Wednesday, November 16, 2011

The Second Location


[Bronwyn Lloyd: The Second Location]

Dual Titus Books Launch

at Objectspace
8 Ponsonby Road, Auckland
Sunday 27 November, 3-5pm:

Bronwyn Lloyd's first book of stories
The Second Location

Scott Hamilton's second book of poems
Feeding the Gods


The MC for the event is Auckland poet and academic, Jack Ross
Special guests Michele Leggott and Paul Janman will introduce Lloyd and Hamilton respectively
Refreshments and home-baked food will be served
A range of Titus titles will be available to purchase for Christmas presents.

ALL WELCOME



[Scott Hamilton: Feeding the Gods]


So obviously this is pretty exciting news in our household. My brother and sister-in-law are flying up from Welilngton for the event, and it's great that we'll be able to have the launch at Objectspace, where Bronwyn's exhibition Lugosi's Children has just been held.

If you want to know more about the book, and the event, check out Bronwyn's blogpost at Mosehouse Studio.

And if you'd like to read Scott's thoughts on the likelihood of this being a happy post-election extravaganza, clebrating the political demise of John Key and his right-wing allies, go to Reading the Maps ...

But seriously folks, a very special thank you should go to Brett Cross at Titus Books, for being the bastion of alternative publishing that he is. And another one to Ellen Portch, for her cool cover design for Bronwyn's book. And to Graham Fletcher, for letting Bronwyn use that image. And to Margaret Edgcumbe, for allowing Scott to use those Kendrick Smithyman photographs in his book. And to Cerian Wagstaff, for her promotional expertise. And to Michele and Paul, for contributing their time to this mad venture ...

So come along. Buy a book. Support the mavericks. You may need us one of these fine days.



Friday, November 04, 2011

Koroneho



Why pink, you ask? It does seem rather a garish shade for the cover of this first posthumous publication by my old friend Leicester Kyle.

Actually the whole thing came about rather serendipitously as the result of a request to republish some of Leicester's (many) poems about orchids by Ian St George, editor of the New Zealand Native Orchid Journal.

David Howard and I told him that, as Leicester's literary executors, we'd be happy to cooperate with such a scheme, but I also mentioned in my reply that - while there were certainly a number of short lyrics describing orchids he'd encountered in the hills around Millerton - his major contribution to the subject was a vast epic poem called Koroneho, an account of the life and work of pioneering printer, missionary and naturalist William Colenso (1811-1899), written in the form of a series of descriptions of 14 native orchids found by the latter in his wanderings around the North Island of New Zealand.


[William Colenso (c.1880)]

The significance of these orchids, for Leicester, appears to have been that, while Colenso's description of each of them been duly published in the scientific literature at the time, they hadn't been confirmed as separate species by subsequent classifiers.

They were, then, real specimens of phantom plants - a pretty appealing notion to any poet, given that our business is supposed to be the depiction of "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" (Marianne Moore, "Poetry").

In his reply, Ian mentioned:

Perchance I am also editor of eColenso, the newsletter of the Colenso Society. November 17 is the bicentennial of Colenso's birth, and we are having a Colenso Conference in Napier. It would be brilliant to have a few copies of Kyle's Koroneho available at the conference - perhaps a limited edition of 50 copies? I would be happy to arrange the printing.... are you interested?

Was I interested! Just about any plan that could help spread interest in the life and works of Leicester Kyle would interest me, especially one like this, which seemed just to have dropped into my lap out of nowhere.

So anyway, to make a long story short, having just laboriously transcribed the poem from the one surviving typescript, a mass of crumbling yellow pages given by Leicester to his great friend and poetic ally Richard Taylor in the late 1990s, I sent it off as a file-attachment to Ian.

He had a number of interesting comments to make about it:

I think it's an important (at least in NZ) modernist collage long poem in cantos, and I wondered if he had been influenced by William Carlos Williams' Paterson, as well as Ezra Pound.

(This was in response to my comparing it with The Cantos - not to mention Smithyman's Atua Wera - in the introduction I'd written to the poem.)

I had thought to make it a simple paperback in much the style of Colenso's Paihia press publications - even to the pink paper! Thus it would be all monochrome. An alternative would be to have a colour illustration of an orchid - or one of his orchid drawings (mine actually!) from the original, but in a way that detracts from the theme of insubstantial unreality.

Hence the pink cover, you see - hence too the rather offhand style of the production: Ian's encyclopedic knowledge of Colenso enabled him to find a form which seemed to fit so eccentric a piece of Colenso-iana, in a way which would make sense to the other enthusiasts attending the conference.

Another interesting point about the pink came up in a subsequent email, where he mentioned that it matched "the pink blotting paper that Colenso was forced to use when the CMS forgot to send out any printing paper." That was enough for me. Pink it must be.

Ian also mentioned that Leicester had been a bit premature in thinking that all of these particular orchid identifications by Colenso had been rejected. Apparently some of them have been reinstated in the latest listings. In his foreword to the book he enlarges on his belief that "in imagination Kyle WAS Colenso ...

(I suppose all biographers "become" their subjects) - both were botanists, priests, writers - had similar names - and Colenso stands as the kind of kafkaesque figure, sensitive and intelligent, but beset by machiavellian insensitive authority, that we all find it easy to identify with. There are a number of minor inaccuracies in Kyle's biographical bits about Colenso, but they don't matter: as he suggests, "if you want the facts, go to the biographies - this is about the truth".








Leicester Kyle. Koroneho: Joyful News Out Of The New Found World. Edited with a Introduction by Jack Ross. Preface by Ian St George. ISBN 978-0-9876604-0-4. Auckland: The Leicester Kyle Literary Estate / Wellington: The Colenso Society, 2011. ii + 110 pp.

So there we are. If you'd like to purchase a copy of Koroneho, you can either contact me here online or at the address given on the cover page of the Leicester Kyle website. They're $NZ 10 each (plus $2 postage & packing).

Or you can write to Ian St George, secretary of the Colenso Society, at:

The Colenso Society Inc.
c/o 22 Orchard St.
Wadestown
Wellington 6012
New Zealand

For more about the centennial conference, see here.

What an auspicious project for an auspicious anniversary!


[Māori New Testament
printed by William Colenso (1837)]

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Extraordinary Popular Delusions


& the Madness of Crowds

[J. P. Chaplin: Rumor, Fear ... (1959)]


J. P. Chaplin. Rumor, Fear and the Madness of Crowds. New York: Ballantine Books, 1959.

There's just something about that title, isn't there? Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds ... It almost doesn't matter what the book is actually about: the name says it all.

Or does it? Clearly J. P. Chaplin (or his publishers) thought so when they tried to update Charles Mackay's nineteenth-century classic with their own new set of otherwise inexplicable brutalities and pogroms as Rumor, Fear & the Madness of Crowds in the McCarthyite 1950s.

Strangely enough, I'd never actually read the 1841 original, despite its having had such a disproportionate influence on historians and sociologists ever since.

I found a respectable copy of the "Wordsworth Classics" edition in the Local Op Shop on Friday, though, and am presently finding it rather difficult to put down.


[Charles Mackay: Extraordinary Popular Delusions ... (1841)]


Charles Mackay. Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. 1841. Rev. ed. 1852. Introduction by Norman Stone. Wordsworth Reference. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1995.

I guess I was secretly expecting to find it a bit of a disappointment, and it's true that some of the contents have gone off the boil a bit (the author does rather go to town on his idée fixe, the lives and works of the Alchemists), but - as Professor Norman Stone remarks in his introduction to the 1995 edition - it's terrifying how closely each of the items in the original table of contents resembles one of our own particular contemporary follies.

  • For Mackay's blow-by-blow account of the 18th century French Mississippi Scheme and its British equivalent, the South Sea Bubble, read the Wall Street bail-out and the Euro crisis.

  • For his chapters on Alchemists and "Modern Prophets", read local weather sage Ken Ring and the whole world-wide industry of snake-oil selling psychics, astrologers, self-help gurus and other charlatans.

  • For his chronicle of the almost unbelievable cruelties and fatuous pointlessness of the Crusades, read US foreign policy in Latin America or the Middle East over the last half century.

  • For his sections on ghosts, haunted houses and witches, read ... well, some of our own foolish books or TV series on precisely the same subject. If thereis a difference, it might be that people have grown a bit dumber and more credulous over the past 150 years.



One could protract the list almost indefinitely (Mackay's book is, after all, over 600 pages long -- though he remarks somewhat disarmingly in his preface that he could have filled another fifty or so volumes without too much trouble).

Where I'm rather going out on a limb (and risking being torn limb from limb for my lack of patriotism and proper feeling) is by suggesting that all the Rugby World Cup hooplah we've just emerged from is yet another example of the madness and hysteria of crowds.

Wasn't there a slight sense of let-down for just about everyone last Sunday after the All Blacks squeaked in their victory over the French by the hard fought margin of one point? It's hard to imagine anyone claiming to have actually enjoyed the game. Too much was riding on it - or, rather, too much seemed to be riding on it.

The local equivalent of the Boston Red Socks Baseball World Series curse, or England's long dry spell at the Soccer World Cup (since 1966, I believe), had finally been broken. 1987 / 2011 - almost a quarter of a century between victories, after various other teams had actually succeeded in winning it twice in the intervening period.

Yet now, in the cold light of day, so the hell what? Yes, we won it. Yes, it was all done fair and square. Yes, we have a good rugby team. Didn't all our real problems come flooding back over us with a vengeance when we all woke up on Monday morning, though?


It's quite funny sometimes to study accounts of the rivalries between supporters of the Blue and Green teams of chariot racers in Ancient Constantinople (one of the many vices the Byzantines borrowed from Rome). Whole families and dynasties were born into the faith of one or other team. Emperors were defined in terms of which faction they supported. Riots, violent deaths, murder were common occurrences on the streets after a big race. Don't think that the Brits invented soccer hooliganism - Byzantium was way ahead of them on that one. An estimated 30,000 people died in the sports-inspired Nika riots of 532 AD.

It all sounds a bit odd when you read about it now. How on earth could it matter which chariot team won the race? But it did matter - it mattered desperately. It was apparently even worth killing and dying for, that elusive victory over the Blues (or was it the Greens?)

Dare I suggest that this particular extraordinary popular delusion is pretty similar to our own rugby mania: our own unreasonable fanaticism over the fortunes of the team we "support"? What has all that got to do with playing the game, anyway? Isn't it all supposed to be for fun - or if not fun (perish the thought), fitness, team spirit, all those other strange old virtues? Does gathering around the big screen with a bunch of other chip-guzzling and beer-swilling bozos to bay and leap and scream do anything to promote such ideas? Hardly.

So don't think you can get away with simply calling me "anti-sport" or "unpatriotic" ... Trying, on a daily basis, to be a bit less of an imbecile than at least some of the people I see around me is, I must confess, one of my principal objects in life. And I'm afraid, at times, that that means calling the madness of crowds just what it is ...