Bill Murray and Billy Collins party with Emily Dickinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






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


 “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Karen

The Diagram Prize: hunting the oddest book title

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

And yet, and yet.

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

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

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

Here is the shortlist:

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

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

How to Sharpen Pencils by David Rees (Melville House)

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

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

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


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

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

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

War Hitler Crank?

I think we can answer a resounding yes to that.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mathematical Cranks
by Underwood Dudley

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

Read more about the Diagram Prize at The Bookseller.

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

George Orwell gets a day!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sic Transit Gloria Romance Novels

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

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

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

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

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

All, all are sleeping on the hill.

Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley

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

All, all are sleeping on the hill...

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

Here's my Mills & Boonified version:

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

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


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

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

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

Rosemary Cross:   Hi.

Max:   Hi.


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

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

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

A Christmas Memory

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

What I'm reading

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

Diamond, the hard guy

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


Spade: one-eyed jacks

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


Heart: Edmund Valentine White

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


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

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

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

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

To Albert Wendt, congratulations and fa'afetai

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

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

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

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

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

Used-by Date

We are programmed with used-by dates but so far 

I've outlived mine using pills and other remedies

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

of cool temperatures and mellow sighs

of the sun enjoying the full spread of Ponsonby 

oblivious to how I am snaring and using it

to illuminate this poem's way towards 

understanding and completing itself

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

without knowing it is entering my house at number 63 

and meeting the well-tended memories that people 

wall    floor    carpet    and hold up the ceilings

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

as usual on the bread I tossed out the previous night

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

and the other people I love will forgive me for leaving

a slow unassuming morning that will swing open -- 

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

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

the body that is unaware it is bone and pain

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

and right back again to the dark and the first spark

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

that morning of my going away

to be all that was now and will be 

in the stretch of Tagaloaalagi's breath     

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

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


    

Remembering Ray Bradbury

He wrote the novel whose title evokes for everyone the nightmare it would be to live in a world which has banned all books, and his favourite holiday was Hallowe’en. So October is a good time to remember Ray Bradbury, who died this year at the age of 91, by passing on a letter he wrote to an American librarian about composing that very novel, Fahrenheit 451, in the basement of the Powell Library at UCLA.

Powell Library is that Italian Renaissance-style brick building (I can make this architectural call because it strongly resembles a Brunelleschi rotonda in Florence I remember very clearly, from having once driven my boyfriend's brand new Vespa smack into it) which you will have seen if you have ever watched a Hollywood movie with a scene which takes place at a University, no matter what state or city it is purported to be located in. In fact, I remember seeing it stand in for Berkeley just recently when The Graduate was on TV.

And this of course is perfect for Ray Bradbury, who always used to say that libraries had been his University, just as Prof. Jim Flynn says can be true for everyone in the book he presented at Auckland Libraries for last year's New Zealand Book Month, The torchlight list. The inspiration for Prof. Flynn’s book was the family story of his uncles reading by torchlight on the troopships carrying them to Europe, but it could just as well have been Ray Bradbury, who did at one point apply to attend City College in Los Angeles, but, when the only answer he could come up with when a ‘little elf’ inside him asked him why he would want to was “Girls, women and sex”, decided he wouldn’t go there after all, but devote himself straight away to being a writer.

Here's the letter he sent the Fayetteville Public Library fifty odd years later, when the book he then went and wrote was chosen for their "Big Read", about how that had gone. I came across it on a website called Letters of Note (where you can also see a scan of the actual letter), a site featuring "correspondence deserving of a wider audience (fakes will be sneered at)", and this it certainly is.

September 15, 2006

Dear Shawna Thorup:

I'm glad to hear that you good people will be celebrating my book, "Fahrenheit 451." I thought you might want to hear how the first version of it, 25,000 words and which appeared in a magazine, got done.

I needed an office and had no money for one. Then one day I was wandering around U.C.L.A. and I heard typing down below in the basement of the library. I discovered there was a typing room where you could rent a typewriter for ten cents a half hour. I moved into the typing room along with a bunch of students and my bag of dimes, which totaled $9.80, which I spent and created the 25,000 word version of "The Fireman" in nine days. How could I have written so many words so quickly? It was because of the library. All of my friends, all of my loved ones, were on the shelves above and shouted, yelled and shrieked at me to be creative. So I ran up and down the stairs, finding books and quotes to put in my "Fireman" novella. You can imagine how exciting it was to do a book about book burning in the very presence of the hundreds of my beloveds on the shelves. It was the perfect way to be creative; that's what the library does.
I hope you enjoy reading my passionate output, which became larger a few years later and became popular, thank God, with a lot of people.

I send you all my good wishes,
(Signed)

On the occasion of his 90th birthday, Bradbury wrote a longer version of this story for UCLA magazine, where you can see a photo of Powell Library, the place my sister, who went to UCLA, remembers as the best place to daydream on the whole campus.

Someone named Sam Weller, believe it or not, as if he were one of the exiles from the society which had outlawed books in Fahrenheit 451, the ones who had each memorised a book to keep it alive, and his would have been The Pickwick Papers, has written a book about Ray Bradbury called The Bradbury chronicles : the life of Ray Bradbury. I haven't read it myself, but the reviews on the library catalogue for it are good, although I need to remark on this odd line in the one from Publishers Weekly:  "If Weller places Bradbury in a pantheon occupied by Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens and Poe, he also mentions more than one extramarital affair and his hero's poor eating habits.”

Am I reading this correctly? Is this saying that extramarital affairs are in contrast with inclusion in this exalted pantheon? Shakespeare’s love life may still be anyone’s guess, but Jay Parini’s book The passages of HM convinced even dubious me of the married Melville’s "unambiguous attraction in thought and deed to men"; the married Charles Dickens’s behavior after meeting and falling in love with the actress Ellen Ternan was described by his daughter Kate like this: "He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home"; and while Edgar Allan Poe's reputation is not besmirched by marital infidelity, there is that fact that he married a 13 year old. Maybe it was more the poor eating habits which threaten to take Bradbury out of the pantheon -- you've got to watch that Campbell's tomato soup, one of his more frequent meals, as I recall.

By far my favourite works by Ray Bradbury are his short stories, which, mistakenly apprehensive that they would be too science-fictiony for me, I was only inspired to read when my daughter's Intermediate School English teacher assigned them to her class (forever grateful, Miss Chambers!). Of all the short stories my favourite is "The Fog Horn", a wondrous mixture of the mythic, the sorrowful, and the shivery, in which a sea monster is lured from the deep by the call of a Fog Horn -- I picture the long neck of an aquatic, brontosaurus-type animal rising out of the water, draped with algae.

"One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, ‘We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was. I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.

The Fog Horn blew."

You can read the entire story online at grammarpunk.com.

The stories of Ray Bradbury is an Everyman edition of 100 of Bradbury's best stories, including "The Fog Horn". You can read the early stories which eventually became Fahrenheit 451 in A pleasure to burn: Fahrenheit 451 stories.

Ray Bradbury always said he didn't think of himself as a science fiction writer, because he wasn't interested in getting the science straight. Or maybe because he didn't write stuff like this parody of science fiction which I also found on the Letters of Note website, in a letter by one of my favourite authors, the crime writer Raymond Chandler, sent from the seaside home in La Jolla where he had moved to get away from Hollywood and its parties where people were always mistaking his wife for his mother (according to Billy Wilder) and its abundance of alcohol, although in the end the move only solved one of these two problems. He is writing to his agent, lamenting the consequent drying-up of his creative powers, which must be one of the most horrible curses which can come down on a man, witness F. Scott Fitzgerald's suicide in slow motion, and Hemingway's abrupt and violent one. So we can forgive him a bit of bitchiness, and would anyway, I hope, because it is so funny.

6005 Camino de la Costa La Jolla, California
Mar 14 1953

Dear Swanie:

Playback is getting a bit tired. I have 36,000 words of doodling and not yet a stiff. That is terrible. I am suffering from a very uncommon disease called (by me) atrophy of the inventive powers. I can write like a streak but I bore myself. That being so, I could hardly fail to bore others worse. I can't help thinking of that beautiful piece of Sid Perelman's entitled "I'm Sorry I Made Me Cry."

Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It's a scream. It is written like this: "I checked out with K19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn't enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn't enough. He was right."

They pay brisk money for this crap?

Ray

(On view at the Letters of Note website edited by Shaun Usher. The homepage says a book collection of its contents will be published next month. I'm looking forward to it.)

Celebrating the books that cause dangerous thoughts

It's Banned Books Week, time to celebrate the freedom to read, as the traditional slogan goes, and the right to read, as a newer one I saw this year for the first time goes. We celebrate the fact that books make people think dangerous thoughts about questioning authority and rebelling against conformity, and above all, we celebrate the fact that when organisations ban books to keep that from happening, the books always outlive the bans.

Nowadays in the Western world the out-and-out banning of books by government or religious authorities is not very frequent, but narrow-minded community groups have stepped into the breach with insidious campaigns to get books "cleaned up", ie censored, to render them fit for consumption by young people. Or maybe more than "fit" they just mean "easy". Easy and undistinguished, like fast food.

Matt Bors is a cartoonist and editor at Cartoon Movement whom you may have heard of from his having collaborated with war correspondent David Axe on his talked-about graphic novel memoir about war in the 21st century, War is boring: bored stiff, scared to death in the world's worst war zones. Here is a great cartoon he drew which lampoons this new practice of book-sanitising, from a post called "White wash" on his blog Bors Blog ("comics, politics and ridicule"):

The first panel is true: a sanitised edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn really was published for use in schools where an understanding of the past, including its evils, is evidently not among the lessons children are supposed to learn. The others, well, I'd like to say clearly not, but I wouldn't swear to it!

Read about Banned Books Week, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, on the American Library Association website.

War comics

Special guest blogger Kelly Sheehan writes comics and, also, interesting things about comics, such as this:

Born too late for personal recollections of the Second World War my generation still managed to inherit a strong cultural memory of that great conflict. Games of war were a normal way of passing the time and small plastic soldiers, tanks and planes were a staple part of any boy’s toy box. Comics, which were then a more integrated part of a child’s life, featured a host of characters still fighting the war decades after it ended. Any New Zealand comics fan in his 30s or 40s would have vivid memories of Commando comics and Battle Picture Weekly, not to mention sundry characters such as Captain Hurricane who would routinely tie knots in the gun barrels of Nazi panzers without breaking a sweat.

One of the more bitter experiences of my childhood was going to hospital for a couple of days. I have no idea why I went but I have a very clear memory of the intense disappointment and sadness I felt when I discovered the huge cache of war comics, generously given to me by my older cousins, had disappeared from the locker next to my bed during the night. After that being in hospital kind of sucked.

^{(Picture from Sir George Grey Photograph Collection, 7-A13520)}

There is part of me that wonders if my father was responsible for those comics vanishing. Certainly, he would have felt I should not be reading anything that glorified war. If it was Dad, he was mistaken. While the Commando’s featured pretty straight forward tales of Tommy fighting Jerry, Battle Picture Weekly was a subversive little rag that undermined those simplistic conventions and threw a whole new light on what goes on during war. Written by such luminaries as Pat Mills and John Wagner these were stories that dealt with the unfairness and inhumanity of war, not to mention class, wayward authority, fear and the brutalising effect of violence. Anyone who was ten when they read the episode of Charly’s War featured below did not walk away thinking the First World War was in any way glamorous:

The library carries a number of recently republished comics from Battle Picture Weekly, most notably Johnny Red and Charley’s War. Each volume is lovingly put together, with introductions and afterword material that give the strips, and the historic events featured in the stories, context. The Johnny Red volume features an introduction by Garth Ennis, the Irish writer responsible for comics such as Preacher, Hitman and The Boys.

Ennis has always been effusive in his praise of Battle Picture Weekly. He was a fan growing up, indeed he had a letter published in those hallowed pages:

It is hardly surprising that Ennis is one of the few of his generation to put his own mark on the genre of war comics. Reading interviews with him it is clear that this is where his heart lies. Published under the umbrella titles of War Stories and Battlefields each of the stories covers different characters, circumstances and theatres of war.

A number of Ennis’s stories are undoubtedly responses to various strips featured in his beloved Battle Picture Weekly. Johann’s Tiger featured in War Stories Volume 1 bares a strong resemblance to Hellman of Hammer Force, Nightingale in the same volume can be yoked with H.M.S Nightshade, and the recent Night Witches and Motherland draw heavy inspiration from Johnny Red and his struggles on the Eastern Front during the Great Patriotic War. These are not Boy’s Own narratives. War is shown as brutal and chaotic. If there is there is sentimentality it is hard earned and the price paid for survival is high.
I like to think that Ennis has a secret plan. That, at the end of his career, he will have completed a vast novel composed in parts over the years. An epic novel in pictures that will document the gigantic, tragic history of the Second World War.

- Kelly

Dolman Prize for Serious Travel Book of the Year

This year's winner is John Gimlette. I'll drink to that!
 
Coming to work today I found myself driving along behind a Martian on a motorcycle. No, wait, it was a human being in a bright green jerkin with a box of the same colour bolted to either his back or to the bike, I couldn’t really tell, and then... what was that? some kind of little scooper attached to it. Peering harder I saw the words Auckland Council Litter.

I was trying to figure out what kind of litter would be small enough to fit in the little box and also need removal so urgently as to call out a special operative on a motorbike, when a large white scrap of something detached itself from the contraption and nose-dived into the gutter, the special op blithely chugging on up the road. Littering! The anti-littering special op was littering!

A few minutes later I was behind a large SUV called a… Murano! What? I asked myself incredulously. They named a SUV after that peaceful little island in the Venetian lagoon, the one with the sunlit waterfront lined with houses all in different hues and shops full of glass menageries and NO CARS? Nissan Marketing, listen to me. Murano: stray cats, yes; fishing boats yes; glassblowing, yes; cars, no.

This trip is truly a case of non-serious travel, I said to myself, having serious travel writing on my mind because I had been reminding myself that I needed to check if the winner of this year's edition of the Dolman Prize, "Britain’s only dedicated prize for serious travel literature" (in the words of the Authors' Club, who administer the prize) which rolls around every year in September, had been announced.

And the answer is, yes it has, and it is ... Wild Coast by John Gimlette. The judging session, the Authors' Club website tells us, was held at a bar just down the road from the Authors' Club. I love this! John Gimlette, chosen over drinks! No relation, I suppose, to Thomas Gimlette, the British Royal Navy Surgeon General who gave his name to the Gimlet, from having encouraged British sailors to add lime juice to their gin to ward off scurvy.

I have never actually drunk a gimlet, but I know all about them because the gimlet, and how to make one, plays a major part in Raymond Chandler's most sentimental novel (and my favourite of all of them), The Long Goodbye. A young man with white hair, good manners, a drinking problem and a scarred face practically falls into Philip Marlowe's arms out of a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith, and becomes a drinking companion and perhaps a friend, for a time, during which he teaches him, and the bartender at their drinking hole, how to make a real gimlet, Rose's Lime Juice and all. When Marlowe learns that he has died, he goes back to their bar and orders a gimlet, to say goodbye. It turns out he is not the only person there drinking a gimlet; there is a woman dressed in black, also drinking alone, who also learned about gimlets from a friend, perhaps the same one. He lights her cigarette; she tells him her name. Linda Loring. As they say in Italy, a name that is a whole programme.

Gimlette's book is about the three South American Guianas, one of which, the French one, was where the penal colony of Devil's Island was located, famous in the book world as being the setting for one of the greatest prison escape books of all time, Papillon (made into a great movie starring Steve McQueen).

If you, like me, enjoy serious travel writing (defined by the Authors' Club as "works of literary merit that show excellence in the tradition of great travel writing, combining a personal journey with the discovery or recovery of places, landscapes or peoples to instil a sense of place, excitement and wonder in the reader", and by me as "talented writing and no gimmicks") all the Dolman Prize finalists will be good reading suggestions. Here they are, with a few lines from the publishers to pique your interest:

Wild Coast by John Gimlette
"In this compelling and elegant travel memoir, John Gimlette returns to Guyana, the "Wild Coast" in South America, to discover his ancestral colonial history - one of brutal, cruel and often uncomfortable truths. Intrigued by the tale of a distant ancestor who perished on the Wild Coast in 1630, John Gimlette returns to South America to find out what has become of this primeval land."

Harlem is Nowhere: a journey to the Mecca of Black America, by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Granta)
"For a century Harlem has been celebrated as the capital of black America, a thriving center of cultural achievement and political action. At a crucial moment in Harlem's history, as gentrification encroaches, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts untangles the myth and meaning of Harlem's legacy."

Thin Paths; journeys in and around an Italian Village, by Julia Blackburn (Jonathan Cape)
"In 1994, while walking the Alta Via, the high path winding from the French border to the Bay of Lerici, a man stopped in a remote village, and found he couldn't forget it. 'I've just bought a ruin in the mountains of Liguria,' he wrote, some years later. 'You'd like it here.' Julia Blackburn married that man and moved to that house in 1999. What she found in the mountains was a new way of life, and one that is fast disappearing."

To a Mountain in Tibet, by Colin Thubron (Vintage)
"Colin Thubron recently witnessed the death of the last of his family. He is walking on a pilgrimage of his own.His trek around the great mountain, revered by multitudinous others, awakes an inner landscape of solitude, love, grief, restoring precious fragments of his own origins.This is travel writing at its consummate best from an author of unsurpassable experience, sensitivity, and sheer lyrical power."

To the River: a Journey Beneath the Surface, by Olivia Laing (Canongate)
"To the River is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love."

White Fever: a journey to the frozen heart of Siberia, by Jacek Hugo-Bader (Portobello)
"A lone journey by jeep (and occasionally kayak) across one of the world's most inhospitable and surreal landscapes. An unparalleled insight into the life in Siberia and its various communities and tribes."


And three more, which were on the longlist:

On Extinction: how we became estranged from nature by Melanie Challenger (Granta) Granta doesn't seem to do blurbs, but I can tell you that the contents include Beginnings: natural history museum, London -- First peregrination: West Penwith, Cornwall -- Wild flowers -- Tin -- Ghosts -- Second peregrination: South Georgia, Antartica and the Falkland islands: Whales -- Ice -- Savages -- The third peregrination: North Yorkshire, Manhattan Island and Baffin island: Bones -- Tundra --- Endings: Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire.

Street Fight in Naples by Peter Robb (Bloomsbury) (I got this out for a friend of mine who is from Naples and he loved it) "Street Fight in Naples ranges across nearly three thousand years of Neapolitan life and art, from the first Greek landings in Italy to Robb's own less auspicious arrival thirty-something years ago."


The Fetish Room: the education of a naturalist by Redmond O’Hanlon "Part biography, part musings on biology and nature, this title presents a moving portrait of one of Britain's greatest travel writers and eccentrics. On this joint road trip with journalist Rudi Rotthier, O'Hanlon visits the places that have made him - schools and vicarages, Oxford, Stonehenge and the Marlborough Downs and many more."

A celebration of comics

The kind you read, not the stand-up kind. It's Comic Book Month at Auckland Libraries and we're celebrating the Cosmics, as my father used to call them. "Pass me the cosmics" he'd say as soon as he arrived at the Sunday breakfast table, back when "comics" meant the comics section of your newspaper. Now comics are those comics and comics are cartoons, graphic novels, superheroes, manga and many other genres, and instead of being a once-a-week treat, every big and little kid can get them whenever they want at their local library.

Thanks to Adrian Kinnaird, cartoonist, writer and one of New Zealand's foremost authorities on comics and graphic novels, for contributing this fun reminiscence about the origins of life in the universe, um, I mean, of comics in libraries.

Comics In Libraries: The Collected Golden Age
Comic and graphic novels started popping up in libraries in the early 1980s, if you knew where to look. If you were lucky, you might find a copy of the Smithsonian Book Of Comic Books hiding out in the drawing reference and cartoons section; under the call numbers that would be burned into my memory: 741.5. When I was growing up, I knew if I searched out those magic numbers at any library there was always a chance I might strike gold and find comic books.

On one particular visit to the Christchurch Public Library in 1989 I really hit the mother-lode. While exploring the far reaches of the library floor, the work 'COMIC BOOKS' jumped out at me from a random shelf in the 'Over-sized Books' section. I had discovered the fabled two volume set of Photo Journal Guide To Comic Books: these two enormous volumes contained cover photographs of almost every American comic published from the beginning of the industry to the end of the '50s. The birth of the medium was contained in these two volumes; every cover of Action Comics lined up fifty covers to a page, like postage stamps.

I pored over every page till my eyes hurt, it was almost too much information to take in. It was all here, the history of comics laid out in front of me: the rise of superhero comics, horror, romance and everything in between (who knew Cowboy comics were massive in the 1950s??). Alas, these volumes were marked with the dreaded phrase 'REFERENCE COPIES ONLY. NOT FOR LOAN' ("that means you, kid!", I imagined it saying in smaller print underneath). So I would have to visit them every week, sneaking off to the 'adult' section to the library to soak up as much comics history as I could handle.

On one of these trips I also discovered there was a 'Graphic Novel' shelf, hidden beside 'Young Adult' (sidenote: as a 10 yr old the YA section always made me feel a bit nervous; would I be asked my age if I grabbed the wrong book?). It was only a small shelf, with a couple of volumes that would become cornerstones for this growing section: Watchmen, Maus, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. I flicked through a few pages of Dark Knight Returns and three things occurred to me. 1) It scared the crap out of me 2) I had to read it RIGHT NOW and 3) I had to make neither my mum or the librarian got a good look at the contents when I checked it out (hiding it under a safe Tintin volume took care of that).

Over twenty years later, graphic novels are now one of the largest and most borrowed collections in libraries world wide. There are graphic novels and comics to suit every age and subject. From literary autobiographies like Persepolis, through to children's comics like the collected Tove Jansson Moomin comic strips, and Jeff Smith's wonderful Bone series. Or if superheroes are your thing, you can easily read the first 20+ years of Spiderman and Avengers comics (collections that would set us back thousands of dollars) for nothing! And if you look under 741.5, you can learn the secrets to cartooning from the masters themselves, and learn about their lives and craft. I can now read almost all of those classic comics that appeared in those giant reference guides by looking them up on the Library catalogue.

The entire history of the comics medium is waiting for you at your local library, and my 10yr old self wouldn't know where to start.

-- Adrian Kinnaird

Check out Adrian's blog on New Zealand Comics at www.fromearthsend.blogspot.com
 
...and here's what's happening around the libraries (eg free comics workshops, exhibitions, the "Create a character" competition where you can win a term of drawing classes, prizes for most comics read...)