Glad readers

Although I'm planning to give you a teaser today for the inaugural almost-ready 10K ebook, The Happiest Music on Earth, in the meantime I came across a couple of articles worth sharing.

Writer J.P. Ganley read Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes earlier this year:  "I stumbled upon Jackson’s book at Rosa Mira Books – a classy, rather gorgeous looking NZ e-publishing site, by the way – and read the synopsis, blog posts and review. Within seconds I was hitting BUY NOW, and downloaded a copy onto my KOBO e-reader ... I can’t express enough how much I’m enjoying this …" You can read the whole on her blog, A Certain Book.

In the same hour, I was alerted to this appreciative piece about Road Markings by Terence Rissetto in  The Landfall Review Online, NZ books in review.

 
 Meanwhile (one of my favourite blogwords, I've noticed),  we seem to have a development in the story of 'the other rat'.

Road Markings makes its mark

New Zealand Books is a quarterly magazine devoted entirely to the review of NZ work by fellow writers. For those reviewed it's not usually a comfortable read but considered critique is the magazine's raison d'être. The Winter 2012 edition opens with its editorial: "Two issues beyond the 20th anniversary edition of New Zealand Books and two before our 100th issue, we've reached another milestone. The determined enthusiasts who founded the journal might well have predicted the first two … But we suspect they would have had no inkling of the third: this issue carries our first review of an ebook.   … the word 'book' in New Zealand Books has changed its meaning forever."

That ground-breaking ebook is Michael Jackson's Road Markings, published here at Rosa Mira Books. (Thanks to NZ Books editors, Jane Westaway and Harry Ricketts, for making the leap.) The opening review, it's a generous page and a half of the A3 format by reviewer Alison Gray.  Rather more an outline of content, however, than an appraisal, it's not an easy review to pick excerpts from, but here are a couple:

"Michael Jackson … uses a 2008 road trip … to explore the theme of 'firstness' both in his own life and in the lives of people affected by social and historical events such as adoption, emigration, colonisation, war and illness or death. … It's a grand undertaking …

"The strongest pieces in this book describe how individual people have handled the blows life has dealt them, but the concept of 'firstness' remains elusive. Some people … reshuffle elements of the past to create a workable sense of self; some, like the wonderful Aunt Simone amd Mlle Picard in Menton, struggle not to be overcome by what has happened; some … simply decide to leave the past behind and make a new start, while others, like Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, seem able to recover from loss without 'acrimony, blame or the need for redemption'."

Road Markings is "full of good thinking and ideas about how people construct their lives. I eventually read it twice and was well rewarded both times."

Also in this edition, Chris Else comments on his experience with the Kindle reader.

A review and an opportunity

"Road Markings is no ramble and Jackson has much bigger fish to fry than nostalgic recall. In fact, he has a fish about the size of Maui’s ..."

So runs the review two weeks ago in the NZ Listener. You can read the rest here.

 

 Also. My friend in Argentina, Elena Bossi, has edited a collection of interviews with people of Puna, the high grasslands where Bolivia, Chile and Argentina meet in the Andes. She has worked into the volume poetry and prose originating in the region, along with photos — all of which reveal something of the soul of the people. You can read more about PUNA on my other blog, and you can take your own free copy of the book, which is written in Spanish, here: PUNA in PDF

Elena is a terrific writer who has received accolades for her fiction, criticism and plays so, while I am (as yet!) unable to read this book and to recommend it in its particulars, I know you will be in very good hands. You can read her story 'The Ache' in Slightly Peculiar Love Stories.

Review and overview

                                            A pen, not a rolling pin.


The NZ LIstener's review of Road Markings has appeared (March 3-9 2012) and it's a good one. Nicholas Reid has written  . . . actually, it's not a review that lends itself to excerpting, but he calls it  'another drilling into the abscess of New Zealand Pakeha identity.' (In fact the book ponders human identity so I hope that the rest of the reading world won't be put off by this parochial, dental imagery.)

' … a book of much mature wisdom … '

' … often provocative and always a little unsettling in what it says about New Zealanders. As it should be.'

I'm hoping the full review will appear online in a week or so, otherwise, I'll transcribe it for you.

Talking of abscesses, the dog is brewing one beneath her dew claw; we're off to the vet.

Then I'm going offline for a few days and heading for the hills: time to ponder, among other things, Rosa Mira Books — the resources available; projects in the pipeline; possible new directions, and how to go on operating on a teeny tiny budget. (I'm open to suggestions, as well. At least, I think I am.)

A riveting interview; mellifluous listening

In the weekend, Lynn Freeman of Radio New Zealand's Arts on Sunday interviewed Michael Jackson about Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes. He talks about the awareness he gained on his road trip through the country of what it means to be a New Zealander by birth, by formative first experiences, by a sense of belonging and exhilaration in the landscape, but not entirely by inclination.

Listen here.

 

An anthropologist in Taranaki

Today an article appeared in the Taranaki Daily News, which I'm told has piqued the interest of many readers. Journalist Hannah Fleming was interviewing author Michael Jackson:

A man who won a Taranaki Herald essay competition in 1952 has recently returned to the region to research his latest book. Anthropologist Michael Jackson, 71, spent his youth in Inglewood and at age 12 won the accolade for his essay, "A Day in the Life of a Taranaki Schoolboy in 1875". His new book Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes, released last month, saw him pass through Taranaki while he travelled New Zealand, researching the idea of origins and the value of staying in touch with your roots. 

Dr Jackson said he was surprised at how Taranaki landscapes and industries had changed, in particular the way Inglewood had become a dormitory suburb of New Plymouth. "What used to be a half-hour journey by bus on winding roads, is now a 10-minute car ride," he said. "When I was a child, Taranaki towns like Inglewood were dominated by the dairy industry. Not only has dairying become industrialised, but natural gas, oil and petrochemicals have transformed the landscape." 

 Now a professor of world religions at Harvard Divinity School in the United States, Dr Jackson said his book touched on how personal stories interwove with social and historical events. Those stories explored the search of adopted children for their birth parents, calls from Maori for recognition and social justice, and our preoccupation with geographical and genetic backgrounds. 

Dr Jackson said his journey through New Zealand outlined the improvement of Maori-Pakeha relations and how Kiwis had become more worldly. "New Zealanders are less bothered by their geographical remoteness from Europe, Asia and the USA, compared with 50 years ago," he said. 

Dr Jackson has worked in welfare and community development in London among the homeless, and in the Congo with the United Nations. He returned to New Zealand to resume his studies in anthropology and gained a Taranaki scholarship for doctoral studies at Cambridge University. He then did fieldwork in Sierra Leone, and in Aboriginal Australia when Sierra Leone was plunged into civil war. 

In New Zealand, Dr Jackson is best known as a poet. He won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1976, and the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 1981.
  
Dr Jackson said Road Markings would appeal to any New Zealander who had lived overseas and faced the dilemma of keeping the home fires burning."For those less travelled, it may offer a perspective on the country from outside, but without the distortions you often find in books written by foreign visitors.

This article uses excerpts from a fascinating Q and A between Hannah and Michael that you can read in full  here.

It's a Yes for Road Markings

" … this book is certainly the place to begin a re-consideration of one of our most astute, humane, idiosyncratic, neglected and perdurable writers."
 
 So writes Martin Edmond, author of the  recently published Dark Night: Walking with McCahon. This week, on his website Isinglass, he reviewed Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes:

"A nation exacts a penance from those who dared to leave her wrote James Joyce, explaining why his only play was called Exiles; the line is much quoted but most people who do so leave off the next bit: payable on their return. Michael Jackson left his native New Zealand while still a young man, in the first instance for Melbourne, where he worked among the homeless and had his first encounters with Aboriginality. Later he did similar work in London and the Congo and later still went to Sierra Leone, beginning there the fieldwork that has distinguished his vocation as an anthropologist. He has been far more diligent in his repayments than JJ ever was, returning again and again and, each time, illuminating forgotten corners of what he calls the diffuse and dimly lit world of New Zealand’s collective imagination.

"In Road Markings, published as a ebook by Rosa Mira Books of Dunedin and subtitled An Anthropologist in the Antipodes, Jackson sets out on a road trip through his natal land that is also an inquiry into the idea of firstness: the place of origin in our consciousness, the meaning of beginnings, the aura of the primary as a way of authenticating both personal experience and historical truth. This might sound daunting as a theme but his exploration of it is not: this is autobiographical writing of the highest order, in which the personal is resolutely explored but never just for its own sake: Jackson’s own history, that of his family and friends, his colleagues, his mentors, his literary heroes, are woven together to make, not so much a tapestry as a finely calibrated, gorgeously textured, many-coloured mahi harakeke." Read the rest here.

A few words from Michael

Woosh, the day's been swept away with last-minute preparatory tweaks to the website — those behind-the-scenes tinkerings that ensure purchases go through cleanly, and that one thing leads to another . . . However, I've been rescued from the need to write a post from scratch by author Michael Jackson having kindly come up with an appetizer. I've phrased it somewhat as the conversation we have yet to have.

Michael Jackson photographed by Freya Jackson

Michael, your writing returns, time and again, to the themes of belonging and  failing to belong, and of the hold that the past exerts on us — its places and people and our experiences there:

Yes, in At Home in the World (1995), I wrote of the paradoxical experience of returning to my natal New Zealand every year, like a migratory bird, and finding the place both changed and unchanged, strange and familiar. Every expatriate knows the dilemma that is born of this experience – attempting to keep the home fires burning, yet watching them gutter and gradually go out. There is a Maori saying that for as long as you live on the land, a fire burns there (ahi ka), signaling that you have the right to be there. But if you abandon the land, the fires die (ahi mataotao) and you forfeit that right. As we say, occupation is nine tenths of the law. 

You've lived away for many years now, but when you came back to New Zealand in late 2008 to warm the coals again, you were working over this dilemma?

I hired a car, and hit the road, determined to see if these questions could be resolved through conversations with old friends and visits to old haunts.  Road Markings emerged as a series of meditations on the power of first experiences in shaping our lives – first love, first landfall, first home, first loss.  It touches on the ways that personal stories are interwoven with social and historical events, and shows how ‘the enigma of anteriority’ pertains equally to Maori invocations of toi whenua in making claims for recognition and social justice, the search of adopted children for their birth parents, the notion of childhood as ‘the formative years,’ our current preoccupation with genealogical, geographical or genetic backgrounds, and the allure of myths and models of cause and effect. 

This lovely passage from Road Markings expresses it further:

 

“I sat down on the tideline and slipped the rucksack from my shoulders.  I felt the sun on my face, heard the slipshod sound of the sea and the distracted cry of a nesting dotterel.  My mind drifted. I was thinking of the gap between the inspiration I drew from places like Waikawau Bay and the satisfaction I had found in America, Europe and West Africa. With every return home, the expatriate is reborn. It is not simply because you are returned to the landscapes of your early life; it is because the quotidian, momentarily bathed in a new light, appears exotic.  And so you marvel that this place you could not live in because of its emptiness and insularity still has the power to remind you of who you really are.”  

Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes appears here tomorrow. Michael, thank you for the privilege of seeing it into the world.