Pale gorse, black diamond
Listener - January 12, 2007
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THE GORSE BLOOMS PALE by Dan Davin (University of Otago Press)
As a child, I enjoyed listening to my father (of Galway Irish Catholic stock) on the rare occasions he told stories about his Southland childhood. They were stories about rabbit-hunting with ferrets and ploughing his father's farm behind a team of draught-horses, and when he talked about his grandparents he slipped into their Irish brogue.
Dad's stories weren't all happy nostalgia, though; when he made mention of a particular cane-wielding Marist brother ("a sadistic bastard") who had taught him at school, his eyes narrowed. My father wasn't a reader, but when I told him that I wanted to be a writer, he said, "Like Dan Davin, eh?"
Davin, who was brought up in a working-class Irish Catholic household in Gore and Invercargill, was a high achiever on the international stage, eventually becoming the Oxford University Press's academic publisher. But he never forgot his roots. One of his last stories is about an Invercargill Marist brother who failed to "drive the devil out" of a nine-year-old boy.
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Feed Your Head
Listener - September 16, 2006
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DERMAPHORIA by Craig Clevenger
A writer I interviewed for the Listener last year said that if you could swab the books at your local library to find the ones written under the influence of drugs, "spines would turn red all over the shop". This may be a slight exaggeration, but it wouldn't be a stretch to make a long list of writers who use(d) drugs to fuel their writing.
American author Craig Clevenger has said that he's not a big drug taker. "But," he adds, "I'll make no apologies for the ones I've done. I'll indulge like anyone else." Although Clevenger only fesses up to recreational drug use, the protagonists in his two novels thus far recklessly imbibe. His first book, The Contortionist's Handbook, about a forger addicted to painkillers, is a beautifully written thing with deftly structured plotlines. Dermaphoria, which reads more like a long short story, is about a clandestine chemist who fries his brain when he swallows a handful of pills – "fireflies and black widows".
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A Life Backwards
The Dominion Post - April 15, 2006
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STUART: a life backwards by Alexander Masters (Harper Perennial)
There was a little glue-sniffing guy who frequented Wellington's Cuba Street in the 1980s. His alienated intelligence and limpy gait set him apart from the street kids he hung out with. He was belligerent and compassionate, toxic and sort of interesting. He disappeared from my orbit until I came across him in Manners Plaza drinking plonk and arguing with a couple of grizzly old drunks in the late 1990s. Sleeping rough and substance abuse had ravaged him, and I guess he was only in his early 30s. I don't know his name. I gave him a wide berth. God knows what happened to him.
British writer Alexander Masters first came across Stuart Shorter in Cambridge, England, in 1998. Shorter was begging in a doorway. He told Masters, who was working for a homeless shelter: "Yeah, I'm gonna top meself and it's got to seem like someone else done it . . . I'll taunt all the drunk fellas coming out the pub until they have to kill me if they want a bit of peace . . . Me brother killed himself in May. I couldn't put me mum through that again. She wouldn't mind murder so much."
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I Lost a Farm in Africa
Listener - October 15, 2005
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UNFEELING by Ian Holding (Scribner)
While reading Unfeeling, a debut novel by 27-year-old white Zimbabwean Ian Holding, I imagined Robert Mugabe at his residence, sited over the fence from the Harare Sports Club where New Zealand's apolitical Black Caps recently thrashed Zimbabwe's national cricket team. Mugabe isn't named in Holding's brave book, but the rogue President and patron of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union is omnipresent in it and, given the ruthless way he is implementing his country's land redistribution polices, I hope that Holding is keeping his head down.
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Terrorism, the Novel
Listener - Aug 13, 2005
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INCENDIARY, by Chris Cleave (Chatto & Windus)
It was horrific happenstance that Chris Cleave's debut novel Incendiary, which imagines the grief caused by a fictional terrorist attack at a London football ground, was released in Britain on the same day that real suicide bombers struck London. Advertising for the book was pulled, and Cleave cancelled promotional engagements. A quote on his website questions whether "a book has more to say than a bomb". Cleave wrote the first draft of Incendiary in six weeks. "I hardly slept," he recalls in his essay "Behind the Book", "and when I did I had nightmares which were indistinguishable from the next day's news."
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He Lived
Listener - July 30, 2005
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HEARTLAND: A Memoir, by Neil Cross (Scribner)
One morning in 1969, Neil Cross's mother took him out in his pram with the intention of ending both their lives by stepping into the traffic on a busy road. However: "She looked down at me, in the pram. I was tiny and helpless, she said, a baby with my name and my eyes, wriggling, wearing clothes she had knitted, and she couldn't kill me. So she wheeled me home, and we lived."
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YOUR MIND ON DRUGS
Listener - June 11, 2005
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DOCTOR SALT by Gerard Donovan (Scibner)
THE CONTORTIONIST'S HANDBOOK by Craig Clevenger (4th Estate)
A couple of weeks before I read Gerard Donovan's second novel, Doctor Salt, and Craig Clevenger's brilliant debut novel, The Contortionist's Handbook, a writer friend, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of pharmacology, told me that the guy who concocted the drug Ecstasy originally called it Empathy. He also posited that counselling for emotional disorders is a thing of the past: "Why dig up a shitty childhood, when you can bury it with blocking drugs?" I answered him with an uneasy smile. If I knew then what I know now, I would have said: "Read Doctor Salt."
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MY MANY PAST FAILURES
Listener - April 2, 2005
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WHITE NIGHTS by Geoff Cochrane (Thumbprint Press)
PLEASANT HELL by John Dolan (Capricorn)
After reading Geoff Cochrane's book of short stories, White Nights, and John Dolan's novel, Pleasant Hell, I was puzzled as to why large tracts of Dolan's prose lodged in my head, while Cochrane's stories dissolved into the ether. I recall vividly parts of his two novels, Tin Nimbus (about booze and rehab) and Blood (has some graphic writing about sex), and his nine books of poems. But White Nights and, to a lesser extent Brindle Embers (a companion book published two years ago), left in my mind surreal crafted sensibilities, not concrete cargoes.
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MAN OVERBOARD
Listener - January 29, 2005
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NON-FICTION by Chuck Palahniuk (Jonathan Cape)
"A book of extraordinary truths": that's the claim on the cover of Non-Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk (pronounced "Paula-Nick"). His friends call him Chucky P. His fans reckon he's "the coolest writer in the world today". Evidently, 40-odd people have fainted at recent readings of his short story Guts. It's about a guy who masturbates in a swimming pool, then - shock! horror! - his lower intestine gets sucked into the pool fan. The story is to be published this year in a novel called Haunted, which is being drip-fed in Playboy.
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DRINKING DEEP OF LIFE
The Dominion Post - October 16, 2004
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I'LL GO TO BED AT NOON by Gerard Woodward (Chatto and Windus)
In The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous there are testimonies written by recovering alcoholics, who during their drinking days could have been described variously: as plateau drinkers (who top up regularly, thus slowly killing their livers); binge drinkers (who may also be labelled as a manic depressives or psychopaths); or social drinkers who descend into pathological boozing after encountering life tragedies.
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Cilla of Bluff, Kay of Dunedin
Listener - February 15, 2003
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SOUNDINGS by Cilla McQueen (University of Otago Press)
FEEDING THE DOGS by Kay McKenzie Cooke (UOP)
Two "southern women" poets: Cilla McQueen from Bluff and Kay McKenzie Cooke from Dunedin - their mug shots on the back of their books smile at me: McQueen, Celtic dark, quarter-mooned mouthed; McKenzie Cooke, blonde, strong-jawed and open-faced.
"Soundings" is McQueen's ninth book (she received the New Zealand Award for Poetry in 1983, 1989 and 1991) and "Feeding the Dogs" is McKenzie Cooke's first. McQueen is descended from a clan from St Kilda in the Hebrides, and McKenzie Cooke, born in Tuatapere and raised a Catholic on a Southland farm, is of Kati Mamoe; Ngati Kahungunu, Cockney and Northern Irish descent.
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Gravedigger. Catholic. Poet
Listener - August 3, 2002
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HOW TO MAKE A MILLION by Emma Neale (Godwit)
VALPARAISO by Bob Orr (Auckland University Press)
AUP NEW POETS 2 (Auckland University Press)
William Carlos Williams took issue with Ezra Pound for saying, in effect, that to write serious poetry one had to have digested the art's various ancient roots. Williams, a GP, contradicted Pound's high-minded notion, saying his poetry was more concerned with the language rhythms of Polish mothers in his hometown Rutherford, New Jersey. The dear old doc, one of the prime practitioners of imagist poetry ("no ideas, but things"), knew a thing or two and opened up the game to a wide range of folk.
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Take One Weekly
Listener - October 27, 2001
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FOOL'S PARADISE by Steve Braunias (Random House).
FROM THE HEART by Helen Brown (HarperCollins).
SIT by Joe Bennett (Hazard).
Apollinaire, if I remember rightly, opined somewhere that the future popular press would be the venue for the best contemporary writing. I presume that he expected imaginatively written up-to-date reports on the psychological landscape would sit alongside the news of the day. Imagine it: novelists, essayists and poets on the full-time payroll of the media barons, with instalments of their work-in-progress published daily, weekly or monthly.
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Colin McCahon's Copyrwriter
Listener - June 16, 2001
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ANSWERING HARK: McCahon/Caselberg, Painter/Poet by Peter Simpson (Craig Potton)
"Who are you? A poet or prophet or what?" This question the poet John Caselberg recalls was Colin McCahon's first utterance to him when they met in McCahon's studio in Christchurch in 1948. Caselberg was then 22 and McCahon was 29, and this meeting was the starting point of the most remarkable collaboration in the history of New Zealand art.
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Dear Everyone
Listener - July 15, 2000
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ALISTAIR COOKE by Nick Clarke (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
A few months back in the wee hours of the morning I was tussling with some raw unturned thought that wouldn't sleep. National Radio's "All Night" programme was barely audible on my clock radio, when, ever so quiet, there came to my ears the unmistakable velvety voice, albeit a little shakey, of veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke.
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