A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2014)

[Cover design: Ellen Portch & Brett Cross /
Cover image: Graham Fletcher]

A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014. ISBN: 978-0-473-29640-7. Wellington: HeadworX, 2014. ii + 190 pp.

Contents:

1. Tanera Beag (1981)[p.9]


2. Antipodes (1998)[pp.10-11]
   Midsummer Xmas
   Strange Meeting
   Morning Swim
   Commuter


3. Except Once (1998)[p.12]


4. from Travel Sonnets (1998)[pp.13-16]
   Reading U. K. Le Guin
   Simple
   Rental
   After Supervielle & Apollinaire


5. A Clearer View of the Hinterland (1998)[p.17]


6. God’s Spy (1998)[pp.18-22]
   1 – Cover
   2 – Code
   3 – Stories
   4 – Safe House
   5 – Signs
   6 – The Opposition
   7 – Inside
   8 – Blown


7. Withdrawal Symptoms (1999)[p.23]


8. Out Being Alienated (1999)[pp.24-28]
   1 – Came here the other night for a sticky
   2 – The perfect mixer for the perfect city
   i – Viaduct Basin
   ii – Whiplash
   iii – The Street-Vendor
   3 – Be honest
   4 – Give me a reason to boogie down
   5 – The perpetual time of never coming back


9. Auckland Girl (1999)[p.29]


10. The Britney Suite (2000)[pp.30-47]
    Paul Celan, SCHNEEPART
    SNOWPART
    Wendy Nu , keith partridge y yo
    Paul Celan, ERZFLITTER
    ORESPARK
    Nouvelle vague
    Paul Celan, KALK-KROKUS
    CHALK-CROCUS
    Wendy Nu, mr darling writes to penthouse forum
    Paul Celan, DAS GEDUNKELTE
    DARK
    It’s always too late …
    Paul Celan, BEIDHÄNDIGE
    BOTH-HANDED


11. After Apollinaire (1999)[p.48]


12. from Tiger Country (2001)[pp.49-54]
    Tiger Country
    Dumb
    Civil War
    Disorder and Early Sorrow
    [your name here]


13. Quasimodo’s Last Poem (2000)[p.55]


14. Seven Levels of the Waterfall (2002)[pp.56-70]
    Letter (to Lien Stevens)
    Trekking
    I – Hill Country
    In the Opium Museum
    II – Golden Triangle
    On the Frontier
    III – Air-con Bus
    The Débâcle
    IV – Ayutthaya
    To the River Kwai
    V – Rafthouse
    Erawan
    VI – Erewhon
    The Massage Parlour
    VII – Bangkok


15. Stone Pine Lavender (2002)[pp.71-72]


16. The Return of the Vanishing New Zealander (2003)[pp.73-86]
    I ♥ NZ
    NZ Golf (and English) Academy
    Boi-Boi on Karaoke
    Language School Picnic
    Journey to the West
    Index
    Mysteries: A Christmas Poem
    In the Days of The Lord of the Rings
    A Question of Faith
    Bonfire Gothic


17. Samsara – Breaking through (2003)[p.87]


18. Love in Wartime (2003)[pp.88-98]
    Carl sniffed
    1 – Porphyry skyline
    2 – Rhinoceros
    3 – Entering the world again
    SEX is natural
    4 – Bright Flowers
    5 – You just don’t have the sympathy
    6 – Stops when you watch it


19. The Miracle (2006)[p.99]


20. Three Sisters (after René Char) (2004)[pp.100-103]
    blue pharos love
    1 – in the urn of the second
    2 – twosies
    3 – shoulder your children


21. Zen and the Art of America’s Next Top Model (2006)[pp.104-6]


22. from Roadworks: Auckland Geography (2006)[pp.107-18]
    O Canada!
    Tentacles of Destruction
    Asbestos Hands of Dr. J.
    DEATH & BEYOND
    Refrigerium
    Birkenhead
    A Sunday Walk
    This DVD contains everything you ever wanted to know …
    Newmarket
    Unsuccessful Applicant for Neighbourhood Watch
    Coromandel
    Blinds


23. Zero at the Bone (2008)[p.119]


24. Papyri (2007)[pp.120-34]
    When you walked in …
    The Villa of the Papyri
    Sappho to Anaktoria
    Recipe for Making a Dadaist Poem
    Ode to Aphrodite
    Life among the Surrealists
    Atthis
    Mnasidika
    Fragments (1-7)
    To a girl who doesn’t care for poetry
    Juicy Root
    Virgin
    Sappho’s Epithalamion


25. Eel (after Montale) (2008)[pp.135-36]


26. from 31 Days (2009)[pp.137-53]
    April Fool’s Day
    Hiding the Lunch
    “The archaeologist of the present day”
    Three fits
    New Zealand’s Next Top Model Speaks
    Substitutes only need apply
    The Assassination Weapon
    The Darkness
    Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
    Mayday


27. Last Conference before Passchendaele (2009)[p.154]


28. The Jay Poems (2012)[pp.155-69]
    Jay & the Mail-Order Bride
    Jay as Line-Manager
    Jay & the Great Storm
    Jay Addresses the Troops
    Jay & The Economics of Happiness
    Jay on a Friday Night
    Jay’s Fear of Retirement
    Jay at the Pataphysics Conference
    Jay Finds a ’40s Photograph
    Jay on Fate
    Jay at the Glowworm Caves
    Jay Checks His Father into a Home
    Jay Gets His Hair Cut at the Mall


29. Lounge Room Tribalism (2011)[p.170]


30. from Jueju (2013)[pp.171-77]
    Transcultural Imaginaries
    Make-Up
    On City Streets
    40 Bogan Anthems
    Inferno 13
    Thinking of My Father


31. 12-12-12 (after Dante, Inferno 1: ll. 1-30) (2012)[pp.178-79]


32. The Other Side (2013)[pp.180-82]
    1914 – The Elberfeld Horses
    1966 – The Unknown Guest
    2013 – Rare and Obscure


33. Howard (2014)[pp.183-84]

Blurb:

Leaving Town


or coming home
either I suppose

pausing to look
down the hill

at the bay
and the houses

boats moored not
too far out

from the shore
the road is

the centre though
those foreshortened cribs

have lost their
meanings the shadow

and weight
of their everyday

the wide grey
road a weathered

fence to stop
you falling off

into the dark
plantation of trees

Jack Ross’s publications include four full-length collections of poetry, three novels, and three volumes of short fiction. He has also edited numerous books and literary magazines, including – with Jan Kemp – the trilogy of audio / text anthologies Classic, Contemporary and New NZ Poets in Performance (AUP, 2006-8).

The first of the 33 poems and sequences reprinted here was written in 1981, the latest in 2014. As Paula Green put it in 99 Ways into NZ Poetry (2010): “Jack Ross writes poetry like an inquisitive magpie, a scholar, a linguist and a hot-air balloonist … The end result, in contrast to some experimental work, promotes heart as much as it does cerebral talk.”

HeadworX

978-0-473-29640-7

Graham Fletcher: "The New Order"
[from King of the Wood (2002)]


•

Acknowledgements

The earliest poem in this book was written in 1981 – and published in a large soft-backed anthology called Tango, “a literary rage.” Auckland University Literary Handbook 1982, compiled by David Eggleton, who now edits Landfall. The latest was written in 2014. That’s thirty-three years I’ve been trying to write poetry – longer, actually, since it was quite some time before I succeeded in getting any into print.

I’d like to thank a number of people for their help with this book:

My wife, Bronwyn Lloyd, always my best and most astute critic; the Bookshop (later Eye Street) Poets, Raewyn Alexander, Rosetta Allan, Stu Bagby, Lee Dowrick, Alice Hooton, Leicester Kyle, Jacqueline Crompton Ottaway, Gwenyth Perry, Ila Selwyn, Michael Steven, and Wensley Willcox, who’ve had to listen to most of them in our workshops over the years; Graham Fletcher, for his generous gift of a cover image; Scott Hamilton and those other Salt alumni, Michael Arnold, Hamish Dewe and Richard Taylor, for general aiding and abetting; the inimitable David Howard, for his permission to include his part in our joint translation of René Char (pp. 100-03); my brother K. M. Ross, who’s helped out so much early and late; my mother and father, Drs June and John Ross, for figuring in and inspiring so many of them; Gabriel White, for the neverending stimulation of his work and talk; and all the various editors and publishers who’ve shown faith in my work at one time or another:

Bill Ayton at Narcissus Press; Elizabeth Caffin at AUP; Christine Cole Catley at Cape Catley; Brett Cross and Ellen Portch at Titus Books; John Geraets and his successors at brief; Paula Green and Harry Ricketts for 99 Ways into NZ Poetry; Dean Harvard at Kilmog Press; Jan Riemenschneider-Kemp at the AoNZPSA (Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive) [http://aonzpsa.blogspot.co.nz/]; Jenny Lawn at the SSCS Monograph Series (Massey University); Michele Leggott and Brian Flaherty at the nzepc (New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre) [http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/]; Theresia Liemlienio Marshall at Pohutukawa Press; Alistair Paterson at Poetry NZ; and – last but not least – Mark Pirie at HeadworX, who agreed to take on this project out of the kindness of his heart (as well as his pure disinterested zeal for poetry); and too many other people at too many journals and websites for me to list them all here.

David Howard: in Christchurch Public Library (10/6/19)]

Online Textual Notes:

Papyri

Samples:

HeadworX

Available:

HeadworX

4C/19 Cottleville Tce
Thorndon
Wellington 6011
New Zealand
http://headworx.eyesis.co.nz/

RRP: $NZ30.00

Reviews & Comments:

1. Graham Beattie, "New poetry release by Jack Ross, Auckland." Beattie's Book Blog (September 30, 2014):
   

   
   The first of the 33 poems and sequences reprinted here was written in 1981, the latest in 2014 – a time-lapse of thirty-three years. As Paula Green put it in 99 Ways into NZ Poetry: “Jack Ross writes poetry like an inquisitive magpie, a scholar, a linguist and a hot-air balloonist … The end result, in contrast to some experimental work, promotes heart as much as it does cerebral talk.”
   
   A Clearer View of the Hinterland is Jack Ross’s fifth full-length poetry collection, and his most substantial to date. It reprints four complete poetry chapbooks, as well as including extracts from numerous others. The poems on offer here include love lyrics, experimental texts, and translations from a variety of languages.



2. Mark Pirie, "HeadworX Releases New Books By Jack Ross And John O'Connor." Mark Pirie Blog (October 23, 2014):
   

   
   In September, my publishing company HeadworX released two new poetry books by John O’Connor, of Christchurch, and Jack Ross, of Auckland.
   
   O’Connor’s book is a nifty collection of his poems and prose poems called Whistling in the Dark with a neat cover by renowned Canterbury artist Eion Stevens.
   
   Ross’s book, A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014, is essentially a major retrospective of his work, and something of much anticipation in New Zealand poetry circles.
   
   I’m very pleased to be publishing both of these well established New Zealand poets.
   
   For more details on each book, please visit the HeadworX website:
   
   Jack Ross, A Clearer View of the Hinterland
   http://headworx.eyesis.co.nz/poetry/clearer
   
   John O’Connor, Whistling in the Dark
   http://headworx.eyesis.co.nz/poetry/whistling



3. Tracey Slaughter, Launch speech for A Clearer View of the Hinterland (May 25, 2015):
   

   
   ... If there’s one thing I constantly stress to my students it’s that Art is About Paying Attention – there’s no better illustration of that truth than the poems of Jack Ross. He is “an archaeologist of the present day.” Jack notices everything – the sleepless watcher of his poems is God’s Spy, always Baudelaire-style “out being alienated”, restlessly drifting the streets “photographing things, trying to trace patterns in the gaps.” He’s a sly postmodern neighbourhood watch, playing with the splinters of image that filter through the city, a place of atrocities, cheap thrills, kitsch, all the grace we’ve got. No one’s awake to the hinterland like Jack Ross, or can give you a clearer more haunting view. I’ve called him the King of Alt before, and no one can threaten his title - he’s a shape-shifter and a codeswitcher ... no one can jump cut from the sublime to the sub-pop in an electric instant like Jack. Tender, dirty, clever, lonely, wry, he’ll lead you from the existential longing of Celan to the “plastic voices” of NZ’s top models, from peepshows to pilgrimages, ancient scrolls to ads for lubricant. ...



4. Mark Anthony Houlahan, "When Jack Ross came to town ..." (May 28, 2015):
   
   When Jack Ross came to town the sky split open raining ice and fire.
   A blizzard of small press books scattered by the lake &
   greedy reader seagulls fell upon them.
   When Jack Ross came to town a boy with wild red hair and a boy with towery
   black hair played mad guitar and looked happy in their work.
   When Jack Ross came to town a concrete bunker filed with pastries,
   wine and paintings was lit with joy.
   When Jack Ross came to town there was fond recall of mythical scenes
   from Hamilton early in its holocene era:
   landlines, faxes, test cricket and another uncaring government in power.
   When Jack Ross came to town people bought little pieces of Slaughter & Ross
   with $50 notes showing faith in the future of cash and the printed word.
   When Jack Ross came to town Joel spun round & round & round
   & round & round & round & round & round and round & round
   listening to the happy squawk of grownups mingling
   and we wondered what will he speak & sing?


5. Robert McLean, "A Wind Through the Stays of Syntax." Landfall Review Online (August 1, 2015):
   

   
   So far as voice goes, in its shiftiness and gamesmanship, and how it relates to authorial identity, from the bulk of the poems in A Clearer View of the Hinterland one could make a case that Ross is Dr Jekyll to Manhire’s Mr Hyde. Manhire deals in whimsy and nostalgia, his compassionate tongue in his cheek; Ross ups the ante with kitsch and the ever-erstwhile contemporary, his incisive fangs bared. His modus operandi mash-ups are ‘like’ ideograms, which instead of humming in discordant harmony, shatter into each other, resulting in a spiky co-mixture of shards from shop-front windows and cathedrals’ stained glass alike. ...
   
   It’s lean and mean, no doubt about it – flesh is cleanly flensed from bone, from the marrow is then sucked. My time in the Hinterland has left me more with feeling than thought, which I hope excuses this clinching review-by-analogy: picture yourself on a Gold Coast beach, the wind idly leafing through the pages of a much-annotated copy of Benjamin’s Arcades Project on your lap; as ‘Baudelaire’ flashes by in your peripheral vision, you disinterestedly observe a sleek conferential shark feeding – though far from frenziedly – on a smorgasbord of swimmers, whose names end with unstressed vowels and whose togs are at least a size too small. The water is the colour of an $8 bottle of rosé. I find reading Ross – to borrow his victims’ parlance – kind of like that.



6. Peter Dornauf, "Arts: Dark and Stormy." Nexus (August 4, 2015):
   

   
   The poetry of Jack Ross’s, Clearer View of the Hinterland, coming in at a hefty 190 pages, is difficult to summarize since it is multifarious in every respect. Experimentally eclectic, sometimes allusive, at other times didactically direct, there’s a lot going on in this volume, from Dadaesque, to ad posters, to lists, assorted prose, italics and double entry bookkeeping: a cornucopia from the last 30 years. The best are ones with a wicked sense of humour.
   

   Unsuccessful Applicant for Neighbourhood Watch
   
   I like to see
   What people do
   In private
   In secret
   In the dark.

   It was a dark and stormy night.



7. Dr Matthew Harris, "The Places Behind the Place." Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2 (October, 2015): 244-47.
   

   
   Call me a lazy reader, but I tend to most enjoy Ross's later, more self-contained, narrative poems such as "The Darkness", "Asbestos hands of Dr. J", and "Howard". The first of these, which tells the story of his father's journey down the Waikato river on an air-mattress, deftly shifts perspective to give the reader a sense of the dread his mother must have felt, and makes the point that being caught up in the main action can sometimes be less memorable than by-standing. The ending of "Asbestos hands of Dr. J" is both touching and funny as it scorches the writer’s devotion to his craft, and sums up his desire to condense words into something combustible - the poem as a coal nugget, perhaps. The last poem of the collection tells the story of a noisy neighbour who grieves his mother’s death by playing Led Zeppelin through the early hours of the morning ...

Poetry NZ Yearbook 2 (2015)

Complete Essay:

Matthew Harris. "The Places Behind the Place." Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2015): 244-47:

Jack Ross. A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014. ISBN 978-0-473-29640-7. Wellington: HeadworX, 2014. RRP $30. 192 pp.

Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 reflections on Nikolai Leskov, classified two kinds of writers: those who readers imagine as the “trading seaman”, bringing stories from afar, and those “resident tillers” whose craft depends on a thorough knowledge of the local soil. Jack Ross, I think, is first and foremost a writer of the latter tradition. As a writer who has lived most of his life in Mairangi Bay, Auckland, he has done a great deal of graft in promoting writing in the region, from co-editing Golden Weather: North Shore Writers Past and Present in 2004 to initial selection work for what became known as ‘The Trestle Leg Series’ – a sample of North Shore writing which has graced the underside of the Auckland Harbour Bridge since 2012 (not to mention his support of numerous local journals, and nationally significant publications and poetry events).

For those familiar with Ross’s work, this is probably needless to say, but his resident tilling can also be clearly seen in both the subject matter and the form of the poetry collected here – which, I should note, brings together 33 poems and sequences from a time span of 33 years. The North Shore figures in miniature records of place (I like to see the islands in the gulf, driving / down the long hill, ships floating / down the sky [“Except Once,” p.12]); in humorous tweet-sized lines which sum up the changing nature of Auckland (If you can’t park in Birkenhead / where can you park? [“Birkenhead,” p.112]); and in more atmospheric descriptions:

That scent of air-conditioned air
as you pass a door,
cave-cold; fur
of condensation
on a beer:
Auckland midsummer.
[“God’s Spy,” p.18]

And if the subject matter of the poetry is frequently localised, it could be said that the form is too. To raise something of an old chestnut, fans of the North Shore writing might also see something in the way Ross extends a typically Sargesonian interest in the cadences of everyday speech and pushes it to breaking point, by his inclusions of what appear to be verbatim records of conversations. From a poem set at North Head in Devonport:

– I’ll scrub them when I get home
– Whatever
– Have you had an inspiration?
– Uh
– Get up and stop being stupid
– to a fallen child –
[“A Sunday Walk,” p.113]

While there are plenty of Easter eggs for North Shore readers (one might want to play spot-the-reference-to-Sargeson’s-bach?) I should note that any suggestion Ross’s use of the local might result in a kind of inward-looking parochialism wouldn’t stand up. He is also one of the most well-read poets in the country, conversant in several languages (translations are another feature of the collection), so his body of knowledge means he also writes, in Benjamin’s terms, “from afar” – or, at least, from a perspective which includes – occasionally to a reader’s frustration – reference to diverse and sometimes obscure sources. His allusions to figures such as Celan, Thomas Mann and Britney Spears – not to mention lesser-knowns like Bishop James A. Pike and Alexandra David-Néel – provide a colourful, and occasionally disorienting, juxtaposition to local subjects.

Are you thinkingabout them
ducking round thisplinth
in Eden Crescent?
[…]
Of course one wearsa thong
to pick up kittyStella Maris
Lady of the Seaora pro nobis
As in Th. MannUnordnung
und frühes Leid
cry yourself to sleep
[“Disorder and Early Sorrow”, p.53]

These allusions are more frequent in his earlier work, and over the three-decades of Ross’s writing covered by the collection, it may be possible to detect a drift toward more relational and experiential – rather than pointedly experimental – forms. Certainly, in the latter half of the collection, he isn’t always so determined to complicate his storytelling with external references, and his penchant for literary rarities and the exploration of conceptual archaisms takes up less of the foreground. This, I suppose, will variously please or irk readers who have previously lauded or criticised his leanings toward the avant-garde: Mark Houlahan has called Ross’s writing “slippery” and “quixotic”, Michael Morrissey a “challenge”, Lisa Samuels “uncomfortably interesting, richly literary, and intensely sympathetic”, and Harvey McQueen “a tantalising maze”. But I don’t think one could say Ross’s hyper-connected synapses are any less active in the later poems. The recording of curious text-types, say, in the first half of the collection (the overpass graffiti, bumper sticker, or job recruitment ad) continues to tap into sundry folk-wisdom right until the end of the book (in references to Albert Street signage, t-shirts, and text from a Massey University staff toilet). And the early allusions to Calvin Klein and Miss New Zealand’s head are no more surprising than the later nods to Hosanna Horsfall, Clever Hans, and Slash’s anus. It’s just that the latter are given more context in the poems.

Hosanna is an idiot
I’m going to New York
I’m going to be a star
If they tell me to eat myself
I’ll do it
[“New Zealand’s Next Top Model Speaks”, p.146]

Call me a lazy reader, but I tend to most enjoy Ross’s later, more self-contained, narrative poems such as “The Darkness”, “Asbestos hands of Dr. J”, and “Howard”. The first of these, which tells the story of his father’s journey down the Waikato river on an air-mattress, deftly shifts perspective to give the reader a sense of the dread his mother must have felt, and makes the point that being caught up in the main action can sometimes be less memorable than by-standing. The ending of “Asbestos hands of Dr. J” is both touching and funny as it scorches the writer’s devotion to his craft, and sums up his desire to condense words into something combustible – the poem as a coal nugget, perhaps. The last poem of the collection tells the story of a noisy neighbour who grieves his mother’s death by playing Led Zeppelin through the early hours of the morning:

the fuzz turned up in force
we heard them knocking first

then going round all the doors
finally they broke in
cuffed him

and took him off to jail
(“Howard,” p.183)

It might be said that Ross sacrifices a little attention to form in these more personal narrative poems. For instance, one might query why, in “Howard”, Ross reveals who has called the police so early in the poem, rather than saving that point of tension for the end. Or one might wonder whether the details about his parents’ medical occupation were necessary to the story in “The Darkness”. But these are minor points in otherwise memorable and affecting pieces of verse. If I have any real gripe about the collection, it’s to do with formatting. The Table of Contents is missing page numbers, which makes the book difficult to get around. And the pain of this omission is in no way lightened by the irony of including the poem “Index” which purports to provide contents information on a 1966 edition of The Teachings of Buddha.

All in all though, this retrospective is well and truly worth the effort spent in navigating it. Thirty years seems a good amount of time to draw on for a clear view of Ross’s personal hinterland – and being his fifth collection, it does a thorough job of covering the many of the most important themes and influences behind his large body of work. I would concur with Graham Beattie, in saying that this is Ross’s “most substantial” collection to date. It’s certainly a book I’d recommend to those who haven’t read Ross before. Many pieces will give pleasure in future re-readings, and there are plenty of fascinating allusions to add to one’s reference-chasing wish-list. For those approaching it for the first time, starting at the end, and reading through backwards might be a good idea though: beginning at the place of arrival before moving back to the places behind the place.

Matthew Harris

•

Kingdom of Alt (2010)

Cover image: "Model forest", by Bronwyn Lloyd

Kingdom of Alt. Short Stories and a Novella by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-1-877441-15-8. Auckland: Titus Books, 2010. [iv] + 240 pp.

Contents:

Marginalia

Trauma: Journal
Haiku Diary
The Isle of the Cross
The Purloined Letter
Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret
Finding His Stash
Before the Disaster

Coursebook found in a Warzone: A Whodunit

Cover design: Brett Cross

Blurb:

Is writing about staying on the sidelines, or getting involved - marginal observation, or "skyline operations" (Auden)? This book offers a series of takes on the possibility of a truly engaged literature. Not all the conclusions it comes to are entirely pessimistic.

"You'll all have your own story about how you first encountered the magic kingdom of Alt. As a teenager growing up in the depths of the Auckland suburbs, I believe that discovery saved my life."

- Roger Horrocks

Titus Books
ISBN 978-1-877441-15-8

Kingdom of Alt (2010)

Abstract:

This is a collection of seven short stories, together with a longer, 100-page novella. The stories are grouped in a section called “Marginalia,” since they're all (more or less) concerned with the subject of notes and jottings written in the margins of more conventional texts. In the case of “Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret,” the frame is a dual-text translation of an Old French poem about a werewolf by Marie de France, which is adorned by various notes telling a somewhat more contemporary story. The other stories are concerned with diaries and journals (“Trauma: Journal” and “Haiku Diary”); a long-lost novel by Melville (“The Isle of the Cross”); a forged letter by Baudelaire, and its links to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (“The Purloined Letter”); a heap of print-outs of internet pornography, (“Finding His Stash”); and an examination report on a Masters Thesis (“Before the Disaster”). All the stories (with the exception of “Finding His Stash”) have been previously published (in part or in full) in periodicals or online.

Online Texts:

Banned Books

Crisis Diaries

Samples:

Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret

Publisher:

Titus Books
1416 Kaiaua Road
RD3
Pokeno 2473
Waikato
New Zealand
email: titus.books.akl@gmail.com
mobile: 027 865 3958
http://titus.co.nz/catalogue.xhtml

Available from:

Atuanui Press

RRP: $NZ 40.00

Reviews & Comments:

1. Scott Hamilton, "Literature in the Age of Twitter." Reading the Maps (17 September 2010):
   

   
   The two books being launched by Titus next Thursday at the Alleluya Cafe on Auckland's K Rd are both, in quite different ways, testaments to Brett [Cross]'s style of publishing. Kingdom of Alt is a volume of short stories by Jack Ross, a writer Titus has supported since its inception. With their baroque structures, explicit and sometimes bizarre sex, extreme but seldom gratuitous violence, and innovative use of page layout, variations in font, and illustrations, Jack's books have all too often been easy for reviewers to ignore or to misunderstand. They have also frequently been expensive to publish. Titus has nevertheless stood by Jack, and there are signs now that the critical tide might be turning. It is certainly gratifying for me to see that Paula Green and Harry Ricketts' handsome new survey, 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry, devotes considerable attention to Jack's work.



2. Bronwyn Lloyd, "Jack Ross's Kingdom of Alt." Launch speech at Alleluya Café (Thursday 23rd September 2010):
   

   
   Jack’s maniacal tendencies are well known to those of us who know him so it should come as no surprise to his friends to learn that in the process of researching his novella which features the story of a man who teaches two literature courses in the midst of a war-torn city that Jack invented two entire university papers, ‘Crisis Diaries’ and ‘Banned Books’, complete with an anthology of readings, extensive lecture notes, and a fully navigable blog for each course that you as readers can access via the links on the copyright page of Kingdom of Alt to add to your reading experience ...



3. Elmar Ludwig, "Review of Kingdom of Alt." brief 41 (2010): 103-5.
   

   
   It's a technique that Ross often employs, this layering or intercutting of narratives, and as a reader you find yourself becoming attuned to a number of vibrations, like someone listening to a complex piece of music while also being aware of the sound of a floor-sander in a room next door.
   ...
   It is a sad fact that today Universities are no longer centres of learning but money generating machines, producing graduates for the job market ... One wishes that these coldly rational institutions would crumble, their foundations eroded by termites with diamond-tipped mandibles. Ross is such a termite, both subversive and industrious in his literary activities, I would willingly sign up for his fictitious courses if I were not about to unplug my computer and travel to other shores.



4. Lisa Samuels, "What Happens Next: Review of Kingdom of Alt." Landfall Review Online (1 April, 2011).
   

   
   If Jack Ross has not read J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, someone should get it for him. Kingdom of Alt has some of the anarchic qualities of that confrontational work, but they are more dispersed: Kingdom of Alt is a collection of tales and takes which present entanglements of real-life events and imaginary fictions in order to score or scarify with traumas those experiencing the real live events. The narrators include variously: a twenty-something female university student, a thirtyish divorcee taking evening poetry classes and constructing weird ‘death films’ out of video fragments, a middle-aged man, Jack Ross himself as the speaking author, as well as other points of view, sometimes fragmentary, sometimes unified.



5. Rowan McCormick, "Kingdom." [Email received 20/5/11]:
   

   
   When I was a young fellow I used to read (and re-read) Mad Magazine. First, I'd buy them. Then, I found that I could take them from the rubbish bin behind the Paper Plus in Milford. The humour went from Satire to Slapstick to Ironic to the plain Bizarre - it was all there, and you could move around, reading different things depending on your whim. A lot of it was above me - some 'in jokes' and the like - American Humour that I didn't quite get. I remember getting a Cracked magazine once, and flicking back and forth between two pages, each page referring the reader to the other, each advertising a Square Egg Maker. 'How can I get my hands on one of these - where is the effing order form?', I wondered.

Reading at the launch
(photograph: Cerian Wagstaff)

Complete Essay:
[reprinted by permission]

Bronwyn Lloyd. "Launch speech: Jack Ross's Kingdom of Alt." (23/9/10):

In a launch speech made by Roger Horrocks for Jack’s first collection of short stories, Monkey Miss her Now, published in 2004 by Raewyn Alexander’s imprint Danger Publishing, Roger said:

You’ll all have your own story about how you first encountered the magic kingdom of Alt. As a teenager growing up in the depths of the Auckland suburbs, I believe that discovery saved my life.

By this he meant the kingdom of Alternative fiction, film, art, underground comics and zine culture. When Jack heard Roger’s words he identified with them immediately and decided that this would be the title for his next collection of stories. And here it is.

I’m very pleased to have been asked to launch Jack’s latest book Kingdom of Alt, published by Titus Books. Kingdom of Alt is a collection of seven stories and a new novella, ‘Coursebook found in a Warzone: A Whodunit’.

The thing about alternative fiction is that you can’t neatly sum it up in a short speech and you shouldn’t even try. The reader is a collaborator, so what I might have to say about this book or any of Jack’s other books for that matter, will be completely different from what any other reader will have to say about it.

Jack’s books are writerly texts and readers need to be prepared to participate – to take part in a kind of performance and to go on an adventure where they might end up anywhere, everywhere and nowhere all at once. To quote Roger Horrocks again:

Once a character [in Jack’s stories] has walked out the door, he or she can end up anywhere in space, time or language.

As a reader you are encouraged to tag along, but I can tell you, you can find yourself in some pretty strange and disturbing places, so consider yourself warned.

As an initiate of Jack’s Kingdom of Alt for the past four years with my own sumptuously decorated chamber inside the palace, I’ve utilized a number of strategies and techniques when reading Jack’s books, particularly his trilogy of novels dealing with the subjects of insomnia, amnesia and blindness.

Multicoloured post-it notes were used to chart all the dismembered stories in Nights with Giordano Bruno, and I nearly composed a novel of my own on the side trying to nut out all the clues and ciphers so that I could play the sealed "game for one player" that was tucked inside the back of each copy of the book.

Pink clothes pegs and a retractable washing line were essential for reading the back to front text in my misprinted copy of The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, and a magnifying glass came in very handy for reading the palimpsest text running beneath the main text of EMO.

So I’ve definitely embraced the idea of collaboration when it comes to Jack’s books although generally I don’t respond to his texts in words, but instead find myself making little models out of paper and card: a pop-up minotaur, a labyrinth made out of cardboard wine-bottle dividers, a concertina castle interior where a werewolf lives made from a fold-down six-pack carton, or, in this case, a 3D paper forest made with photocopies of illustrations by Gustave Doré.

I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that there are very few signposts. You need to find your own way into Jack’s Kingdom of Alt, but I will give a couple of tips to any brave new initiates who want to cross the drawbridge.

Don’t be put off by weird page layouts like this, from ‘Coursebook found in a Warzone: A Whodunit’:



Jack’s maniacal tendencies are well known to those of us who know him so it should come as no surprise to his friends to learn that in the process of researching his novella which features the story of a man who teaches two literature courses in the midst of a war-torn city that Jack invented two entire university papers, ‘Crisis Diaries’ and ‘Banned Books’, complete with an anthology of readings, extensive lecture notes, and a fully navigable blog for each course that you as readers can access via the links on the copyright page of Kingdom of Alt to add to your reading experience.

Another thing to note is that you should be suspicious of the subtitle of the novella, ‘A Whodunit’, because you may not necessarily be able to solve this whodunit and you might even find yourself wondering just what it is that got done!

The subject of marginalia unites the collection of seven stories that come before the novella in the book. There’s a little mouse called Max who hovers at the edge of one character’s tormented imagination before the spiders and bloodless corpses take over. There are the hidden clues in an allegedly counterfeit letter written by Baudelaire to his mother, and the scorching marginal notes written by an angry wife in the pages of her husband’s pornography collection. There are the creepy handwritten notes of a young anorexic woman in the margins of a poem about a wolfman cruelly treated by his wife, and in the story ‘The Isle of the Cross’ Jack takes the idea of marginalia one step further, with his character writing in the margins of a non-existent text, Herman Melville’s great lost manuscript ‘The Isle of the Cross’.

I’ll leave you to puzzle the rest out for yourselves when you buy a copy of the book and I’d now like to invite Jack to read a passage from ‘The Isle of the Cross’.

The author in repose
(courtesy: Emma Smith)

•

EMO (2008)

Cover image: Emma Smith, "have I been pardoned yet?" (detail)

The R.E.M. [Random Excess Memory] Trilogy, 3:

EMO. A Novel by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-1-877441-07-3. Auckland: Titus Books, 2008. [vi] + 258 pp.

Contents:

EVA AVE

1. Eva Android
2. Dear E.
3. Family Album
4. February 6, 1935
5. The Cat
6. February 11, 1935
7. Strange Meeting
8. The Contract
9. February 15, 1935
10. First Night
11. Arrival
12. February 18, 1935
13. Searching
14. Work
15. March 11, 1935
16. The Vivisectionist
17. 1001 Nights
18. March 16, 1935
19. Beauty and the Beast
20. Dogs
21. Night Visit
22. April 1, 1935
23. Together Forever
24. The Excursion
25. April 29, 1935
26. Madness
27. The Hotel
28. May 10, 1935
29. Murder
30. But his hands were around my throat
31. Ten Days that Shook the World
32. The Trial
33. May 28, 1935
34. Last Day of a Condemned Man

MOONS OF MARS

1. Marlow
2. Welcome to my World
3. The Invitation
4. Welcome to my World (2)
5. Hysterical Blindness
6. Welcome to my World (3)
7. Luce
8. Dinner
9. Burmese Days
10. The Bargain
11. Backstory
12. Somnambulism
13. Chantage
14. The Investigation
15. Trois filles de leur mère
16. Club D
17. Glam Metal Detectives
18. Night Journey
19. Outside
20. Trilogies
21. Rumble Edge Line
22. Trilogies (2)
23. Life on Mars
24. Trilogies (3)
25. Hydrogen
26. King Candaules
27. Free Love
28. Helium
29. Confessions
30. Marriage
31. High
32. Terminus
33. The Great Stone Face
34. Doubts
35. Iris
36. Iris Recognition
37. Iris Out

OVID IN OTHERWORLD

1. Ovidius Naso
2. Tristia 3.2
3. Video-consult
4. The Undead
5. Tristia 3.3
6. Blood-drive
7. Exul Ludens
8. Tristia 3.8
9. Drip-feed
10. Blinding
11. Tristia 3.10
12. Truth-telling
13. ovid v. divo
14. Tristia 3.12
15. Witch-finding
16. roma amor
17. Tristia 3.13
18. Hypno-slave
19. Ovids 3
20. Tristia 5.7
21. Fever-dreams
22. Ovid in the Third Reich
23. Tristia 5.10
24. Head-hunter
25. Six Memos for the Next Millennium
26. Tristia 5.12
27. Title-story
28. Lost Books of the Fasti
29. Epistulae 1.2
30. Poetry-reading
31. Sleep Threshold – Hypnagogia
32. Epistulae 4.7
33. Face-saving
34. Ovid Misunderstood
35. Epistulae 4.10
36. Scene-stealing
37. Suetonius: “Divus Augustus”
38. Epistulae 4.14
39. Fasti V: 421-44
40. Dream-catcher

Cover design: Brett Cross

Palimpsest Texts:

SCHEHERAZADE'S WEB:
The 1001 Nights and Comparative Literature

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Malory and Scheherazade: A Study in Narrative Method
Chapter 2 - Europe, Christianity and the Crusades in the 1001 Nights
Chapter 3 - Voyage en Orient: The Victorian Traveller and the Arabian Nights
Chapter 4 - Parodies of the Nights in Nineteenth-century Literature
Chapter 5 - The Poetics of Stasis: Twentieth-century Readings of the Nights
Works Cited
Bibliography
Chronology
Concordance

JACK'S METAMORPHOSES:
Collage-Poems & Sequences (1997-2007)

Metamorphoses I: Chaos
Jack’s Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses II: The Crow
Evenings in the Blackout
Metamorphoses III: Semele
Dieting. I’m Hungry too
Metamorphoses IV: Daughters of Minyas
In the Cave of Henry James
Metamorphoses V: Arethusa
The Britney Suite
Metamorphoses VI: Marsyas
Ancestral Voices
Metamorphoses VII: Theseus
Anamorphoses
Metamorphoses VIII: Icarus
Love in Wartime
Metamorphoses IX: Iolaus
Postcards
Metamorphoses X: Pygmalion
Servants of the Wankh
Metamorphoses XI: Midas
Suburban Apocalypse
Metamorphoses XII: Rumour
Days Under Water
Metamorphoses XIII: Glaucus
Citizens of the People’s Republic of Freaktown
Metamorphoses XIV: Pomona
Muses
Metamorphoses XV: Hippolytus
Papyri
Notes on Sources

Publius Ovidius Naso:
TRISTIA, EPISTULAE EX PONTO & IBIS

Tristia
Book I
Book II
Book III
Book IV
Book V

Epistulae ex Ponto
Book I
Book II
Book III
Book IV

Ibis

Blurb:

In the third volume of his REM trilogy, after the urban inferno of Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000) and the purgatorial stasis of The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006), Jack Ross explores the closest thing to a paradise his cast of crazies can conceive of – let alone aspire to.

E M O

RANDOM EXCESS MEMORY

“ … I had a companion when I first came here, all those years ago. But we spent too long exploring our new world. When he tried to leave he shrivelled into dust. I found his body and buried him. Flint, he was called.”
“But ... why didn’t you shrivel into dust. If you followed him out.”
“He never drank the water or ate the weeds.”
“But ...”
Suddenly something clicked into place. She saw the milky mildness of his deep-set eyes as they actually were: a mask for thick, impenetrable cataracts of scar-tissue.
“Yes, I fed you on them. I’m sorry. I want you to stay with me and be my wife.”

EARTH
MARS
OTHERWORLD
... the book itself exists like a music of the spheres that runs along the tops of the pages, available only to a concentrated sense of hearing, but as real as fuck.

- Will Christie

Abstract:

"There’s an obsession with blindness, certainly – with ageing dictators and visionaries: Hitler, Ovid, Shahryar. What else can we say about the narrator of this book? He (or she) takes refuge in flights of fancy, posting pseudonymous entries on the web.

Later they’re printed out on the backs of any pages, used or scribbled on, that come to hand.

Each of the three stories explores a set of flawed relationship: Hitler and Eva, Marlow and Phil, Ovid and the wise-woman. …

Is it all an attempt to find the perfect partner, whether she be android clone, registered nurse, or girl-next-door? ..."

This book consists of a set of three online narratives: one devoted to Earth (EVA AVE), a futuristic story about a girl convinced that she’s the clone of Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun; one to Mars (Moons of Mars), the story of a violent sex-ring based under the pyramids of Mars; and one set in the Otherworld of a patient under psychoanalysis (Ovid in Otherworld), who believes that he’s the poet Ovid, in exile on the Black Sea. The titles of the stories make an anagram of the word EMO: a neo-gothic youth style, derived (allegedly) from the words “Excessively Emotional”. Before publication, I copied each story onto pages already “contaminated” by other texts: a critical book about the 1001 Nights, a set of poetry pageworks grouped around Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as the Latin text of Ovid’s exile letters. These can be seen (but not clearly read) through the print of the “over-story”.

Online Texts:

EMO (e-book, 2020)

Samples:

Jack's Metamorphoses

The Britney Suite

The Cat

Love in Wartime

Papyri

Publisher:

Titus Books
1416 Kaiaua Road
RD3
Pokeno 2473
Waikato
New Zealand
email: titus.books.akl@gmail.com
mobile: 027 865 3958
http://titus.co.nz/catalogue.xhtml

Available from:

Atuanui Press

RRP: $NZ 40.00

[Titus Book launch (l9/6/08)]

Reviews & Comments:

1. Jen Crawford, "Jack Ross's EMO: Launch speech at Alleluya cafe, Thursday 19th June." blue acres (24/6/08):
   

   
   ... this is a book which isn’t satisfied with being self-contained. It reaches beyond its own covers, beyond its author, inviting you into one of the great endangered pleasures of literature – which is the sense of its endlessness, the way one book can open another book for you, like a friend giving you a private gift; perhaps the key to a room you can now share – a room, of course, which would have many other doors.



2. Scott Hamilton, "Independent's Night." Scoop Review of Books (24/6/08):
   

   
   Like its predecessors, Nights with Giordano Bruno and The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, Ross’ EMO is a sprawling, delightfully bewildering work. Ross sets several stories in motion, as he moves between Mars, Nazi Germany, and the dream-like version of Auckland’s North Shore that recurs almost obsessively in his writing. At the heart of EMO is the tale of a recently blinded writer and his servant, a very human android named Eva. The embittered writer tries to impose his will upon Eva, but she subtly resists his whims. The story of Eva and her faltering master has the simple power of a fable, and Ross finds parallels for it in the Arabian Nights, as well as in the relationship between Hitler and his secretary-cum-wife, Eva Braun ...
   
   Ross is a lapidarian scholar, fluent in half a dozen languages, but he is also a passionate fan of America’s Next Top Model, and his writing has always refused to distinguish between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The very look of EMO mocks the conventions of both literature and academic scholarship - texts are artfully layered on its outsize pages, alongside photographs, cartoons, and cryptic diagrams. Ross’ prose is full of dirty jokes, as well as learned asides and sad observations. EMO could keep you busy for years on a desert island, but it can also entertain you during that hour between the end of Shortland St and the beginning of Desperate Housewives.



3. Bill Direen, "Review of EMO." Percutio 3 (2009): 82.
   

   
   My review copy measured in at 17.4 x 24.7 x 2.1 cm which, knowing Jack a little, might represent some mystical dimension of an alchemical age. The first impression is dramatic. Here we have a book uncharacteristically (for both the author and for Titus Books) large and boldly striking (with its blood-red sketch of a weary child's face); it also invites a biplanar approach. It is at once strident and muted. ... The impression is of a private studio, reflection of the writer's mind, scattered with his influences and cuttings which have appealed to him over the years, which have formed him.



4. Richard Taylor, "Review of EMO." brief 39 (2010): 116-21.
   

   
   In terms of pure formal complexity, “visual beauty”, originality of form and intellection connected to a strong underlying ethic, EMO is a unique masterpiece of an innovative and original kind, rarely seen in NZ literature. Jack Ross has long had a very real and intense fascination with stories and tales: in particular science fiction, horror, fantasy, stories of Borges and others, along with other literature; and most prominently in EMO, the stories from 1001 Nights, and those of Ovid’s Metamophoses. Despite an extensive and sometimes disturbing use of sex, violence, Fantasy, Gothic, and of irony, it is an ultimately engrossing and enchanting tale, or a tale about writing or of writing magical tales. And whatever else it is, EMO is homage to Story, and the pure magic of The Tale.
   ...
   Are we then in some monstrous intellectual monument with no end – can this book not be read and enjoyed? Do we all have to read all works of literature and so on and read modern philosophy to enjoy or deal with this book? Do we have to wade through all these codes and complexities and cryptics? I must confess that this was my own doubt. But the main text’s story, or stories, makes up what is in itself a narrative of extraordinary adventures, and indeed the central section is set on Mars, involves intrigue, seduction, sado-masochism, drugs, murder, as well as codes. We are in a labyrinth, but it is compensated for by the very enchanting language that Ross uses, and the intensity of the many episodes in the book.



5. Brett Cross, "Power Relations and Sexual Manipulation: Review of EMO, by Jack Ross (Titus Books, 2008) $44.95." Landfall 219 - On Music (2010): 189-91.
   

   
   The poetry is one of the highlights of the book, simple and moving, contemporary yet mythical: here is Ross writing at his best. Ovid, too, is the other genuinely sympathetic character in EMO, 'bookending' nicely with Eva in the opening section.
   
   When an author tries to do so much in a book, experimenting radically with layout, story structure, plot, character and setting, there are bound to be certain things that excite and exasperate different readers. Most, though, should be won over by both the cryptic and engaging design, and by the unremitting atmosphere of gothic mystery.



6. Scott Hamilton, "Against all 'decent restraint': Jack Ross talks about EMO." Reading the Maps (5/2/11):
   

   
   I'm certainly pleased to be able to publish an interview with the venerable Jack Ross which has apparently proved too long for any of our local offline literary journals to host. The interview was conducted by Richard Taylor, a man with a longstanding and well-deserved reputation for digression, and moves through subjects as different and differently interesting as life on Mars, the future of the book, the last days of the Roman poet Ovid, the 'socio-sexual extremism' of Kathy Acker, Auckland's 1998 power blackout, and the political consequences of the suppression of emotion.
   
   As they chat, Jack and Richard return again and again to EMO, the large and strange novel Jack published in September 2008. Jack has a vast private library, which he has catalogued in disconcerting detail on a website named A Gentle Madness, and EMO, with its multiple layers of text, multiple plots, and slips between distant times and places, often seems like an attempt to fit a whole library between the covers of one volume. Precisely because of its improvisational, wide-ranging nature, Richard's chat with Jack makes a good introduction to the book. ...



7. Brett Cross, "Just gone up on mebooks ..." Titus Books (Facebook) (30/7/20):
   

   
   Just gone up on mebooks, three new ebooks: Marked Men by David Lyndon Brown, his only full-length novel, poetic, violent - an ode to Auckland's gay scene, told with real affection - also self-destructiveness and the lead protagonist's need for love; EMO by Jack Ross, which also tugs at the heart strings, expressing the vulnerability of the powerless, and how power relations are misused. A lot else too, including the moons of Mars, some poignant poetry and explicit sex; and Jen Crawford's collection of poetry Bad Appendix, controlled yet surreal, images that refer to things of concrete importance though you're never quite sure what they are - mebooks.co.nz/titus-books

Interview (abridged)
[edited by Bill Direen]:

EMO: A DIALOGUE
between Richard Taylor & Jack Ross

Richard: EMO – what does it mean and why is it the title?

Jack: Well, it’s a musical style – and a kind of lifestyle choice. “Emo” stands for “extremely emotional” (or so I’m told). It’s rather like the Goth style, only Goths tend to see Emos as very suburban and spurious. When I heard about it a few years ago, I thought it perfectly summed up what I was trying to do in this book – both the excessive emotionalism and the faint air of the spurious. After that, though, I started making up a whole series of puns as retrospective justifications: E/ Earth – M/ Mars – O / Otherworld; and E/ Eva – M/ Marlow – O/Ovid. That gave me my core cast. The mood preceded the material in this case.

Richard: Am I right in saying that EMO is quite different from the work of other writers today because you are yourself quite vigorously using the Internet and Blogs to allow the reader to follow the various "strands" of EMO?

Jack: The internet and the idea of hypertext and shifting plains of reference is certainly a gift to the aspiring labyrinth-builder. Joyce and Escher seem to have got along okay without it, but I guess for me the world-wide-web is a kind of democratisation of the impulse: everyone their own Borges, with a tithe of the effort.

As far as the death of the author goes, well, there is another Jack Ross – a hard-bitten desert-loving Reno detective in the works of a guy named Bernard Schopen (and actually, since EMO was published, yet another Jack Ross has surfaced: a Scottish crime-writer who wrote a book called Requiem) – so maybe I am dead after all, and just don’t know it … I deliberately fail to name the protagonist in all three books of the trilogy. Which makes sense to me because they’re all focussed on a central male figure undergoing some kind of extreme turmoil (they might all be versions of the same person, in fact). But actually all three books are by me, and I’m a male, resident in Auckland (where all three books are set), sharing many experiences with these central figures, etc. So of course they are all me. But then they’re not, either, because they’re fictionally-projected personages in mysterious mirror-worlds. These seem to me unavoidable accompaniments to the whole business of writing fiction. You could say that I was deconstructing fiction by undermining certain aspects of the projection – pointing out the paradox of pretending to be someone else when everyone knows it’s just you in a funny wig. But then Cervantes did all that in Don Quixote and it didn’t stop his characters seeming real – or believable, which isn’t quite the same thing.

I guess EMO takes this lack of verisimilitude pretty far. It’s hard for me to believe that many readers will be comfortable with such naked and perfunctory scaffolding I provide in various parts of the story. But then I’m not particularly interested in making people feel comfortable. You’ve got to go pretty far nowadays to wake them up at all – to break up the frozen sea within them, as Kafka said.

Richard: Do you think that there are too many “strands” or “themes” in EMO?

Jack: Well, there’s a lot of stuff in there, certainly. I make no apology about that. Too much is a value judgement every reader will have to make for themselves. I’d say there were too many plots and stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, myself – it’s not a particularly unified work. “Is EMO so overpacked as to be incoherent?” I guess you’re asking. I’m sure some readers will think so. But I suppose the readers I want are the ones who like to read into things – who don’t expect everything to present itself elegantly on the surface so they can move on to the next thing as rapidly as possible. Nobody’s obligated to dive into EMO. I hope, in fact, that only the people who get a kick out of that kind of thing do. It’s hard to see it seriously comparing with the Cantos or Finnegans Wake or Maximus or those other twentieth-century whales when it comes to being packed with material, though. Even Moby Dick or Tristram Shandy, for that matter.

Richard: [comment question] I don't see EMO as only a novel. In fact I don't see it fitting into any particular genre. I would say that EMO is multi-textual and involves (like Nights and The Imaginary Museum) many visual elements. It also connects to popular and high culture and so on.

Jack: I’d certainly concur with that. And again, I don’t claim any great originality there. It’s got a lot of competing generic elements (as do Kathy Acker’s “novels”). I chose the designation “novel” for it for various reasons, I guess:

1. because it sounds more approachable (and therefore salable) than calling it an “experimental text” or something like that.
2. because I’m in love with the idea of the novel form: a genre so debatable, so potentially all-inclusive that it can straddle bourgeois fiction, magic realism, Apuleius, traditional Chinese & Japanese forms, and virtually anything else you can throw at it. Where are its limits, in fact? We haven’t reached them yet.

Richard: Did you deliberately place the text that is “horizontal”, which I call the “subtext”, and which contains all the stories and other texts on your other Blogs etc, in such a way that it obscures the “main text”? This “slowing the reader” down, making the reader pay attention to the process of your writing?

Jack: Yes, that was one reason. A literal metaphor for the contextualising we all do when we try to make sense of one text in terms of another. Really, though, it was because I saw some letters written in the early nineteenth-century, around the Jane Austen era, where the writer had crossed the text – written first horizontally, then vertically, on the same piece of paper – with every confidence that their correspondent would make sense of it. That was done purely to conserve paper, of course (at a premium during the Napoleonic wars, I understand). But it just looked so fantastic – so impenetrable and mysterious. I immediately started to wonder how one could reproduce that effect in a printed book.

Why should one bother is I guess one valid question, but the answer must be because it enables you to literally incorporate many texts in one. There are, then, three books contained within the one book of EMO. There’s the principal text on top, the three novellas, but underneath that there’s a complete book of critical essays on the Thousand and One Nights (written by me, of course, but attributed in context to the main male character in the Eva Ave story – insofar as that isn’t me. I created him, and he wrote my book, so in a sense he is me, but of course he’s also fictionalised and gifted with a lot of ideas, opinions and character traits which I certainly hope aren’t true of me, since I find them quite abhorrent). As well as that there’s a book of 15 collage-poems (mostly published in brief magazine at various times) called Jack’s Metamorphoses, which includes a set of 15 short essays on the numerous English verse translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. So that’s three books in one: fiction, poetry and essays all bound into the one cover. But as well as that I include the Latin text of Ovid’s exile-letters from the Black Sea underneath the third section of the book, Ovid in Otherworld.

All of that is there. But of course there has to be a fictional justification for it in the world of the book itself as well. And that is basically that the (blind) almost-invisible protagonist of the whole narrative, who’s presumably dreaming up all these stories and printing them out, has accidentally started to use a set of pages which already had writing on them. He can’t see the effect, but we do. That’s also why the texts underneath are running backwards, in reverse to the flow of the top, “executive” narratives. That’s what would happened if you picked up a stack of Xeroxed pages and run it through a printer backwards.

Richard: The images, photos, symbols, diagrams and the font changes and alternations; together with trace of the subtext “behind” the main text make this book quiet visually and conceptually exciting for me. Apart from all else the very layout of the book has a kind of beauty.

Jack: I hope so. It took an awful long time to achieve some of those effects, I must say. I was on the edge of my seat till the very last minute to see how the printers would deal with that bleached-out subtext and deliberately boldened top-text. It had to be at least potentially readable to work …

Richard: You are quite interested in codes and symbols?

Jack: Yes, I guess that “being interested” in codes and symbols is putting it mildly. I’m a huge admirer of Poe’s work. The nineteenth-century French (Baudelaire and Mallarmé principal among them) were entirely correct in their assessment of his genius, in my opinion.

Richard: Is “Metamorphoses” the alternative name?

Jack: It can be if you want it to be. Strictly speaking, Jack’s Metamorphoses is the title of one of the underlying texts in the book, the collection of poems. Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass is also called (in Latin) Metamorphoses, of course – and I guess you can see how much I’ve been influenced by it. It’s certainly in my top ten favourite books, if not my favourite of all. You can see it in this book as much as the more directly invoked Ovidian epic. So, yes, this book is the conclusion to a conversation about the idea of Metamorphosis or change conducted through all three parts of the trilogy, Bruno, Atlantis, and EMO. The titlepage of the first novel in the sequence includes a quote from an Italian book about Giordano Bruno, in fact:

II fine di tutto l’operazione è forse essenzialmente questo, modificarsi.
[The point of the whole operation is perhaps just this, in essence: self-transformation]

(15-16/9/09)

[Jen Crawford]

Complete Essay:
[reprinted by permission]

Jen Crawford. "Jack Ross's EMO." blue acres (24/6/08):

Many of you already know Jack Ross as a friend, as a teacher, as a prolific poet and fiction writer, an editor, critic, translator, publisher, blogger, and as a warm advocate for some of the more under-explored reaches of New Zealand literature. (I think the relevant epithet that turns up in EMO is “the Sheriff of Freaktown”). A number of us know that we’ve directly benefited from his work in those roles; I could say we all owe him something, because we’re recipients of the literature to which he so generously contributes his energies and talents – and without his work mapping and making that literature it would be considerably narrower.

Having said that, at first thought it seemed a little bit of a daunting prospect to introduce this book, EMO. There’s a passage in EMO where Jack describes one of his source texts, The Thousand and One Nights, as more of ‘a literature than a unified work’ – and this is also true of EMO itself. It’s more a library than a book. The book is one of a trilogy, the Random Excess Memory trilogy – yet it stands alone. Within EMO is another trilogy – the books of Eva, Mars and Ovid – or Earth, Mars and Otherworld – EMO. Behind this internal trilogy, ghosting through its pages is another set of texts – palimpsest texts – that include translations of Ovid and Sappho and Paul Celan, a comparative reading of the Thousand and One Nights, collections of Jack’s original poetry, and so on. One can also read these texts on a series of linked websites, which (as websites do), lead us on to other websites, just as the books within EMO lead us to other books, both internal and external to its pages.

In other words, this is a book which isn’t satisfied with being self-contained. It reaches beyond its own covers, beyond its author, inviting you into one of the great endangered pleasures of literature – which is the sense of its endlessness, the way one book can open another book for you, like a friend giving you a private gift; perhaps the key to a room you can now share – a room, of course, which would have many other doors.

So EMO, with its layered texts, gives us a visual realisation of the narrative manifold that is, to my knowledge, entirely unique (and I should just offer kudos at this point to both Jack and to Titus Press that this is so well realised: there’s no visual strain in reading this, which is quite a technical feat – there’s a lot of love and care gone into its production). The awareness of historical and characterological tensions that are created by these palimpsests is extraordinary. But I’m wary of making the book sound like something it’s not – it’s not a comfortable intellectual rehearsal of post-structuralist concepts.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that ‘Eva’, the protagonist of the first book, is an android clone of Eva Braun; that the middle book is a post-Sadean detective story set on Mars, that in the third book Ovid hallucinates his exile in Auckland and his vampiric enslavement at the hands of a succubus nurse.

So it’s a very moving book.

I’m quite serious about that. Jack quotes Borges writing about The Thousand and One Nights – ‘keep reading as the day declines and Scheherazade will tell you your own story’. For all the weird schlock-genre fun that EMO allows us to indulge in, it is very much about our own stories. It’s the most outlandish fiction, and the most unsettling fiction, because it won’t quite sit down and be fiction. Or it might be more accurate to say that it won’t quite sit down and let its readers – or its writer – be real. So however much I appreciate Jack Ross’s contributions to literature, I’m no longer entirely convinced that he’s not actually a three-dimensional simulacrum of a fictional Reno private eye. Having read the fragments of Eva Braun’s diary, which Jack includes here, and having read the heartbreaking letters of Eva Android to her lost sister, Eva Braun, I’m pretty sure I know some other members of the Eva clone-clan – in fact they are disturbingly familiar.

One comes away with a deep consciousness and a deep wariness of the way that people become stories and that stories recur: Beauty and the Beast; Scheherezade and Shahryar, the wives of Bluebeard, Eva and Adolf. But Eva, however quietly, insists: she is a clanswoman, not a clone. This is one of the great beauties of this book and of Jack’s work in general. Among the stories are so many of the generic horrors, generic pleasures, generic loves we live and dream – but the generic is never blindly presented as ‘the way things are’ – nor is it dismissed as meaningless repetition. The power of its unities is openly encountered; the insistent delicate variety of its individual manifestations, and of its metamorphoses, is uncovered.

So this is a serious book. It’s a book that suggests our stories – those we return to over and over, those we read in the dead of night, those we hide under the bed – especially those we hide under the bed – are not incidental. They’re not accidents, they’re not outdated, and they’re certainly not irrelevant to the more ‘serious’ matters of our human condition here and now. I want to read you a short passage from the Mars section, where two clinicians contemplate how to interpret a patient’s story:

“It was useful to get the whole story out of her, but all it can do now is confirm that she’s been living in a fantasy world for quite some time, and that parts of it still seem quite real to her.”

“Observe and treat accordingly then?”

“You’ve got it. I was like you once, you know. Keen to take up the cudgels for each new patient – trusting their stories, hunting down the corrupt officials and cops who’d victimised them. It doesn’t make you any friends, for one thing. Nor does it really help your patients, longterm. The trouble is their stories just aren’t plausible, in the final analysis. Either you believe we live on a knife-edge of sanity in a world of seething bestial indulgence and mass-murder, or else you accept that a few wounded souls have difficulties with the stress of modern life ...”

Eva Braun’s presence in this book doesn’t really allow us to accept the second alternative as all there is to it. How we handle the possibility of the first alternative is, of course, a perennial problem. But EMO reminds us – shocks us – into a new consciousness that we are not without means, not without tools, not without a language for understanding and engaging with the full substance of our world, if we choose to acknowledge it. Because we have our stories, and our stories are talking to us.

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