Landfall 214 – Open House : Editorial (2007)

Jack Ross, ed.: Landfall 214 (November 2007)

Editorial:
Rules of Engagement

Amy Brown: The Propaganda Poster Girl (2008)

I thought it might be as well if I opened by describing the criteria I applied in guest-editing “Open House,” the first non-themed Landfall for a while. I’ve put together quite a few issues of literary magazines in my time (twenty, by the last count), and have made a few observations along the way:

• First, editors (by and large) love themed issues. It means you can impose a shape on the material that comes in to you, and give yourself the sense of constructing a single unified piece out of other people’s inspirations. It’s rather like anthology editing, in fact – the closest most of us can get to the editor-as-hero.
• Second, writers (by and large) detest themed issues. It means that unless you were specifically invited to submit something to the issue, that you have to contort whatever you happen to be working on to fit – however loosely – that particular theme. Or else you write something else entirely, something designed for the occasion, which may or may not end up going in. If it doesn’t, you’re stuck with an eccentric piece which may never find a home elsewhere. It’s fun every once in a while, but tiresome when it becomes the exception rather than the rule.
• Third, readers (by and large) are indifferent whether journals have themes or not. Mostly, I suspect (I’m generalising here even more wildly than usual), they read magazines to follow the fortunes of specific writers who interest them.

So whose interests should prevail? It’s a little like the American political machine, I think: that delicate balance between the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary. What’s needed to keep our literary magazines lively and relevant is a system of checks and balances between the three interest groups. After all, most of us straddle all three categories at different times, so it’s hard to conclude that either editors, writers or readers should be deprived of their own special brand of amusement.

“Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn,” as the good book puts it (Deut 25: iv). It’s a lot of work to put together an issue, so editors (the executive) do have to reserve themselves a few private satisfactions. When that turns out to be at the expense of writers (Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world”), though, we have a problem. Hence the need, in most cases, for some kind of ratio of themed to non-themes. In the end, of course, it’s you readers (the judiciary), who decide what qualifies as entertaining and instructive and what doesn’t.

•

I tried to read, accordingly, through the – very many – contributions for this issue with as much objectivity as I could muster. Anything, in theory, was grist to my mill. In the end, though, I do have my own views. I have invited certain authors to contribute pieces who might otherwise not have thought to do so. I’ve also tried consciously to introduce new faces, which has led me, in some cases, to put in only one or two pieces each for poets (in particular) who would really merit a more comprehensive selection.

Do the results sound piecemeal, fragmented? Up to you to judge, but I feel that there’s a spirit in much of the writing I’m encountering nowadays which does succeed in giving unity to this disparate-by-design assemblage of pieces.

Many of our younger writers wear emotional extremism as a kind of badge of honour. The best of them seem intensely aware of contemporary literary theory and linguistic philosophy – the heartbeat of postmodernism – but they’ve gone beyond it into a world of private concerns and fragilities.

Take Amy Brown (“Siamang”), for instance, who sees a captive monkey in a zoo as “tailor-made to comfort / someone as sorry as me.” It isn’t that she’s unaware that the monkey is suffering more than she is – it’s because of that he can serve as her ambiguous double.

Then there’s Thérèse Lloyd, whose Levin kids:

… drag race
their souped-up Ford Escorts
leaving thick black stripes
that come to abrupt endings.

Both Brown and Lloyd are recent graduates of Bill Manhire’s International Institute of Modern Letters Masters programme in Creative writing, but their work shows little of the ironic distance generally seen as characteristic of the Wellington school.

Actually I’d say that the strength of writing programmes such as the Manhire school can be seen in the fact that these two writers, fresh from its workshops, do not sound at all homogenised or smoothed out – rather, individualised in a way which fits larger trends in New Zealand writing.

It’s easy to mock the tendency of every editor to detect new trends and incipient literary movements. “Jack says that if you’re depressed, over-educated, self-absorbed, and anxious to go on about all three then you’re on the right path …” It’s not as simple as that.

My selections for this magazine may well have ended up privileging a personal impression of what is most pointed and relevant in contemporary writing. But some of the poems and stories included in this issue move me in quite a new way. I feel intensely curious to read what these new poets and fiction writers will produce next. If any of this excitement communicates itself to you, the whole venture has been richly worthwhile.

(8/07)

Landfall 214 – Open House. ISBN 978 1 877372 93 3. (2007): 5-6.
[Available at: The Imaginary Museum]

[895 wds]

Landfall 214 (2007)


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The Need to Gather Stones (2007)

Jack Ross, ed.: Landfall 214 (November 2007)

The Need to Gather Stones

Geoff Cochrane, 84-484. Wellington: VUP, 2007. ISBN 9780 86473 5584, 87 pages, RRP $25.

Fiona Farrell, The Pop-Up Book of Invasions. Auckland: AUP, 2007. ISBN 978 1 86940 388 1, 104 pages, RRP $25.

Fiona Farrell: The Pop-Up Book of Invasions (2007)

‘Four things are required by every work of art: a Place, and a Time, an Author, and a Cause of Invention.’ – The Speckled Book

And he’s feeling teetery and predisposed, and he feels it in the air like a fuzzy pastel buzz: the need to gather tools and summon energies, the need to try to start a new book. The need to gather stones and start again.

The first quote is from Fiona Farrell’s new book The Pop-Up Book of Invasions, written while she held the inaugural Rathcoola Writers’ Residency in County Cork, Ireland, in 2006. The second comes from Geoff Cochrane’s new poetry collection, 84-484, written (to all appearances) as he wandered around his old haunts in Wellington and, especially, Island Bay.

The two books are very different. So different, in fact, that it’s staggering that two writers of roughly the same generation could have such diverse outlooks and personae. “Pain distilled” was the description applied to Cochrane’s work in the Oxford Companion to NZ Literature. Farrell, on the other hand, paints herself here as a relaxed, somewhat garrulous travel companion, effortlessly at home with the craic, the pleasant meanderings of Irish life and culture.

Home & Abroad, then – pain / pleasure – male / female. A set of facile dichotomies could easily be established between these two poets’ latest projects, but I’m not sure that they would get us much nearer to understanding the essence of either book. It would be easy to argue that they were mutually exclusive. I prefer to see them as complementary: each supplying something the other lacks.

Let’s begin with Fiona Farrell. The most immediately striking thing about her book is the extensive body of notes included at the back. Farrell comments engagingly (and a little disingenuously?):

Poems should stand for themselves – and I hope these do – but when I go to readings I like the asides, just as I like the footnotes in books and the marginal scribblings of an irritable scribe.

Most of the time, I’d have to say that I couldn’t agree less. When I go to readings I like people to get to the point, read out the poem straight away, leave out all the lengthy explications altogether. So, as you can imagine, I came to these notes full of incipient disapproval. Only to be won over totally. The little comment about the “marginal scribblings of an irritable scribe” is a case in point.

In her introduction Farrell expounds on her choice of title, talking of the original Book of Invasions, “a compilation of eleven manuscripts describing the discovery of Ireland following the Creation and the Flood.”

The book is written in vellum by several hands, notably by a scribe called Muirges MacPaidin who grumbles in the margins that the light he is working in is bad or that he has lost the piece of pumice he uses to smooth the vellum or that the ruler he has been given to line the page is too thin. He died, probably of irritation, in 1543.

A more determined and driven author might have had no space for Muirges MacPaidin. But he would be quite a loss, I’d have to say. Especially as he’s clearly a model for Farrell herself in her marginal musings on so many evocatively (and somewhat absurdly) named texts: The Book of the Dun Cow, The Speckled Book, The Battler, The Yellow Book, The Black Book, even the Book of Kells …

But do the poems suffer from our growing need to turn to the back, check out the commentary before one can come to terms with the text itself? In some cases, I’d have to say, the back of the book does begin to overshadow the front. “The Way of the Dishes,” for instance, meant little to me until I’d read the notes. After which it fell perfectly into place.

And yet so many of the poems do stand so perfectly, so definitively, “for themselves,” that I’d prefer to see this as an outline rather than a critique of her method. The idea of a book which combines to form a complex whole, like a tessellated pavement or Byzantine mosaic, surely deserves ungrudging admiration.

Which poems would I single out as freestanding compositions? Well, somewhat surprisingly, given the author’s own reservations (mainly over her lack of Irish), I think her translation of “The Lament of the Nun of Beare” an absolute delight:

Bony my hands now
that once touched
splendid men.
Too bony to rise over
sweet boys again!

There’s a strange, syncopated energy in these irregular stanzas:

I was wanton in youth
and I’m glad I was bold!
If I’d been more cautious
I’d still sit here: old

in my ancient cloak –
when the bare hills’ covering
is the fine icy cloak
flung down by the King.

In her own voice, too, there are some triumphant pieces here: “Genealogy,” for example, which cries out to be quoted in full, flowing as it does from the two dismissive quotes about the Irish at the poem’s head: “a ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder’ (Carlyle); “ a tribe of squalid apes” (Froude):

Vermin begat Squalor
who married the fourth son of
Hunger who fathered the Pig-
child and the Rat-daughter who
mothered Filth who bore
Raggy Mary who wed an
Empty Glass who was the
son of not-enough-land whose
wife was Dull Superstition …

There’s a certain kind of verse which arises from one more residency in one more evocative spot. This is not it. Farrell’s immigration has clearly been pricked and energised by her six months away from Otanerito, where the previous owners “spelled out ‘Long Bay’ in daffodils across the steep hillside. The flowers come up every spring, growing more blurred and chaotic by the year as the plants multiply.”

What more perfect image for this whole iconography of assimilation and invasion? Like the daffodils, when one closes Farrell’s book one’s abiding impression is of a whole rather than a collection of disparate pieces: “It’s hard to make out the individual letters now.”

Geoff Cochrane: 84-484 (2007)

Geoff Cochrane’s 84-484, one has to say, lacks the unity and focus of The Pop-Up Book of Invasions. It also lacks Farrell’s light tone and engaging delivery. Cochrane’s is a grimmer, more existential enterprise – part of an ongoing project running through his last few books of poems from VUP.

In fact, if one wanted an international analogue for the demands Cochrane makes of his reader, one would have to look to a poet like grim old Peter Reading: the sudden shifts of register, the refusal to explicate a pattern once it’s been formed.

I have been to Wellington, and to Island Bay (to Ireland, for that matter – even to County Cork); reading Geoff Cochrane, though, I begin to wonder if I’ve ever been to me … The central title piece of the book, “84-484,” begins in an offhand manner by recalling that “84-484 was my grandparents’ telephone number in the 1950s. Absent from my head for donkey’s years, it made its return last night as I was watching Antiques Roadshow.”

My parents and myself
lived with my father’s parents.

Oh, no, I thought – not another genealogy poem ...

I remember Eileen’s sewing patterns,
Percy’s pink Free Lances,
the marzipan mice and Napoleon cake
of my fifth or sixth birthday.

Wait a minute, though – as the finely judged details of a Lowell-esque life-study begin to appear:

If and when it suits me,
I can also recall breaking a window,
poohing wickedly on the wicker chair in the shed,
slicing my finger open with a razor blade.
(The neat white tick of the scar
is still quite visible.)

Now the true form of the poem comes into focus, the inimitable lines of a Cochrane original – “poohing wickedly on the wicker chair …” – the almost compulsive honesty of shameful recollections most of us would be happy to suppress.

And so it goes on. Because, like Farrell, Cochrane too is a novelist. In a very different vein, admittedly, but with the same finely-honed skills of pacing and cumulative detail. We learn more about his grandparents; then, as his grandfather Percy drops out of the picture, more and more about the “troubled and troubling and troublesome” Eileen: “An ageing Ophelia determined to remain dismayed by sex.”

Percy had been dead for seven or eight years, but he woke me up one night by trying to strangle me …

Eileen had ceased to sleep,. but we rubbed along together like a couple of shrewd old crooks. I’d come home boozed in the wee hours and she’d let me in without protest. …

Odours of dripping and gas. A stove of Transylvanian blackness. Stubby flames of turquoise and cerise.

“In the end, of course, the cops took an interest.” But even that wasn’t quite the end, one more scene remains, from journey’s end, the old people’s home Day Room:

Eileen waits until her daughter is talking to a nurse, then turns to me and winks. “The next time you visit, bring a little car and I’ll come away with you!”

But I have no home to take her to. No car, no flat, no money. “I’ll see what I can do,” I say. While smiling a bum’s ambiguous, impotent smile.

It’s a lacerating journey, this one, through distant hells of memory. Cochrane spares himself nothing – one reason why we forgive him such harsh, accurate judgements on others. But how is this different from any other slice-of-life realistic short story? Cochrane’s unerring sense of language illuminates the whole with strange flashes of manic, electric brilliance: that “bum’s ambiguous, impotent smile,” the white-haired heads that “tip and loll.”

In one sense, then, Cochrane’s poetic has got looser, more inclusive over the years. His sense of form has enlarged to include short stories, “Worksheet” poems, haiku-like images in the same kaleidoscopic mix. His sense of style has got ever more acute and deadly, though. He’s a risk-taker, noting anything and everything which might contribute to a poem, then leaving us questioning what the poem actually was.

The ambiguous hero of “How it Begins:” Ray Green, 48, “the unembarrassed author of four rectangular novels of modest thickness,” is a little younger than his creator, the – hopefully proud, rather than simply “unembarrassed” – author of two novels, two books of short stories and ten poetry collections , but he appears to have a similar philosophy of life: “All you can do is tend your own patch, order and illuminate your own little corner of the world.”

We used to use amphetamines ourselves, back in the seventies, but with this difference: we didn’t know we were meant to get tooled-up and riot, raid banks and slay pizza-delivery boys.

Cochrane’s is a poetry of survival – a report on the human condition from one of its furthest outposts, bulletins from the barricades of the inner-city.

It is, admittedly, a far harsher voice than Farrell’s, with fewer solutions and more hard questions. And yet what I admire about both is the ability to include the violence and disorder of our past and present without being choked into silence.

Farrell talks of the potato famine and its aftermath, the Irish hegira, with the grace of a distant descendant. Yet she’s well aware of the dangers of pure evocation:

Then the poet comes and / sees in the flop of failure / the outlines of some old / hero whom another poet / made from grunt and stab / on some muddy hill.

Cochrane puts it more simply: “The need to gather stones and start again.”

(29-30/8/07)

Landfall 214 (2007): 175-79.

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At the Revival Meeting (2007)

Jack Ross, ed.: Landfall 214 (November 2007)

At the Revival Meeting

Martin Edmond, Waimarino County and Other Excursions. Auckland: AUP, 2007. ISBN 978 1 86940 391, 240 pages, RRP $40.

Martin Edmond: Waimarino County (2007)

I first met Martin Edmond in Devonport, on the night of Alan Brunton’s memorial concert in December 2002. A group of us were booked to do a cabaret-style performance at a café as part of the Massey Gothic Conference (also on that weekend). We were planning to speed on over the bridge afterwards to catch the dying minutes of the concert. As it turned out, the venue we’d been booked to perform in had – quite unexpectedly – gone out of business, so we ended up being able to attend the whole of that baroque, extraordinary, farewell celebration.

From the moment we met, I felt as if I’d known Martin for years. It’s true that we’d been corresponding for a while – over his contributions to brief magazine, which I was then editing, and also various matters to do with Brunton’s Bumper Books, the publishing arm of Red Mole. Meeting people you feel you know through letters is not always entirely satisfactory, though. All sorts of things you hardly notice on paper can suddenly rear up when print converts to flesh.

Which is a rather roundabout way of saying that we got on well, and have continued to get on well. What’s more, the manner of our meeting was a characteristic serendipity. I’ve never had a conversation with Martin Edmond which hasn’t involved him filling me in on some piece of arcane lore about a little-known writer, or place, or iconic event.

In one sense, then, I’m the ideal reader for Martin’s collection of essays, Waimarino County & Other Excursions. Leafing through it is a lot like the experience of meeting the man himself. Witty, urbane, well-informed – but not in the distant, old-world way that those words would appear to imply. No, Martin’s writing never eschews emotional involvement with the matters he is describing. There’s hardly an essay here which sounds as if it was constructed to order. The subject matter is always close to his heart.

I guess, for me, the most striking example is “The Hallelujah Chorus.” At the centre of this essay there’s a terrifying account of his visit to a revival meeting:

And as these sinners declared themselves, the chanting in the theatre rose in pitch and fervour and intensity until there came above the thunderous chorus a weird, high ululation from the stalls on the front left-hand side. I had never heard people speaking in tongues before. Glossolalia sounds like someone yodelling so hard their uvula goes into spasm. It reminded me of a time I heard a flock of sheep mustering at dusk on a Lands and Survey block out the back of Stratford ... [20]

I was there! Not at that particular meeting, of course, but many similar ones (Billy Graham, the Church of Christ, the Assembly of God). The only difference is that I would have been part of that flock yodelling strangely as the spirit of Pentecost came down on us …

Praise the Lord the Holy Ghost has descended upon us in Tongues of Flame! the Preacher screeched above the clamour of the Believers, doubling and redoubling their efforts. Then he began to call particular people out of the crowd. Suddenly I heard him say: There is a young man of sixteen or seventeen years (I had just turned seventeen) and he is sitting on the right-hand side of the cinema (I was) two thirds of the way towards the back (exactly!) and be is wondering whether to come forward now and give his soul to Jesus (I wasn’t, but, hell …). Let us all now raise our voices to the heavens and ask the Lord to give strength to this young man so that be may come and join us...

That’s precisely it. He’s put his finger on the mastery of it, the curious effectiveness of those techniques of mass persuasion. How many times have I sat fidgeting in the middle row, sure that I was the one who was being singled out for attention, sure that this was it, that tonight was the only chance I would ever have to escape perdition?

And I did feel a powerful force calling me. I was young and uncertain and the exorcism of possible demons from the chaos of my awakening mind did for a moment seem desirable, even seductive. Surely there was no harm in it? It was certainly impressive to see old people getting out of their wheelchairs and tottering forward to lean on the edge of the stage.

An opportune bit of squabbling saves Martin in the nick of time – “Any chance I would go forward to be saved blew away in that poor kid’s outraged, helpless sobbing” [21]. What impresses me, though, is that he is prepared to admit that the opportunity was there, that he might have given in.

Mind you, I doubt it would have taken. Martin Edmond was born to be a flâneur, a Baudelairean dandy exploring the byways of the metropolis (whether it be Auckland, Wellington or Sydney). There’s another part of him that is in deadly earnest, though. The strength of his writing is that he is able to give equal weight to both sides.

Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde named the two warring impulses within his hero after the two dominant intellectual influences of that time, the late nineteenth century: on the one hand, the amoral aestheticism of Walter Pater, on the other, the moral earnestness of John Ruskin. In Martin’s case I’d be tempted to call the two Ohakune and Alan Brunton.

Does that sound frivolous? It isn’t meant to. The Martin Edmond of Autobiography of My Father, of the childhood portions of Chronicle of the Unsung, of the “Autobiographies” section of the book we’re examining here, is a man profoundly, wistfully in love with his own past – with the complex intensities of youth and adolescence in that little town on the Grand Trunk Line. He’s the poet of that region, in fact – more alert to its contradictions and diversities even than that near neighbour of his, the Gothic novelist Ronald Hugh Morriesson.

And yet there’s also the Martin who ran away – almost literally – to join the circus, who followed the mercurial Alan Brunton on tour with Red Mole, abandoning the academic gravy train of Victoria University to do so. This is the Martin who writes so lovingly about Cavafy and Pessoa, who understands the attraction of that shifting signifier of international modernism, the heteronym.

Why are Martin’s books so challenging in form? Why does he resist easy genre identification, that secure place in the bookshop racks? It’s cost him, that’s for sure. Anyone straddling the uneasy frontiers of fiction and non-fiction, whose work might equally well be shelved under autobiography, travel writing or cultural commentary is liable to the suspicion of lazy readers. Praise, yes – there’s been a lot of praise of the originality of Martin’s work, but it’s usually (paradoxically) coupled with the name of some other writer whose example he is implied to be imitating: W. G. Sebald is the most obvious example, but recently Thomas de Quincey has been cited as a strong precedent (this despite the fact that Martin assures me that he has only the most tangential familiarity even with the original Opium Eater essays).

It’s hard for me to imagine any reader not finding something to their liking in the four sections of this book: ‘Autobiographies’; ‘Meditations’ (on subjects ranging from the Rosetta Stone to Alan Brunton); ‘Illusions’ (prose poems and dreams, mostly from his online blog); and ‘Voices’, published previously under the title Ghost Who Writes in Lloyd Jones’s excellent little Montana essay Series. Nor do I think I’m unique in finding virtually all of it to my liking. In fact, I can’t think of a book which has beguiled me as much since I first picked up Borges’ Labyrinths when I was a teenager.

The idea of the blog, the online diary, is another important component of Martin’s collection. He began (as I understand it) with the idea of starting a new blog for each new book project, but they appear to have evolved into a more complex symmetry.

There’s Luca Antara (“... who knows what other travellers might not have set out with a wild surmise for these shores? Looking perhaps for Luca Antara; perhaps just for the day after tomorrow”), described as being the work of a “schizoid antipodean.” That one has been running since 2004.

Then there’s dérives (started in 2005), which began with prose poems and reflections, but has now settled down to a portrait of the seedier side of cab driving in Sydney.

White City (begun in 2006), now a compendium of dreams and dream essays, was presumably intended to accompany Martin’s Ern Malley memoir / novel (accessible, so far, only in extracts such as the one included in this issue of Landfall).

No doubt Martin foresees a date at which he can move over to the new blog, Fetchers (started in July 2007) At present it’s confined to the single optimistic statement: “It’s a happy day today,” but there’s no doubt a lot more to come.

Raw material for the books? Undoubtedly. But the mere fact of being able to make your random jottings available online within minutes of writing them has an inevitable influence of the nature of that writing. It’s hard to see how writers can continue to ignore the possibilities of instantaneous communication – the barrage of comments and cross-references possible through hypertext.

In the present case, it’s fascinating to see how they’ve stolen into the texture of Martin’s book, along with more considered pieces from the nzepc, brief, and various other anthologies and projects, to give us the closest thing to an anatomy of the life of a twenty-first century writer I can readily imagine.

So I guess the reason I’d really advise to buy this book is not simply as an entry pass to the world of Martin Edmond, but also as a cartography of where we are, right now, at the bottom of the world, in the complex of world culture.

(13-17/8/07)

Landfall 214 (2007): 187-90.

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Landfall 214 (2007)


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Irony and After: New Bearings in NZ Poetry (2007)

Owen Bullock, ed. Poetry NZ 35 (September 2007)

Irony and After:
New Bearings in NZ Poetry

Bill Manhire (2012)

1 – The Anxiety of Influence

This is progress.
For instance, it is nearly dawn.
– Bill Manhire

For a long time now I’ve been wondering what the next big upheaval in New Zealand poetry was going to be.

The hero-saga of New Zealand poetry (in Allen Curnow’s version, at any rate) tells us that our first few derivative colonial bards (Thomas Bracken, Alfred Dobell, Edward Tregear) were succeeded by a group of pastoral Georgians, many of them women (Eileen Duggan, Jessie Mackay and – to a somewhat lesser degree – Ursula Bethell and Robin Hyde) who were in their turn displaced by hardheaded Modernists such as Curnow, A. R. D. Fairburn, Denis Glover and (of course) R. A. K. Mason.

This triumph of the sons over their predecessors fitted in very nicely with the theory of literary revolutions promulgated by the young Harold Bloom in his seminal critical text The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). In the Oedipal drama described by Bloom, each poet’s relation to his predecessors became a source of acute anxiety. In short, poetry is one more manifestation of the Freudian family romance: sons plot to kill their father, the elder of the tribe, in order to monopolize the attentions of their mother, the Muse:

Every poem [says Bloom] is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety. Poets' misinterpretations of poems are more drastic than critics' misinterpretations or criticism, but this is only a difference in degree and not at all in kind. There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations …

“A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety.” Note that last point as we begin to descend to cases. Let’s take, for example, the Bill Manhire poem “On Originality” (from his 1977 collection How to Take Your Clothes Off at the Picnic):

Poets, I want to follow them all,
out of the forest into the city
or out of the city into the forest.

The first one I throttle.
I remove his dagger
and tape it to my ankle in a shop doorway.
Then I step into the street
picking my nails.

Everything in these few lines is significant, is coded to make sense to other sufferers from this singular anxiety called influence (or “influenza,” as Bloom himself calls it: “an astral disease”). Our speaker wants to “follow” all poets, whether their genre be Virgilian pastoral (“out of the city into the forest”) or Juvenalian satire (“out of the forest into the city”). After killing the first of them, he steps “into the street / picking my nails” – a clear reference to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) where the ideal modern artist is described as “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible … indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

A clear reference, that is, to those in the know – to other readers of the great Modernists, with Joyce as their ultimate avatar. There’s an ironic wink here over the heads of a less learned audience, distracted by the serial-killer details of Manhire’s sinister protagonist’s pilgrim’s progress.

I trail the next one into the country.
On the bank of a river I drill
a clean hole in his forehead.

Moved by poetry
I put his wallet in a plain envelope
and mail it to the widow.

“Moved by poetry …” To Manhire, like Bloom, the poet is a killer. His art can only flourish in the dead body of his predecessors (in this case, presumably, Curnow and the other New Zealand expressive regionalists: Baxter, Louis Johnson, Kendrick Smithyman). I don’t know if he had particular originals in mind for the three poets he throttles, knifes and shoots in the course of the poem, but it wouldn’t much matter even if he did. The greatness of Manhire’s poem resides in the simplicity and pain behind lines such as:

It is a difficult world.
Each word is another bruise.

Of course the poem is a gag. Bill Manhire isn’t really a killer. His “originality,” here, consists of mixing the high art form of lyric poetry with the pop culture tropes of the hardboiled thriller. To us, now, that might seem a postmodern cliché, but one can see the overwhelming effect it must have had on the hothouse rhetorical earnestness of his elders when Manhire’s work first began to appear in the seventies. This was a new voice and a new attitude. Bill Manhire was cool in a way that no previous New Zealand poet had ever been. It was as if John Coltrane had suddenly stood up and started to play hot licks at a hootenanny barn dance.

And so it began, the birth of the cool. The Oedipal drama had moved into another act, the new Miles Davis / Manhire had arisen to dispatch old Satchmo / Curnow.


2 – The Birth of Soul

I like typewriters because they are always turned on.
– Will Joy Christie

And yet, how tedious it has started to sound, this revolution of the ironic and knowing over the ponderous and crafted. Curnow came back with a vengeance, like a roaring lion, with his own version of the postmodern aesthetic (most notably in An Incorrigible Music (1979), but actually in the whole mass of his later work). After all, if cool, postmodern irony was the new ideal, how easy it was to produce!

It’s salutary, in this respect, to compare the crystalline reserve of early Manhire, a mask covering unspeakable depths, with the more facile playacting of James Brown’s “Loneliness” (from Favourite Monsters, 2002):

I was just sitting there, wandering lonely as a cloud, when
– honest to heaven – looking out of the window
I saw Elvis. I know I know, but honest to heaven
it was him – or my name’s not James Brown.

The Wordsworth reference segues easily into the Elvis / James Brown joke, and, yes, there’s still anguish there, but one can’t help feeling that it’s ever-so-slightly put on for the occasion. Whatever shock-value and impetus this poetic movement once possessed, it appears to have left the building. Which leaves us all sitting by the microphone waiting for the next big thing, the new Moloch before whom we can all prostrate ourselves. Is it Glenn Colquhoun? Bill Direen? Who will it be?

Meanwhile Harold Bloom himself had become unhappy with his old critical pontifications, and had written a preface to the 1997 reprint of his most famous book in which he lamented its failure to account for the protean genius of poetic shapeshifters such as Dante and Shakespeare …

And, really, it does seem very dated, this Freudian primal myth of emasculation and cannibalism performed by each new greedy generation on the last. It seems very male, among other things. Where are the daughters of the tribe in this scenario? When Michele Leggott revived the submerged voices of Bethell and Hyde in her 1994 text DIA, where was the anxiety? Was she trying to eat them, replace them? Was she Electra to Manhire and Wedde’s Oedipus?

Many questions, few answers.

•

What I’d like to do now is to recount my own poetic displacement myth, designed not so much to supplant the Colonialist / Modernist / Postmodernist map we’ve hitherto accepted as the true face of New Zealand poetic history, as to supplement and perhaps complicate it a little.

The recent Hollywood film Ray popularized the idea of the musical revolution accomplished by blind bluesman Ray Charles when he set out to combine the emotional intensity of Gospel with the sexual raunch of Honky-tonk. The Devil’s music had met up with the Lord’s, and the result was Soul – a new, overarching genre designation which continued to dominate successive generations of Funk, New Jack Swing and Hip-hop artists. Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige and (yes) James Brown were all, according to this paradigm, soul artists, nourished by this strange fusion between the church and the dancehall. Pop and Jazz continued to flourish on either side of Soul, albeit with innumerable cross-overs and connections, but there was nevertheless a distinction which had to be felt rather than described. There was a reason why Whitney Houston was pop whereas her mother’s old friend Aretha Franklin had soul.

Is it impossibly pompous of me to claim that for some time now I’ve been observing the growth of a similar trend in the most distant provinces of New Zealand poetry, far from the corridors of cultural power?

So what are the characteristics of this new poetry? Who are its high priests and priestesses? To whom do they owe allegiance? These are complex questions, to which I have (as yet) only provisional answers. All I can say is that of late I’ve observed a strange metamorphosis taking place among the “despised students of the Humanities” (to quote from Troy Kennedy Martin’s classic 80s thriller, Edge of Darkness).

On the one hand we have a generation of graduate students trained in the austere uncertainties of deconstruction – bookworms to whom Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Žižek and Baudrillard are household names. This, I suppose, might be described as their gospel, their source of intellectual rigour and intensity.

On the other hand we have the emotional realities of being “doomed – bourgeois – in love” as Whit Stillman’s preppie comedy Metropolitan (1990) put it. Some of the writers I have in mind are a country mile from being bourgeois, but you get the general idea: no money, no prospect of making any, a crippling student debt, and far too much education for their own comfort.

Out of these two elements has come the most extraordinarily passionate and disturbing poetry of our time. Some of the these writers who’ve already published books – and whose work can therefore be conveniently accessed – include Olivia Macassey (Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Titus, 2006), Will Christie (Luce Cannon, Titus, 2007), Jen Crawford (Admissions, Five Islands Press, 2000), Thérèse Lloyd (many things happened, Pania, 2006) and Tracey Slaughter (Her Body Rises, Random House, 2005).
Among the men, I might mention Scott Hamilton (To the Moon, in Seven Easy Stages, Titus, 2007), and possibly that revered elder statesman Richard Taylor (Conversation with a Stone, Titus, 2007).

You mustn’t take my word for it (I wouldn’t want you to, in any case). Who, after all, is their Manhire, their Curnow? Do they gather under anyone’s umbrella? I think the whole point is that they don’t. There is no school. They’ve all come independently to the same conclusions: “My rigorous poststructuralist schooling tells me to distrust emotion and enthrone the intellect, to detect aporia [gaps] in all simple statements of feeling., and yet – I hurt. I hurt so much, I’ve been hurt so much that I have to cry about it. I crave the simplicity of childhood yet know that I can never go back to it. That was horrible, too, a lot of the time.”

In “Outhwaite Park,” for instance, Olivia Macassey invites:

… three tears
for the people we used to fuck
for backbones scraped on the washing machine
for the strangers who slept outside your bedroom door
and the schoolgirls and drag queens playing table tennis
and the cockroaches breeding in the microwave;
and the four am trains and six am busses,
mint icecreams, roofs of carparks, moulting hedgehogs
lit by the phonebox, the grass overrun by wirewoves
and rotting cardboard, my summer clothes, my love

But isn’t this just the same old Romantic cult of childhood all over again, you ask? Is this the revolution? “Token wonder girls and one trick ponies, and … wooden clothespegs made into hard unhappy dolls.” (Macassey, “Outer Suburb”) Not so. Let’s take another example, Scott Hamilton’s “1918,” a prose poem about the great influenza pandemic:

When Queenie got the cramps we took her to the small house behind the marae, and laid her out on a clean sheet, and fetched a bucket of creekwater, and cooled her stomach and hips, and washed the mushrooms under her arms. The younger kids giggled beside the bed, expecting another baby cousin. First her fingernails then her hands turned black; her breasts swelled, popped their nipples, and dribbled blue-black milk. We couldn’t straighten her arms in the coffin, so we folded them across her chest. She looked like she was diving into herself.

Scott’s a Marxist and (some would say) an ideologue. But in this case it has the effect of making him value individual experience of world-historical events above the facile paradoxes of postmodernism. His work reverses the cliché about R. A. K. Mason, that his conversion to the Left made it impossible for him to write more poetry. For Scott, it’s precisely Marxism that enables his poetry – a complex realm of abandoned loners and doomed explorers heading for the frontier. It’s as if he’s decided to show us once and for all that Auden’s Orators (1932) holds the seeds of a new poetic, rather than being the “fair notion fatally injured” its own author called it.


3 – The Law of Attraction

Maybe I have spent too much time these last 40 years thinking about Celan & translating his work, & maybe Celan's work has been too essential for my own writing for me to have a detached view on this, but the association of PC with Britney Spears makes me shudder...
– Pierre Joris

When I posted my poem-sequence “The Britney Suite” (first published in 2001) on The Imaginary Museum, my online blog, a couple of months ago, it was actually in response to a number of people who’d demanded to see it, presumably intrigued by the conceit of engineering a meeting between anguished concentration-camp-survivor poet Paul Celan and blonde pop goddess Britney Spears.

I was a little disconcerted to see that the point of this jarring juxtaposition escaped Pierre Joris. But I was far more surprised to see how many people rose to my defense. They could see what I was talking about. They understood the idea of trying to bridge the gaping abysses cutting across our culture.

Recently I watched a documentary called The Secret, which purported to offer the answer to all of life’s problems in the (so-called) “law of attraction.” The universe, claimed the various snake-oil salesmen and hokum-peddlers in this made-for-TV-but-gone-straight-to-DVD movie, will supply you with anything you call to yourself. If you expect a flat tyre and a bill in the letterbox, that’s what the universe will send you. In effect, anything you receive you’ve asked for in advance.
Of course this is a simplistic way to go about explaining the inconceivably complex gestalt of life, the universe, and everything, but it’s so dumb it’s almost wise. If only it could be so! “Thinking positive” and “having a good attitude” may be irritating clichés, but the placebo effect indubitably works sometimes. Your mental attitude does affect your physical health.

If this double-mindedness, this fusion of extreme intelligence and New Age moron-fodder repels you, you’ll probably be happier with a more comfortable range of poetry. If, however, your attraction to it is stronger than the repulsion, then you’re probably already of the Devil’s party without knowing it. In short, you have soul.

I’d like to finish by quoting from “The Uncanny Truth about Abelard,” (published in brief 25 (2002): 39-41), Olivia Macassey’s charting of the permeable membranes connecting her two worlds.

12:37 am on Oct. 4

“We deplore the disappearance of the real under the weight of too many images. But let’s not forget that the image disappears too because of reality”

– Jean Baudrillard c2000 (do you believe it? My lonely twin.)


9:16 pm on Nov. 16

for example I have no thought now of what you look like, except
that saints have your eyes. When they are dying.

Excisions. Elliptical scar around the nothing, and those dark thighs.
she could push her fingers in there, it is an eye
under the window, thinks a woman who thinks


1:23 am on Dec. 8
Yesterday I saw you (me) for the first time (for the hundredth time). You
told me that you have been reading those same letters etc; these coincidences no longer bother me. I can see where I have been thinking: my ghost on every page.

Already the quote marks are fading; they will be my things,
it will become my dream; you will afterwards believe – because you will only be me
You will no longer read me, it is beginning,
embraces me in the water, limping and howling,
follows me everywhere, saves for (me) the last card. I cover everything. I arrive.

Abelard had gotten it wrong – I was Abelard; I am him all along

all of the words will be mine.

Heloise, “a woman who thinks,” and Abelard, “my lonely twin” have been so chewed up, dispersed, mythologized and distanced by our histories that they’ve come to seem, finally, unapproachable. Macassey can see that, but she refuses to admit defeat. Her own levels of experience speak more strongly the more mediated they are by puppets and lonely quotes.

“Let’s not forget that the image disappears too because of reality …” Our nostalgia can be as much for the lost certainties of the intellect as for the simplicity of the unclouded heart.

Macassey’s poem, like so many others by the poets I’ve mentioned above, laments our incapacity to learn how to live in this strange dystopia we’ve built in the midst of plenty.

Can’t we all learn to get on? To understand each other? To stop being so goddamned horrible so much of the time? That is what the new poetry I’ve been seeing sprouting up, irrepressible, all around me, is about.

I’m afraid you didn’t realise what you were doing when you funded all those PhDs, imported those books of French theory, when you allowed those souls to grow up, angst-ridden and dispossessed, in the dark corners of your kingdom.

This is my nest of weapons.
This is my lyrical foliage.

So Bill Manhire, thirty years ago. I see no need to replay all those Bloomian fantasies of overthrowing the elders of the tribe, conducting a palace coup in the centre of culture. Can’t we embrace our elders instead of excommunicating them?

All the new poets want to do is to teach you how to feel again. However difficult that may be. If you don’t get it first time (thinking, perhaps, that you’re too smart), they’ll persevere. They’re patient. They’ve got soul.


Bibliography:

• Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 1973. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Brown, James. Favourite Monsters. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2002.
• Christie, Will Joy. Luce Cannon. Auckland: Titus Books, 2007.
• Crawford, Jen. Admissions. New Poets Series 7. Wollongong: Five Islands Press, 2000.
• Hamilton, Scott. To the Moon, In Seven Easy Steps. Auckland: Titus Books, 2007.
• Lloyd, Thérèse. many things happened. Wellington: Pania Press, 2006.
• Macassey, Olivia. “The Uncanny Truth about Abelard.” brief 25 (2002): 39-41.
• Macassey, Olivia. “Outhwaite Park.” [Available at: http://www.macassey.com/poems/poem_4.htm]
• Macassey, Olivia. Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Auckland: Titus Books, 2006.
• Manhire, Bill. Collected Poems. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2001.
• Ross, Jack. The Britney Suite. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2001. [Available at: http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/2007/03/meeting-paul-celan.html]
• Secret, The. [Available at: http://thesecret.tv/home.html]
• Slaughter, Tracey. her body rises. Auckland: Random House, 2005.
• Taylor, Richard. Conversation with a Stone. Auckland: Titus Books, 2007.

(6/07)

Poetry NZ 35 (2007): 95-103.
[Available at: The Imaginary Museum (10/8/07)]

[3365 wds]


Poetry NZ 35 (2007)


•

The Golem (2007)

Jack Ross: To Terezín (2007)

The Golem

1 – Heteronyms

When I am thinking about a new novel, I always think of Auschwitz
– Imre Kertesz (Reuters, 2002).

Michael Chabon: Summerland (2003)

On the copyright page of my paperback edition of Michael Chabon’s novel Summerland, published by Fourth Estate (London) in 2003, appear the following words:

The right of Jonathan Franzen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. (Chabon, 2003, p. ii).

Jonathan Franzen? But isn’t the book by Michael Chabon? Maybe they collaborated on it. Perhaps one is a pseudonym (the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa referred to his various literary personae as “heteronyms”) for the other. In that case, which is which? More to the point – which one is real?


Michael Chabon, a consultation of various blurbs and internet sites informs me, was born in 1963 in Washington D.C. He grew up in Columbia, Maryland – according to the blurb for Kavalier and Klay (Chabon, 2001) – or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – according to the blurb for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Chabon, 1988).

In any case, he now lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their four children. He is the author of four novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), a novella, The Final Solution (2004), two collections of short stories, a “serial novel,” Gentlemen of the Road, appearing at present in the New York Times magazine, and the novel The Jewish Policeman’s Union, promised for May 1, 2007 (Michael Chabon, 2007).

Jonathan Franzen, by contrast, was born “near Chicago” in August 1959. He grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, but now lives in New York City. He is the author of three novels, including the National Book Award-winning The Corrections (2001), a collection of essays, How to Be Alone (2002), and – most recently – an autobiography, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (2006) (Franzen, 2007).


Let’s make a little chart:

1959Jonathan Franzen born (Chicago)
1963Michael Chabon born (Washington, DC)
1987The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
1987-92abortive work on Fountain City
1988The Twenty-Seventh City
1992A Model World and Other Stories
1992Strong Motion
1995-2001working on The Corrections
1995Wonder Boys
1999Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories
2000The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
2001The Corrections
2002Summerland
2002How to Be Alone
2003(ed.) McSweeney’s Treasury of Thrilling Tales
2004(ed.) The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist
2004The Final Solution
2006The Discomfort Zone
2007Gentlemen of the Road (15-part serial novel)
2007The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

There’s nothing actually impossible to reconcile here. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that relaxed (Jewish) family-man Michael Chabon acts as the mask for tortured (WASP) loner Jonathan Franzen, then we can see at once that Chabon’s alleged traumatic battle with his abortive second novel Fountain City – “Where Mysteries had been a kind of Drake’s voyage, a wild jaunt in a trim ship to make marvelous discoveries and conduct raucous pirate raids on the great ports of American literature, Fountain City was more like the journey of Lewis and Clark, a long, often dismal tramp through a vast terrain, in pursuit of a grand but fundamentally mistaken prize. Mosquitoes, sweltering heat, grave doubts, flawed maps – and, in my case, no Pacific Ocean at the end” (Chabon, 1995) – coincides with Franzen’s own fictional debut. Similarly, while the latter spent seven years grappling with the intricacies of The Corrections, the former was dashing off two novels and a collection of short stories.

The suspiciously long gestation periods in both author’s careers are thus neatly plugged by the conjecture that they are one and the same person. As Chabon remarks in Wonder Boys, his novel about an author obsessed with an unfinishably vast master-work:

Motivation, inspiration were not the problem: on the contrary I was always cheerful and workmanlike at the typewriter and had never suffered from what’s called writer’s block; I didn’t believe in it.

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming … it stood, as of that morning, at two thousand six hundred and eleven pages, each of them revised and rewritten half a dozen times. (Chabon, 2000, pp. 11-12).

Like Stephen King’s “Richard Bachman,” like Evan Hunter’s “Ed McBain,” like Ruth Rendell’s “Barbara Vine,” Jonathan Franzen appears to have constructed an alter-ego to draw off the flak, to divert attention from himself, above all (perhaps) to justify his inexhaustible creative fecundity. “Mr Difficult” (the title of a new essay added to the 2003 paperback edition of How to Be Alone) may well be, at the same time, America’s sweetheart: “nominated by The New Yorker as one of twenty writers for the 21st Century,” according to the blurb for Wonder Boys (Chabon, 2000).[1]

It’s as if Mark Twain and Henry James turned out to have been the same person all along.


  2 – Matchboxes

Golem stories are all hard telling.
– Gustav Meyrink (Meyrink, 1972, p. 43).

But I can see that I’ll have to go back a bit in time to explain this sudden interest in Summerland and the other works of Messrs Chabon and Franzen.

While collecting various bits-and-pieces of local ephemera to bring back as presents from the Czech Republic (as one tends to do in exotic places), I came across a display-case full of Golem matchboxes. There were also Kafka T-shirts, Prague Castle tea-towels, Charles Bridge coasters, Metamorphosis mugs, but I won’t bother you with those. (Funnily enough, I was actually looking for pieces of Jaroslav Hašek – Good Soldier Švejk – memorabilia, but that’s another story …)

The Golem matchbox defeated me. Its jaunty, kitschy absurdity seemed pleasingly at variance with the heavy-handedness of so much of the official culture I’d run into there: ostentatiously “post-modern” plastic statues of President Havel with a bra and suspenders, automobiles made out of toilet-rolls, pictures of scruffy losers participating in happenings … all the stuff that would have seemed so daring in the days of Yoko Ono. I bought it. It wasn’t expensive.

What’s more, I had the perfect recipient in mind: my friend Sarah Shieff of Waikato University, who makes a speciality of Golem lore (one of her more daring conjectures is the relationship between the Golem of Jewish legend and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Gollum, that cringing, treacherous, slimy little sneak … (but see further Shieff, 2006)).

Sarah seemed inordinately pleased to get the matchbox (if I’d known just how pleased she’d be, I might also have presented her with the set of Golem playing cards which had been given away to another friend). It looked like a fairly paltry offering to me, but she repaid it by lending me two things: one a rather blurry dub of the German expressionist film The Golem; the other a copy of Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

The film proved to be a bit of a disappointment. I’d heard it was a classic, but it was actually long, static and boring (though the Golem himself has a kind of loony zest about him). Predictably, I discovered later that there are in fact two films: the 1915 Der Golem, dir. Henrik Galeen and Paul Wegener, based loosely on Gustav Meyrink’s novel, and a 1920 “prequel” entitled Der Golem, wie er in der Welt kam [The Golem: how he came into the world], dir. Karl Boese and Paul Wegener (Internet movie database, 2005). Both are generally entitled The Golem in English, but the first – fabulously rare – is set in the present day, while the second – described by one critic as more impressionist than expressionist – takes place in 16th-century Prague. They’re often confused with one another. It was the second one that Sarah lent me.

Chabon’s book, by contrast, was a revelation. I started to read it the evening I got it out of a tepid sense of duty to my hosts, but was immediately glommed. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the picaresque tale of the intertwining lives of two cousins, American-born Sam Clay (Samuel Louis Klayman), and his Czech cousin Josef Kavalier, set in the 1940s and 50s, spanning two continents, a host of minor characters etc. etc. Your typical Pulitzer-prize winning pap, in other words. What made it stand out, for me, was the author’s obsessive interest in Golden Age American comics (his heroes first create, then make a living writing and drawing the adventures of a costumed super-hero called “The Escapist”[2]). That, and the marvellous opening sequence where Josef, a trained escape-artist, makes his exit from Nazi-occupied Prague in the same crate which is being used to ship the original Golem to safety in the Baltic states … Well, you’ll have to try it yourself to see what sets it apart from other sprawling epics of the same ilk.

As I read on, I began to realise just how much this Michael Chabon had been dogging me. His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, had usurped a title which I very much wanted to use for my own unpublished (and probably unpublishable) first novel. The Mysteries of Auckland, my anticipated homage to the world of Eugène Sue, had to give way to the Borgesian Keep Reading as the Day Declines …

Then there was Wonder Boys, one of my all-time favourite American films. I hadn’t made the connection, hadn’t even realised the film was based on a novel, let alone one by Michael Chabon. This saga of Michael Douglas’s Lost Weekend on an American college campus seemed to me at the time (2000-2001, around the turn of the millennium) to have rolled every cliché about hard-bitten American writers into one pleasing package. They all used typewriters rather than computers, they were all drunk or stoned almost all the time, everyone admired them and hung on their every word, and they always got the girl … In short, however hungover, down-and-out, stubbly or ill-dressed they might be, they were the epitome of cool. What more can you ask for in a fantasy?

Then, hunting through a second-hand shop for a copy of Kavalier and Clay (having had, reluctantly, to return Sarah’s copy), I came across Chabon’s Summerland, a curious amalgam of Harry Potter and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which uses the metaphor of baseball to motivate its juvenile hero and heroine’s journey-of-self-discovery. And that, of course, was the coincidence which alerted me to the Jonathan Franzen connection.


3 – How to be Alone

In his various entities he created his own epics.
– Jack Vance, The Killing Machine (Vance, 1997, p. 286).

So what of Jonathan Franzen? What’s his part in this equation? When I say that he’s the man who dissed Oprah Winfrey – or, rather, the man who had his novel unselected for Oprah Winfrey’s bookclub – I imagine you’ll remember what I’m talking about.

His website (Jonathan Franzen, 2001) still provides links to a lengthy debate on the subject:

Jonathan Franzen stands accused of insufficient Oprah gratitude. And since his infamous banishment from the Winfrey polis on Oct. 12 [2001], that sin, in turn, has dilated into nearly every character flaw imaginable—he’s arrogant, elitist, hypocritical, snobbish, and flat-out stupid. Such, at any rate, has been the verdict of nearly every commentator since the curiously inert affaire Oprah has exercised the literary world and its wags. …

But what, exactly, has he said? He’s ambivalent, that’s all. In an interview with the Portland Oregonian, he did utter the fateful characterization of himself as a writer “solidly in the high art literary tradition.” … Likewise, his other infamous pronouncement, on the Powell’s bookstore Web site, bespeaks less foppish disdain for the besotted taste of the masses than simple bewilderment. Yes, he said that Oprah has “picked enough shmaltzy one-dimensional [novels] that even I cringe.” But he also rushed to remind his interviewer that “I think she’s really smart and fighting the good fight. And she’s an easy target.”

[Chris Lehmann, Posting Thursday Nov 1, 2001]

and so on …

Newsweek quoted a literary agent as saying, “Most of the people I hear talking about all this now refer to Franzen along the lines of ‘that pompous prick.’ ” Another agent, quoted in the New York Observer, called him an “ungrateful bastard.” What publishing person in his right mind would get on the wrong side of Oprah, when she has the power to make your career with a single phone call?

And any writer who defends Franzen in this fight does so at the risk of ruining his own chances of ever scoring that cash cow. Why else would Rick Moody and Harold Bloom tell the New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick that it was hypocritical to object to Winfrey’s logo?

[Eliza Truitt, Posting Thursday Nov 1, 2001]

It isn’t that Franzen actually refused Oprah Winfrey the right to “select” The Corrections for her book-club; the problem is that she “disinvited” him after hearing some of his negative comments about 1/ her irritating logo, and 2/ the quality of some of the earlier selections. As a result, he became America’s pre-eminent example of an élitist literary snob.

That damning central accusation informs most of Franzen’s essay collection How to be Alone. Am I or am I not a snob? Is it or is it not possible to write “well” – or to the best of one’s ability – and “accessibly” at the same time?

In some of the essays he comes across as the worse kind of hypocritical fencesitter: “To the man-in-the-street who, I’m sorry to say, / Is a keen observer of life, / The word intellectual suggests right away / A man who’s untrue to his wife” (Auden, 1991, p. 298). “Sifting the Ashes,” for example, where he begins by pointing out all the myriad evils of smoking, and then justifies the fact that he still smokes by suggesting how nobly the act “[inhales] contradiction and [breathes] out ambivalence.” (Franzen, 2003, p. 168). Yeah right.

In others we come, I suspect, a little closer to the heart of his dilemma. In “Mr. Difficult,” for example, he points out to a correspondent who described him as “a pompous snob, and a real ass-hole” that “Even as an adult, I consider myself a slattern of a reader”:

I have started (in many cases, more than once) Moby-Dick, The Man Without Qualities, Mason & Dixon, Don Quixote, Remembrance of Things Past, Doctor Faustus, Naked Lunch, The Golden Bowl, and The Golden Notebook without coming anywhere near finishing them. (Franzen, 2003, p. 241).

Just plain folks, in other words – not one of those fancy-pantses who actually get to the end of “high art literary” novels … He proceeds to damn with faint praise the career of William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions, which Franzen did once succeed in reading by dint of taking ten days off from his own work. Gaddis, the “Mr. Difficult” of the title, was – in Franzen’s view at any rate – a genuinely snobby, élitist ass-hole who wrote genuinely difficult books. By contrast, despite his admitted use of “fancy words … like “diurnality” and “antipodes” [and] phrases like “electro-pointillist Santa Claus faces” (Franzzen, 2003, p. 238), the author of The Corrections is a positive W. C. Fields!

In “Meet me in St Louis,” Franzen chronicles in embarrassing detail the lengths he actually went to in order to placate Oprah’s Book Club before the final débâcle of the “disinvitation.” He allows himself to be poked, prodded and packaged by a film crew until the reader positively longs for him to grow a backbone and tell them to back off. No dice. The ghastly travesty continues. His excuse is that he’s the kind of person “who instantly acquires a Texas accent in Texas”:

When I talk to admirers of Winfrey, I’ll experience of a glow of gratitude and good will and agree that it’s wonderful to see television expanding the audience for books. When I talk to detractors of Winfrey, I’ll experience the bodily discomfort I felt when [during the filming] we were turning my father’s oak tree into schmaltz, and I’ll complain about the Book Club logo. (Franzen, 2003, p. 300).

As a result, “my sense of dividedness will only deepen.”


It’s easy to make fun of this beginners’ treatise on Alienation for Beginners: “How to sound like a tormented intellectual in fifteen easy lessons.” One has to remind oneself constantly that this was a real dispute, with serious repercussions. The inherent absurdity of jumped-up talk-show host Oprah Winfrey as arbiter of American letters (with the apparent endorsement of such luminaries as Harold Bloom) should not obscure the difficulty of Franzen’s task. He’s forced to explain the inevitable trahison des clercs: the tendency of all writers to bite the hand that feeds them, to an audience of Dr. Phil watchers. He doesn’t make a very good job of it, but who would?


Without the Chabon connection, one might be tempted to write off Jonathan Franzen as one more victim of the increasing impossibility of communication between high culture and low culture. How can the Blooms and Franzens speak meaningfully to (let alone for) the people who attend Monster Truck rallies? Franzen’s alter-ego, however, his Golem, Michael Chabon, can chatter on about baseball and comics to the manner born. His dividedness has deepened, all right – for a moment there, in 2001, as the Twin Towers fell and L’Affaire Oprah ground on, it must have threatened to swallow him up.

Then came the National Book Award, and – above all – the Pulitzer Prize.

 
4 – The Original

One person is the whole world
– Rabbi Hillel

Gustav Meyrink: The Golem (1916)

But why do I refer to Chabon as Franzen’s Golem? Who, or what, is the Golem? It is, to begin with, one of the central metaphors in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

There’s a lot to be said on the subject, and very little consensus, it seems to me, but I’ll begin by quoting an encyclopaedia entry about it:

Golem, in Jewish legend, an image or form that is given life through a magical formula. A golem frequently took the form of a robot, or automaton. The word means “embryo”, or anything that is not fully developed. In the Hebrew Bible (see Psalms 139:16) and in the Talmud, the term refers to an unformed substance. Its present meaning developed during the Middle Ages, when legends arose of wise men who could instil life in effigies by the use of a charm. The creatures could be used to carry out their creators’ commands and were later conceived of as offering special protection to Jews. The best-known of the golem stories concerned Rabbi Juda Löw of Prague, who was said to have created a golem that he used as his servant but was forced to destroy it when it became unruly. Der Golem (1916) by Gustav Meyrink takes the legend of the golem as its theme. (Microsoft Encarta, 2003).

The Golem, in other words, is a kind of mystical Frankenstein’s monster, always liable to turn on its creator.

The Golem had no inclinations, either good or bad. Whatever action he performed he did under compulsion and out of fear lest he should be turned again into dust and reduced to naught once more … nothing would stop him in the execution of anything that he had undertaken. (Rappoport, 1937).

Rabbi Löw (allegedly) had to remove the “tablet on which he had written the Ineffable Name from under the Golem’s tongue,” every Friday, “as he was afraid lest the Sabbath should make the Golem immortal.” On one occasion he forgot this duty, and as a result it ran amok.

There are many other versions of the legend. In the 1920 silent film, the Golem saves the Emperor Rudolf from a grisly death, thus persuading him to rescind his decree to banish all the Jews from Prague. All the commentators do agree on one thing, however – the creature was designed to protect the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe from accusations of ritual murder and bloodshed. Where opinions differ is on how well it fulfilled this task.


Gustav Meyrink takes a rather different slant. For him the Golem is a kind of psychic doppelgänger. On the few occasions it actually manifests itself in his strange, elliptical prose fantasia, it has the narrator’s own face, for:

as that same Golem stiffened into clay the instant that mysterious phase was removed from its lips, so must, I thought, these humans dwindle to soulless entities so soon as was extinguished within them some slightest spark of an idea, some species of dumb striving, however irrelevant, already deteriorated with most of them, from the look of it, into a mere aimless sloth (Meyrink, 1972, p. 26).

We are all lifeless Golems, the author implies, unless we are engaged in the quest for transcendence. The novel ends with a vision of the perfect alchemical union of man and woman, accomplished under the twin sign of Isis and Osiris: “a hermaphrodite in two halves, the right female, the left male … its golden head is in the form of a hare. The ears of it stand up high and close together, giving the semblance of two pages of an open book.” (Meyrink, 1972, p. 287).

That book, presumably, is the book IBBUR, repeatedly invoked in the text, a kind of super-Kabbalistic ritual volume, written in Hebrew, and containing a whole variety of mumbo-jumbo fin-de-siècle secrets of the universe. In another sense, it is perhaps Meyrink’s own book, a runaway success in the feverish, super-charged psychical atmosphere of First World War Austria.


Michael Chabon has another, even more ingenious take on the Golem. When the young Czech artist Josef Kavalier, early in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, is asked to draw his own idea of a comic-book Superman for a prospective publisher, he produces a sketch of a “tall, brawny man … [with] four Hebrew characters etched into his forehead.”

“Is that the Golem?” said Anapol. “My new Superman is the Golem?”

“I didn’t – the conceit is new to me,” Joe said, his English stiffening up on him. “… To me , this Superman is … maybe … only an American Golem.” He looked for support to Sammy. “Is that right?”

“Huh?” said Sammy, struggling to conceal his dismay. “Yeah, sure, but Joe .. the Golem is … well … Jewish.” (Chabon, 2001, pp. 85-86).

The name of the original Golem, Rabbi Löw’s bond-servant, was Joseph. Sam has Americanised his surname from “Klayman” (Clay-man) to Clay. The symbiotic relationship of the two cousins – their friendship and artistic collaboration– culminates in love for the same woman, Rosa Luxemburg Saks (named for the leader of the abortive Spartacist revolution in post-war Germany), and in a child, Tommy, fathered by Josef but brought up by Sam.

Which is the original and which the copy?

Neither, one is forced to conclude. And both.


5 – Europe after the Rains

We finance your future, not your past
– Trustbank TV Ad

Terezín, or Theresienstadt, was built as an Austrian garrison-town in the late eighteenth century. The whole area was surrounded by deep ditches and immense earth and brick fortifications. The smaller, satellite redoubt outside the main walls came, over time, to be employed as a prison. During the First World War, Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was incarcerated in it. He died there of influenza in 1918.

After the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Terezín was turned into a concentration camp. It was actually used as a marshalling point for the death-camps further east, but the Nazis went to great lengths to persuade foreign observers, especially the International Red Cross, that it was a kind of idyllic spa-town: hence the lying propaganda film (directed by Kurt Gerron) about the so-called “Paradise Ghetto.”

Of the 140,000 people who were interned at Terezín, 33,000 died and 87,000 were transported to Nazi death camps elsewhere. Of those, 15,000 were children. Only … 132 children lived. (Fields, 2005).

The concentration camp command made little or no attempt to combat the various epidemics that broke out periodically in the overcrowded ghetto, but conditions there were generally more tolerable than in the other camps. There was a lively cultural life, including lectures, concerts and even hand-copied magazines, and the children were able to continue their education in makeshift schools. Thousands of their drawings and poems still survive, and can be seen on display in the Terezín Memorial museum in the centre of the town.

The small fortress became an SS prison, and was used for recalcitrant prisoners (including the poet and resistance leader Robert Desnos) from all over Europe. Brutal executions and torture were commonplace. Many of the cells and dormitories still remain in their original condition.

In August 2002, during the unprecedented floods that inundated much of the Czech republic, including the centre of Prague, the Elbe overflowed its banks and drowned the lower floors of the Terezín Memorial museum. The damage was even worse in the small fortress, which was almost entirely under water. An concerted international effort has, however, succeeded in restoring most of the exhibits.

 
6 – Nine Great Reasons to Visit Prague

Kidnapped by communism for 40 years, [Prague has] opened its gates to a flood of happy-go-lucky tourists?
– Kris Dando, “Nine Great Reasons to Visit Prague” (Dando, 2005).

Recent visitor Kris Dando’s nine “reasons” are arranged under the following headings:

1. Getting Around
   
   “One of the features of Prague is that it is compact and simple to find your way around.”
   
   It’s interesting to recognize – and not recognize – your own experiences in getting to know a new place when reading about it afterwards. My main memory of the trams is the strange whistling clangour they made gliding past the windows of my room late at night (they can’t have stopped running till the early hours, if at all).
   
   As for the metro, what struck me about it was the steepness of the escalators angling their way down deep under the earth. On one occasion one of them seized up, forcing all of us to climb back to the surface. Louts riding in the opposite direction hooted and jeered to see so many elderly, heavily-laden ladies and gentlemen struggling wearily up the precipitous incline.


2. Cuisine
   
   “The food is overall pretty bland and basic, involving uninspiring meats like sausage and dumplings and the vegetables are pretty scarce. Cabbage is very popular.”
   
   The food is a bit on the heavy side. The beer, however, is excellent, and cheaper than any other beverage (including water). As a result, I put on a lot of weight while I was there. Almost every pub seemed to offer cheap, reliable food all through the day.
   
   It was, however, rather appalling to see so many prosperous-looking Czechs sitting proudly in McDonalds or KFC, scarfing down gourmet Big Macs and chicken nuggets.


3. Guided Tours
   
   “We had a diverse mix of people: singles and couples, Germans, Aussies, Brits and an obnoxious cabbie from San Francisco.”
   
   I didn’t go on any tours while I was there, preferring to walk around on my own. Perhaps my most interesting encounter was with a pair of young Japanese at the foot of the castle, vainly trying to make sense of a truncated tourist map. They asked me for directions in German. Having ascertained that they spoke no English, I was forced to admit that I, too, was a stranger (Ich bin auch Ausländer) in town …


4. Castles, castles, castles
   
   “With a magnificent cliff-top outlook, a 1000-year-old history going back to a simple walled-in compound in the 9th century, and a breathtaking scale that qualifies it as the biggest ancient castle in the world, Prague Castle is the indisputable centrepiece of the Czech capital.”
   
   It’s actually more like a small town than your normal image of a castle. Wandering through it, I began to understand what Kafka (who lived for a time in Golden Lane, a little cul-de-sac running down the side of the walls) had in mind when he wrote, in Der Schloss, of an immense administrative labyrinth unreachable by any but the elect.


5. Take A River Cruise
   
   “The price included a few free drinks and buffet dinner but sitting on the boat’s top deck, gazing at Prague by night was worth the admission alone.”
   
   I didn’t do this, either, even though a river cruise is usually my favourite thing to do in a new place. Perhaps the city streets were just too fascinating. Perhaps (it was Midwinter) the waters of the Vltava / Moldau looked just too cold and grey.


6. Prague Memorials
   
   “Small prayer papers covered with small stones and coins adorn many tombstones [in the Old Jewish Cemetery]. One of the most adorned is that of 16th century scholar Rabbi Low about whom many legends are told, most notably that he created the ‘Golem’, a servant made of mud who later went on a destructive rampage and had to be destroyed.”


7. Museums
   
   “Objects from 153 Jewish communities throughout Bohemia and Moravia were brought to Prague by the Nazis in 1942, to be used in a planned ‘museum of an extinct people’ after their extermination programme was complete.”


8. A Bit Of Entertainment
   
   “I wasn’t too sure I’d enjoy it but was it was good wholesome fun: two princes fighting over the same girl, duels, wrath of the Gods, soaring violins – I forgot I was watching string-led puppets after a while!”
   
   I missed the puppet theatre – though a good impression of it is given by Jan Švankmajer’s 1994 feature-film Faust – but we did go to the Opera, the Ballet, and the Black Light Theatre, where objects float about the stage as if by magic. One of the pieces there was about a love affair between a taxi driver and a mermaid, unable to settle on whether to live under water or in the world above.


9. The Countryside
   
   “Undoubtedly the highlight (well, for me anyway) was the cemetery at Sedlic [sic], just a few minutes out of Kutna Hora. Macabre is an understatement - the place has an ossuary, a huge building filled with the bones of over 40,000 people. Yes, bones.”
   
   “More than a tad creepy,” Kris Dando calls it. Again, I was alerted to its existence by one of Jan Švankmajer’s films, the ten-minute short “Kostnice” (1970). “You can smell the death,” as one commentator remarks (Internet movie database, 2005).

 
7 – Feet of Clay

The real question about Auschwitz is, not why did it happen, but why doesn’t it happen more often?
– Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters

But maybe you knew all this already. Maybe I’m the last person on earth to whom this is news. I haven’t actually seen any references to the Franzen-Chabon double-act anywhere, but that doesn’t prove anything.

Whether or not Jonathan Franzen actually is Michael Chabon (and there are an appalling number of doubles, masks, deceptive resemblances, and completely counterfeit pasts in the latter’s books – one reason why I read him as the carbon-copy and Franzen as the fons et origo), the question remains why it should mean so much to me to demonstrate the fact.

The Summerland copyright page is, after all, my only smoking gun – all the other evidence is completely circumstantial. It could be a mistake, a mere misprint. Franzen would have to have been very busy indeed to create two thriving literary careers in the time it normally takes to jump-start one.


On the one hand, of course, I’m fascinated by literary impostures and doubles, by the way in which they can release a kind of energy unavailable to the everyday self.

I’ve created a fair number of pseudonyms and alter egos myself – or, rather, found myself writing in someone else’s voice. Lorraine West, author of Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know (2004) and Wendy Nu, co-author of The Britney Suite (2001) are two who have made it between covers, but there are, I’m afraid, various others still lurking in the back issues of small magazines.

“Every woman adores a fascist,” said Sylvia Plath (with doubtful veracity) in “Daddy” (Plath, 1974, p. 55). Every writer adores the double. It stands for so much! It can act as the voice of conscience (Poe’s “William Wilson”), dramatise the split psyche (Gogol’s “The Nose”), or simply point to the crucial disjunction between the worldly and the artistic selves (Henry James’s “The Private Life”).


On the other hand, there’s the Golem itself – that brute lump of clay brought to life by a few scrawled hieroglyphics.

The Golem, as we’ve seen above, can be seen as a type of the superman – a projection of our own idealised strengths and aspirations. But it also dramatises our Jekyll-and-Hyde duality – the masks we use to reveal a hidden self.

I’ve already talked about Jonathan Franzen’s attempts, in How to be Alone, to explain (indeed, embody) the “treason of clerks,” their general untrustworthiness and tendency to be members of the awkward squad. Why do they always seem to satirise their patrons (Oprah) and speak up for their foes (William Gass)?

Where is that betrayal more apparent than in my response to Terezín?


Even before I saw the place – Terezín, Theresienstadt, whatever you want to call it – I knew I had to write about it. I knew I had to write about it the moment I saw that it would be difficult to get there – that there was a resistance to overcome. “Press on the pressure point because it hurts,” is what I wrote about it. Press on the pressure point because it hurts. No matter who it hurts. In a sense it’s easier if it’s only oneself.

The Holocaust is such a simple morality tale to those of us born so long after the war, so far away from its physical legacy. It’s so easy to paint the protagonists in black and white, Oskar Schindlers and Josef Mengeles, oppressors and victims.
Everything’s more complicated when you’re on the spot, in the New Europe, that constantly-expanding superstate which swallowed up (took in?) the Czech republic just a couple of months before my arrival, surpassing the wildest dreams of the Holy Roman Empire.

I knew, of course, that the real story of the Terezín ghetto was far beyond my powers. I had no right to tell it – no angle of engagement with it beyond normal human sympathy with the suffering that went on there. Watching Prisoner of Paradise (2002), the Oscar-nominated documentary about Kurt Gerron, the infamous director of the Theresienstadt propaganda film, had given me some idea of the facts about the “model ghetto” before I left New Zealand. Reading the book I have not seen a butterfly around here (1993), available in numerous languages from the Jewish museum in Prague, made me aware of the heart-wrenching character of the site itself.

It was difficult to get there, though – it did turn into a quest – and that made me suspect there must be something behind this apparent reluctance to face up to the past. There was something there needing to be examined. For my own satisfaction, if for no other reason. “Nothing if not curious,” that’s my motto. Nosey, some people would call it.

The Māori politician John Tamihere landed himself in the doghouse in mid-2005 for suggesting that enough has already been said and written about the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. He claims that it’s time to move on, that dwelling on past injustices tends to foster a “victim” mentality. I can see his point, but I don’t really agree. I wouldn’t necessarily accuse Tamihere of this, but I suspect that it’s generally those who’ve done well out of the past who are most eager to forget it.

Nevertheless, I think he speaks very strongly for our collective will to forget. It seems to be almost a biological necessity in the aftermath of tragedy to hide and lick your wounds and turn your thoughts elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that “war literature” tends to appear either during a war or twenty years afterwards. The books that came out a year or two after the First and Second World Wars were mostly ignored or damned with faint praise.


My Czech hosts in Prague must feel something similar. In their case there is the additional injustice that half a century of suffering under Russian occupation is mostly overshadowed, in the eyes of the world, by the events of 1938-44 (don’t forget that the war began a year early in Czechoslovakia, as a result of the betrayal of Munich …). It must seem, to them, the height of bad manners for people to come barging into their country demanding a package tour of the murder sites. “Tourist,” after all, equates pretty closely with “voyeur.”

One local analogy that occurred to me at the time was a foreign visitor to Auckland, eager to see the sights, asking to see Bastion Point first of all (“I hear your police force brutally manhandled a mass of peaceful Māori land protestors there; I’ve always wanted to see the place …”) I imagine that most of us might want to downplay the incident, put it in perspective, explain its larger implications – reroute them to a nice beach like Piha or Wenderholm, basically.

I’ve never been welcomed more heartily, or with more open arms, than by my hosts in the Czech republic. Not only my friends John and Jana, but Jana’s family went out of their way to make me feel at home. Why, then, do I still feel compelled to touch on the sore point – to take a gawk inside Bluebeard’s chamber, brave the forbidden door, the one place they least wanted me to see in the cornucopia of wonders that is Prague?
How can I possibly justify that lack of good manners?


I’m forced back, once again, onto the metaphor of the Golem: the emissary you send out to do your dirty work, that other whom you suppress or deny at your peril. Socrates called it his Daemon. It prompted him to ask all those awkward questions which led to a death sentence for “corrupting youth.” Then it demanded that he stay and take the hemlock rather than fleeing into exile.

It was that same still, small voice that prompted Jonathan Franzen to open his fat mouth and denounce Oprah Winfrey. “There’s something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil” (King, 1990, p. 59), as one of the characters in Stephen King’s The Stand says to the closest thing to an artist in that book.

There’s something in every writer, I’m afraid, that’s like biting on tinfoil: a basic ingratitude, a cold calculation of effect:

The Golem had no inclinations, either good or bad … nothing would stop him in the execution of anything that he had undertaken.

As a human being, I have absolutely no right to sit in judgment on the people who live in or near Terezín or the thousands of other camps lying like unhealed scars on the body of Europe. No right and no inclination. As a writer, though, I have to poke in my nose. If one could feel sure that it really was all in the past, that such things could never recur, then it would be easier to leave it alone.

It’s not all in the past, though. It’s now. In the Czech republic itself (as in many other parts of Europe) the victimisation of the Romany continues (See further Polansky, 1998). That’s one small example. If we continue to conspire to forget the enormities we’ve committed in the past, where’s the incentive to rein ourselves in right now? As the children starve in the Congo and the bodies pile up in Iraq (or Israel/Palestine), we’re in no condition to pat ourselves on the back just yet.

The Golem, to be sure, is a dangerous type of Superman. As a truth-seeking crusader, it has an unfortunate tendency to get distracted, run amok. But maybe that’s why it’s such an appropriate symbol for most of us. The Man of Steel makes a pitilessly rigid, inhuman model to live up to (you’d think even the “world’s policemen” would have noticed that by now). Personally, I agree with Chabon / Franzen: it’s better our heroes should walk on feet of clay.


References:

• Auden, W.H. (1991). Collected poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. 1977. London: Faber.
• Bataille, G. (2004). Romans et récits. Ed. Jean-François Louette. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard.
• Chabon, M. (1988). The mysteries of Pittsburgh. London: Sceptre.
• Chabon, M. (1995). Wrecked. Swing magazine. Retrieved March 2005 from http://www.michaelchabon.com/archives/2005/03/wrecked.html
• Chabon, M. (2000). Wonder boys. 1995. London: Fourth Estate.
• Chabon, M. (2001). The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay. 2000. London: Fourth Estate.
• Chabon, M. (2003). Summerland. 2002. London: Fourth Estate.
• Dando, K. (2005) Nine great reasons to visit Prague. XtraMSN. Retrieved April 14, 2005 from http://xtramsn.co.nz/travel/0,,8425-3918426,00.html
• Fields, S. (2005). Terezin: a concentration camp. Retrieved March 2005 from http://user.intop.net/~jhollis/terezin/htm
• Franzen, J. (2003). How to be alone. 2002. London: HarperPerennial.
• Franzen, J (2007). The Jonathan Franzen website. Retrieved March 2007 from http://www.jonathanfranzen.com/
• Internet movie database. Retrieved March 2005 from http://www.imdb.com/
• Jonathan Franzen: a Defense. Slate magazine. Retrieved March 2005 from http://slate.msn.com/id/2058036/entry/2058101/
• King, S. (1990). The stand: The complete and uncut edition. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
• Kundera, M. (2003). L’Ignorance. Paris: Gallimard.
• Mendelson, E. (2000). Later Auden. 1999. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Meyrink, G. (1972). The golem. 1916. Trans. M. Pemberton. Prague & San Francisco: Mudra.
• Michael Chabon. (2007). Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 2005 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chabon
• Microsoft ® encarta ® encyclopedia. (2003). © 1993-2002 Microsoft corporation. All rights reserved.
• Plath, S. (1974). Ariel. 1965. London: Faber.
• Polansky, P. (1998). Living through it twice: Poems of the Romany holocaust (1940-1997). Prague: G plus G.
• Prisoner of paradise (2002). Dir. Malcolm Clarke & Stuart Sender. Narrated by Ian Holm. USA/Canada.
• Rappoport , A. S. (1937) The folklore of the Jews. London: Soncino Press. Pp. 195-203. Retrieved March 2005 from http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/golem.html
• Reuters’ daily news report (2002). Retrieved October 11, 2002, from http://www.reuters.com/
• Shieff, S. (2006) Well-laundered elves. In M. Kavka, J. Lawn, & M. Paul (Eds.) Gothic NZ: The darker side of Kiwi culture (pp. 111-19). Dunedin: Otago University Press.
• Vance, J. (1997). The demon princes. 1964. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.
• Volavková, H., Franková, A., & Povolná, H. (Eds.) (1993). I have not seen a butterfly around here: Children’s drawings and poems from Terezín. Trans. J. Kadečková, J. Nĕmcová & E. Pargeretová. Prague: The Jewish Museum.

Jack Ross: photograph by Jana Hašková (2004)

Jack Ross teaches Academic and Creative writing in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Massey Albany. He is the author of various books of poems, including City of Strange Brunettes (Pohutukawa Press, 1998) and Chantal’s Book (HeadworX, 2002), as well as four works of fiction: Nights with Giordano Bruno (Bumper Books, 2000), Monkey Miss Her Now (Danger Publishing, 2004), Trouble in Mind (Titus, 2005), and The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Titus, 2006).

He also edited, with Jan Kemp, the spoken-word anthologies Classic NZ Poets & Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance (AUP, 2006 & 2007).

___________________________________

Notes:

1. The same disparity is maintained in their respective “official” websites. www.jonathanfranzen.com opens onto a chummy set of bio-bibliographical details; www.michaelchabon.com leads to nothing but a promotional poster for the 1977 Sitka World’s Fair, and a schedule of upcoming “Chabon dates.”

2. Now the hero of a series of real (albeit pastiche) comics, collected in Michael Chabon Presents (2004): The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist. 2 vols. Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Books.

(3-22/4/05)

To Terezín. Travelogue by Jack Ross, with an Afterword by Martin Edmond. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132. ii + 90 pp (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 49-83.

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Jack Ross: To Terezín (2007)


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