Showing posts with label short stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label short stories. Show all posts

Monday

Haunts (2024)


Cover image: Graham Fletcher (by courtesy of the artist) /
Cover design: Daniela Gast (2024)


Haunts. ISBN 978-1-991083-17-3. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2024. 202 pp.

Contents:

On the Road to Nowhere
Revisiting Samuel Butler’s Erewhon

Stories
In the Le Fanu Museum

The Station

The Cat’s Veto

Skeleton tracks

Ghosting

The Interrupted Journey

Wellington

Mythago Wood

The Missing Pages

Cartographies of the Afterlife
Preface: The Treasure House

The Haunted Bookshop

Suicide Note




Blurb:
'As Jack Ross stated in his latest collection Ghost Stories, ‘We’re most haunted by that which we’ve worked hardest to deny and eradicate from our lives.'
- Brooke Georgia, Aubade (2022)
What do we actually mean by the word haunt? In this new set of stories inspired by the term, Jack Ross invokes a series of his favourite haunts via voices from the past, beginning with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and concluding with Emanuel Swedenborg.
In between he visits with Irish ghost-story maestro Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, along with others ranging from James Joyce to H. P. Lovecraft – not to mention Scheherazade herself, creator / narrator of The 1001 Nights.
Most importantly of all, perhaps, he tries to settle accounts with his own father, the architect of a vast entangled empire of native bush and weeds at the back of their suburban quarter-acre section in Mairangi Bay.
The book ends with the novella Cartographies of the Afterlife, an exploration of the penumbra between life and death, based on accounts from recent visitors.
In the immortal words of Bette Davis: ‘Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night.’

Jack Ross is the author of six poetry collections, four novels, and four books of short fiction. His previous collection, Ghost Stories (Lasavia, 2019), has been prescribed for writing courses at three local universities. He’s also edited numerous books, anthologies, and literary journals, including (most recently) Mike Johnson’s Selected Poems (2023).
He blogs at http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.




Abstract:

This is a set of nine short stories, together with an essay: 'On the Road to Nowhere: Revisiting Samuel Butler’s Erewhon,' which serves as an introduction to the collection as a whole. The book concludes with the novella 'Cartographies of the Afterlife', an account of an imaginary secret society based in the hills of Titirangi, on Auckland's West Coast.

The stories are grouped around the common theme of haunting, in a variety of different forms. Many of them centre on famous authors: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, James Joyce, and (of course) the ineffable H. P. Lovecraft. Some have been previously published in periodicals or online, but six - including the novella - are appearing here for the first time.

This is my fifth book of short fiction, after Monkey Miss Her Now (13 stories - 2004), Trouble in Mind (novella - 2005), Kingdom of Alt (7 stories and a novella - 2010), and Ghost Stories (10 stories and two essays - 2019).



Available:



Reviews & Comments:

  1. Mike Johnson, "About Us." Lasavia Publishing (2015):

    Publishers distrust the wild card, that which might put readers too far out of their comfort zones, as if comfort was somehow the purpose of literature. Both writers and readers lose out. Real grass roots work is lost or supplanted by celebrity culture.

  2. Melanie Dixon, Moments More: Review of Breach of all Size: Small stories on Ulysses, love and Venice, edited by Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni (The Cuba Press, 2022), 98pp, $30 . Landfall Review Online (June 1, 2022):

    In the meantime, I’m off to find myself a copy of Ulysses. Maybe I’ll find one in a book exchange in town, something left behind by one of Jack Ross’s characters, ‘travellers who’d repented of their self-improving zeal’.

  3. Tracey Slaughter, Facebook (July 1, 2024):

    Another glorious volume of stories! Architectural, chilling, clever, harrowing, moving, wry.

  4. Isabel Haarhaus, Launch Speech (October 5, 2024):

    Disconcertingly, in this collection it is the usually comforting motifs of bookshops, cats, strolls, suburban streets and home that are the worrying sites, which shows us that it is always local and current fears that transform, trip up and haunt us.



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Isabel Haarhaus: Haunts on Waiheke (15/7/2024)


Complete Review:

Isabel Haarhaus. "Notes for the launch of Haunts (2024) by Jack Ross (Sunday 6 October, Mairangi Bay):

A long-time admirer of Jack Ross’ work, I was delighted earlier this year when Jack invited me to say a few words at the launch of his new book Haunts. I had loved Ghost Stories (2019) for its probing of the uncanny coincidences scattered throughout the banal and familiar, its tripping us down portals to parallel places and sometimes outright horror, and always enjoy the puzzles and traps laid by Jack’s brainy conversations with impressive bibliographies of writers and texts. So I said yes.

But as it happened, I couldn’t be at the launch, so was grateful that Bronwyn agreed to read out my notes. Fitting, perhaps, to be in the Hastings Road garden today by proxy — not here but still speaking, sort of . . . Ngā mihi nui eh hoa.

When I was trying to work out the key to this wonderfully strange and sometimes elusive collection of Revisits, Stories, Cartographies and Notes – Jack’s 15th book and second collection of ghost stories – I found the references to Jung’s theory of acausal connectivity, whereby internal, psychological events are linked to external world events by meaningful coincidences rather than causal chains, most useful. Going back through the book after several readings, I could see that what connected the places I had annotated most vigorously with exclamation marks, were those dedicated to epistemological questioning of what describes our experience as real or imagined and where these two possibilities intersect.

In “My Best Friend”, part of the Notes section at the end of the collection, the narrator, trying to make sense of things alongside the reader, asks, ‘Does what you write shape, or influence reality? Does it actually have an ‘objective correlative’? . . . All I know is that once I started writing about things that go bump in the night, things started to go bump in the night.’

Musing, or worrying on the extent to which we write, think, imagine, remember, desire and regret our world into being, for me characterises the experience of reading Haunts.

Mostly in the first person, our cast of narrators waveringly guide us through what typically start off as ordinary, everyday places and experiences towards ‘daemonic realit[ies]’ that exist ‘as a contrast to our world of causation and certainty.’

By turns bemused, perplexed, sceptical, frustrated, irritable, outraged and bewildered, the narrative voices, like the settings of the stories themselves, speak from the point of view of the local and recognisable but at a disconcerting slant, the register and tone alluding to other times and places and nervously second guessing themselves.

In “The Station”, our unsure and confused narrator wonders, then panics, as to what he ‘might have done’, as he trapses seemingly in circles in a search of a bookshop. His overwhelming sense that everybody else in the world is ‘moving in entirely the opposite direction’ is the hallmark of anxiety, regret and doubt and the psychic refrain throughout this and other stories.

If, as we are told in “My Best Friend”, ‘[w]hat you think changes what happens to you’, then what, we wonder, will become of these narrators, whose experience of the everyday is as a ‘complete trackless wilderness’?

In “Wellington”, a story about an annoyingly mismanaged delay by Air New Zealand, it is the narrator’s oddly naff turns of phrase, like ‘would to God’, ‘comedy of errors’ and ‘Captain Klutz’, teemed with an incredulous and increasingly shrill and vitriolic tone, that shifts the memory to a parallel colloquial realm, where tensions are nail bitingly high and the glass could shatter dangerously at any moment. Stuck in the no-man’s land that is an airport, the protagonist is ‘quite literally nowhere,’ cleverly returning us to the beginning of the collection, where in “On the Road to Nowhere: Revisiting Samuel Butler’s Erewhon” we learned that ‘nowhere’ is ‘an inversion of utopia’ — be it fantastic nation-building cartography or a seemingly innocuous, if botched, trip to the capital of the country.

The collection teems in homage to the ghosts of illustrious ghost writers – including Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James, Aleister Crowley, Edgar Allen Poe, E.T.A. Hoffman and Patrick Harpur – reminding us that ‘that which we manifest as haunting is a projection of what can at that point in time be imagined.’ So in this book, Jack Ross’ hauntings are around the creek at the back of this garden, in bookshops and homes and streets — sites to which we are repeatedly returned, as in a Kafkaesque labyrinth.

At the heart of the collection, or ‘where it all start[s]’ and to which the stories return, is the creek, swelling from an innocuous body to a ‘raging torrent’ that sometimes, to the children’s horrified delight, floods the neighbourhood. For the children in the story “Mythago Wood”, what’s on the ‘other side’ of the creek is like what is glimpsed in these stories: ‘an alien and yet somehow, fascinatingly paradoxical space’, which, though feared is ‘crossed and recrossed . . . often.’

A generic convention of horror is the protagonist asking if what they are seeing, feeling, experiencing is real or a figment of their imagination, thereby inviting the audience to ask the same about our own experiences. Reading this collection, snatches of strange coincidences and haunting glimpses of paradoxical spaces sneak up on the reader and leak into our reality. We are taken along by our careful yet misstepping narrators until we arrive – or don’t arrive, which might be the point of arrival – to find that we have slipped into some sort of other place or time or both, where we are disorientated and may very well feel conspired against and lost.

Disconcertingly, in this collection it is the usually comforting motifs of bookshops, cats, strolls, suburban streets and home that are the worrying sites, which shows us that it is always local and current fears that transform, trip up and haunt us.




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Sunday

Ghost Stories (2019)



Cover image: Graham Fletcher (by courtesy of the artist) /
Cover design: Daniela Gast (2019)


Ghost Stories. ISBN 978-0-9951165-5-9. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019. 140 pp.

Contents:

Introduction
The Classic New Zealand Ghost Story

Stories
Eketahuna

The Scam

Featherston

Leaves from a Diary of the End of the World

Is it Infrareal or is it Memorex?

Company

General Grant in Paeroa

Brothers

Catfish

The Cross-Correspondences
Paragraphs

Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences




Blurb:

David Foster Wallace once wrote that 'every love story is a ghost story.' Not all of the stories in Jack Ross’s new collection are about love, but certainly all of them concern ghosts – imaginary, real, or entirely absent. As it turns out, there are even stranger things in the world: from haunted hotel rooms in Beijing to drunken poetry readings on Auckland’s North Shore. Or perhaps, as the Mayan prophets foresaw, the world really did end on the 21st December, 2012, and 'all bets are off, all the rules have changed, and – new Adams, new Eves – we have to find the courage somehow to start naming the strange new things we see.'

'There’s no one in New Zealand literature exploring the dark ways of narrative with the alchemical touch of Jack Ross, and his gift of spinning tales which jump "from track to track on the time-space continuum" never fails to leave me exhilarated, in outright awe'.
- Tracey Slaughter

Jack Ross works as a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University. He is the author of five poetry collections, four novels and three books of short fiction. His novel The Annotated Tree Worship was highly commended in the 2018 NZ Heritage Book Awards. He has also edited numerous books, anthologies, and literary journals, including brief, Landfall, and Poetry New Zealand. He blogs at http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.




Abstract:

This is a set of ten short stories, with two essays: 'The Classic New Zealand Ghost Story,' an introduction to the collection as a whole; and 'Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences,' an account of the alleged attempts at communication from the other side by various dead members of the Society for Psychical Research in the early years of last century.

The stories, too, are grouped around the common theme of ghosts and ghost stories, but in some rather unexpected ways. Two ('The Scam' and 'The Cross-Correspondences') are set in China, but most are explorations of the haunted landscapes of the New Zealand's North Island, from Featherston and Eketahuna to Raglan and Northcote. All of them (with the exception of 'Paragraphs') have been previously published in periodicals or online.

This is my third collection of short stories, after Monkey Miss Her Now (13 stories - 2004) and Kingdom of Alt (7 stories and a novella - 2010).



Available:

Amazon.com
RRP: $US 15.00 (+ postage)

Amazon.co.uk
RRP: £UK 12.28 (+ postage)

Book Depository
RRP: $NZ 29.44 (free postage)

Wheelers Books
RRP: $NZ 49.50

Lasavia Publishing
37 Crescent Rd West
Ostend
Waiheke Island
Auckland 1081
https://www.lasaviapublishing.com/
Lasavia Publishing: Editorial

RRP: $NZ 20.00 (+ postage)



Reviews & Comments:




  1. Brooke Georgia, Aubade (March 17, 2022):

    As the New Zealand writer and academic Jack Ross stated in his latest collection Ghost Stories “We’re most haunted by that which we’ve worked hardest to deny and eradicate from our lives.”

    Brooke Georgia’s use of found objects, both in her garments and visual art, speaks to this gothic complex due to the way she works with and repurposes abandoned materials. Not only running against the tendencies of fast fashion and its associated wastefulness, this praxis speaks to the mysterious histories of objects, raising the questions of where they come from and what they have seen. The objects already have their own stories and their own weight of being, aside from their material reality, although this can never be directly accessed.

    Rather than turning to the new, Brooke Georgia looks to these pre-existing objects and carefully reworks them, sensitive to their unique individual agency. The mystique associated with these objects emphasises critical aspects of the unknown, because in the gothic imagination the non-human exists within the human and vice versa.

  2. Shana Chandra, Haunted by Home. Landfall Review Online (March 1, 2023):

    ... Shayne P. Carter’s memoir Dead People I Have Known offered me a paraphrase from a James K. Baxter poem. In the poem, Baxter philosophises that, due to the vast and unrelenting nature of Aotearoa’s landscape, which continually confronts each person who inhabits it, we are constantly reminded of our mortality.

    It was a quote that I was reminded of when reading the introduction to Jack Ross’s most recent collection of short stories, Ghost Stories (2019). The collection begins with an essay entitled ‘The Classic New Zealand Ghost Story’, which investigates the history of ghost stories in Aotearoa. It features Ross’s collected bibliography of books on the subject and the characteristics and narrative arc that define our Kiwi version of these universal stories. One of the most notable characteristics is that our ‘local product’ strongly emphasises haunted space rather than haunted people.

    As colonised land, it makes sense that our islands would be threatening, with death coating its soil and its sacredness to Māori consistently desecrated. It makes sense that the land, the whenua, would transpire to avenge this desecration, encoded as it is with the tikanga of Māori tapu. But so, too, does Baxter’s quote come into play here: the enormity of Aotearoa’s landscape, eerie in its isolation, is the perfect setting for our ghost stories. This ‘dark, threatening land’ — a trope Ross quotes from Sam Neil’s seminal documentary Cinema of Unease — haunts its inhabitants instead of vice versa.

  3. Douglas A. Andersen, Wormwoodiana (August 8, 2024):

    ... topics run from numerology to L. Frank Baum, old movies to Mayan eschatology, General Grant of the US Civil War on to sites to see in modern China, as well as covering aspects of Kipling - some of his stories, as well as his "mad" sister, Alice Fleming.

  4. The Story Graph:

    Across hotel rooms in Beijing and bars on Auckland’s North Shore, these quietly unsettling tales drift between love and absence, suggesting that every journey is haunted by the ghosts we carry and the world that may have ended while we weren’t looking.

    For the literary wanderer who welcomes ghosts.






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Massey University: The Gothic Imagination (2022)


Email Interview:

Jenny Lawn. 'Teaching "Eketahuna" for "The Gothic Imagination" - some questions from students.' Private Email (14-15 March, 2022):

Kia ora Jack

I hope you're in fine fettle and managing to keep omicron at bay.

Thank you for being willing to entertain some questions from The Gothic Imagination class about “Eketāhuna.” Students have expressed that they enjoy the story. In the syllabus, it sits alongside M.R. James’ “Lost Hearts” and Saki’s “The Open Window.”

Here are some questions, which you are welcome to address however you prefer, and in whatever format you prefer e.g. writing, audio or video response, interview with me.

Here we go:

  1. Students were curious about the series of empty places: starting with Eketāhuna itself, a town that some say doesn’t exist; the abandoned town; the empty campground-paddock; and the non-existent (?) motel itself. Here are some student questions on this point:
    • Is the point of the story that we see what we want to see or believe what we want to believe in life? Or is life more complicated then what we see as reality and time and there are more dimensions that exist?
    • I felt a false sense of security after the campsite. I however thought it was just the old man who was going to be the ghost, and not his daughter as well. Not sure if anyone else got tricked by this as well?
    • Did anyone else think the climax of the story was in Eketāhuna, begin to relax because the “climax” was just no one being around and a sub-standard campsite, and then get more of a shock from the actual climax because of that false sense of security?
    • Why do you think the daughter believes her father to be a ghost? What do you think separates her death from her father's? How come the two ghosts don’t know each other exists?
  2. On the narrative voice:
    • I’m really curious about the quote, “It’s tempting to call it ‘13’ and make the whole thing sound spookier than it was.” The story to date had given me an eerie feeling, why downplay it?
    • Was the narrator's voice a conscious choice, or if there was at one point a draft written where the narrator is more insistent that the events were a truly supernatural experience?
    • The fact that Ross’ narrator seemed to be conscious of the fact that his experiences as they unfolded were fodder for good dinner party conversation really resounded with me. His use of certain words, phrases and gothic tropes indicated to me that the narrator was aware of the potential ridiculousness of comparing his experience to some gothic ghostly tale - but that this comparison would provide a certain amount of intrigue, and reflected the unshakeable fear of things actually going wrong.
  3. The tone of the story comes off as recognisably Kiwi. How would you say your story sits within larger tradition(s) of ghost stories in Aotearoa New Zealand? A related question: Are you appealing to Kiwis, and how might non-Kiwis feel about the writing?
  4. Did you grow up (and now live) in the city or more rurally and has this affected your writing? More generally, do you have any thoughts on how rural areas figure in the New Zealand Pākehā imaginary? Is there a specific local legend around Eketāhuna?
  5. What advice do you have for students who are writing their own ghost stories, in terms of how to create atmosphere and suspense?
  6. Which ghost story writers have most influenced your writing and why? More specifically: did you have any other “motel horror stories” in mind?
  7. Anything else you'd like to add …

Looking forward to hearing your always canny observations and ghosts and all the rest.

Ngā mihi nui

Jenny


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Kia ora Jenny,

Your letter has forced me to reread 'Eketahuna', which was quite an interesting experience. It all seems such a long time ago, really.

I'll do my best to answer the questions below, but in some cases I have to admit that your guess is probably as good as mine. Your queries are very acute, though - going straight to the heart of the matter:

  • Is the point of the story that we see what we want to see or believe what we want to believe in life? Or is life more complicated then what we see as reality and time and there are more dimensions that exist?

Well, that's the big question, isn't it? I certainly wish I could answer it definitively, but you're certainly right to see it as the basic dilemma posed by the story. I certainly want to believe in the second alternative, and have probably slanted the narrative in that direction. On the other hand, all the narrator's observations are so contingent and deliberately unreliable that one has to acknowledge the first as an equally valid reading.

  • I felt a false sense of security after the campsite. I however thought it was just the old man who was going to be the ghost, and not his daughter as well. Not sure if anyone else got tricked by this as well?

I've always been addicted to 'literary' ghost stories - M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and all the rest. I wrote this one as a kind of low-octane, vernacular nod to that genre. A twist of some sort is always required, though, and the best I could come up with was the double-ghost shtick. I'm very pleased to read of your reaction, as that's certainly what I *wanted* a reader to experience. The Irish poet Paul Muldoon speaks of sending a 'stunt reader' through each poem he writes just after it's finished - a kind of imaginary everyreader who will hopefully react to each clue, in turn, as it's presented. My ideal reader would certainly feel just as you did, but of course that's not to say that readers actually do.

  • Did anyone else think the climax of the story was in Eketāhuna, begin to relax because the “climax” was just no one being around and a sub-standard campsite, and then get more of a shock from the actual climax because of that false sense of security?

Again, I love this reading, since that really was the point of the story for me - my (real) experience of driving through Eketahuna under precisely those circumstances (campground and all), capped by a bit of ghostly scaffolding at the end.

  • Why do you think the daughter believes her father to be a ghost? What do you think separates her death from her father's? How come the two ghosts don’t know each other exists?

It's an odd admission, but I have to confess that I spend a lot of time thinking about ghosts and how they feel and react to things in general: which naturally includes each other. There is, in a sense, no such thing in purely narrative terms, since we can only describe living reactions and emotions - so our 'ghost' characters are really just adapted people, just as animal characters are always more or less anthropomorphic. I did get a kick out of the idea of a ghost who thought it was her father who was the ghost - the wheels within wheels suggested by that (and perhaps corollary doubts of the narrator's own status). I hasten to say that this is not an original thought: the classic Mexican novel Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo, does wonderful things with a whole town full of ghosts who mostly think they are still alive.

  • I’m really curious about the quote, “It’s tempting to call it ‘13’ and make the whole thing sound spookier than it was.” The story to date had given me an eerie feeling, why downplay it?

There was a British writer called A. J. Alan who used to tell ghost stories on the radio in the 1930s. I never heard any of them, but I've read quite a few, and they're in this very conversational, colloquial tone. I guess I was trying to get something of the same feeling into my narrative style - a narrator who is trustworthy because so self-deprecating and a bit slangy at times.

  • Was the narrator's voice a conscious choice, or if there was at one point a draft written where the narrator is more insistent that the events were a truly supernatural experience?

No, I always needed a narrator to play down rather than build up the events, as those events basically evaporate if you look at them too closely. It's an old trick, really - Jane Austen does it wonderfully in Northanger Abbey. She wrote a very dramatic story, with a young lady thrown out from the house she's staying at because her venal old host has discovered that she's not really the rich heiress he expected, but it sounds very real because it's constantly paralleled by Catherine's own absurdly over-the-top readings of things based on endless perusal of Gothic novels. In my case, the narrator is aware of telling a ghost story, but constantly tries to emphasise its failure to be as melodramatic as such things are conventionally beefed up to be.

  • The fact that Ross’ narrator seemed to be conscious of the fact that his experiences as they unfolded were fodder for good dinner party conversation really resounded with me. His use of certain words, phrases and gothic tropes indicated to me that the narrator was aware of the potential ridiculousness of comparing his experience to some gothic ghostly tale - but that this comparison would provide a certain amount of intrigue, and reflected the unshakeable fear of things actually going wrong.

I don't know if it matters if the narrator is likeable, but I think he definitely has to sound plausible. If he's a fantasist, then there's little interest in any experience he recounts. He's certainly very conscious of his role as a storyteller throughout, but I wanted him to be the kind who leaves you with a sense of something worryingly *possible*. What could happen if you set out to drive across country in the middle of the night. That great NZ film The Locals plays lots of interesting variations on that notion.

  • The tone of the story comes off as recognisably Kiwi. How would you say your story sits within larger tradition(s) of ghost stories in Aotearoa New Zealand? A related question: Are you appealing to Kiwis, and how might non-Kiwis feel about the writing?

I guess that's more for the audience to answer. I certainly didn't play down the local colour and flavour, but those are the things I enjoy when I read stories from elsewhere, so I doubt that it's a problem for the sort of people who actually read short stories still. In the context of the book as a whole, though, I do develop some ideas about the nature of NZ ghost stories as a form: their relation to a pervading sense of alienation from the land contingent on the sins of colonialism. Again, that's something that's come out strongly in NZ film as well as the many, many ghost stories which seem to infest our literature: always some dark secret to be hidden, then gradually unearthed.

  • Did you grow up (and now live) in the city or more rurally and has this affected your writing? More generally, do you have any thoughts on how rural areas figure in the New Zealand Pākehā imaginary? Is there a specific local legend around Eketāhuna?

Oh, I'm a born-and-bred suburbanite. But nowhere is truly urban in New Zealand - the country comes busting in no matter what you do. I think that's why I feel NZ is such a great place for storytellers: things buried deeply elsewhere are so much closer to the surface here: our small towns are so terrifying, our cities always on the point of disintegration (as in the recent occupation of Wellington Central: talk about the return of the repressed!) I don't know if there are any local legends around Eketāhuna, but it was a real motel. It's important to remember that. I *hope* there are some such legends, mind you.

  • What advice do you have for students who are writing their own ghost stories, in terms of how to create atmosphere and suspense?

I don't really have much wisdom to impart on that. I feel myself that the closer they are to real experience - in the background details, at least - the more effective they're likely to be. Again, I think it has to be a vehicle for expressing your own doubts and unease over the nature of reality. As M. R. James stresses, a friendly ghost is really a contradiction in terms. By their very nature they question our assumptions, and you must be interested in that queasy feeling yourself before you can communicate your doubts to a reader.

  • Which ghost story writers have most influenced your writing and why? More specifically: did you have any other “motel horror stories” in mind?

I suppose I've read so much M. R. James over the years that he remains my touchstone for ghost stories. I also love Dickens's few ghost stories: 'The Signalman', in particular. Shirley Jackson is one of the very few people who's ever written an effective ghostly novel, rather than just her (excellent) ghost stories. And finally there are such Stephen King stories as 'Rm 1408' (a great haunted hotel story) and 'All that you love will be carried away' - a wonderful haunted motel story.

  • Anything else you'd like to add …

As I said above, I hadn't reread the story for ages, and it's hard to say what I make of it as a whole. The thing that seems most valuable about such exercises, though, is the degree to which your piece gradually sounds less and less like something you wrote yourself and more and more like something you just picked up to read. That's actually a bit of a relief.

And then there's the fact that the story itself embodies an interesting time shift - the actual experience it's based on, then the process of writing (and rewriting) it, and now, years later, seeing it as a kind of thing in itself. It's as if all of those times are still present inside it, which is probably the main reason why I persevere with trying to write things: good or bad, they mark and preserve time: for yourself, certainly; but possibly, if they strike a chord, for other people also.

I hope that's some help. It's certainly been very enjoyable - though also terrifying - to see my story through other people's eyes. Thanks for inviting me to contribute to your thinking on such gothic themes in general ...

ngā mihi hui, jack




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Tuesday

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




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)



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Monday

Monkey Miss Her Now (2004)


Cover image: Raewyn Alexander / Design: Jack Ross / Layout: Olivia Macassey

Monkey Miss Her Now & Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know. ISBN 0-476-00182-X. Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004. 138 pp.

Contents:

Monkey Miss Her Now [Mon coeur mis à nu] (by Jack Ross)

Robinsonade
Adiós DOS
Tango Summer
On Love
Tahiti in 1978
The Great New Zealand Vortex
A Strange Day at the Language School

Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know (by Lorraine West)

The Yellow Room
Bird-girl
The Money Pit
The Red Room
Waiwera
The Blue Room




Blurb:

“Jack Ross continues to create work that is inventive, evocative, droll, and highly distinctive. His new book is a mosaic of scenes and styles that interact in unexpected ways. No reader is going to forget the ‘strange day at the language school,’ the rediscovery of ‘New Zealand Vorticist poet Walter E. Clarke’, or the strange collection of ghosts and 19th century pornographers who populate ‘Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know.’ Once a character has walked out the door, he or she can end up anywhere in space, time or language. Ross’s writing manages to be both adventurous and accessible. He has an uncommon way of mixing humour and melancholy. Any but the most impatient or literal reader should find this a book rich in discoveries.” (Roger Horrocks)

de l'amour
about love

ISBN 0-476-00182-X
danger
publishing
Front cover - acrylic painting by Raewyn Alexander


Abstract:

...

Available:

Raewyn Alexander
Danger Publishing
Bright Communications
bright_com@xtra.co.nz

RRP: $NZ 24.95


[Bruce Mason: The End of the Golden Weather (1959)]

Reviews & Comments:

  1. Roger Horrocks. "Launch Speech." The George Fraser Gallery, 24 October 2004.

    Confronted by a book of this uniqueness and strangeness, there is only one logical course of action, and that’s to buy it. Do we really want to leave the world of books to Whitcoulls and George W. Bush? If Danger Books sell lots of copies today, this publisher will survive to publish another one. Customers will have struck a blow for dangerous books! You will have helped Danger Books in its efforts to become even more dangerous! You will also get a terrific read, so head immediately for that sensuous red cover.

  2. Sue Emms. Bravado 3 (2004) 52.

    There’s a line in ‘Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know’(part two of Monkey) that goes like this: “Releasing her handholds, she lunges wildly in the darkness for the lip of the tunnel”.

    Yep, I can identify with that. Reading this book is like a wild lunge in the dark – you just never know what you’re going to find. Sweet moments of poetry and tender prose, or a threesome as witnessed and described (graphically) by a daughter of the household ...

    I don’t believe Ross has any interest in having his readers curl up by a fire with his book in their hands, and relaxing. No, Ross wants to make them think, to question what the hell it is they’re reading. Ross wants to wake them out of the fictional dream.

  3. Joe Wyllie. Takahe 54 (2005): 63.

    Outside of literati farm, this sort of thing has a very limited life expectancy ... Much of the material here reads like a workbook, something en route to being much more. And yet, apart from having to negotiate large slabs of Other People’s Art ... it can be highly enjoyable stuff, often rising to a fine spooky edginess. I’d like to read more of his work — once one loses sight of the artifice, he can be very good indeed.

  4. Mark Houlahan. "Strange days in the language school." New Zealand Books 15 (2) (June, 2005): 14-15.

    ... Ross’s wry and quixotic “works” are designed to be slippery, wilfully blending the apparently “autobiographical” with the apparently “fictional”, a mélange of genres precisely framed to forestall any suggestion that a single “authorial” voice was at work ... Nobody else in New Zealand writes quite like Ross, though some of Bill Manhire’s fictions in The New Land are precedents.

  5. Scott Hamilton. "After the Golden Weather: Jack Ross and the New New Zealand." brief 32 (2005): 115-19.

    As postmodern as it is parochial, Monkey Miss Her Now drags a venerable tradition into the strange new worlds of twenty-first century New Zealand.


[Scott Hamilton: Reading the Maps]

Complete Review:
[published by permission]

Scott Hamilton. "After the Golden Weather: Jack Ross and the New New Zealand." brief 32 (2005): 115-19.

Jack Ross is a Shore Boy. The blurb on the back of his fabulously rare first collection, City of Strange Brunettes, tells us that he ‘grew up in Auckland’s East Coast Bays, where he continues to live’, and Monkey Miss Her Now hits the bookshelves at the same time as Golden Weather, an anthology of North Shore writing he has co-edited with Graeme Lay.

The Shore is a strange place. The golden sand, pohutakawas, and island views of those East Coast Bays are still keeping bad watercolourists busy, but the vistas looked prettier thirty or forty years ago. Sargeson and his acolytes colonised a Ruritarian paradise, but for more than three decades the Shore has been a developer’s dream, one of the fastest-growing parts of New Zealand.

Jack’s home suburb, Mairangi Bay, offers an especially sharp lesson in the dialectics of development. Thirty years ago it was a hippy paradise, complete with dirt roads and fields of mushrooms. In the eighties the hippies became yuppies, swapping Values for Lange-Labour, and potholed right-of-ways for smooth concrete drives. Today’s boom town is nearby Albany, where streets lined with half-built houses make for a boy racer’s paradise at night.

It is possible to argue that, in the very extremity of the juxtapositions it now presents, the North Shore exemplifies changes seen across New Zealand society over recent decades. In his introduction to the poetry section of Golden Weather, Jack talks about the ‘two sides’ of the Shore – the fragments left over from a ‘golden, relaxed, Mediterranean’ age, and the ‘coarseness’ and ‘realism’ of the new ‘mortgaged suburbs of modern homes’. Most of the writers in Golden Weather are noticeably keener on the Old Shore – at least, when choosing their subject matter, they prefer baches and fresh-caught snapper to boy racers and concrete drives. Frank Sargeson, the godfather of them all, waged a famously stubborn rearguard action against the New Shore, refusing to abandon his Takapuna bach to an advancing motorway.

Today Sargeson’s home stands as a sort of monument to the Old North Shore, mocked by the hiss and roar of a nearby on-ramp. Many of the stories and poems in Golden Weather make a similar stand. In the anthology’s first piece of prose, for instance, Michael King grits his teeth and turns his back on the ‘nascent urban centre’ of Browns Bay, with its ‘seven banks and seven real estate agents’, and comforts himself with the indifference of the sea. It seems a remarkably nihilistic gesture, from a man so identified with a feel-good flavour of liberal nationalism, until one realises that the whole aesthetic of the Defiant Old North Shore – of snapper caught beside rush-hour traffic, and remembered baches blotting out beachfront apartments – is predicated upon a fear and loathing of most of the real inhabitants of the New North Shore.

I wish that Jack and Graeme had thrown a few of the stories in Jack’s book into their anthology, because Monkey Miss Her Now is a determined attempt to come to grips with the place Michael King rejected. Jack’s unusual achievement is to treat the subject matter of this ‘new’, if not improved, New Zealand – language schools, suburban swing parties, boy racers, text message pests, and the rest – using a style and sensibility that hark back to the ‘classical’ New Zealand literary tradition that the best writers of the Old Shore did so much to establish. Sargeson has left his bach-fortress, forded that motorway off-ramp, and discovered a strange new world.

Admittedly, there are no concrete drives or boy racers in ‘Robinsonade’, the first story in Monkey Miss Her Now. Jack offers us, instead, a resourceful castaway, on a well-resourced tropical isle – building blocks, one might think, for a classical adventure story. On Jack’s isle, though, nothing happens. The tokens of Crusoe’s industrious self-improvement – the raft, the vegetable plot, the windmill, the hut – are judged ‘singularly futile and pointless’, and the closest we get to Man Friday is a rather diffident ghost. Like Valery and Wittgenstein before him, Jack has created his Crusoe not to justify a plot, but dramatise certain traits of the human beings who live inside a real society. Crusoe is isolated in the way that a scientist’s sample is isolated. His sense of boredom and futility is all the more affecting, because it seems to have its source in something deeper than mere loneliness. Reading this Crusoe’s response to a random epistle from the offshore world, we sense that his isolation is existential, as much as geographical:

This morning, walking on the beach, I found a little glass bottle...As I had hoped it contained a note...Why did it anger me so much, I wonder? Was it the idea that of all the people in the world, I should pick up a portion of this one’s private correspondence? The triviality, the banality of it all! Why should anyone even dream of writing such a letter?

In the first volume of Edward Upward’s trilogy The Spiral Ascent, the protagonist leaves his job and settles on the Isle of Wight, determined to live the perfect ‘poetic life’ in seclusion. All too soon, though, he becomes tormented by a feeling of futility, and decides to jump off one of the island’s many cliffs. Only a decision to join the Communist Party and live a ‘meaningful’ (read: political) life keeps Upward’s hero in one piece. Jack’s Crusoe actually makes it off his cliff, but his ‘tentative crab-like tumble’ suggests that ‘my body, the house of my life’ has ‘decided to stay’. Jack’s resolution is less dramatic than Upward’s: ‘back to the kelp beds, I suppose’ is as much as he seems able to manage. This sort of dour stoicism belongs, of course, to Sargeson’s isolated anti-heroes.

‘Robinsade’ is a good introduction to Monkey Miss Her Now: its faux-exotic, almost abstract setting dramatises themes that will appear in more quotidian surroundings through the rest of the book. In the second story, 'ADIOS DOS', the theme of alienation relocates to an English language school, where a bereaved teacher’s exact observations of his surroundings only dramatise his emotional isolation. Jack weaves students’ exercises into his text with a sensitivity that recalls Michael Henderson’s anti-Vietnam war masterpiece Log of a Superfluous Son:

He is very kindly and friendly. Everyday he wears difference quite nice dress. He always wear a pair of nice glass. I think he is more tolerant person. Sometimes he likes sociable, but a lot of time he keeps his life alone. He is very knowledge.

Again and again, the protagonist of ADIOS DOS returns to a ravine that seems to symbolise his own wound. But the hole that Jack digs can’t offer the succour his hero requires:

[I]t was no friend of his. It was no friend of anyone’s. It was just a big black hole – a meaningless feature of the landscape.

Ultimately, ‘furniture, clothes, books’ and ‘a new living room purged of negative associations’ seem a better bet. (Perhaps some Walpole novels would look good on those shelves?) Jack’s theme may come straight from Sargeson, but the formal structure of 'ADIOS DOS' is far removed from the austere manner of Takapuna’s last horticulturalist. A better reference point is Sargeson’s one-time acolyte, Maurice Duggan, who lived for many years in Forest Hill, just a gentle stroll from Mairangi Bay. Written through the mists of morphine in the summer of 1974, Duggan’s late, great story ‘The Magsman Miscellany’ reads like a rough blueprint for the episodic, allusive, yet compulsively observant style of Monkey Miss Her Now.

The three pieces which follow ADIOS DOS – ‘Tango Summer’, ‘On Love’, and ‘Tahiti’ – push Duggan’s form to breaking point, coming close at times to collage. ‘Summer Tango’ and ‘On Love’ organise their fragments with overarching themes, while ‘Tahiti’ appears autobiographical. These stories’ cut and paste method helps Jack to make extensive use of what was once rather delicately called ‘vernacular language’.

But Jack’s dirty language often lies down beside highfalutin’ registers and references – the sort of stuff that’d make Jake Heke blush – so that we are aware of the author’s distance from his subjects. Is anyone else reminded of Sargeson, who sat alone in a corner of a 1930s pub, scribbling down and annotating ‘authentic working class dialogue’?

‘On Love’ and ‘Tango Summer’ are clever, and frequently entertaining, but they seem a retreat from the seriousness of ‘ADIOS DOS’. Is the real impetus for Jack’s writing being disguised here? Is the author valourising rather than exploring his alienation? In some of his other books Jack has given himself a sort of bumbling, pedantic ‘Doctor Watson’ persona, in an effort to dramatise the distance he feels from his subject matter. In Chantal’s Book, the cycle of poems issued last year by HeadworX, a pedantic narrator manages to erase the real personality of his girlfriend and ostensible subject by continually taking his eye off her to scribble learned and irrelevant notes. In the novel Nights with Giordano Bruno, Doctor Watson makes a rather awkward visit to Showgirls. The same comic persona can be found in ‘On Love’, and I am not sure whether he dramatises or trivialises the author’s alienation:

“We’re all hairdressers” they say, and start to rattle off names. There are five girls and one boy (his name you do catch). They’re all dressed alike, in black, and are probably around seventeen or eighteen, from what you can judge.

“Hey driver man, do you have a stereo?” You do, and turn it on to Classic Hits, indulging itself with Abba revivalism.

“Mind if we change the channel?” You don’t, particularly.

The most important text in Monkey Miss Her Now is ‘A Strange Day at the Language School’, which won Jack second place in Landfall’s 2002 essay competition. Jack’s dry observations of an outpost of Auckland’s flagship ‘postmodern industry’ are interrupted by the sudden death of one of his students, In-Jae Ra. I remember reading Michael Schmidt condemn Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ for burying the real human being who was its ostensible subject under an avalanche of resonant obscurities, rhetorical sleights of hand:

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death

Reading these lines, I am lost in a verbal facility that exploits and obscures the tragedy Schmidt wants to remember. ‘A Strange Day’ takes a stand against such dishonesty, as Jack remains attentive to his own confusion, and to the limits of his empathy for a student he knew only fleetingly and superficially. He has no truck with easy eloquence, let alone easy answers:

It was a moment which called for something extraordinary from each of us, and afterwards it was impossible to know how well one had performed. Simple human gestures were what was required, yet they didn’t seem enough. The gulf between us and the students, between them and poor In-Jae, could not be bridged.

With its radical reticence, ‘A Strange Day’ shows Jack’s debt to the earlier generations of Shore Boys who occupy such canonical places in our literature. The ghost of Sargeson’s deeply feeling yet confused and inarticulate protagonists haunts Jack’s language school.

A highlight of the launch party for Monkey Miss Her Now was a generous and amusing talk by Roger Horrocks, who located Jack’s scribblings in the ‘exciting alt. lit tradition of local writing’. Horrocks’ opposition of ‘alt. lit’ to ‘mainstream literature’ took me back to Alan Loney’s theory of two warring and irreconcilable traditions of New Zealand writing – the one formally innovative, and influenced by American modernism and postmodernism, and the other local, parochial, and formally conservative. More than any other living writer, Jack Ross shows us the inadequacy of Loney’s schema. As postmodern as it is parochial, Monkey Miss Her Now drags a venerable tradition into the strange new worlds of twenty-first century New Zealand.



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Wednesday

Short Stories


Birkenhead (March '06)


Contents:

List of Abbreviations:



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Stories in Order of Composition:
(1996-2023)
  1. Robinsonade (18/8-9/10/96) [M]
  2. The Great New Zealand Vortex (26/2-10/5/97 / 4/03) [M]
  3. Adiós DOS (2/7-4/9/97) [M]
  4. Grafton Amours (20/1/98) [N]
  5. Tango Summer (4/11-4/12/98) [M]
  6. The Great Hunger (8/10/99) [N]
  7. The Storm (3/7-5/8/2000) [P]
  8. Tahiti in 1978 (22/9-17/10/2000) [M]
  9. Ars Combinatoria (30/10-25/12/2000) [T]
  10. A Strange Day at the Language School (7-30/6/01) [M]
  11. The Red Room (28-30/8/01) [M]
  12. The Yellow Room (31/8-1/9/01 / 1-5/6/03) [M]
  13. The Blue Room (2-5/9/01) [M]
  14. The Scam (25/12/01-13/9/02) [GS]
  15. On Love (29/7-2/8/03) [M]
  16. Bird-girl (30/7-2/8/03) [M]
  17. The Money Pit (3/8/03) [M]
  18. Waiwera (4/8/03) [M]
  19. Haiku Diary (4/3-1/4/04; 29/8-12/9/05) [K]
  20. Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret (16/11/04-16/9/05) [K]
  21. Trauma: Journal (21/7-5/8/05 & 14/4-21/5/98) [K]
  22. The Isle of the Cross (18/9-4/12/05) [K]
  23. Finding His Stash (29/9-15/10/05) [K]
  24. The Purloined Letter (5-31/10/05) [K]
  25. The Cat: Extract from EMO (15-22/8/06) [E]
  26. Fever-dreams: from Ovid in Otherworld (31/3/07) [E]
  27. Before the Disaster (30/11/07-14/2/08) [K]
  28. Coursebook found in a Warzone: A Whodunit (11/6/08-11/2/09) [K]
  29. The Pedestrian Crossing (6/2008) [K]
  30. Featherston (1-17/1/11) [GS]
  31. Eketahuna (7-13/12/11) [GS]
  32. Leaves from a Diary of the End of the World (6/2-27/4/13) [GS]
  33. Miss Herbert (6-10/11/14) [H]
  34. Is it Infrareal or is it Memorex? (11-17/11/14) [GS]
  35. Company (13-14/12/14) [GS]
  36. The Classic New Zealand Ghost Story (17/1/15-25/7/16) [GS]
  37. On the Road to Nowhere (18/2-1/12/15) [H]
  38. General Grant in Paeroa (12/9-24/11/15) [GS]
  39. Brothers (20-23/12/15) [GS]
  40. Catfish (14-28/12/17) [GS]
  41. The Cross-Correspondences: Paragraphs (4/6/18-26/1/19) [GS]
  42. Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences (6/6/18-18/1/19) [GS]
  43. In the Le Fanu Museum (12-13/7-27/8/19) [H]
  44. The Station (15/11/19-27/1/20) [H]
  45. The Cat’s Veto (13/12/19-27/1/20) [H]
  46. The Interrupted Journey (9/12/20-16/7/21) [H]
  47. 77 Days (1-3/11/21) [H]
  48. Skeleton tracks (18-19/11/21) [H]
  49. Cartographies of the Afterlife: Suicide Note (16-29/1; 13-15/4/22-20/9/23) [H]
  50. Cartographies of the Afterlife: The Haunted Bookshop (30/1-8/2/22-19/9/23) [H]
  51. Ghosting (18-24/3/22; 22/4/22) [H]
  52. Mythago Wood [19/5/22-16/8/23] [H]
  53. Wellington (7/6/22-21/9/23) [H]
  54. Cartographies of the Afterlife: The Treasure House (21-24/6/22) [H]
  55. The Missing Pages (26/7-15/8/2023) [H]


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Stories In Periodicals & Online

  1. “General Grant in Paeroa.” brief 56 (2018): 97-107.

  2. “Brothers.” brief 54 (2016): 99-104.

  3. “Leaves from a Diary of the End of the World.” brief 53 (2015): 80-97.

  4. “Is it Infrarreal or is it Memorex? Robert Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and the Eternal Avant-garde.” Landfall 230 (November 2015): 89-96.

  5. “Ars Combinatoria” [Extract from Trouble in Mind]. Titus Books: A Platform for New Writing. [visited 4/8/11].

  6. “Featherston.” Starch: A New Zealand Literary Journal 1 (2011): 71-74.

  7. “The Pedestrian Crossing.” Bravado 16 (2009): 7-8.

  8. “Extract from EMO.” brief #36 (2008) – The NZ Music Issue: 31-40.

  9. “The Cat.” Music by Padmanabha Fischlinger. [Brief #36 CD: track 7].

  10. “The Cat.” With backing music by Padmanabha Fischlinger. Titus Books: A Platform for New Writing. [visited 31/3/08].

  11. “from Ovid in Otherworld.” Magazine 5 - Utu, Justice (2007): 83-86.

  12. “Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret.” Percutio 2 (2007): 60-69.

  13. “The Purloined Letter.” brief #35 – A Brief World Order (2007): 14-33.

  14. “Bird Girl.” evasion online (12/03-1/04)

  15. “The Yellow Room.” brief 27 (2003): 94-96.

  16. “The Great New Zealand Vortex.” evasion online 2 (4) & 2 (5) (4/03-6/03)

  17. “A Strange Day at the Language School.” Landfall 203 (2002): 119-25.

  18. “Tahiti in 1978.” brief 23 (2002): 36-50.

  19. “Tango Summer.” evasion 2 (2000): 20-27.

  20. “The Great Hunger.” A Brief Description of the Whole World 14 (1999): 34-37.

  21. “Grafton Amours.” Pander 9 (1999): 18-19.

  22. “Adiós DOS.” Pander 6/7 (1999): 18-20.

  23. “Robinsonade.” Pander 2 (1997): 14-15.





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pander 2 (1998)




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