was 21 and won a Tony award before he turned 30. Lemon’s passion for the written word and poetry was awakened within him while in prison. Lemon became a regular on, and had the most aired episodes of, HBO’s Def Poetry and was an original cast member of the award winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. A high point in the Lemon rollercoaster ride.
It was interesting that at his festival appearance Lemon said he has not seen the documentary and that it had been a hard process having the cameras constantly around him and especially his family.
“So watch me be the artist who was born ready made, watch me take the lemons and make the best goddamn lemonade.” LEMON
AWRF 2012: Maurice Gee, inaugural Honoured New Zealand Writer
Laura from Leys Institute Library tells us about this most special of the Festival Special Events. The New Zealand Honoured Writer is an initiative conceived to celebrate New Zealand's most accomplished writers, their body of work and the immense contribution they have made to the literary landscape of New Zealand.
What a treat it was to hear much-loved author Maurice Gee speak on Sunday night, and what a lovely way it was to end this year’s Writers and Readers festival. The normally event-shy Gee said he would have declined the invitation to appear had it not been for the request to be the festival’s inaugural ‘Honoured NZ Writer’. A gracious and humble man, Gee felt it would have been “churlish” to decline, and how thrilled the audience was that he didn’t.
As a keen children’s and young adult book reader, I was nervous at first that interviewer Geoff Walker might focus on Gee’s adult fiction work, but the session managed to cover a great cross-section of the master writer’s material, from Under the Mountain to Live Bodies, The Half Men of O and Plumb. It certainly made you realise what a great force Gee has been in New Zealand literature.
We were treated to a reading from The Prowler (entertained chuckles rang throughout the crowd), as well as a piece of unpublished memoir about Gee’s own introduction to reading as a young boy. We heard how he fell in love with Dickens, and began to write his own stories after becoming acquainted with the world of one Oliver Twist.
But what stuck with me from the session was something Gee said early on about the themes of his books for children and young adults – that of the creek and the kitchen. Gee talked about how he never could seem, in his writing, to get away from the small town in which he grew up and the things that surrounded him in his childhood. He told of an encounter he had when he was small, when out walking with his mother and brother by the creek that was his frequent playground. They came across a swagman bathing himself in the river. His mother stopped and turned her small group around, but there was enough time for Gee to notice the man’s stare and to realise that there had been something about the encounter that he had not understood. The eerie encounter was to become a scene in The Fat Man, but the creek features in another way in all of Gee’s stories for younger people: the creek, he said, came to stand for danger, and the haven that was his household kitchen growing up, for safety. They were always there in his stories – the creek and the kitchen, the dark and the light.
Such is Gee’s touch, turning the simple into the riveting. Sadly Gee said he had put down his fiction-writing pen (for he still writes by hand in exercise books), and had turned to memoir, more for his own entertainment than for publishing purposes. He had no sense of loss about the end of his fiction writing days, as his final words for the evening show: “I look back on 30 or so novels and think, ‘That’s ok’.”
Sunday evening’s session was insightful and entertaining. The standing ovation Gee received certainly showed I was not the only one who thought it a fitting tribute for one of our literary legends.
May 16, 2012
AWRF 2012: The God Matter
This was a Tri-Professor event, with Tom Bishop, Professor of English at the University of Auckland (where one of his regular courses is "Stages of Religion"), chairing a discussion between visiting US Prof. Lawrence Krauss, author of A Universe from Nothing, and Lloyd Geering, Emeritus Professor at Victoria University and author of Wrestling with God, on the need for God in the 21st century and beyond. Jonny from Central City Library reports:
During this session Krauss and Geering debated the role that religion has played in the development of science. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, currently a Professor of Physics at Arizona State University, argued that religion had only ever been an impediment to science, and that it was immaterial that many great scientists had held Christian beliefs.
Geering argued that the Christian concept of ‘unity’ of the universe was essential to the development of scientific thought. Geering also believes that Christian tradition plays in an important role in providing a foundation for modern society’s moral structures.
Although Geering in his writings has departed from a concept of a Christian god, he still believes that Christian values and a ‘modern’ concept of god are essential to Society’s existence, and that the meaning and morals of life can be found in the teachings of the Bible. He drew attention to the ‘wisdom’ of the Book of Ecclesiastes. His idea of God seems to consist of the idea of unity in nature and the universe.
Krauss dismissed any idea of the value of the Bible outright. Through science, rational thought will lead us to meaning in life and provide us with the tools we need to survive as a species. Science, Krauss believes, can lead civilisation into a ‘post-religious’ world. It is in this world that rationalism and empiricism will provide humanity with structure and meaning.
Although the two speakers fundamentally agreed that Christian concepts of God and spirituality are out of date, there was no agreement between them on the ongoing value of Christian or any type of religious belief systems.
