DEVENPORT : A Diary - Bill Direen

A video taken at the launch of Devonport is now on the Holloway Press website (www.hollowaypress.auckland.ac.nz) under Latest Titles: Devonport. 
Click on Latest Titles 3. Devonport is top of the list. Click on :[ more] 4. Scroll down to the black rectangle headed Devonport: Bill Direen; click on it. 

It includes a clip of Bill Direen reading from  Paris.

CHARLOTTE RANDALL

Charlotte Randall now has a facebook page, where news and updates about her latest talks, courses, events and upcoming books can be found. :-)

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Charlotte-Randall/165234246873318 

MATARIKI

The Michael King Writers’ Centre and The Depot join together to present a series of free literary events, workshops and an exhibition to celebrate Maori writing and art, starting this weekend.

Matariki: Exploring Our Stories

Saturday 4 June, 1.30–3 pm, The Depot

Stellar writers Ben Brown, Robert Sullivan and Reina Whaitiri join Carol Hirschfeld from Maori Television to talk about Matariki, oratory and story-telling.

Exhibition: Celebrating Maori Artists in the Maori New Year

4-16 June, Opening Saturday 4 June, 3–4.30 pm, Depot Galleries, Clarence Street, Devonport

Four Maori artists – Bethany Edmunds, Chanel Breen, Jenny Papa, Orewa Kingi – weave new ideas into contemporary and traditional styles.

A Million Poems for Matariki

Poetry workshops for schools, young people and individuals, led by top Maori and Pacifica poets: our own writer-in-residence, Ben Brown, Robert Sullivan and Selina Tusitala Marsh

(To register or for further information email phone (09) 445 8451)

Matariki and the New Stars

Sunday 12 June, 1.30–3 pm, The Depot

Our writer-in-residence from 2010, Bradford Haami, speaks about stars and navigation. Leading poets Ben Brown and Selina Tusitala Marsh celebrate the new stars on our literary horizon. Come along and share your Matariki poems!

Supported by the Auckland Council Creative Communities Scheme

I SHALL NOT HATE

Izzeldin Abuelaish's great humanitarian work has been referenced by President Obama in his recent middle east speech. Here is the transcript of the reference:

"I recognize how hard this will be. Suspicion and hostility has been passed on for generations, and at times it has hardened. But I’m convinced that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians would rather look to the future than be trapped in the past. We see that spirit in the Israeli father whose son was killed by Hamas, who helped start an organization that brought together Israelis and Palestinians who had lost loved ones. He said, “I gradually realized that the only hope for progress was to recognize the face of the conflict.” And we see it in the actions of a Palestinian who lost three daughters to Israeli shells in Gaza. “I have the right to feel angry,” he said. “So many people were expecting me to hate. My answer to them is I shall not hate…Let us hope,” he said, “for tomorrow”

That is the choice that must be made – not simply in this conflict, but across the entire region – a choice between hate and hope; between the shackles of the past, and the promise of the future. It’s a choice that must be made by leaders and by people, and it’s a choice that will define the future of a region that served as the cradle of civilization and a crucible of strife."

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/144336

Izzeldin Abuelaish was recently in New Zealand as a guest of the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival and in Australia as a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival.

Pecking order

Click for bigger.

Guilty dog can't hide the evidence

YouTube link.

Mexican teacher calms small children during gunfight

A kindergarten teacher sang along with her young pupils to keep them calm last week, while outside the Colonia Nueva Estanzuela school in Monterrey, a gunfight raged as an armed group aboard seven trucks murdered five taxi drivers accused of spying for an organized crime gang.

While filming the incident on her phone, the teacher gently asks her class to keep their heads on the floor, as gunshots ring out in the background. She reassures the children that everything is okay and that they'll be safe in the classroom, reminding them to keep their heads down.


YouTube link.

To distract them, she starts singing the Raindrop Song from the Barney show in Spanish. The song is about if raindrops were chocolates and how you'd open your mouth wide to catch them all.

By getting the children to sing the song she managed not only to keep them calm but also to keep their heads on the floor, as she prompts them to turn over and look up to the sky with their mouths wide open. The as yet unidentified teacher is being hailed a heroine.

There's a news video showing some of the aftermath outside here.

Rat burglary victim to get free new false teeth

It looks like there will be a happy ending to the story of an Australian woman who lost her false teeth to a cunning rat. Last week, Margaret Pidgeon, from Stonehenge in the west of Queensland, revealed a long-haired rat had taken her teeth, (audio), from a bedside shelf.



Residents in the region are coping with a rat plague due to lush conditions. The federal Member for Maranoa, Bruce Scott, says he has spoken to the Minister for Human Services Tanya Plibersek, and there is a Medicare entitlement to fund new dentures under "exceptional circumstances".

"Rats will get up to all sorts of things - they have an extraordinary capacity to carry all sorts of things to their little habitat," Mr Scott said. "That's why I'm pleased that this is a criteria under Medicare and I am just wanting to make sure that we're able to put Mrs Pidgeon in contact with somewhere where we can get these dentures replaced.



"Through chronic diseases criteria, particularly under exceptional circumstances where someone's physical health will be affected because of their dental health, there is an entitlement to receive financial support. This is an extraordinary case and I'm just wanting to make sure we can get the loose ends tied up and Mrs Pidgeon to a dentist where she can get her dentures replaced."

Dog survives being trapped under 45 tonnes of rock for a week

Meet Jessie the miracle Jack Russell that spent a week trapped under 45 tonnes of rock while chasing a stray cat. For seven days, four-year-old Jessie was wedged metres underground at Mt Beckworth, Victoria, Australia, between enormous rocks only able to wiggle her front paws and move her head. But the devotion of her owner, Steve Porter, never wavered as he moved the earth ­- literally ­– to save his dog.



State Emergency Service units from Maryborough were able to move a rock thought to weigh about 20 tonnes, but still Jessie was unreachable. With his dog surviving on liver that was attached to a wire and sent down into the rocks, Mr Porter set about bringing in machinery that could separate the enormous rocks. His son Tom had already started drilling through the solid granite rock, but time was running out.

A massive hydraulic ram, capable of lifting 95 tonnes, was hired from Melbourne, and Mr Porter and a team of men set about shifting the rocks. The team of four worked tirelessly, sometimes until 2am, to move the rock, inch by inch. But still Jessie could not move. Mr Porter said there were times when he considered euthanasing the dog to put her out of her misery, a decision he weighed up every night. But such was his love for the dog he continued to battle the freezing elements.



Eventually, after seven days underground, Jessie was pulled free using a dog-catcher loop that had been borrowed from a local animal welfare group. She ran straight towards Mr Porter and leapt into his arms. “I couldn’t believe she was in such good condition,” he said. “Neither could the vet.” After spending the night under observation at Eastwood Veterinary Clinic, Jessie was released in surprisingly good condition.

There's a large photo gallery here.

Mile-high flirting goes horribly wrong

A US man who tried to flirt with a young woman on board a plane by bragging he was carrying enough poisonous gas to knock out the entire aircraft found himself arrested and banned for life from Delta Air Lines. Bryan Sisco, 40, allegedly knocked back five double whiskey-and-cokes at an airport bar in Dallas on Friday before boarding his Atlanta-bound plane, on which he took a wrong seat and found himself next to Danielle Valimont, 23.

When confronted by a flight attendant about being in the wrong seat, Sisco said he and Valimont were newlyweds. The 40-year-old then whipped out a butane lighter, sparking it near Valimont's legs, and boasted that he had a canister that contained enough gas to knock out everyone on the plane. In further attempt to impress her, Sisco also claimed he was an architect and a federal marshal, and his father was in the CIA.


Photo from here.

"We were talking, sharing M&Ms, eating chocolate, having a good time," he said. "I fabricated some truths about myself. ... I thought we were getting along pretty good." Valimont pretended she needed the bathroom and managed to alert a flight attendant. The flight was diverted to Memphis, where a baffled Sisco, who had been sleeping and oblivious to the unfolding panic, was arrested by officers who boarded the plane.

"I fell asleep, and woke up in handcuffs in Memphis with the FBI questioning me. ... I couldn't even feel my thumb, the handcuffs were put on so tight," he said. "I spent three days in a county jail and a fourth day in a federal penitentiary. I was stripped buck-naked twice." The flight continued on its way to Atlanta, while Sisco was released on a $10,000 bond. He faces charges of carrying a weapon or explosive on an aircraft.

Injured cheetah caught roaming Abu Dhabi residential district

A nine-month-old cheetah was found chasing a rooster as it roamed the streets of Karama in Abu Dhabi on Sunday morning. One of the residents who saw the cheetah with a thick chain around its neck, immediately contacted the Abu Dhabi Police and an animal activist, Raghad Auttabashi, founder and a volunteer of the Al Rahma Animal Welfare and Rescue Society.

"The cheetah's left front leg was badly injured, and it looked dehydrated, skinny and malnourished. I just hope that the cheetah's previous owner did not de-claw it, otherwise that would be highly inhumane," said Raghad. The cheetah was immediately transferred to the ADWC, where it received plenty of water, food and vitamins.



Ronel Smutts, the director of the ADWC, said that upon reaching the centre, the cheetah was dehydrated, hungry and traumatised. "The animal was obviously privately owned by one of the villa owners in Karama, and did not get enough exercise nor the proper food, calcium and vitamins it requires. When it first arrived, it couldn't put any weight on its left front leg. For now we gave the cheetah pain medication, and want it to get plenty of love and rest," said Smutts.

The injured leg could have been a result of the cheetah jumping over a fence as it tried to catch its prey (the rooster), assumed Smutts. Being an endangered species, the cheetah comes under Cites (Convention on the Illegal Trade of Endangered Species).Offenders could face fines of between Dh5,000, (£825, $1360), and Dh50,000 and a jail term of between three and six months.

Bangladeshi woman cuts off alleged assaulter's penis as evidence

Police in southern Bangladesh say a woman cut off a man's penis during an alleged attempt to rape her and took it to a police station as evidence. The incident took place in Mirzapur village, Jhalakathi, about 200km (124 miles) south of the capital, Dhaka.

Monju Begum, 40, a married mother of three, told police that neighbour Mozammel Haq Mazi forced his way into her shanty and started assaulting her. Mr Mazi, who denies the accusation, was admitted to a nearby hospital.



"We will arrest him once his condition gets better," police spokesman Abul Khaer said. "She said she fought back and cut off his penis and brought it to our police station in a polythene bag to prove that Mr Mazi tried to rape her," police spokesman Abul Khaer said. "She has registered a case accusing him of attempted rape," he said.

"It is quite an unusual incident. As far as I am aware, this is the first time that a woman has brought a severed penis to the police station as evidence." Prof AMSM Sharfuzzaman, a senior surgeon at the Sher-e-Bangla Medical College and Hospital in Barisal town, said it had not been possible to reattach the organ.

Female butterflies avoid sexual harassment by closing wings

In the fleeting existence of a female small copper butterfly, sex is a one-time affair. And scientists in Japan have observed that the butterflies have a simple way to avoid the unwanted attention of persistent males; they close their wings. By folding away their bright, striking wing patterns, the females make themselves less visible to males.

Lead researcher and butterfly lover Jun-Ya Ide from the Kurume Institute of Technology in Fukuoka, had noticed that female small copper butterflies often closed their wings when other copper butterflies flew very close to them. "I also found that she closed the wings at a lower rate when other butterfly species flew nearby," said Dr Ide. And he set about trying to find out why this might be.



"Persistent mating attempts" from males can harm the delicate females, so Dr Ide thought the females might close their wings as an harassment avoidance strategy. He used a model of a male copper butterfly to trigger a reaction in the females. "When I brought the model close to a mated female, she often closed the wings," he said.

Virgin females, on the other hand, left their wings open. "So, I concluded that, since females don't need more copulations, they close their wings to conceal themselves," Dr Ide said. Whereas virgin females that want to mate "keep their wings open to be conspicuous". "The wing closing behaviour has evolved," he said, "to avoid sexual harassment."

Church fined $100 per branch for improper tree pruning

Every two to three years, Eddie Sales trims and prunes the crape myrtles at his church, Albemarle Road Presbyterian Church.

But this year, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, cited the church for improperly pruning its trees. "We always keep our trees trimmed back because you don't want to worry about them hanging down in the way," said Sales, a church member.



The church was fined $100 per branch cut for excessive pruning, bringing the violation to $4,000. "I just couldn't believe it when I heard about it," Sales said. "We trim our trees back every three years all over our property, and this is the first time we have been fined."

The fine will be dropped if the church replaces each of the improperly pruned trees, said Tom Johnson, senior urban forester for city of Charlotte Land Development Division. Charlotte has had a tree ordinance since 1978, and when trees are incorrectly pruned or topped, people can be subject to fines, Johnson said.

Passengers flee as dozens of deadly cobras spotted on train

Hundreds of rail passengers fled in terror when dozens of deadly snakes were found on a train travelling from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi in Vietnam. A guard and conductor were checking tickets as passengers got on in the central city of Quang Ngai on Thursday evening and spotted the live king cobras and cobras under a seat.

People fled the carriage as panic broke out, and the smuggler was able to escape in the chaos. The reptiles, which are extremely venomous and can kill a human within just 30 minutes, were being carried in four see-through cloth bags.



One passenger, Pham Van An, 20, said: "Some of the snakes were very big, and looked terrifying. Most people ran away. But some people went to look at them and the cobras rose up. Then police took the snakes off the train." Officers handed the snakes over to Quang Ngai province's wildlife protection officers for release into the wild.

Nguyen Van Han, chief of the Quang Ngai Forest Protection Department, was unable to say how many snakes were in the bags, but said they weighed a total of 45kg (99lb). Authorities believe the endangered creatures, which are protected under Vietnamese law, were to be sold to restaurants in Hanoi.

Company director dresses as woman to fool photographers outside court

A male company director appearing at court tried to evade the waiting media attention by dressing as a woman. Dressed in female clothing including a stripy top, black knee length skirt and high heels, Martyn Crute left Lincoln Crown Court hoping to give the cameramen the slip.

But his disguise was noticed within seconds by the waiting photographers primed to snap him as he exited. And as they gave chase, he flicked his hair across his face in a bid to hide his manly stubble and chiselled jawline.



The bid to make sure his identity remained a secret came as Crute, a director of UK Oil and Gas Ltd, appeared in court charged with trading for 15 months without being registered to gas safety body CORGI. His business was said to have put lives at risk due to the poor standard of work it carried out during the period.

Crute, from Retford, Notts, admitted a charge of breaching the Health and Safety at Work Act. He was fined £2,000 and ordered to pay £41,000 prosecutions costs and was also banned from being a company director for seven years.

HERE AND THERE

 

Hardie Grant Books

RRP NZ $34.99

Paperback

From acclaimed writer A A Gill comes this collection of travel pieces selected from his monthly column in Australian Gourmet Traveller – ‘A A Gill is away’. Witty, acerbic and often moving, these pieces are far from standard travel writing fare. Touching on tourism, airports, world cuisine and countries including Madagascar, Iceland and Russia, Gill’s perspective is often controversial and always unique.

He ponders Italy’s ability to turn organised crime into a tourist attraction, stumbles upon lobster-shaped coffins in Ghana, contemplates the Darwinian drive of bastardised dishes around the globe, explains why Johannesburg is the luckiest place in the unluckiest continent and considers the great black lake of tears that immigration leaves behind.

With an introduction and extra piece written exclusively for this collection, Here and There showcases the very best of Gill’s hilarious and insightful travel writing, and is a must read for his many fans.

About the Author

A A Gill ,(pic right by Peter Marlowe), was born in Edinburgh. He is the TV and restaurant critic for the Sunday Times and is a contributing editor to GQ Magazine, Vanity Fair and Australian Gourmet Traveller. His books include two novels, Sap Rising and Starcrossed, both travel books, A A Gill Is Away and Previous Convictions, as well as The Angry Island and Paper View. He lives in London and spends much of his year travelling.  

A A Gill was in New Zealand for the Auckland Writers’ and Readers Festival and in Australia for the Sydney Writers Festival.

He proved to be an enormous draw card at both Festivals with the house full sign going up whenever he appeared. The Bookman was fortunate enough to see and hear him at both Festivals and I was most impressed. Surprisingly there was no duplication at all in his presentations. Unsurprisingly this book was a best-seller at the bookshops at both Festivals. It is a marvellous book to have beside the bed for dipping into.

The publishers have given me permission to publish an edited extract from Here and There, from his Introduction, and this follows:

Introduction

Here and There wasn’t my idea.

Here and There sounds a bit now and then, hot or cold, red or white, window or aisle. It’s a bit hostess binary.
I wanted to call it Aussie Tucker Walkabout, because that’s the name of the file I keep these articles in.
My little joke.

I told Pat, my editor at Australian Gourmet Traveller, that I wanted to call the collection Aussie Tucker Walkabout, and across a dozen time zones, 20 weather systems and 10,562 miles I could hear his eyeballs roll in their sockets. ‘That’s funny,’ he said in the measured tone we keep for foreigners who copy our accents.

I’m lousy at titles. I’ve had bad reviews just for the titles of my books. And, actually, Here and There isn’t bad. I’m here, you’re there. Or perhaps you’re here and I’m there. If there’s anything that connects this collection of disparate and syncopated streams of peeved whimsy, then it is the hereness of there, and the thereness of here.

These are night-time thoughts, opinions and observations. They come out of the dark, are written last thing and filed to Australia as they or you start work, and I or they go to bed. I turn the lights out, check the locks and enjoy that peculiar, particular frisson of knowing that my chilly, damp words are now sunny, dry words; that a ten quid thought can emigrate to become a better idea, to be free and work hard and grow up to be a theory that it could never have been back here, or there. There’s a sense of playing truant, a leave of absence in writing something for the next day, for people I don’t really know, and better still, who don’t know me. I have this alter ego now, this doppelganger.

Recently read and much-enjoyed non-fiction titles:

Rob Lowe: STORIES I ONLY TELL MY FRIENDS

Rob Lowe

Bantam Press - $39.99

Intimate, honest, wryly funny, and sometimes deeply moving, Rob Lowe’s autobiography is his personal account of his life, both in show business and with his family, of sobriety and of fatherhood.  The actor, political activist and now writer looks back on his travails as a fledgling and misunderstood child actor in Ohio, his transition to the rough, counter-culture free-for-all that was Malibu in the mid-1970s, his wild ride from as teen idol to movie star at the beginning of today’s youth movement in entertainment to his current status as one of Hollywood’s top actors.

Included are sixteen pages of photos which I found fascinating.

Rob Lowe is a film and television actor who has played such diverse characters as a teenage rebel (The Outsiders) and a White House senior staffer (The West Wing). Outside of acting, he is involved in politics. He lives with his wife and two sons in California.

BLOOD BONES & BUTTER

Gabrielle Hamilton

Chatto & Windus - $37.99

 A sharply crafted and unflinchingly honest memoir that follows Gabrielle Hamilton's culinary education - from growing up in a food-centric rural home in New Jersey with a French mother and bohemian father, to killing her first chicken, to backpacking around the world alone at nineteen, to the vagaries of finally opening her own restaurant in New York City. In between are the often beautiful and sometimes coarse stories of all the places and people who shaped her journey.

Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York’s East Village. The author received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appétit, Saveur and Food & Wine. She has also authored the eight-week “The Chef” column in The New York Times, and her work has been anthologized in six volumes of Best Food Writing. She has appeared on Martha Stewart and the Food Network, among other TV. She currently resides in Manhattan with her two sons.

HEROES & SPARROWS – a celebration of running

Roger Robinson

Streamline Creative - $34.95

First published in 1986, Heroes & Sparrows has been hailed by reviewers and the worldwide running community as a major contribution to the understanding and appreciation of the sport. It has been called one of the best running books of all time. 


This 25th anniversary edition includes introductory essays to each section, where Roger Robinson relates the original chapters to the 21st century running movement. 
A Postscript keeps this classic of the first running boom as fresh and inspiring as a morning run.

These days my morning runs have become morning walks but I often think back fondly to my running days in the YMCA Harriers in Gisborne as a schoolboy and then years later running three marathons and countless half-marathons in the 1980’s, and some 14 Round-the-Bays runs. Roger’s wonderful collection of essays and articles took me happily back over the years. Thanks Roger, great stuff.

Roger Robinson’s  Postscript to the 25th Anniversary Edition, 2011:


Heroes & Sparrows is not an autobiography, but its varied writings grew directly from my involvement in running and racing at all levels in the 1980s. Twenty-five years later, there seemed one major personal omission – my best marathon, run in May 1981. I had never written about it, probably because it was only later that year that I began to write regularly for Tim Chamberlain's New Zealand Runner. Preparing this 25th anniversary edition happened to coincide with an invitation to write about that Vancouver race for the first 

time, for its 30th anniversary in 2011.

So here are my memories of that race, drawn partly from the race diary I always kept, with some thoughts and advice about marathon running that might be of service to the new generation of runners and readers this edition is intended to serve. In my own career, it partly fills the gap between my belated marathon debut at New York in 1980 (‘A Field Full of Folk’), and my Boston record in 1984 (‘Boston from the Inside’).

Anyway, every runner will understand that it's nice to end with a good race. And I wanted to make the book's last word “life.”  

Two of my favourite photos from the book follow: 

Alison Roe winning the New York Marathon in 1981, and Round the Bay Run in 1978.

A Fine Prospect

A History of Remuera, Meadowbank and St.Johns

Jenny Carlyon & Diana Morrow

Random House NZ - $55.00

In this richly illustrated and comprehensively researched history the authors (both with PH’D’s in History) record the sense of noblesse oblige that has long pervaded Remuera life.

I have had such fun dipping into my advance copy of the book over the past week (publication date 17 June). It is a fascinating account of this part of Auckland’s eastern suburbs with the most readable text being complemented by hundreds of photographs and illustrations., some of which appear below.

For many Aucklanders, not just Remuera residents, Jack Lum is the number one source of fresh fruit and vegetables. Lum started his business in the early 1970s at 365 Remuera Road, on the Clonbern Road corner, in premises previously owned by the Wong family, moving to the current Clonbern Road shop in the 1990s. Born in New Zealand, he is the son of a Chinese couple who immigrated to New Zealand in the 1920s. They worked as market gardeners in Mangere, where Lum grew up. He and his wife Carrie, who live in St Johns, are shown here in their very popular shop with their son Michael, who also works in the business.

The bottom of Victoria Avenue in the 1930s.

This photo, taken between 1910 and 1919, looks south from Mount Hobson along Remuera Road. The newly built Arts and Crafts houses are on the right-hand side, with King’s School and Ladies’ College on the left

Tuesday Poem takes you to the stars

At Tuesday Poem this week is a poem by writer and film-maker Kathryn Hunt of Port Townsend, Washington, called Travelling at Night. It is selected by this week's editor Seattle poet T Clear and includes a video of the poet reading. T Clear says,

'I've long enjoyed Kathryn Hunt's work, beginning ten+ years ago when she joined my writing group. There exists in her work an elegance and richness that defies her unadorned use of language. In this poem, especially, we are asked to examine the close-at-hand details of a life lived in intimate contact with the earth -- from "his sideways gimp" to "the missing finger" -- while at the same time standing in awe of the greater vault of the nighttime sky and the profound mysteries it offers. It's a modern and yet age old interpretation of Blake, where he impels us to "Hold infinity in the palm of your hand." '

After reading Kathryn's poems, Tuesday Poem readers are directed to the sidebar on the blog where links take you to the blogs of a the group of Tuesday Poets with their offerings - poems by themselves and poets they've selected for Tuesday. Amongst them, are two poems which like Hunt's poem lifts the reader skywards: Tuesday Poet Zireaux, whose epic novel-in-verse Res Publica was read recently on National Radio's Nine to Noon, is posting the whole poem stanza by stanza on a daily basis and is up to Stanza 20 inspired by the flying figures in a Marc Chagall painting Bestiaire et Musique. Zireaux has also posted a poem by March Chagall (in translation) which deals with the same themes. To read the whole of Res Publica to date, the reader just has to click on the May archive in Zireaux' sidebar and then roll back to May 10 where the poem begins. 

Philadelphian poet Eileen Moeller's poem this week also seems to have been inspired by a painting - a whirl of colour that whirls inside the poem and the person at its heart. And then Jen Compton (Australia/NZ) has posted a link to a poem called Lies by Yevgeny Yevtushenko that made a huge impact on her as a child. She talks about what happened when she met her poetry hero once which included her being tongue-tied. 

Almost as if in reply to that, NZ poet and publisher Helen Rickerby has posted on her blog The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from her 'Nine Movies' sequence which has at its core some wonderful lines about the weight of the great writers :

Running through the passages, tunnels of us
all made of books, stacked floor-
to-ceiling, and if they should topple
we’d be trapped beneath Brontës and Eliots
Dostoyevoskys, Tolstoys
Atwoods and Couplands and Greenes
Living in constant danger of being crushed
by the weight of Western literature
is just one of the risks we take

And there is so much more in the Tuesday Poem site to stimulate and entertain and move you. Why not reach for the stars?  Visit a poem today. Here. 

Books in the wild

Posted on May 31, 2011 by vicbooks

There’s a joke amongst publishers that the second book off the Gutenberg press was about the death of the book. Now, in the face of the e-Onslaught predicted to overwhelm book collections, digitising them into an ethereal state, I’m potentially left with a living space that will require alternate interior design. This induces panic. With all that banging around my head (and many other book-heads) it’s refreshing and uplifting to see people reading actual books – you know, the ones made of paper. I’ll miss the joys of literary voyeurism on the bus, at cafés or sunny spots around the city when the digital demons banish books to Kindles and Nooks and Kobos (which all sound like Pokémon characters to me).

We’ve decided to honour the corporeal existence of books with occasional posts dedicated to books in the wild, those living in hands and bags and heads of people around campus. So here are some books we’ve seen around the campus lately.

The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan
Part II of the Wheel of Time series, in which Lots of Stuff happens. Then a Lot more Stuff happens in the following 12 books. Originally intended as a trilogy but surprised everyone by outlasting even the author – who died in 2007. Jordan left copious notes so Brandon Sanderson could finish the series.
Interesting Facts:

• Jordan served two tours in the Vietnam War as a helicopter gunner.
• Wrote several Conan the Barbarian books.
• Was a nuclear engineer.
• The Wheel of time series amounts to over 11,300 pages, 4,000,000 words and, if read out loud, would take 2 and a half weeks to read.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Tells the story of twins raised in southern India, set against a background of political turbulence. Arundhati Roy’s first and only novel is much celebrated and won the 1997 Booker Prize. Since its publication she focussed on political activism and social advocacy.

• Has written 12 other books, all non-fiction.
• Is a qualified architect.
• Lived homeless in Delhi at the age of 16.

Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis
A satire of 90’s consumerism and celebrity culture featuring fashion models that have turned to terrorism. Can be described using cool words like synecdoche, solipsism and designer-terrorism.
Interesting Facts:

• Ellis went to university with future bestselling writers Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem.
• There was a literary conspiracy theory that Ellis wrote Donna Tartt’s bestseller, The Secret History.
• In his youth did stupendous amounts of drugs.

What have you seen around the place?

Thanks to Marcus Greville at Vic Books for allowing me to reproduce this item from their blog.

INVITATIONS TO MEET GERALDINE BROOKS & PAMELA STEPHENSON

THE WOMEN'S BOOKSHOP PRESENT:


AN EVENING with GERALDINE BROOKS
THURSDAY 9 June 8pm
Raye Freedman Arts Centre, Epsom Girls Grammar
TICKETS $15 from The Women’s Bookshop
To book tickets CLICK HERE or phone 376 4399 

We are thrilled to be hosting an event with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Year of Wonders, March, and People of the Book. She is in NZ with her stunning new novel Caleb’s Crossing, a fascinating exploration of early contact between Puritan settlers & the Native American inhabitants of Martha’s Vineyard (where Geraldine now lives.) It brilliantly imagines the life of the first Native American to graduate from Harvard University & his childhood friendship with feisty Bethia who is not permitted to study because of her gender.


AND 

SEX LIFE - 


AN EVENING WITH PAMELA STEPHENSON-CONNOLLY
 
TUESDAY 14 June, in the bookshop, $5 at the door

She’s a New Zealander, married to Billy Connolly She writes a regular ‘Sexual Healing’ column for The Guardian. She’s been a psychotherapist for many years  She’ll dispel the myths, guilt & mystery surrounding sex. She’s a lively presenter who will be frank & entertaining. Drinks and nibbles from 6pm, Pamela will speak at 6.30 The Women's Bookshop 105 Ponsonby Road, Auckland www.womensbookshop.co.nzbooks@womensbookshop.co.nz (09) 376 4399 |

Book launch invitations

The Friends of Takapuna Library invite you to a lunch hour with Jill Worrall

 Jill will be speaking about her book Two Wings of a Nightingale: Persian Soul, Islamic Heart

Wednesday, 8 June 2011, at Takapuna Library

Light refreshments served from 12.00 noon, Author talk 12.15 pm

Admission is $2.  Friends of the Library – free

For catering purposes, please RSVP to Helen Woodhouse, ph. 486 8469 or email helenw@shorelibraries.govt.nz

The Booklover will provide books for sale and for signing

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The Friends of Takapuna Library invite you to the launch of

Daniel: A Tale of Courage and Determination of Love and Loss

By Vicki Adin

At Takapuna Library, Tuesday, 14 June 2011

Light refreshments served from 6pm, book launch at 6.30pm

Please RSVP to Helen Woodhouse, ph 486 8469 or email helenw@shorelibraries.govt.nz

Gallipoli novel on PM short list

• Stephen Romei, Literary editor
• From: The Australian
• May 28, 2011 

WHEN former New Zealand soldier Stephen Daisley published his first novel, Traitor, one of his old army mates emailed him.

"Dais," he wrote, "I see you are an author now. Read your book. Didn't understand a f. . .king word of it. But good on you, mate."

Daisley, who now lives in Perth, remembered that critique yesterday when his novel was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards. "It's a huge honour," he said. "A fine Australian nod for this Kiwi."
Traitor, a novel about patriotism and friendship that starts on the beaches of Gallipoli, is one of five finalists for the fiction prize, worth $80,000 tax-free.

The judges have described it as "brilliant, poignant and provoking". It won the best first novel prize at the NSW Prime Minister's Literary Awards last week.

Full story at The Australian.

Poem of the week: The Cuckoo Song

Carol Rumens Monday 30 May 2011- The Guardian

This jolly 13th-century poem is made all the better for not having its old spellings translated into modern English

Feel good hit of the sumer ... The Cuckoo Song was all the rage in 1260

The 13th-century round known as the Reading Rota or, more informally, The Cuckoo Song, isn't about the approach of summer, but its arrival. "Sumer is icumen in" is frequently mistranslated, but "icumen" means it has come, as the presence of the cuckoo implies, and it's here, nu (now). Summer, that is. If this thought is nu to you, if your bank holiday skies are grey, and cold raindrops falling down your neck, you might not be in the mood for such a loud, sweet, jolly Poem of the Week.

On the other hand, The Cuckoo Song could cheer you up. Especially if you can find a group of people to sing it with you – in a gorgeous West Country accent.

There are numerous versions in print and online: here's a rather nice one. The variations between the different modern texts available are small, and mostly connected to the decisions made by later editors confronted by 13th-century orthography. I don't know why different editors modernise different words: perhaps they're guided by assumptions about their readers' understanding. Nevertheless, which version you happen to discover first can make quite a difference to the way you savour the poem. For instance, doesn't "lhude" sound ruder and louder than the "loude" some editors prefer? And "murie" seems worlds away from "merry". The old spelling pushes your lips and tongue to a different pronunciation, while charming your eye with an unfamiliar pattern of letters that has nothing in common with the cliches of "Merry Christmas" or "Merrie England".

Full piece.

Joyce Meets Twitter: Boiling Down ‘Ulysses’

By JULIE BLOOM in The New York Times, Art Beat.

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” Seventeen characters left to complete a tweet. It just might work. What would James Joyce think of Twitter? More important, what would his handle be? It’s impossible not to imagine the inherent fun the great English-language experimentalist would find in translating his voluminous ideas onto the 140-character template, or at least the irresistible challenge.

On June 16, Bloomsday for those not in the know, lovers of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom (no relation) and Molly will have the opportunity to dip into the mind of Joyce and try to tweet his thoughts. Ulysses Meets Twitter 2011, a project created by one “Stephen from Baltimore,” invites devotees of the approximately 265,000-word work to recast the novel through tweets from start to finish within the 24-hour period that the novel’s odyssey through Dublin (on June 16, 1904) takes place.

“Would it be horrific? Beatific? Hence this experiment,” Stephen asks. We’ll find out, but for now the call is out for a global-volunteer army to tweet “Ulysses” on the @11ysses account. All volunteers need to do is choose a section, or several, from the 18 episodes, structured loosely on Homer’s epic, “then thoughtfully, soulfully, fancifully compose a series of 4-6 tweets to represent that section.” You have until May 30.

More information is available at 11ysses.wordpress.com. Circe is taken.

Hay Festival 2011: Handshake ends a famous literary feud

The Nobel Prize-winner VS Naipaul and his former protégé Paul Theroux, who had not spoken for 15 years, had an emotional reunion at the Hay Festival yesterday, helped by the novelist Ian McEwan.

Paul Theroux and VS Naipaul shake hands at the Hay Festival  Photo: DANIEL MORDZINSKI

By Sameer Rahim, and Claire Fox in The Telegraph, 29 May 2011

Mr Naipaul and Mr Theroux, the travel writer, first met in Uganda in 1966. Their friendship spanned three decades but came to an abrupt end after Mr Theroux discovered that one of his books, which he had inscribed and given as a present to Mr Naipaul, had been put on sale for $1,500. Mr Naipaul had apparently been angered by an exchange between Mr Theroux and his wife Nadira and broke off all relations with his former friend.

Deeply hurt, Mr Theroux wrote a memoir of their friendship, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, which portrayed the older writer as a brutal, unforgiving man who referred to Arabs as “Mr Woggy” and Africans as “bow-and-arrow men”.

Mr Naipaul claimed not to have read the book but took to damning Mr Theroux in interviews, saying they had barely known each other. He also dismissed his work as “tourist books for the lower classes”.

Festival-goers were intrigued to see that both men were scheduled to appear at the event within in a day of each other, with some joking that they might need to be kept apart. However, yesterday the old friends turned bitter enemies did see each other in the festival green room and – with some help from Ian McEwan – there was a moving rapprochement.

Spotting the man he once worshipped as a literary titan, Mr Theroux said to Mr McEwan: “Oh God, that’s Naipaul, I should say hello but I really don’t want to.”

“Life is short,” said Mr McEwan. “You should say hello.”
Mr Theroux walked forward and offered his hand. “I miss you,” he said. Mr Naipaul glanced at his wife – and then shook it. “I miss you too,” he said.
“After so many years, we’ve finally spoken,” said an excited Mr Theroux later. “I’ve had an experience today with a capital E.”
And Mr Naipaul, after delivering the London Library lecture to a packed audience at the Hay Festival, was gracious. “It was very nice to see him. And I’m pleased things have worked out the way they have.”