Thursday, January 26, 2012

Complete Written Correspondence Volume Two: RKM (hearts) CNZ

Word has come in from the far north, the tail of Maui's big fish, that Richard Meros has pieced together a new book to be released in 2012. The book is provisionally titled $30 Meat Pack: The Complete Written Correspondence Between Richard Meros and Creative New Zealand volume two, which is a follow up to his 2008 book Beggars and Choosers, volume one in the series.


When asked why a second volume was collated, when the point had been aptly made by the first volume, Meros replied that the new series was simply the follow on from what the title of the first volume would suggest ie. more than one volume. He also suggested that if it were accepted that life were absurd and that the first volume was absurd then does it not follow, given absurd logic, that a second volume increases the absurding and thus relevance of the project. If one had to exist, then so does two, then three, then four, then five. Who will end it? That is an open question indicated by the authors life. When The Dearth of Richard Meros is published, that will end the question. But for now, ponder the failed selections in the new volume:

Monday, December 12, 2011

New Bats play for Meros 2012

He tried to save New Zealand by becoming Helen Clark's young lover... He failed.

Now, the Chapman-Tripp® award-winning Richard Meros is back, with a  new nuclear-PowerPoint® to prove. The number-8 wire nation faces extinction, our pioneer culture eclipsed by the globalised Fonterra® farmer with a Facebook® account. Meros alone holds the key to our salvation – the craggy New Zealand hardness that still glimmers within the most urbane of latte-drinkers. The spirit of The Southern Man.


This is the initial blurb for the new adaptation of RK Meros's Richard Meros salutes the Southern Man book for performance in March 2012 at Bats Theatre, Wellington.



I think that one of my favourite lines of that whole book was not written by Meros, but by one of our fly-by-night interns who composed the press release for that book in 2007. It goes like this: “There is a difference between these people and you and I,” Meros affirms, “while we sit here sipping our frappa-mocha-whatevers, they are dealing with the intimacies of living close to their earth. Their bodies become hard while we peddle our papers.”

Sunday, December 11, 2011

in 012

In 2012, Lawrence & Gibson will engage with Duncan Sarkies in a bit of the old quid pro quo. Sarkies will have his 1999 VUP collection Strange Thoughts and Nose Bleeds expanded and culled into a moderner recollection of his works. He has also produced an introduction to the 2006 Richard Meros tract Richard Meros salutes the Southern Man which shall be performed by Arthur Meek and directed by Geoff Pinfield across the depth and, dare I say, bredth of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

We don't yet have a blurb for Duncan, but we took this from another website, translated it into Yiddish and then into Welsh, thenback into English to plumb the depths of his psyche:



Sarkyes, dunkan (1970 -) is a playwright, screen writer, fiction writer and stand - up comic. The rhythm and energy of performance is an important aspect of his written work. He is best known as co - author, along with his brother Robert sarkyes, from 1999 skarfyes highly successful film.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Chinese Food

Those of you who follow this blog will know that a theatrical adaptation of Richard Meros's Privatising Parts is partially planned. Over Chinese Food - vegan by all accounts - a member of our publishing collective chatted with Heleyni, the actress and adaptor. Across the table were four young Aucklanders. I love young Aucklanders. They were celebrating Gabe's 30th, or one of his brithdays in his 30s. Another of the young Aucklanders was called Rachel. She reviews books. The member of the collective sent her a copy of the book. It arrived, we have now realised, and has been reviewed at the BookieMonster.co.nz website. You can read the review here. But if you click here, you will find something else. If you really want to just read the review, then you can also click here, or just go back to the original here, back there.

We went to Meros for comment, but the Skype connection was bad. Apparently he is living near Kerikeri for the summer, plotting out some erotic tome or whatnot. He did want it on record that he made good on his promise to vote for Grant Robertson in Wellington Central, due to Grant nailing those three three-pointers that day when him, Will and Meros were on that court near Aro Park. But I can say that Don Franks's 'Caught in the Act' was one of a few inspirations for Meros when he conceived of that book when driving throguh Taihape and also when he typed that book in the Omiyar Hotel in Aleppo. Everyone has their part of play. We love you Don!


Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Adapt or Die, or both

So it seems like Geoff has put up an early performance of On the conditions and possibilties..., on Vimeo. The adaptation of Meros's 2005 book began in 2007 and hit the stage in 2008. The collective's memories of those glory days are hazy, so do have a look and judge for yourself.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Five Shillings, Sir?

When Richard Meros saluted the Southern Man in 2006 he noted how the city of Dunedin was obviously made of the climate that surrounded it: weatherboards as barely concealed strips of timber, the mason's rock, tin rooves curling like an overgrown toenail. And so on. But Dunedin also has a sharp, cold and violent lip that bear's its teeth at Wellington's approximations of style and Auckland's sleek wealth. It was the home of the Dunedin Sound and if certain circumstances conspire it would be the home of Lawrence & Gibson. That said, since half of the collective did undergrad degrees there it is certainly the home away from home for many of our kin.

And so we announce that an online version of Landfall, straight out of central Dunedin, has published a review of Richard Meros' Zebulon and Brannavan Gnanalingam's Getting Under Sail. The review in question is here. I won't deign to summarise the contents of the review for regular readers of this blog, for the review speaks for itself. Nor will I provide critical appraisel for the review, for the reviewers should be the ones to review themselves.

In lesser news, I, Stephen Kawariki, am on holiday and will not be updating the blog for a month or two. I will have James Marr fill in the blanks if he is not too busy with the psychologically uplifting task fo binding, invoice arranging and couriering. Ti he to commerce! Ti he to Landfall!



Wednesday, October 12, 2011

The Ceremony of Pure Joy


I've always been a fan of long term relationships, none more so than marriage. Especially amongst sexy young people. As an editor at Lawrence & Gibson I'd like to pay tribute to the seduction skills of Mr William Dewey, who now has a soul to move and probably a tender jaw. And I dedicate to he and his new wife a song by Dan Bern called 'Jerusalem'. Salom!


Tuesday, October 4, 2011

in the background of the title

Location: Murgab, Gorno-Badakshan, Tajikistan.

The man: Emomalii Rahmon

Religion: Sunni Islam

Position: Presiden of Tajikistan

Rating: 3 out of 10

Comments: photo slightly out of focus power lines obscuring face. That said, good light and nice geographical positioning for more authenticity of etccc

Friday, September 16, 2011

Totally Over Summer


Totally, over summer, there will be some finger on keypad action for collective members. And so while Meros' planned four books for a year is being cut down to three plus an interactive website, 2012 is going to be another bumper crop for our eclectic collective.

We'll be publishing mostly NZ based books, though perhaps William J Dewey will return with his The Homeland of Pure Joy. What an effing babe!

Though Meros is now in charge of his own www.richardmeros.com he has also asked me to communicate that he's looking forward to exploring the flaura and fauna of the far north from October to February. He'll be thinking of Iran, bunny rabbits and the longstanding text that needs a rewrite and which we are all familiar with: Tino Rangatiratanga Motherfucker!

Oh and some editing work.

Editing: ake ake ake.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

The beauty of co-operation

Check out the following link for some hidden underground publishing messages.

http://www.3news.co.nz/Police-should-apologise-for-Urewera-raids---Sharples/tabid/309/articleID/224730/Default.aspx

At 1.13 an example of the zen-like splicing technique for book binding is offered by Val, while Nicky Hagar's latest is in the foreground. The splicing technique means that the paper, printed through printey, to her right, does not curl.

At 1.22, the cover for William Dewey's My Tender Jaw is visible in the background. This cover was designed by P-Dawg in 09.

Oh and also, fuck yeaahhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh and below is T and the new binder. Notice the cover for Gnanalingam sitting on the right of the binder. Note: you may need to zoom in.


Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Books from Mutable Sound

Lawrence & Gibson are the distributors for the literature branch of the Chicago/Eugene based publishers Mutable Sound. We have a supply of their stock in New Zealand and can sell it to curious locals..

At present we have the following titles in stock, in Wellington, in a mould free storage space.


MUT013 - Amazing Adult Fantasy by A D Jameson
168 pages; softcover;

A D Jameson, lost and innocent, narcissistic and corrupted, has been dreaming his way through the past thirty years, the dying breaths of the fictional 20th century. In his dreams he made many friends: the alien puppet ALF, cantankerous, threadbare, and living in a casket; Luke Skywalker, middle-aged, mustachioed, and hateful; and Bonnie Raitt, the ceramicist, shining spotlights onto sand and cancer.

He invites you now to join both him and them; his lips shape your name. For his dreams have also been about you; he’s been searching for you for a long time. Lie down beside him; allow him to drape his glittery silver fur coat across your shoulders. He’ll fold his hands and bow and whisper. He’ll hand you a gumball that’s grown stale inside a locket. He’ll hand you a gem that fell down from the moon. Together, you’ll sail across the ocean on his wok rat, nibbling his tree pig. Together, you’ll enter these fantastical tombs.

Lawrence and Gibson released Jameson's Giant Slugs in June 2011. Samples of Jameson’s writing can be found on our website. To read his story, Rock Albany! go here, and to read his story, 7 Movie Reviews, go here.

Buy Amazing Adult Fantasy





 
 
MUT008 - A Survey of My Failures This Far by Gabriel Boyer
952 pages; softcover; yes, I said 952 pages.
 
Boyer’s influences range from William Faulkner to David Lynch, from Hunter S. Thompson to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Jorge Luis Borges. A Survey of My Failures this Far, his third book to be released through Mutable, is on the one hand just what it purports to be, a collection of materials (mostly narrative) from Boyer’s library of unpublished manuscripts, but it aspires to be something more, and perhaps herein lies the failure, what Faulkner called the “splendid failure to do the impossible.” Descriptions of each individual book within the larger collection to be found below.


The Many Lives of Yours Truly
A collection of stories about a single character, Bosworth Paine. It is a collection within a collection and opens with a passage that could perhaps describe the author’s relation to Survey as a whole, “This is how it is for me. I am so many different sorts of people it makes me want to stick my fingers in your mouth.” Many of these stories return to his adolescence, and an obsession with one woman in particular, for she was tied to another Bosworth could only grin in the face of so much suffering, rather than always muttering obscenities in the corner.

Jacks and Jill’s Sunshine Retreat Center
A psychedelic horror comedy that takes place on a wellness retreat just outside Santa Fe New Mexico and run by a man name of Colin Jacks. Persons have begun to disappear at an alarming rate. “And besides, you have warts on your penis.” Similar sorts of witty banter to be found within.

Chewing in the Land of the Bonobos
Characters A and B throw seeds in a bucket, and occasionally attempt to bed each other, while watching the development of war, agriculture, and ultimately resort hotels.

Devil, Everywhere I Look
An economic collapse has brought the end of the United States of America, a civil war having raged ever since, and Jackson Cole, political pamphleteer by profession, is becoming more and more caught up in a greater game of political intrigue with every step he takes, only to finally discover the truth about his younger brother’s death at the same time he finds himself addicted to the new hallucinogenic narcotic some claim is transforming humanity into an altogether different species, these being the last days before The Atlantic Bloc fell to the Midland Coalition in this post-apocalyptic nightmare world.

The God Game
A gaming manual, in which you play the game by creating the game, the God Game begins with an exploration of basic games, though the bulk of the manuscript involves universe creation and ultimately LARPing the God Game. “Does the ground consist of spires that reach to the tips of the atmosphere, or is the entire orb made up of a teaming mass of encephalocapsules?” Many questions are posed. Few are answered!

The Manikin Textbook
We open on the protagonist’s adolescence, spent as a fugitive whore in the Capital of the North American Districts, obviously modeled after New York. Then it is ten years later, and now our protagonist (also Colin Jacks) is married with children and concealing contraband information within his larger memory template. Throughout his travels he will meet a woman infested with multi-dimensional carniverous vegetation who believes he is the messiah, a man who leads him through the underground facilities where dreams are developed and propagated upon an unsuspecting populace, and ultimately a shape-changing agent of the Ministry of the Morning Star.

Shorthand with Periodic Tenderness
A collection of the sorts of poems P. K. Dick’s androids would write, especially the more abstract (such as one entitled “The Myth of Technology” which involves the repeated re-arrangement of six words), although there are more traditional poems in here. “In the Smallest Hours of the Night”, for example, contains the lines, “Face as beautiful as any god’s / Androgynous icon / And as present as crumpled sheets,” but many seem as if concocted by some computer in an effort to simulate intelligence.

Buy A Survey of My Failures This Far


Saturday, August 27, 2011

Knock Knock


The courier knocked but had left before I could answer the door. On the stoop was a sack. Inside the sack were books. Lawrence and Gibson have Mutable Sound books to distribute throughout New Zealand, and we might send an AD Jameson to Aus on the sly if you are keen, but that Gabe Boyer book, well, no wonder postage is such a cost! Egads!

NUKEM - RIP www.lawrenceandgibson.com

So we were hanging with the Fungi in 07 and Ron said "If you don't got no website, no-one will pay attention to you!"It was one of those warm autumn nights and they were playing the noise too loud. There was lager and smoking on the balcony, looking down the gullet of Cuba St, like a doctor checking tonsils.


So we got bluehost to grab www.lawrenceandgibson.com and we got Carla to do the website. There were four books up and we had a submissions page with lyrics from 'Submission' and we had five email addresses, all @lawrenceandgibson.com - numerous emails came through that way. I miss them dearly, even the spam that went to design@lawrenceandgibson.com, even the submissions that were sent to us as attachments, like prayers to a defunct deity, like fourth form fantasies that I done got forgot. Damn...

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Lies in red, exaggerations in green

Excuse me, I just need to take a photo of this book. I work for the company that released it. Someone told me that it was in the window.

Oh, no problem mate. What's it about?

It's a retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh...

...oh....

There's a King and he has to leave his village because it gets invaded by giant slugs. Then he goes off on some adventures. Sort of about the Americans going to Iraq to teach them about civilisation in a way.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Listener review now free for all (who have the Internet)

Read all about it. Meros and Gnanalingam reviewed. Sales soar.

Economically speaking, the value of the review has depreciated to the marginal position whereby its role as an archive of New Zealand culture that shows the NZ Listener to be a magazine of record has matched the lost value of back issue sales combined with the freerider problem that has scuttled much of the print media's productivity. Let us now drop a hot image in honour of the free rider.


Sunday, August 14, 2011

New Homepage for Richard Meros

Whilst others were spending their Sunday Mornings contemplating the unknowable beyond the unknown, RK Meros has had his author page go live. It can be glimpsed here. And here. And here.

This Sunday afternoon, RK Meros is digging a hole in his back yard. It will be a deep hole. He has dried an attic of thyme and will make his way down for a little nap.


Thursday, August 11, 2011

October the Something

In early October, to little or no fanfare, Lawrence & Gibson will release a book by Richard Meros called Easy Whistle Solo. There will be a mild press release and softly petted review copies. But it is a genuine story, and one which readers can identify with. It is a story where Meros moves from Satire to Romanticism.

Our BeLoved readers of Zebulon: a cautionary tale, have expressed confusion over that title. 'What in all hell is a Zebulon?' they've asked. Our screenshot has done little to please them.

Originally Zebulon was called The Impotence of Being and Somethingness.
Originally Easy Whistle Solo was called 2029: A Foucauldian Analysis of Yo Momma.

An easy whistle solo is a musical refrain that it is easy to whistle along with. For example, Peter, Bjorn and John's 'Young Folks' chorus. The easy whistle solo only requires lips that are unencumbered by other uses. It only requires memory of a melody. It only requires malady. And it is easy and uplifting, in the same sense that Soren Kierkegaard might be seen to have been.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Hot Presses


It is a strangely divided page that houses the reviews for Lawrence andGibson's releases of Privatising Parts and Getting Under Sail in the present week's New Zealand Listener (unshrouded from paywall on August 15). The two page spread is split in four. Compare that technique to that of the Dominion Post... please!

An adverto-competition for a book about wine takes up half of the left page (p.38), while an advertisement for the New Zealand International Film Festival takes up half of the right (p.39). Our review, along with a review of a Philip Henser novel is protected from the magazine's outer margins by advertising. There is no chance that our reviews will fall off the page, buffered as they are by revenue generating content, or content generating revenue (as the case is with the 100 Must Try Wines competition - perhaps I will enter, perhaps I will WIN!).

The review for the two L and G books makes up two-fifths of the page and is backed in tasteful soft lime, much like the walls of our offices for those of you in the ken. The review is by a gentleman named Sam Finnemore who I have just google stalked (as I do with any reviewer under the rationale of "who will critique the critiquers?").  I am pretty sure Sam is a man.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Married Married


I don't know what they put in that 'Merican waters but our writer W Dewey is hitching his wagon to some filly's apple cart. Hot Dang! Wedding night! Well that concerns you not, but what concerns you is that his The Homeland of Pure Joy has turned up in our inbox, replete with morbidity, allusions to his vast knowledge of Norwegian death metal (1988-1994) and couch snuggles. We expect to like and release the book.


Dewey recently described The Homeland of Pure Joy (or THOPJ) as "a gushing love letter to Wellington". We'll do our best to get him over here for a launch party at his UNITY haunt. Revisit Wellington history here. Make sure you notice the statue of Frederick Engels pointing to our nation's capital building. Yes! Das Kapital.

Friends with Benefits

As the Republicans and Obama continued to play around the Maple Pole, the editorial board (bored editors!) of Lawrence and Gibson completed negotiations with the publishing arm of Mutable Sound on Sunday July 23rd. The two organisations have set down the basis for a distribution deal that will see Mutable Sound distributed in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Lawrence and Gibson books distributed to US buyers.


G Boyer, of Mutable Sound made the following prescient remark in an email that did not have a confidentiality clause attached to it: "I was a little confused in general at the time."


RK Meros replied: "Hi Gabe, I know a little bit about business, but am purposefully ignorant of most stuff."


The two Skype-shook on a deal, the medium of which precluded them from having their hands bound together with flax-twine in the Pagan tradition of Handfasting, as both would have possibly preferred.





Lawrence & Gibson will start supplying AD Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy and Gabriel Chad Boyer's A Survey of My Failures This Far as soon as the new moon wanes, or when the courier delivers it, whatever comes first.