Arete Again

Last week I was trying to explain to my kids about Odysseus getting his men to tie him to the mast so that he could listen to the Sirens sing, and afterwards took down from the shelf my copy of The Odyssey to check the story. This book belonged to my father, it's a Penguin classic, translated by E V Rieu ... in fact, it was the very first Penguin classic, published in 1946, although Dad's copy is a 1952 reprint. He also had its companion volume, The Illiad, bought and inscribed with his name and the date, August, 1950. Lovely old books, browning and fragrant and disintegrating.

I'd just been reading a collection John Fowles' occasional prose, which includes a long essay in which he elaborates on his view that The Odyssey was written by a woman - he held this in common with Robert Graves and Samuel Butler and, who knows, maybe he's right. Anyway, I read the bit about the Sirens and then, for some reason, curiosity I guess, turned to the front and started to read from the beginning. How long since I had? When did I last? Don't know, doesn't matter, I was gripped from the start and have been reading it ever since. With intense and unalloyed pleasure. Particularly in the intricate and wonderfully non-linear structure of the story-telling.

Then, a couple of days ago, I finally reach the point, about a third of the way in, when Odysseus arrives in Phaeacia, where he will tell the story of his wanderings to the King and Queen and their company. The King is called of Alcinous and his wife, the Queen, on whose mercy Odysseus has been instructed, by Athene, to throw himself, is called ... Arete. The name I heard called in a dream a week or so ago, and wondered who or what it meant. It is in this sequence that the assembled company is entertained by a blind bard singing of events at Troy, which does make you question what kind of a homage this is - Homer speaking of himself? Or another, speaking of Homer?

But The Odyssey has been in my mind for another reason, I've been writing a film treatment called The Return, set on a remote NZ farm in 1948 and also, in flashback, on Crete in 1941. The plot is pretty simple: a man who is thought to be dead returns to find his brother has married the woman he loves and is the de facto father to the daughter who is actually his. The brothers were involved in a fatal misadventure on Crete in the hiatus between the evacuation of Greece and the German paratrooper invasion and this has changed things forever between them. The drama plays out on the farm in a manner I like to think of as Rural Noir.

At one point, I had the returned man sitting outside the rabbiter's hut where he stays, reading a copy of The Illiad. Then I realised two things: the E V Rieu translation, which I want to use if and when the film is made, wasn't published until 1950; and The Odyssey is more appropriate to the story I'm trying to tell. So I changed it. Now, here is what the translator has to say of the circumstances in which it was made:

I began on the Odyssey three years before the Second World War started, and completed the first draft as France fell. Home Guard service intervened, and I could not finish the job till 1944. Even so, its revision was undertaken to the sound of v1 and v2 explosions and the crash of shattering glass - an accompaniment which would have chimed in better with the more warlike Iliad, and which, I hope, is not reflected in my style. Actually, I went back to Homer, the supreme realist, who puts his magic finger every time on the essential qualities of things, by way of escape from the unrealities that surrounded us then - and still surround us in a world of fantastically distorted values.

We'll Never Turn Back

The extra extraordinary

Otoliths

is one year old today

Or was that voice calling Arrêté!?

Last night I dreamed of a woman called Arete.

She is the one sung in the Song of Solomon. The one who sings in the Song of Solomon.

Her eyes like dove's eggs. Her mouth wide as a river of longing. Her hair the memory of time, glossy and black, to be climbed up or down or among. Her sweet white teeth.

Her children, a girl and boy, deserted by their father. The boy asks him to come but he is busy working. The boy does not ever speak to his mother about his father. He has his pride.

Pride will get you killed in a war, you would rather die than admit to fear.

She is from Persia. Her name is Greek because of Alexander's passing, two millennia ago. Or for some other reason, her courage perhaps, her spirit, the sheer elegance of her person.

I heard her name called three times, that was all the dream was; her attributes I divined later, while still under the spell of the vision.

Today I saw her in the street, looking into the bakery shop window while she waited for the bank to open. So slender. Immaculately dressed. Beautiful.

I could not tell if she had seen me or not, but as I passed by with my newspaper I turned, caught her eye, smiled and said Hello.

Hello, she said. How are you today?

I'm well, I replied. Then the door of the bank opened and she passed inside, out of my sight for now.

Arete! the voice called. Arete! Arete!

The Listener reviews Luca ...

This

arrived this morning at my door, six copies, before I'd even had my cup of tea. Answering the door wearing only pink boxer shorts with Chinese characters on them is something I haven't done before but the delivery guy was Chinese himself and didn't seem to mind. More about this particular publication here ... and subsequently ...

In the mirror of the world, the ten thousand things.

another picture of Saturn

from Cassini

I have never seen:

the Aurora Australis from Outer Space

SATURN'S BURNING

is the title of #44 in Alan Brunton's Fq. Full text here.

While here are the mysterious hexagonal clouds at the north pole:

Wordlessly

... a ruby bead dried above his upper lip. Saturn was burning, tilted between Leo and Cancer, the rings would appear edge on by 2009, as they did fifteen years ago. You could see it setting in the evening skies. If you knew where to look. The hexagonal clouds at the north pole have no explanation. As with so much else. They were red too, the heavy crimson of velvet drapes, like those in his grandparent's house. Not a memory, a supposition: their house felt that way. Where a midget spoke cryptically, backwards, perhaps. Why was he dreaming of his mother? Two times this week. Once she held his hand and talked about her fear of dying, seven years after the act. If dying can be said to be an act. Then, the other night, falling in the foyer of the theatre, dexterously managing to spill hardly any of the glass of white wine she'd just refilled. Sinisterly, was that a word? Spellcheck says yes. The shame in her eyes, the drunkard's veiled plea for excuse of the inexcusable. He'd never seen her drunk, or not falling down drunk. Happy, yes. Excited. He'd asked his sister to look after her. Why not himself? Because he never really had, or not in later years. It wasn't his mother's parent's house, he retained no memory of that, it was his father's. In Hamilton. And it was his father who was the drunk, who sometimes stumbled and fell. Whom he always tried to raise up again. The blood was from a shaving cut, welling strangely away from where the sharp slant of pain was. In the yellowy late afternoon light, as currawongs whistled operatically and rain began to fall, he put his finger to the spot. The wound, the tear, the entrance or exit place of spirits. While Saturn burned, and his mother continued to die, blood flowed ...

Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon

Many years ago I wrote down this quote from Flaubert:

The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that black hole is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions - nothing but the fixity of a pensive gaze ...

I wanted to use it as a epigraph for a book but I had, and have, no idea of what the book in fact might be. Or might have been, I should say. Then I lost the quote ... a few days ago it recurred in my mind but I couldn't exactly remember it. So I went looking on the web, and found it, eventually, here.

It comes from a letter Flaubert wrote to Madame Roger des Genettes and there's more:

... just when the gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.

This, it turns out, was (part of?) M. Yourcenar’s inspiration for her book Memoirs of Hadrian though I don't know if she uses it as an epigraph or not, never having read the book. Perhaps I should. Somehow, though this wasn't the case when I first copied it down, the remark now makes me think of this:

yesterday's papers / tomorrow's headlines

Sunday must be dream time around these parts. Last night it was my mother, a rare enough event for me, tho' I often dream of my father. We were sitting outdoors on some uncomfortable, perhaps wrought iron, chairs at a little round table. A wall loomed oppressively to her left, as she sat there on mine. Holding my hand. This is not just rare, it's unprecedented, at least since childhood. It was certainly her hand, knotted, veiny, wrinkled. She was expressing her horror of dying, which was very real while she lived, and remarking how bits of her liver were coming out her nose, a kind of powdery zinc or arsenic like deposit. There was more of the dream that lead up to this but I have not retained it. Nor what happened next, if there was any next. It was only as I made breakfast this morning, looking at the phone bill on the fridge to see when it is due, that I realised today is her birthday and remembered the dream. She would have been 83. The thing she hated most about dying was that she wouldn't know what happened in the world after she left it. Which means, I suppose, that her consciousness could not bear the thought of its own extinction. Strange how in the dream she seemed to have aged over the seven years since her death. As if the consciousness that could not bear the thought of extinction has somehow lived on, somehow survived the death of the body. It was a melancholy dream and left a slightly bitter aftertaste, like arsenic or zinc, on the back of my tongue.

A longer version of Luogo di Pietra

2 images from Tarquinia

Still life with jug and paintbrushes, Philip Clairmont, 1977 (Fletcher Challenge collection)

committing to memory

The last post was a transcription of a dream, made just after I woke up yesterday, although I didn't wake from the dream - that happened sometime in the night, when I did that thing you seem to have to do with dreams, committed it to memory.

***

And yet ... that isn't really the dream: for instance there was a bit I've omitted before we left the palazzo that came, I think, from the film version of The Comfort of Strangers, which means it was in Venice, where I have never been. Plus who was we? When 'we' were sitting on the beach watching the people eat out of spider-silk stockings, I was with my eldest sister, and it was our younger sisters coming from the north. And they were very well dressed. And the beach looked like the coast south from Wellington.

***

The sea shells on the other beach - and by this time it was certainly the west coast of Italy, north from Rome, where I have never been either - looked very much like one of the vessels Philip Clairmont was so fond of painting. A vase, perhaps. Their colours were his colours, but I wrote Etruscan because of where the dream was set and because I love the word.

***

And because I have a little book of Tarquinia frescoes that was somehow mixed up with the Clairmont-esque images of the sea shells. Which themselves resembled ornate, open-topped cinerariums.

***

As for the lapis lazuli, that wasn't actually in the dream at all, it came from a documentary about the Sumerians in which a pile of greyish stone, looking a bit like schist, lay against a wall while a man sluiced water over it and that startling deep blue colour appeared as if by magic. But the gleam of olivine that I've called peridot ... that was really in the dream, though half indistinct and perhaps the stones were not as large as boulders.

***

Also, when I went to the restaurant with the sea shells, I actually went to the bathroom first, to have a crap, and it was while I was doing that that the little boy came in and peed on the rocky fountain thing at the other end of the small room. It was later, after I came out of there, that I saw him with his hoop and stick. And the hoop was tiny and perhaps square, with paint flaking off it.

***

The woman who spoke at the end, the one to whom I tried to give back the stone, was there for the whole of the dream: at the palazzo in the beginning as much as at the gate at the end. She was the hostess of the dream, its mistress, perhaps, or ciccerone. You could even say it was her dream, she was entertaining me in it. I didn't describe her because I have no visual memory of her, she was a presence not an image. A voice.

***

And besides all that, and more, the plain fact is that as soon as you commit a dream to memory, it changes from what it was into a version; and when subsequently you write down what you have memorised, it changes again and you have a third version.

***

And yet, strangest of all, the original dream survives in, and persists apart from, its versions. For me, the reason for writing down a dream is precisely this: so that its persistence as itself may be recalled from the imperfect versions of it, both the one in memory and the one in writing.

Luogo di Pietra

In the portico of the palazzo I pick up a stone the size of small egg, it is made of red chalcedony, there is a face carved into it, a fish perhaps, or a bird. A fish, it has lips. We go out onto the shore, we are waiting for the tide, we will go swimming. Here the people bring their food wrapped in dense white silks spun by spiders and afterwards leave them on the sand where hermit crabs find and crawl into them. The grey-brown sea sluices in among the black rocks, I see flashes of green and purple as the crabs drag their silks deeper into crevices or bury themselves in the sand. Tides are brief and violent on this coast, no sooner am I down among the bathers in the bottom pool than the water begins to recede; but instead of heading back to shore we stamp our feet, we move our bodies, we dance. I see my sisters coming from the north, picking their way towards us among the gleaming outcrops. This must be an island, now we are on the other side, another shore, here are intricate, upstanding, tubular seashells in Etruscan colours, yellows and reds and browns, they are shaped like a kind of pasta, they are everywhere. I see in the light falling across the sand that there are many precious stones here too, feldspar, chrysoprase, beryl and more, some are antique, they have been worked long ago and then abandoned to lie upon this shore. A crook of amber with silver intaglio. A pile of lapis lazuli, mined in Bactria, that reveals an ineffable blue when water pours over it. Polished boulders of peridot, that green olivine. I pick up some of the shellfish and take them to the restaurant to ask if they are edible? Of course, the man says, and when you are tired of them, you can go further south and you will find other kinds of food, just as good, but different. A small boy with a stick and a hoop is playing across the tesserae of the courtyard. Later, as we are leaving, paying a small tariff for the privilege of being here, I show my hostess the egg-like stone I have carried all through this dream, I want to return it to her but she smiles, ever gracious and says no, keep it, we have so much, goodbye ... I wake with my hand curled around a stone and begin immediately to work upon it, carving the vulvine lips just as I remember them, the crooked eyes, the slight ridge at the back that might be a forehead or might simply be a mark left there yet despite aeons of rolling in the sea.

Forest of Signs

Transom is one word, truss another, span a third. As if building a bridge across an abyss that has one side only, the shivery bank I start from. The bridge is on gaseous Jupiter, consecrated by a poet: Dead men naked they shall be one, he wrote. With the man in the wind and the west moon. The other side is an unknown, it is not yet within reach, I cannot even imagine what is there, nor how to construct a foundation that will support the throws I dream towards it. I saw my dead father last night, my younger son sickening in his arms: I wanted to reach out and take one from the other, the other from the one. And yet both perhaps are one. Or other. I am the same age now that my father was when his third daughter died. The great red spot is a swirl in the heart, it revolves on an eight hour period, it bleeds constantly, it has been going on since the seventeenth century; the small red spot is hope, it appeared late in the last millennium, it is quick and vicious, it may be salvation. From what? From having to choose between the love that kills and killing yourself. Not as hard as it sounds. I am lost in a forest of signs and I wander. The forest is made of names, I survive there by telling. The first tell: When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone / They shall have stars at elbow and foot. Afterwards, I see the path their dying light made, I breath in the air of their longing, and I sing.

... in a manner less visible ...

This phrase from a French documentary about the Indus Valley civilization that screened Sunday night. Quite a large slice of the program concerned a site at Dholavira in Gujarat, now a virtual island with the Arabian Sea to the west and the two marshy arms of the evocatively named Rann of Kutch to the north- and south-east. Dholavira is remarkable for its stone constructions of vast reservoirs which may have been public baths; indeed, according to this view, the Indus Valley civilization was 'about' water. The French film makers characterized the people as democratic, egalitarian, peaceable, game-playing, ecologically aware ... noble antiques, perhaps.


It twigged something in my mind and, today, I went back to some books I've owned since the mid-sixties: Leonard Cottrell's 2 volume Penguin Book of Lost Worlds (1966). I had some vague memory of a completely different take on the Harappans, as they're sometimes also known, after one of their main cities. Cottrell writes: Part of its fascination lies in the grim fact that it appears to have foreshadowed some of the economic features of the totalitarian state ... the barrack-like buildings, the huge granaries, and the raised platforms on which rows of workmen pounded grain all suggest a life of controlled communal activity. Cottrell hedges this rather large claim about with many qualifications but you can still tell that he thinks it's probably more or less true.


It's a bit like the debate about the even earlier city states in Turkey, which some archaeologists have characterized as insect like cellular structures full of terrified humans propitiating strange gods, and others as idyllic shrines to the great Mother Goddess. Goddess worship has also been alleged in the Indus Valley; and at Dholivera was found a large sign (13 characters) that was once fixed over one of the gates to the city, which suggested that there might be enough in it to begin the decipherment of their mysterious script - but alas, no. The writing, if that's what it is, remains, like Cretan Linear A, unreadable. The brilliant English linguist Michael Ventris was said to be about to tackle the Indus Valley signs when he died in a car accident in the early 1950s. Since then, no-one has come close.


But one thing leads to another and wandering in cyberspace I found an article in The Hindu about a recent find in the south of India. It's a celt, an ancient worked stone tool, with four of the signs carved into it. The first of these has been tentatively translated as the name of the god Murukun and this is further held, by some, as proof that the language of the Indus Valley was an early form of Dravidian. The Indus Valley fascists/lotus-eaters' civilization disappeared about the time of the Aryan invasions from the north in the second millennium BC. Again, the experts are split: some say that the people of the Rig Veda put the Indus people to the sword, others that it was more a case of accommodation and assimilation than of conquest.


I like better what the Frenchman said: the people began to live in a manner less visible to archaeology.

The Revenge of the Wild Mouse

Don't want to turn into my own agony aunt, but some stories seem to need to be told ... about this time last year I took my sons to Luna Park. They had a ball, as you'd expect, except that Liamh, the younger one, when he had a go at steering the Dodgem we were in, received a whack on the face when he cannoned into the wheel.

And I completely freaked out when I accompanied him (he's too small to go on his own) on the Wild Mouse - which is the roller coaster there. I also lost my glasses but, by refusing to leave until they'd looked properly for them, got them back when one of the guys went into the bottom of the superstructure and discovered them lying unbroken in the fairy floss dust down there.

So when, a few weeks ago, they announced they wanted to go again, I was dubious. I suggested that they save up their pocket money, thinking the idea would probably fade in the face of a real financial commitment. Well, I was wrong. In no time at all they'd accumulated enough to make it impossible for me to refuse them a visit; but I made one condition. I said I wouldn't under any circumstances be going again on the Wild Mouse.

On Friday night, off we went. All the fun of the fair. The Laughing Clowns. The Fun House. Coney Island. The Dodgems. The Spider. The Ferris Wheel ... when we took a break for a Coke and a Fanta, Jesse, who'd earlier said he wanted to go off on his own for a bit, left us. But before he did, I asked him where he was going? To the Wild Mouse, of course. He'd gone on it 7 times on the previous visit. Liamh didn't make a murmur, so I figured he'd accepted we wouldn't be doing that this time.

But, much later in the evening, after our second visit to the Fun House, he looked imploringly up at me and asked, quite quietly, if we couldn't after all go on the Wild Mouse? Please? And I just didn't know how to say no.

Once we were strapped into our little metal car and had been pushed around the corner to where the conveyor belt that whips you round the track begins, we found ourselves face to face with the vaguely malevolent vaudevillian whom Liamh had enjoyed taunting earlier during our Ferris Wheel ride. He snickered and leered, holding us back for a few seconds then launching us viciously into the abyss.

The Wild Mouse is a typical Sydney experience: nasty, brutal and short. It's over in about two minutes but for that two minutes you think you're going to die. I decided to cope with it this time by not looking ahead to those abrupt ninety degree turns over the void; instead, I concentrated on the structure itself, letting my eyes play across the abstract mass of rivets and steel, as if roaming across a Léger painting perhaps.

And it worked a treat ... until we came out of the last bend, into the last dip, before the end. I'm not sure how or why it happened. Perhaps I relaxed slightly, knowing it was almost over. There was one last massive jolt and Liamh, who was sitting in front and between my legs, cannoned back into my chest. His head hit me just below my heart. There was an intense jab of pain. Afterwards, I could barely get out of the car.

It's a rib injury - a crack of bone or tear of cartilage, I'm not sure which. It's at its worst when I lie down, of course. Can only find one position - huddled on my right side - in which to sleep. After six hours of sitting last night in the cab, I felt like my entire chest had caved in. Laughing is a mistake that I can't remedy. Otherwise, I'd weep. And through it all, I keep seeing the ri jaune of the vaudevillian and hearing, faintly, the maniacal mechanical cackle of the Wild Mouse.

they want my shit in tasmania

Yesterday, during the distraction hour, which is what I call the lead up to going to work, when I can neither do or not do anything, I heard the postie's bike down in the street. Went out to see if there was anything - bills, junk - in the box. Sitting on the stairs was a bulky white envelope. Had the Australian Government Emu/Kangaroo logo on it in blue, and I glimpsed my name through the cellophane window: Dear Martin Edmond, it said. O god, I thought, too shaken even to pick it up, it's the Tax Dept, they've got me. But, on the way back, natch, I did. Brought it inside, ripped it open with trembling fingers, swearing to myself, my delinquent stupidity that always catches up with me ... but it wasn't the Tax Dept. It was something much more gruesome: a Bowel Cancer Testing Kit. From Tasmania.

I'm someone who's never really had health issues. A few broken bones here and there when I was young, a bout of meningitis when I was twenty something, and that's about it. I've generally acted as if I'm going to live forever or, at least, suffer no serious damage getting there. I've drunk, smoked, snorted, ingested, even (once only, I don't like needles) injected whatever I wanted to whenever I wanted to. My heart is good, I'm not over-weight, my kidneys are ok, my liver's holding up, there must be tar in my lungs but I can easily swim a kilometre at the pool without feeling strange afterwards. But, for the last month, and really, if I'm honest, for the two and a bit years before that, I haven't been quite right.

It's vertigo, a mild form, but persistent, which means the world whoomps and blurs each time I turn my head. Can't unblock my ears, haven't been able to for ages. This condition comes and goes, sometimes it's almost imperceptible, at others, so bad I can't hardly get out of bed and have to hobble round with a stick. The Doc I saw in Darwin when it first came on, said he didn't know what it was. My GP here murmured Menières Syndrome and gave me some pills, which did absolutely nothing. Now I'm booked to see a specialist next week ... if it is Menières, another Doc in the cab told me this week, it's incurable but can be 'managed', whatever that means. Basically it's a malfunction ... at least I don't have the tinnitus that's sometimes associated with it.

It's well known that healthy people handle illness badly and I'm no exception. Perhaps that's why the Bowel Cancer Testing Kit fills me with horror. But, my maternal grandfather died of that disease so I guess I'd be stupid not to take it. What you have to do is so revolting I won't even start to try to describe it. It's going to take me a while to work up to that. Meanwhile, the White Envelope sits on the bathroom floor, under the washbasin, waiting. I'm beginning to wish it was from the Tax Dept. And then there's another question I can't help asking: Exactly whose tax dollars are paying for this? Surely not mine ...

The Transit of Venus

Venus slips behind the steeple, looking silvery as a lost love. Bigger than yesterday. A downward trajectory. It takes minutes. I don't understand the universe. Last year it was Saturn, yellowy and insouciant, ringed with desire. The year before that, Jupiter, reddish, baleful, gargantuan, whirling fate into strange corridors of time. How do several bodies take up the same space of sky? It isn't the universe I don't understand, just the solar system. Or my mind. Why do these signs seem sometimes so hopeful then at others deliver a doom I cannot help but bend my neck to receive? Being a protestant means your conscience will never be assuaged, never quieted, never quiet; yet you'll always find a way, this side of the grave, to say that what you did wasn't really wrong, only misunderstood. I have no use for a god who misunderstands, do you? Does anyone? Have a use for god. Point. Shriek. Query ... Venus has gone, she's slipped behind the spire, leaving a ghost of silvery longing. I'll turn my head away, I'll bare my neck some other time. All the hairs standing up there. The nightsweet swirls in the night, the planet sets. Somewhere between my age and death, she said, and laughed. I won't see her again.

WC

Was mildly alarmed the other day to realise that the titles of the two books I'm trying to urge out of chrysalis state and into imago-hood both abbreviate to ... WC. Hell ... ! What can this mean?

Waimarino County (& other excursions) is a collection of shorter prose pieces that I put together last year because, well, perhaps because the exigencies of taxi driving made (make) it impossible to write longer works. Impossible for me I mean, there are others who probably don't suffer from the kind of uni-focus I do. Waimarino means something like calm waters and the County is the one I lived in until age ten. In the central North Island of New Zealand. It's also the title of the first piece in the collection, which was written after I went back there in 1980 looking for ... clues. This book is fairly well advanced, it's about to go to print I think and will be published by my New Zealand publishers, Auckland University Press, towards mid-year.

The other WC is White City which is, for want of a better term, a novel. Except ... is it? I'm really not sure. A work of fiction, then? Yes, maybe. I like the way W G Sebald used to describe his books: prose works of indeterminate form, he said. White City is in fact an autobiography, but it's not my autobiography, it's someone else's. Although I, indisputably, wrote it. How can that be? Well, it's the autobiography of a fiction. And that's all I'm going to say about it at this point. The ms has been turned down by one publisher already not, they said, for any intrinsic defects but because they are non-fiction publishers and this is a non-non-fiction book. It was given to another (fiction) publisher last week and, who knows, she might even be reading it this weekend.

WC ... I can't believe I've done this. It is, of course, a word that used to be used for the loo. Water Closet was the euphemism, then it was abbreviated. You still came across it sometimes when I was younger, you hardly ever do now. Now ... is that the sound of flushing I hear?

colloquy with a seven year old

Me: Well, you might as well make the most of it, you only live once.

Liamh: No, you don't, you have heaps of lives.

Me: Huh?

Liamh: Yeah! I've been all sorts of things. I used to be a giraffe.

Eclipse

The insomniac moon at 4.04 am hangs rust red in the west. Torn clouds circle an earth that is sliding, right now, in front of the rising sun. My lids are rolled in grains of sand, my head is scoured by thoughts I do not wish to have, my body jumps and twitches under the interrogation of the hours: why offer love where no love is? There were sunspots blazing in your hair. Your eyes were jet. Something immemorial on the planes of your face. Suffering and joy, poised equally before the possibilities of the world. Impossibilities. I never noticed before the slight out-thrust of the lower lip of that unkissable mouth. When I write world it should perhaps be eternity. When I write eternity it should be nothing. Or everything. Flares burn out thousands of kilometres into space and here on earth we contort, we genuflect, we dance, we bend in sorrow before strange gods. The meaning of the planets is in their conjunctions so far beyond our comprehension as to be meaningless. This is how astrologers talk of love. It is a sound of mourning cast upon the air, the silence in which a flame destroys the night. It is the equipoise of those celestial bodies passing each other, the unthought consummation that may consume a soul. While the body endures, out on the balcony, at 4.07 am, watching the shadow of the earth prevent the sun's light, for a moment, forever, illumining the moon.

A Few Volumes More

Something about this process of recalling old books seems to require revision &/or addition. I remember The Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling as an enduring fascination in my childhood. A red, clothbound hardback that, like its companion The Jungle Book, was serially falling apart, which was intriguing in itself. The stories were illustrated by the author & there were curious embellishments to the drawings & to the texts themselves. A sort of extravagance that had nothing insistent or overbearing about it. Wonderful tales, all of them, but the ones about the invention of writing impressed me above all. And the runes themselves, reproduced somewhere therein.

When I was about eleven I read J R R Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings in a three volume hardback edition with a burning eye on the olive green dust jacket cover of each. It blew my mind. But, here's the rub, when I re-read it, which I did quite soon after & then several, or many, times more, it wasn't the same book! Nor did the movie(s) ever approach anywhere near that first imagining, which I’ve never found again … after a while I gave up on it & the last time I picked up a copy, was filled with ennui. Two lessons, I guess - you can exhaust a book; & you can never quite recover the thrill of a first reading.

Going over in my mind some of the prose works I read in the 1970s, one that left an indelible mark was Pablo Neruda's Memoirs, which I don't own a copy of & never have. It was revelatory in the way that, say, Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude was. Except, & this was crucial for me, Neruda was using that magic realist prose not in the service of a fiction but for a description of his life. It was impressive that a life could be so poetic - that was how I understood it. I did not know this before reading that book. It is also interesting, in retrospect, to think that I would prefer to re-read that book to any of Neruda's poetry. An autobiography, then, can cancel a life's work as much as it can cancel a life - though only, I am sure, for some readers. The prosaic among us, perhaps.

I was going to go on & write about Lytton Strachey's Life of Queen Victoria, & Frenchman Philippe Jullian's biography of Oscar Wilde, but, somewhat to my dismay, neither is on my shelves any longer. Where can they have gone?

Something else is on my mind however. Among our books at home was a yellow hardcover written by Enid Blyton. Name is lost, but it was a sombre illustrated version of The Pilgrims' Progress in which the sins committed by the wayfarers were expressed physically as burdens lashed to their backs. If they could make their way to the Celestial City then the implacable ropes tying these loathsome bundles to their backs would be loosed & they would be set free. I remember particularly an episode in which one of the pilgrims over-balanced & fell backwards, no doubt into the Slough of Despond, & was dragged under by the weight of his sins. I often wish I'd never read this horrible book which left a lifelong impression, like a muddy stain, on my soul.

At this point I should be reaching for my copy of Carl Jung's Dreams, Memories, Reflections, except I no longer have it either. Or, for another kind of consolation, Flaubert's Salammbô. But that too I never owned, having read a small blue hardback from some library or other, in another time, in some city of the past.

There is no sovereign music for our desire

Dammee - tagged again! I always curse a bit when this happens, but gradually the curses fade into grumbles, the grumbling turns into mumbling & then a list begins to appear:

1. The King Must Die & The Bull from the Sea - Mary Renault

When I was quite young, these filled me with the wonder & terror of their imagining of antiquity, specifically, the Theseus story. For years afterwards I thought I probably was Theseus & maybe still do. The sequence on Naxos when Ariadne joins the Maenads in their revels has never left me.

2. Thus Spake Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche

Read this in a Penguin Classic edition the summer after I left school, the summer before I went to university. Was working at the General Motors plant in Trentham, assembling cars at the time. Remember lying on my tummy on the sitting room floor covering pages & pages of a pad with Nietzschean prose, since lost & now unremembered.

3. Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges

Again, a discovery of the early 1970s, one that completely changed my, & a lot of other people's, notions of what writing could be. My copy has my mother's name & address impressed on the cover, which means I must have posted it to her, why I don't know, in 1970 or '71 by the style of the hand.

4. Illuminations - Arthur Rimbaud

Probably came to Rimbaud via Robert Lowell's Imitations, which was a kind of sacred text for us in the early 1970s. What can you say about Illuminations? Inexhaustible, ineffable, incomparable. How about a line like this: La musique savante manque à notre désir, which Louise Varèse, whose translations I prefer above all others, renders: There is no sovereign music for our desire.

5. Illuminations - Walter Benjamin

This was a selection translated by Harry Zohn with an introduction by Hannah Arendt published in 1968 I think. Inexhaustible, like it's namesake above. There are essays on his library, on Kafka, on Baudelaire, on the Philosophy of History. There's a companion volume, called Reflections that I also have. Benjamin's prose is mysterious, redolent, you can meditate upon a sentence or a phrase forever it seems.

6. Triste Tropiques - Claude Lévi-Strauss

Like the Benjamin, I read this in the mid-seventies in Wellington. They taught Structural Anthropology at Vic & I've always been grateful for that introduction, since it meant I didn't have to genuflect when deconstruction became the rage a little bit later on. Lévi-Strauss' theoretical works were too much for me but this book is a delight, an education in itself.

7. Canopus in Argos - Doris Lessing

Some books change forever the way you think about things & this series did that for me, especially the first, Shikasta, & the third, The Sirian Experiments. They suggest that something completely different to what our histories have taught is going on on the planet - & in the universe. It's not necessarily true, you don't have to believe it, but you can't altogether dismiss it either.

8. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

This I bought at Sydney Airport one day in the late 1980s or early 1990s, because it looked interesting. A Picador paperback. Had no idea who the author was, but have now read most, if not all, of what he's published. Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is roughly comparable in its range & intensity with Moby Dick. Except of course it’s a Western. The ending is like nothing else I've ever read.

9. The Book of Disquiet - Bernardo Soares, Assistant Book-keeper in the City of Lisbon

... who is actual a semi-heteronym of the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who I first discovering from reading José Saramago's magnificent The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. The Book of Disquiet is an infinite book, & there are many English selections / translations, all different; I like best the one prepared by Margaret Jull Costa. This is writing that somehow manages to be at once dream & reality.

10. The Rings of Saturn - W. G. Sebald

... have always counted myself lucky that I'd written my first two books before I encountered Sebald, because, I don't know, the anxiety of influence I guess. This was the first book of his I read & it's still my favourite. A melancholy master like Soares perhaps, with an ability to digress that always returns you to the main theme.

Others who don't figure as particular books but as authors I re-read might include Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus, Henri Michaux, Raymond Chandler, Samuel Beckett, Bruce Chatwin, William Gaddis, Italo Calvino, John Berger, William Burroughs and perhaps a thousand others.

I've also always read a lot of poetry & if I had to make a list of ten poets they would be, in no particular order, W. B. Yeats, James K Baxter, Alan Brunton, César Vallejo, Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Gary Snyder, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton & Constantin Cavafy.

Painters have been an influence, especially, and decisively, Philip Clairmont, with his techniques of layering & collage, where pieces of old works are archaeologically present as constituents of the new.

Influence is a strange beast, there are books / writers you read that seem to have been prefigured in your soul - so it's not so much about wanting to be like them as it is of discovering how & why this deep affinity exists. You can admire a book or a writer without feeling this affinity; you can also feel it for a work you don't necessarily admire. Some sort of DNA involved perhaps?

The Iago Gate

for Mark Young

Strange horizon in the city of styles. Reminiscences of Byzantium, of Carthage, of Trieste. Three buildings, side by side, from three different years. 1897. 1900. 1898. Their walls contiguous and the centre one ziguratted, with a stepped facade, after the fashion of houses in Amsterdam. Here is the African Market, here they sell leather goods, whips and chains, here is a travel agency where you buy tickets to Mars. At the other end of the strip I find two pictures of old Malacca, Jonkers Street (1890), where the (fake) antique shops are, Dutch Square (1880) which I don't know; but I remember the toothy wastrel in the annex of the roofless church on the hill who sold me an image of the St Iago Gate (1890) in the same manner for a fraction of what they want for these two prints. A gate, local superstition says, that it is death to walk through. And yet I did. The rows of poetry books are black with dust, it comes stickily off onto my fingers, sweat drips inside my shirt as I go to the counter to buy the one my friend wants. The proprietor remembers the poet, two months before she died, coming in with armloads of books to sell so she could feed her addiction. He shakes his head. Such a good poet, he says. So sad. I pause, waiting for more, but he just looks blankly over his glasses, folding and passing large denomination notes to the younger man at his elbow. Out in the street it no longer looks like antiquity but a future I don't want any part of, one made out of gasoline, pheromones and noise. Choose your seat, a man says, climbing a ladder with spanner and screwdriver. Cretin is an old French word for Christian, I recall, lion is still lion. In the Coliseum. My own book on the floor of the shop, in the history section, didn't look like one that anybody would want to buy. Sometimes the train arrives on the platform the same time as you do, sometimes fate takes a hand. I get on, feeling suddenly as if an un-sought-for destination has chosen me. Rookwood, perhaps. And what, after all, does Knäbel mean? Knife? Knave? Or some other knackery?

Mystery over Australia

Ones I'd See Again

Impossible not to take it serious when you're tagged. But equally impossible to limit the top movies to ten. I wrote down ten films at random & then, during my shift, realised they wouldn't do. Had to make geographical distinctions. Ten European. Ten American. Ten Eastern. Ten Antipodean ... but that's forty ... & what about Mexico? Iran? Egypt? Mongolia? ... where to put them? It's vertigo inducing. Anyway. Here's the ten I wrote down yesterday, & afterwards, some of the omissions:

The Night of Counting the Years

Wild Child

Pan's Labyrinth

Unforgiven

The Travelling Players

La Strada

The Third Man

Days of Heaven

The Man Who Wasn't There

The Passenger


Nothing here by Jim Jarmusch ... Dead Man? Down by Law? Broken Flowers ... Dog Day Afternoon is not here. Nor Midnight Cowboy. Double Indemnity. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The Grifters. Rumblefish. Nothing by David Lynch ... Blue Velvet? Mulholland Drive? The Elephant Man? No Scorcese either. Only one Western. One (latter day) Noir.

It's the same when you look at the Europeans: Pasolini? Visconti? Melville? Godard? Bresson? Bergman? Where is Herzog, Fassbinder, Wim Wenders? What about Nosferatu? The Russians? Remember Burnt by the Sun? Solaris? Stalker? And the Brits, where are the Brits? David Lean. Ealing Studios. Where is Stanley Kubrick?

And now I remember The Ten Commandments & Three Colours: Blue, White, Red by Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Ashes & Diamonds by Andrzej Wajda. A Czech film called Closely Watched Trains. Shoah, the Holocaust documentary. A French film about the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

The great early films of Zhang Yimou. Yellow Earth, Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, To Live ... Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood For Love. Dersu Uzala.

Japan, India, Africa ... it's endless ... I can't go on, I'll go on.

If I were thinking about Antipodean films I'd list ... Breaker Morant; Picnic at Hanging Rock; The Quiet Earth; Vigil; Utu; Sweetie; The Tale of Ruby Rose; The Year my Voice Broke; Mad Max; Illustrious Energy ...

It’s as if some wise old literary Gaia might use fraud for her own ends, and this is a recurrent theme in Luca Antara—a hint that, where a writer’s intelligence is finally unconstrained by identity or the conventions of genre, the truth within that writer’s work might burn brighter.


Geoff Chapple in the Dominion Post, 17.2.07

Adam & Eve & Eat Me

Turns out the first plant we know to have been cultivated by humans was ... the fig!

Hardly ever go to the theatre any more, but Saturday night I did, with a friend, who works in a group who had a play in this year's Short & Sweet festival. The seven plays we saw - late, missed the first - were variable in quality, as you'd expect I guess; none of them was bad but ... don't know quite how to say this, all of them made me feel uncomfortable. Put simply, I always feel uneasy in a traditional theatre audience. It's something about how audiences are addressed, or perhaps I should say, imagined. We are, as it were, generic. We are one. We are the audience for theatre. It's not exactly that the fourth wall is up, though for quite a few of these plays it was; more that we as audience are the creature of the theatre, of an act of theatrical imagination in which I, for one, feel trapped. Feel like I want to protest. I was once thrown out of a theatre performance in Sydney, at the Stables, for refusing to go along with the delusion of a particularly deluded theatre practitioner ... but that's another story. Those years (1977-81) that I spent working in the theatre we used to try to construct and deconstruct theatrical illusions at the same time. We would solicit the audience's belief in an illusion at the same time as telling them it was false. And, when we addressed that audience, we did so as if they were a collection of individuals who might, just might, form themselves into a collective, with us, that could make magic happen. Whereas, I don't know, Saturday night I didn't feel I had any choice but that of polite acceptance of what was put before me.

After the theatre we went around to a local pub, the Lewisham Hotel, where, every now and again, they have a ... reggae night? Not sure what they're called. A back room, dimly lit, with massive speakers, a desk where two DJ's perform, one manipulating the turntables and the sound, the other toasting with microphone. An eclectic crowd, mainly African - whether from the Caribbean or not I don't know - and Japanese, with a sprinkling of whites, the odd others. This is the second of these night I've been to, and I just love them (thanks, Dom!). They remind me a bit of the discos I used to go to in my teens, where a roomful of people would gather to dance to the records someone played. Because this is what everyone is there to do, to dance. And everybody does. Looked around at one point and saw that the whole room, including those faraway in dark corners cluttered with bizarre bits of furniture, was dancing. And it's not a boy-girl thing either, sometimes the dance floor was 80-90 percent males, dancing - outside of gay clubs, where do you ever see that, these days? And some of those guys can really move ... so, what am I saying, something about how the sense of being one in that dancing room came simply out of being there, was not imposed, not a given, not a role that had to be conformed to; just what happened.

megacities, airports, highways, stadiums, plane fleets, resorts ...

What appear to be disparate effects - say, the normalisation of plastic surgery for teenagers at one end, and wars for control of oil reserves at the other - are really shards of the same shattered vessel, our cup which hath overfloweth. As denial comes to the centre of the culture, two social tasks, steering rational action and reproducing an ideology, start to be confused for each other. The production of values is rendered cynical and strategic (the knowing emptiness of Paris Hilton) and planning comes to be based on illusion and fantasy (the empty knowingness of George W. Bush).

It seems to me that it is this aspect of our culture that will expand in the years to come. We are in the strange cultural situation whereby the core process at the heart of our civilisation - scientific rationality - overwhelmingly argues that we are undermining, or already have undermined, the basis of life. And yet there seems no way in which a real process of cultural change (as opposed to near-useless "carbon neutralising") might develop on a global scale, before visible and disastrous effects start to concentrate the collective human mind.

This is not to suggest that the case for global warming has been utterly, unequivocally proven, or that the (fairly rare) honest sceptics should cease to offer alternative accounts. It is simply to make the cultural point that the phenomenon has been taken into people's lives as a truth, and that the utter state of denial in which we find ourselves cannot but have a series of corrosive cultural effects. After all, if even the mid-range scenarios prove correct, then a vast amount of current human effort, the megacities, airports, highways, stadiums, plane fleets and resorts, amount to the most phenomenally futile project in human history.

Guy Rundle in the Australian Literary Review; full text here.

An Ohakune Story

Christine runs the local St. Vinnies, just round the corner from here, in Smith Street. She's been there for about a year, replacing the Chinese woman who was, I'm told, pilfering the stock, keeping the best of what came in for herself or her friends. Christine runs a tight ship and has increased prices and decreased stock, making the shop less of a wonderland of chaos but, no doubt, a better business. She's from Wanganui, the nearest city to the town, Ohakune, where I grew up. We've become good friends, although I haven't yet given her the copy of Luca Antara she wants, probably because I suspect it wouldn't be her kind of thing. On the other hand, refusing it is perhaps worse ... maybe I will before she goes back to En Zed for her niece's birthday at the end of the month. The other day she offered me a copy of Alan Duff's One Night Out Stealing (which I declined) and, in subsequent conversation, told me an Ohakune story. Her friend, who grew up there, said that every night her father came home drunk, he would sit his children along the mantelpiece and insist that they sing for him: five, maybe six kids, in a row, singing. He also used to rough up his wife, their mother. And then, one night, she, the wife, had had enough. She picked her husband bodily up and hung him by his jacket collar from the coat hanger on the back of the door. His feet could not reach the floor and his arms could not reach the coat hanger. He hung there until she deigned to lift him down. He never beat her again, nor did he ever again make the children sing for him from the mantelpiece. Her friend, said Christine, has the most wonderful voice and an astounding repertoire of old songs, word and tune perfect - but cannot often be persuaded to sing.

the dream courier ... visits

Last night Jean Vengua came to me in a dream. She's as elegant and beautiful as I'd always imagined she would be. Mark Young was there too although, this is perhaps peculiar, since I've met Mark but haven't met Jean - his visual image was absent. Well - such blessings. The sad news is, I don't remember the dream very well, only some of its constituent parts. I'm reading Doris Lessing's Mara & Dann and the main freight of the dream came from that. It was a long series of inexpressibly poignant disappearances of cultural artefacts from African towns. Everything from pieces of coloured cloth to words on paper was sifting away to nothingness. Contrast that with a highly cluttered apartment which, in its layout but not its contents, resembles this one where I live. We were making arrangements for an event of some kind. I'd like to say it was the photographing of the dream fragments before they disappeared but I'd be making it up. This organising was mostly being done by telephone but the phone kept getting lost under drifts of paper, books, clothes ... and then it, the phone, rang one more time, in the next room, and Jean came through from answering it to say it was for Mark ... and that's when I 'met' her for the first time. And it was good.

hanging gardens

Yesterday I went to have my photo taken. Something I don't like to do, but this had been organised for me after I failed - for a variety of reasons that I won't go into - to arrange it for myself. It went ok I think, who knows, the photographer was gentle & kind &, in conversation, interesting; his wife & daughters too. While we were sitting having coffee afterwards I saw great splotches of yellow hovering before my eyes & felt unsure as to what was happening: perceptual distortions? neurological problems? my liver? This was in a part of Glebe where I lived for several years back in the early 1980s, in fact, you could see my old building out the window of the terrace house where TC & his family live. I walked around there afterwards. The flat I lived in appeared to be empty. The building was rather decayed, the years had not been kind to it & I wondered what the rental on #1 might be now? Not that I'd want to live there again. There used to be a couple of beaut gum trees in the garden alongside of the block that the landlords had cut down one day because their roots were getting into the pipes & causing plumbing catastrophes in the building ... I won't go there either, suffice to say, I will never forget, no matter how hard I try, what I saw bubbling up one day in the bathroom. Later I planted a jacaranda & a banana there, also, there were ginger flowers & one year sun flowers too. All that's gone, some kind of weed-tree has taken over the whole strip, with weed-grass growing beneath them. There's a wide concrete area outside the balcony of #1, the roof of the car garages underneath & in the far corner of that expanse I put an odd kind of pot made out of a tyre & who knows what else. Painted yellow. In the soil within were planted succulents of various kinds, non-specific, aloes & such like, cuttings of which I'd retrieved from various places round about. They had proliferated. Gone wild. Spread across the concrete and over the lip to hang down above & past the garage doors. I must not have looked at this quiet corner of Glebe, up behind the Kauri Hotel, for twenty years, yet in my mind it had kept on existing as an ideal, the way things do: a great spreading jacaranda letting fall its purples, colonies of banana palms, with their hands of yellow & black fruit, the scent of ginger flowers ... strange how the succulents, that I'd never thought of from that day to this, at the same time denied and fulfilled this vision of a hanging garden.

Here's the link for Laura Kroetsch's podcast ...

http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/ntn/ntn-20070125-1030-Best_Books_of_2006-064.mp3

gardens of light

Tuesday, was mumbling over a review of some art books I was writing when I noticed holes in my vision ... sounds weird, but that was the feeling. Parts of the screen were missing from my visual field, especially the left visual field. Wasn't much point in proceeding so I left the screen to look at a draft print out in the next room. Same deal, bits of words were missing, though if I scanned up or down or sideways, I could recover them. Had some shopping to do so that's what I did. Was feeling normal (apart from the visual glitch) until I stepped outside. It was a blue day, hot and dry, about 11 am. In that bright glare I could see a series of pale coloured zig-zags, red-yellow-orange-green-blue-indigo-violet, swarming in my left visual field. Kind of like what you see if you tilt a CD, bottom up, to the light. Things looked strange, with the other-worldly, hyper-real intensity that precedes a faint (I used to faint quite often when I was a child). In the Supermarket I saw Mark Mordue, a local writer, whom I've met once but never conversed with. Been meaning to bowl up and have a chat next time I see him, but I was feeling too strange. He was examining the fine print on some packet or other in aisle 5. I made the check-out and accomplished my purchases without alarming anyone, but still couldn't shake the pre-syncope feeling. Kept thinking of a word, scotoma. Did I have a scotoma? What is a scotoma? When I got back home, I took a couple of panadol and wondered if I should lie down for a bit. Didn't seem possible that I could drive a cab in this state but, half an hour or so later, I was back to normal. Later, during my shift, I noticed the intermittent pain I get in my left ear was back and realised I'd suffered another bout of the infection I picked up on Flores in late 2004. This was completely disabling at the time, for two or three days, and took another week or so before I recovered. I've had a couple of other, milder repeats since then, usually when I've been exhausted or run down; this, I guess, was a third, even milder and not accompanied by the main symptom on the other occasions, loss of balance. And, no, I don't think it was a scotoma. The visual effect, though not associated with pain, was more like the fortification illusion migraine sufferers get. Or the Garden of Light.

News from New Zealand ...

I see that book reviewer Laura Kroetsch is about to name Luca Antara one of her four Best Books of 2006 - it'll be on National Radio tomorrow and podcast and the URL should go up on the NatRad website immediately afterwards.

Wish someone would do something like that here.

... in dreams

A most peculiar dream last night, in which I worked out a modus operandi by which you could photograph the action going on in dreams. It made perfect sense at the (dream) time, what you did was rehearse & then re-stage the energies at play, then expose them to real world emulsions (it was clearly pre-digital); the same process, I remember thinking in the dream (or dreaming in the think) would work for photographing the past, should you want to do that. This was not primarily a technical question, it was psychological, or perhaps psychical; machines were not the issue, tissue was. Stupid, maybe, but all day I've been walking on air.

Then there were all the different ways you could tell someone to shut up. Life was talkative in those pre-TV days, families would gather around the radio after dinner to listen to their favourite serial.

Three I remember with mingled affection & alarm:

Oh, dry up!

Put a sock in it!

&

(my favourite):

Give it a bone!

... as if the voice were a barking dog, I guess.

& maybe it is.

By Jove

For some reason I've been mulling over things my parents used to say, many of which you don't hear much any more. Someone stupid, my Dad would say, was bone from the neck up. Someone he didn't like was a nasty bit of work. Something good was corker. When you absolutely agreed with something someone said, you said: Too right! In the same way us kids used to say, if we really meant to do something, No fear! Couple of other expressions referred to unusual or remarkable people: She was an original. He was a character. I guess these are still quite familiar, even if they're not heard that often; but what about this? Both my father and my mother were in the habit of saying, many times a day: By Jove! As in: By Jove, it's cold today! I can even remember my mother walking into a room to announce something with the words: By Jove ... When I was young I had no idea what this meant, and heard it as a generalised, probably meaningless, exclamation. It seemed even stranger when I learned, a few years later, that they were in fact invoking a Roman god, actually Jovis pater, Father Jove. They must have picked it up from somewhere like The Admirable Crichton, and probably all their Teachers Training College friends said it too, but Jove still seems a peculiar deity for school teachers in the remote King Country of New Zealand in the 1950s to swearing by.

Pam Brown is generous & perceptive about Luca here.

While over here, Stephen Davenport comments.

As for me, I've been missing this site & feeling like the decision to dedicate it solely to Luca issues was a mistake. I thought that White City might replace it but that place has somehow arrived with a formality that makes it difficult for me to chat there. Although I do like to publish on it from time to time.

... so ... I'm back here in 007, which I'm calling the Secret Agent Year.

chief biscuit says some sweet things about Luca here - thanks, Chief! (I always feel like Maxwell Smart when I say that.) &, there is another Trip Book due from AUP this winter ... I hope.

a magical tale?

Long before Australia was discovered by Europeans, it was imagined in the hearts and souls and minds of rulers, explorers and romantics on the other side of the world. Martin Edmond is a modern day romantic who embarked on a journey to discover the mystery around Luca Antara, now known as Australia. This is not a standard historical text, nor strictly a memoir. Edmond has written a magical tale about himself and his obsession with the past ....


Mary Philip in the Brisbane Courier Mail, 16.12.06

beautiful lie or elaborate joke?

This seems like an altogether more reasonable - and generous - account of what the book is, and is about. Apropos the SMH review, my publisher wrote yesterday and said: The best books generate a range of responses. Have no idea if this is true or not but it was sweet of her to say so. As to the question, it's perhaps a case of both/and not either/or.

peccable?

My agent told me on the phone this morning that there's another Luca review in the Australian Book Review. It's not available online & so haven't read it yet. But Fran said it describes the writing as 'impeccable'. This goes someway towards mollifying my outrage at the SMH's 'pedestrian' slur, even though I've always been a walker & believe, in fact, that prose writing at its best does have a peripatetic dimension. Or should that be ambulatory? Anyway ... I've been extremely well treated by NZ reviewers in recent years so perhaps the violence of my reaction to a bad review is partly due to a false sense of entitlement? Don't know. Interesting that the ABR also reviewed Luca as a work of fiction. Which, I repeat, though some of it is 'made up', in totality, it isn't. If that makes any sense.

PS Actually the word she uses is flawless as in flawlessly written. And closes with the adjectives beautiful and overwhelming although this second is not meant in an absolutely complimentary way but rather to suggest that there's just too much in the book. That's okay - I can live with that.

Stopped buying & reading the Sydney Morning Herald on a regular basis about a month ago because I was sick of their increasingly shallow & sensational approach to news & current affairs. Switched to The Australian which, while deeply conservative in many respects, does give a wider & less parochial consideration both to what is happening & what it might mean. So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at the miserable review of Luca Antara the SMH published this weekend. Must be a piece of attempted cleverness on someone's part to have it reviewed as a work of fiction, which it isn't, & this smart-arsedness is echoed in the review itself, which says, on the one hand, that the book exorcises the spectre of fiction and on the other that Luca Antara is yet to be written - huh? I think what the guy is saying is that I wrote a book like this because I wasn't able to write a novel. Echoing, it's true, something I - or 'the narrator' - also says at one point. The earnest often fail to recognise irony & thereby take seriously what is meant in jest, in the same way that the mean-spirited sometimes resent generosity in others. Everyone who writes knows that there is a shadow side to their work, a possible view or assessment of it that condemns it as negligible or nugatory; just as there is an alternative view that overstates its claims or reckons all that is attempted, achieved. Guess you hope reviewers see both possibilities & negotiate some kind of accord between them. What you don't ever want to read is a response that seems to arise out of anger or dismay at your temerity in writing the book at all. Unfortunately, that's what seems to have happened here. It's galling, particularly since the review focuses on formal matters, which aren't of particular interest to me, at the expense of content, which is, but what can you do? Something about the fiction of non-fiction was perhaps always going to end up in the Herald's too hard basket.

cherchez la femme

One of my neighbours the other day told me she saw a woman on a train reading Luca Antara - & she was a long way into it. A local Summer Hiller perhaps? Someone who was at the launch? Or - tantalising thought - a complete stranger? Guess I'll never know ...

a capital review

For reading, as this book demonstrates, is a journey of myriad possibilities ... in its profuse network of associations - some fleeting, some enduring - Luca Antara maps not merely the maze ... that reading can become, but the formation of our deeper selves. For as the hero of the Portuguese expedition to Luca Antara, Antonio da Nova, comes to realise, every journey is, inevitably, a search for our own souls. Edmond may not have the mastery of Sebald with this hybrid form, but this is nevertheless a book rich in ideas, at once erudite and eclectic, and full of beautifully unexpected and evocative descriptions ...

from Fact or fiction, a remarkable journey; Diane Stubbings, The Canberra Times, 11.11.06

PS Was reading yesterday Randolph Stow, in the preface to To The Islands, complaining that some people thought his book was influenced by Patrick White's Voss, when it had in fact been written before Voss was even published. I feel a bit the same way about the (inevitable) W. G. Sebald comparison. It's an affinity, not an influence - I discovered my 'style', such as it is, before I'd read a word of Sebald.

from: A TRUE TALE OF LOVE IN TONGA (told in 23 engravings on wood and 333 words) by Robert Gibbings, London, Faber & Faber, MCMXXXV

ex libris Trevor Charles Edmond

Caught the train at about 4.30 from Summer Hill Station. There was a guy on the platform wearing a top hat & tails, a purple shirt & a gold bow tie. He was going up The Rocks to do some spruiking. Another bloke complimented him on his get-up & then started ear-bashing a pregnant Englishwoman, with child asleep in pram. It was about the tragedy of growing up in this world. She humoured him for a while and then lost it: I'm not going to go home & kill myself because some stranger on a train tells me his troubles! she snapped. He barely missed a beat but later, walking down the platform at Central, admitted to me that She got me there. I was early, I dawdled down Broadway, past where Antiquarian Books used to be, thinking I might stop in at the Broadway Hotel for a glass canoe ... but it's now a boutique cafe serving only bottled, boutique beer, so I turned off into Shepherd Street and walked up past where Pergamon Press used to be to the pub on the corner & had a beer there instead, among the scruffy, pre-rock 'n' roll crowd, with the dusty sunlight slanting down through the windows & the traffic roaring outside. Although I've been in there often before - once even to hear The Drifters play - I couldn't remember the name of the pub until I was leaving it. The Lansdowne. The great cloudy glass balls on the Grace Bros. Buildings are held in place by griffins, I realised, for the first time, & regretted not including that detail in the book. Ah, well. Past the shop where I bought this computer, noticing a screen / monitor almost twice the size of my one & wishing I could buy it. I'm dreamy & vague now because of the beer so I nearly don't recognize Jane Macduff sitting with Lesley McFadyean at a small table outside Badde Manors. I go with Jane to look at the venue & also to drop off the 2 cds I've brought along, Mariza's Transparente & Tinariwen's Radio Tisdas Sessions. Fado before & Tuareg desert music after seems like a good idea. Then we go back to join Lesley for a coffee before returning to Gleebooks where we stand around outside as the first few people start to arrive. By half past six the room upstairs is filling up nicely, the fado sounds great, the Turkish pizzas & the wine & the beer are going down but I don't want to start because my kids haven't arrived yet ... just then they show up at the top of the stairs, Liamh without one of his front teeth, which fell out this morning. I ask Jesse if he wants me to say anything about The Evil Chicken, his book, but he says no. They dim the lights, turn the music off, close the bar. Jane gets up & introduces Roger, with praises. We're sitting either side of the podium on the stage. I haven't seen Roger for a few years, he looks both more handsome and more gaunt than he used to. His launch speech is nicely meandering, he wanders happily here and there through the book, which he extols in almost embarrassingly fulsome terms. I see Jesse signing to me from the very front row, he means that I can say something about The Evil Chicken after all. I've tuned out momentarily during our dumb show & when I tune back in, Roger is talking about something he found on the Net, how he didn't realise I'd been living in a town in Queensland where he has relatives & visits often, which is a pity, because we could have caught up ... what on earth is he saying, I wonder, I've never lived in Queensland, I've only been there twice, once to the airport on the way back from Fiji - we didn't even get off the plane - and the other time to a National Park, a bat cave just over the NSW border? Then comes the punchline, he's been reading the Q & A I did with Mark Young as if I were Mark ... not realising I was the one asking the questions. This is quite funny although also a bit disconcerting. Then it's my turn, I say a few things & then read the bit about seeing the convict ghosts in the street outside the old Darlinghurst jail that time. My last remark is about Katherine spilling wine over her copy ... & as soon as I sit down at the signing table, that's what I do, spill my wine, all over the table. Fortunately there are no books on it at that point, but the cloth is soaked & they whip it away, leaving behind a surface that reminds me of an old school desk from the 1950s. The kids all crowd around while I'm signing, Liamh jigging my elbow & grinning like a pirate with his gat tooth, Jesse taking e-orders for The Evil Chicken, which I've described as both shorter & funnier than my book. That it is. His mate Monty is there too. It gets a bit blurred then, people saying goodbye & leaving with their books, some crashing bore who was at my last launch telling me Luca Antara is really Antarctica & then we're all being shooed out. Last person I see is my ex who calls across the street & comes running over, to say what I can't remember, but she hadn't bought a book & it was a great pleasure to give her one from my stash, though whether it will be a pleasure for her to read is another question, since she's in it, albeit under another name. Fran, Jane, Morgan & I go up to the Toxteth where I remember I sent, in all innocence, Anthony off to the Friend in Hand, since that's where I thought we were going then. I call them up, hear his name being shouted through the bar, but no answer. We drink 2 bottles of Oomoo & eat meaty dishes with many toasts & lots of laughs. Later still, the cabbie who takes me home is a negro Buddhist from Sri Lanka who says, when he's not working, he plays with his five year old son. I love my son, he says. And, of his religion, that acts have consequences. You do something bad, it will come back on you. Even so, we can't be good all the time. After I pay him, we shake hands, which is nice. Then I come back up here feeling ... beached or launched, I can't decide which. Perhaps I'm beached while the book is launched? If so, it must be time to do some more beachcombing ... happy days.

Luca X London

Heard this morning from my sister, who's been honeymooning in Europe, that she acquired a copy of Luca Antara in London last week ... ! Felt obscurely envious of the alleged author of such a far-travelled work. She, Katherine, has a friend, Belinda, who runs the NZ Bookshop in Lundinium, & Belinda had ordered in a few copies. This one, over what ocean I do not know, was accidently annointed with a few drops of (red?) wine on the trip back. Surely a good sign ...

Especially since the looming launch is causing me slight anxiety, if only because the invite did not include an RSVP address, so the Events Manager at Gleebooks (thank you, Morgan) does not know how many to cater for. She wanted me to re-call all those on my launch list to suggest that, if they're coming, they confirm, but I just can't do that. Figure that, you send out the invites & people come or not as they see fit. Turkish pide / pizza for 40 should do it, surely? And enough wine to spill over a few more copies.

Fernando Pessoa speaks ...

I’m nothing .
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I’ve got all the world’s dreams inside me.

in the person of Alvaro de Campos, The Tobacco Shop, opening lines

Alas

The first town we passed through was called Alas. It was the night of 1 November in that part of the world, the night before the US election. Everyone was awake; all the lights were on—greeny-blue low-wattage bulbs which give hardly any illumination. Every house had a TV set on too, brighter than the lights in the room, showing soap operas, dreamy laid-back music videos, advertisements for things the people watching would never be able to buy, interspersed with Muslim hymns, sermons, prayers and rants.

The people were awake because it was Ramadan and they had spent the day fasting, and were now spending the night eating and talking. All the young men with nowhere to go and nothing to do sat outside watching the traffic, playing guitars or chess, talking and not talking, waiting. For what? Alas, like every other town we passed through on that strange hot night under the gibbous yellow moon, was a town of hovels with, every now and then, a resplendent mosque in which the light was bright white, a tiled, clean, well-lighted place where white-robed men and women sat and talked or sang or prayed. The hovels explained the mosques or the mosques explained the hovels, I couldn't decide which, but in Indonesia it is the case that a mosque will be made available if there are ten believers who want one and some towns, the larger ones, really do seem to have a mosque for every ten hovels.

But not Alas. Alas was just a small town, a few hovels, one mosque, and still that crowd of young men sitting outside on the stoops in the hot night with or without guitars, waiting. Small children dressed in rags ran after the bus as we passed down the dusty single main street, yelling out in shrill high voices, dropping behind as we turned the corner and changed down and headed further east, where the road ran out of town and along a low shore with palms and the shadows of islands further out, behind which the swollen yellow moon rose higher in the brown sky.

from: Luca Antara