lawrence and gibson publishing collective

Complete Written Correspondence Volume Two: RKM (hearts) CNZ

2012-01-26T11:57:00.003+13:00

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:

* Baby Boomer Funeral
* Dating Westerners: tips for the new rich of thedeveloping world
* An introduction to Self-Harm
* Hugo’s there! Mr Chavez what are we to do about our rightwing government?
... and a section detailing Meros's consultancy work in the muchtalked about restructuring of Creative New Zealand into Reactive New Zealand ina bid to align the art’s agency with the goals of mainstream New Zealand.

New Bats play for Meros 2012

2011-12-12T10:56:00.000+13:00

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: “Thereis a difference between these people and you and I,” Meros affirms, “while wesit here sipping our frappa-mocha-whatevers, they are dealing with theintimacies of living close to their earth. Their bodies become hard while wepeddle our papers.”

in 012

2011-12-11T10:44:00.001+13:00

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.
Skarfyes is shown in international film festivals including the ability and sundanse, and was released in New Zealand quickly became one of the nation's best - film grousing locally.

As a Christian Knox writes in a book of New Zealand, sarkyes talent is' [s] the reality of the Internal Housing Works on average - up human brain is a terrible place and Torturous ... Sarkyes Likes to show the ways in which we all are, if not quite mad, and at least some Unhinged ... As Jeanette Frame or Doris Lessing, and you can venture into the terrifying world of madness that is familiar. '

Chinese Food

2011-11-29T13:27:00.001+13:00

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!

Adapt or Die, or both

2011-11-15T19:34:00.001+13:00

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.

Five Shillings, Sir?

2011-10-26T10:02:00.001+13:00

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!

The Ceremony of Pure Joy

2011-10-12T16:53:00.000+13:00

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!

in the background of the title

2011-10-04T16:02:00.000+13:00

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

Totally Over Summer

2011-09-16T09:08:00.002+12:00

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.

The beauty of co-operation

2011-09-06T19:46:00.003+12:00

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.

Books from Mutable Sound

2011-08-31T10:19:00.006+12:00

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.

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.

Knock Knock

2011-08-27T10:58:00.000+12:00

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!

So sometime in next week we will re-organise the website and create a place for chicos and chicas to place their order for these two books. We will make a sexy addenda to our brochure and will send it to libraries and to bookstores. And who knows? Maybe we'll sell out in a week, a month, a year.

NUKEM - RIP www.lawrenceandgibson.com

2011-08-27T10:49:00.000+12:00

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...

And from .com we linked to this site for our news. But now we are the e-Autocrats. We update, we dabble in html, we go in and out of coherence. We are the webmasters.

Lies in red, exaggerations in green

2011-08-23T23:07:00.001+12:00

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.

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

2011-08-15T16:28:00.000+12:00

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.

New Homepage for Richard Meros

2011-08-14T13:52:00.003+12:00

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.

October the Something

2011-08-11T10:56:00.004+12:00

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 .

Hot Presses

2011-07-31T17:17:00.005+12:00

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.

When requests were made for book cover images to one of our PR merchants, Mssr Stephens, it was assumed a small review was to be filed. A larger review would have required a photo of the author. But as a small publisher we are happy with inclusion on any level bar a subpar review. To have the torso of Meros printed on page appeases some sort of Mad-God-Ego.

The title of the review references the title of the Meros book. It is 'Privatisation on parade'. Five of seven present collective members think it sparks a jolly ring. One thinks that promenading, as suggested by the term 'parade' is disastrously sentimental. The other is Skyping in the other room and can't be interrupted.

Links and analysis of the review will come later, once the paywall has been lowered and once I look up the word 'swingeing' in my Mum's big Oxford dictionary that she keeps in the lounge of her granny flat in Naenae.

Married Married

2011-07-27T17:18:00.001+12:00

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.

One for the newly-weds:

Friends with Benefits

2011-07-27T17:03:00.002+12:00

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.

We, immodest thugs, renew our subscription to New Zealand's leading cultural magazine

2011-07-22T12:07:00.000+12:00

This week, metaphysically speaking, Lawrence & Gibson have renewed their subscription to the New Zealand Listener. Why? And does Sinatra have anything to do with it?

Easy Whistle Solo, scheduled for early October for all of you Rugger fans.

Other news: international media conglomeration to be made out of scotch tape and thread. Visit our print pals to find out how. Swoon with us over our print crushes.

Extended until July 11

2011-07-06T09:04:00.001+12:00

Hello all y'all,

The US postage-free option on any of our books is being extended to a second shipment that will be sent out on July 11. If you have already paid for yours, rest assured - hell, pump up the AC and just sit back - because the handy trans-Pacific partnership of NZ Post and AllPost America will soon wing that shipment to your door or apartmental nook.

yours

The Collective (reg. 231/AG - 08/07/10; exemptions apply)

Excerpt; handsome devil

2011-06-15T10:23:00.001+12:00

Kiaora all - a short notice today: an excerpt from Giant Slugs can be found at The Collagist's website at the following linklinklink. And if you feel like seeing an author, then scroll your eyes to the right. I would suggest that you right click on the image to open it in a new tab and then zoom in to scan for the possible existence of minor dermatological imperfections.

I mean, isn't that what everyone wants from an author - skin that offers clogged pores? I mean, you people won't be happy until the author is... is.... is...

Limited time free/cheaper postage to US for Giant Slugs

2011-06-11T10:40:00.000+12:00

Though the sticker cost of sending AD Jameson's Giant Slugs to the USA is $11.64NZD, until July 4th Lawrence & Gibson are offering free shipping to Chicago and $5NZD to other parts of the USA so as to facilitate the reading of this opus. Just go to the Giant Slugs page on the sidebar and click the appropriate 'Add to Cart' button after selecting your postage zone.

Also, see here to download an interview where a crackly voiced AD speaks to a chipper Kiwi, and go here to read another interview with AD from our own James Marr, who I can assure you is a man whose parents $12,000 was well spent on elocution lessons to make our James sound like an English Toff.

AD is yet to provide us an author photo, but thats because he is so busy at work. As such is the case I will include an image of a New Zealand postie.

Is there... there anyone there?

2011-06-08T16:14:00.001+12:00

In recent weeks a strange phenomena has occurred at Lawrence & Gibson. Ukrainians have been frequenting this webpage. They are now third most prevalent on the page, up from not at all persistent in recent times. They have come in such numbers that they are clearly trying to tell me something/trying to learn something.

But what? What do you want???? Comments sections have been opened for the next few days as a means to establish dialogue. Who are you and what do you want?!

Oh, if it could be the beginnings of a FEMEN protest. Or are they taking me as their ideologue? I plea for you to upstage me or take my word as The Word.

Or is it some fascination with Giant Slugs or Zebulon. Or an ex- who is stalking AD's every move (Meros lacks lovers past).

It is feeling a little extra-terrestrial.

p.s - if you don't say then baby Lenin (pictured below) will eat your brains.

Its moments like those we need Mintos

2011-06-06T16:14:00.002+12:00

The plural of any individual is produced through courting then coitus. But, the catch is, that to make the single human plural one needs a partner. And so to profuse life we must diffuse ourselves. I can-can promise that.

AD on the Radio

2011-06-04T07:57:00.005+12:00

At 11am today (6pm Chicago time), A D Jameson was being interviewed on Caffeine and Aspirin, a brunchy show on RadioActive in Wellington, the aim of which was to promote his new book which you probably are at this website to look at, based on the stats that I have seen. I don't think that they podcast these things so it will exist as radio is supposed to: into the void. OR: lets see if I can get it on here somehow...

OK, let's say that if you're really keen on hearing it you can download it and listen to it on yer own 'puter. The link is probably here:

--------------------------------Download-------------------------------

Es like a re-run and awesome son

2011-06-02T20:18:00.000+12:00

Hey there, folks, looks like my old friends at CNZ as given Art and Geo FF the cash that they asked to make Richard Meros salutes the Southern Man into a theatre-thingey, not dissimilar to Otcapohctmahyl. All praise the gods of rationality and reason. If there be Gods for that sort of bushwackery.

Tomorrow we make art

2011-06-02T19:56:00.001+12:00

Tomorrow Meros deals with muesli and legislation. See this post on his justification for cutting up the, so to speak, dance floor. I mean, there is critique and then there is propagandha... eh? And Lenin backs the later.

Photos of the binding session

2011-06-02T19:53:00.001+12:00

Here at L and G we bind our own books, stitching supplied by placenta of first borns, glue provided by the boiled down skin of our enemy's defeated nags. Above is Ruth Bird in the laborious splicing process.

Lager Lager Lager!

Slugs as a cover, pre-binding.

Printey, as the anarchists call him.

Either Giant Slugs or Zebulon.

Tuppance deals to it with the e-gullotine.

Gnanalingam to read Giant Slugs in one full day

2011-06-02T19:42:00.000+12:00

eLaunch lads sitting about having a bevy and Gnanalingam, B., suggests he'll read LG011 in a day. Bah! I say, but he could be one of those speed readers. Know what I mean?

Where are they now?

2011-06-02T19:28:00.001+12:00

Looking at the back catalogue of authors, I ask theeeee, where are you now. And the universe (Google) responds:

Ulrich Haarburste aka Michael Kelly: waiting for his new book; has since published the fantastic My Godawful Life

William Dewey: has been shopping around his Homeland of Pure Joy when not future forecasting.

Nestor Notabilis: AWOL. contact L&G if y'all hear anything new about Notabilis.

Brannavan Gnanalingam: come on, its only been two months since the launch. He's been our retail jockey.

Meros: The Zebulon interview

2011-06-02T18:41:00.001+12:00

James Marr, publishing intern/picket line crossing scab, asks RK Meros about his new book Zebulon, the second in his 2011 releases.

JM: Richard, you've just released a book. My God! You're prolific!

RM: I am young and incautious.

Nevertheless, two books in three months. What else is to come?

Easy Whistle Solo is next. It is an imminently publishable novel and if I had played my cards right as a younger man it would be the story of a great love.

But it's not?

Well it is. But we're here to talk about Zebulon. My book released on June 2.

What is a Zebulon?

In this case, it is a cautionary tale. At the level of the Part (there are Parts and Chapters), the book is about youth, confusion, and resolution in adulthood. The caution is in the making of great claims. Like tonight I was talking with some dolly bird about Slavoj Zizek and making out like I'd read heaps of his work. I mean, I've read three of his books and seen the film Zizek!, but the sound of my voice when I was waffling on, well! It caught me! Zebulon, at its broadest metaphorical level, is about the various ways in which young men and women give up on the ideological rhetoric that was saturated their vivid youth.

At a purely referential level, the name refers to the writings of Zebulon M Pike, and to the hometown of Vic Chesnutt, the musician. I don't want to get into this too much, but lets just say that I grew up in a place not unlike Zebulon, GA. Though I do have to say that I was utterly affected by the fact that Vic Chesnutt's first tour to New Zealand was in July of the year he killed himself by overdosing on muscle relaxants. It makes me think of those lists of places to see before you die and makes me wonder if he had that in mind when he decided to come here. Brannavan Gnanalingam, author of Getting Under Sail, was one of the last people to interview him. Whatever that means...

I hear that its a novel. Is it?

Well, I suppose it is. Its a novel of lots of little pieces of other stories. I have a debate with some friends about the legitimacy of the short story as an art form. I like to say that it is illegitimate - it gets the conversation rolling. And then I concede that Borges and a few others made a real art of it. But aren't many novels just a clever juxtaposition of a number of different short stories? No? Oh well, then, perhaps you are right. But with meta-fiction and chaps like Calvino strolling about (though he's well dead, RIP) I think there might be something to it. Zebulon is in three parts. It also has three distinct books within it. But as my editor said, they come together and wrap up quite tidily... which was my aim, as it is with life, I think.... you see what I am getting at.... ideology making way for pragmatic realism (babies).

Don't tell me the last few pages are just the written version of a baby screaming.

No no! But that's a great idea. I wonder if we can stop the presses.

If it is at the presses there must be a cover and other design. Tell me about how the aesthetics match this book.

Well, I had the help of the talented Shane Fairhall. We sat in some cafe, getting acquainted while I babbled about the broader themes of the book. He listened, and to the best of my recollection, jotted notes in one of those sexy notepads that designers own. Then we went to a church and I pointed out some lovely architectural points which he massaged into the bluey/steepled cover that is. Strangely enough there is some crossover with the brick theme as it appears on the cover of AD Jameson's Giant Slugs which shall be released on the same day. The bricks, as per usual, are the foundational.

Meros has been appearing in your books as a character more than he used to. How did you go from the Helen Clark book, where Meros was the author, to a novel by Meros with Meros as the central character?

I haven't really thought about it. Meros was always a present character in OTCAPOHCTMAHYL (note: a friend once remarked that if the word Otcapohctmahyl appears in print one more time, a dark god of the Aztecs will be summoned). Meros was always trying to be objective about the Young Lover thesis, but his own desire for choosing this subject kept getting in the way. Perhaps with Zebulon the idea of writing a thesis as Meros has been abandoned. Or put to one side. In Privaitising Parts, the first two chapters, situate Meros amongst the pines. From there he took out his chapbook for his buddy to read. So Meros has always been keen to bounce into his own pages. I suppose that is the lesson for the person wishing to be the non-social scientist, or should I say, the asocial scientist. That you will eventually inhabit your work; that it will inhabit you, make you live and breathe.

Thank you for your time, Richard. I respect you and your work.

Thanks James. I also respect you and your work.

[end]

Interview with Giant Slugs author A.D. Jameson

2011-06-02T18:06:00.001+12:00

Lawrence and Gibson: Good afternoon, A D.

A D: Good afternoon, Meros. But it's morning here, on the other side of the world.

How did it come about that you were to work with Lawrence and Gibson to release Giant Slugs?

You know the answer to that as well as I do.

I'm testing your memory.

You'll find it lacking! But I believe you were given the manuscript by our mutual friend Michael Kelly, who at the time called it "the most brilliant thing I have ever read, bar none." Or words akin to that. Which reminds me: I must buy him a case of something nice.
Michael had it because he'd asked to see the MS after reading some excerpts online. I'd emailed him after reading his Ulrich Haarbürste's Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm, which I thought the most brilliant thing I'd ever read, bar none. Read this answer backwards and you have it.

Giant Slugs is a re-telling of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Yes.

How far do you stray from the original?

Very far, at times (most of them). I took primarily Gilgamesh's broad outline—its central plot points—which I then changed to fit my own ludicrous ends. But the story's shape should remain recognizable to anyone who knows it. That said, a knowledge of the Epic is in no way a requirement for reading.

And why the Epic of Gilgamesh?

Because I like it! It's one of my favorites!

Another answer, and one potentially no more illuminating: Giant Slugs is at least partially a response to the US-led Iraq War, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest work of Iraqi literature. If not human literature.
But first and foremost, it's a damn good story, which has been retold for millennia. The authors of the Hebrew Torah and Christian Bible reworked a good chunk, for example.

So the Epic predates God?

Well, one current view of him, at least. She. It.

That would explain the preponderance of fairies, dwarves, and other fearsome critters?

Where? In your bathtub? Dude, nothing explains that!

I understand that you used constrained writing techniques for Giant Slugs, such as Georges Perec’s avoidance of the letter ‘e’ in La Disparation. Can you tell us about the constraints surround Giant Slugs?

Mine were neither as restrictive or as concise. And different chapters employed different constraints. But there were a few overarching rules. The book takes place, conceptually and thematically, across a single day, from predawn to night (even though the actual action spans years). And each chapter has its own identifying color, a Joycean conceit.
To illustrate both: Chapter 6, "Red Lunch," the central chapter, takes place mostly at different lunchtimes, and contains mostly red things. I also sneaked in the word "red" as often as I could. (Daredevilry, very assuredly—but also [is it credible?] cultured, clever edits.)
There's a great deal of of this sort of language play throughout the book; the chapter titles are clues to some of the proceedings. I also included as many puns as I could—indeed, every pun that I thought of.

What scares you most about the release of Giant Slugs?

The fact that it's going to be weeks before I see a single copy! Which is why I kept hounding you for photos.

And see how assured my keystrokes are, surrounded by a warehouse of them! Can you imagine such a thing? Are you enthralled by the reproduction, the low hum of a distant printer?

... Yes!

Tell me a little about the cover image and how you came to use it.

My friend Philip Durkin originally suggested that I use an image by the land artist and sculptor Charles Simonds. When that lead didn't pan out, I made a list of every visual artist whom I knew, then scoured their websites, looking for something comparable (or at least reminiscent). Waiting for me at the very end of that search was a beautiful image by Stephanie Nadeau that can now be seen on the cover.

Both Simonds and Nadeau use brickish imagery. Was the process of writing Giant Slugs akin to bricklaying?

I'm afraid I wouldn't know, having never laid bricks. But you've touched on something foundational in the novel (pardon the pun). Gilgamesh makes a big deal about bricks: key passages in the epic celebrate how Gilgamesh built Uruk's walls. And one-third of that city was devoted to clay pits, where more bricks were always being made. The walls were decorated with pictograms, which in time became cuneiform, the first written language. This brick/wall/tablet/writing connection fascinated me, and provided the central thematic structure of the novel.

So it was important for me to have bricks somewhere on the cover.

When I imagine Chicago, I see (like in Wellington) pages aflutter, and Nelson Algren.

Newspaper pages aflutter, I'll assume you mean; they drift amidst the plastic bags, to rather charming effect. Algren's ghost can still be spied in certain bars, if you're seated at the right stool.

I recall how someone once told me that the quintessential Chicago accent was that of the Berenstain Bears.

The Charmin Bears, I think they meant.

Can literature thrive in Chicago? Does it thrive for you?

There is a very welcoming literary community here—indeed, there are several literary communities; I count myself fortunate to be part of more than one of them. And living in Chicago has been very productive for me; I've completed five book-length manuscripts in the past six years.

Though I might have finished even more were I not so given over to watching movies. (Chicago is one of the best cities in the US for cinema—there's a reason why Roger Ebert and Jonathan Rosenbaum live here.) Plus the lake is very pretty; I like lying next to it. That takes up a lot of my time.

Then you, sir, are a giant slug. And that's The Word.
[end]

Underground author burrows into hi-speed internet

2011-05-27T10:15:00.003+12:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE MAY 23

June 1 Press Release - "Giant Slugs invade!"

On June 2 instead of the usual book launch wine and cheese event, Lawrence & Gibson and Richard Meros will release a deluge of material on www.lawrenceandgibson.org. The collective will cram YouTube book readings, interviews with authors present and past, an essay on artist-oriented collectives and the launch of an online store into a one hour period.

James Marr, assistant editor, is looking forward to the evening: “This collective [Lawrence and Gibson] came together to give authors more control over the production process and a greater access to the revenue their books generate.”

“While the internet has allowed a direct connection between musicians and their audience, by-passing the dinosaurs of the record industry, authors have not yet found a way to really benefit from the opportunities afforded online. E-Books go some way towards rectifying this problem, but for Lawrence & Gibson the issue is not just a format for distribution - pixels versus paperbacks – it’s also profits”

The two books to be released are A D Jameson’s Giant Slugs, a largely silly, slightly filthy, pun-laden Epicurean retelling of the ages-old Epic of Gilgamesh and Zebulon: a cautionary tale by Richard Meros. While Meros is a Wellingtonian, Jameson alights from the other windy city, Chicago.

The two books share a bildungsroman plot, but are set in radically different locations. In Giant Slugs, the narrator is ousted from his home Uruk, a somewhat Sumerian stage; in Zebulon the Nootropic isles, a near-future New Zealand, are the home to gadfly Meros and his bawdy, tawdry cast.

Zebulon is Meros second release of 2011. Asked as to how many more releases eager-beaver readers might be able to gnaw into before the year is out, he replied: “One more. Or two. Or three. I’m just taking every day as it comes, and if I happen to write a book, well... damned good luck!”

Surf over to www.lawrenceandgibson.org on Thursday, 2 June for the eLaunch. BYO.

For more information email James Marr: lawrenceandgibson@gmail.com

"every establishment needs an underdog to nip at its heels..... Lawrence & Gibson have emerged as the pack with the loudest yaps and the best placed nips... a rare beast - attractively designed books with clever content" Dominion Post, May 2011

Dominion Post review of Lawrence and Gibson; books

2011-05-18T20:59:00.002+12:00

[CLICK TO ENLARGE]

In the past, there have been rash accusations by producer types (who don't know a damned about art) that Lawrence & Gibson takes issues of copyright in vain. Well, let me just say that we consider the reproduction of any media review that we are discussed in to be part (and parcel) of our fair use rights for critical analysis of the pieces, which, in turn, have quoted from our texts using this fair use rationale.

That said, I am not actually sure that either Privatizing Partz or Getting Under Zail are mentioned by name in this estimable steamer. For archivists, I would like it known that I am presently listening to Jackson C Franke and Maxine Funke - that is what something like iTunes does to one's track selection.

We Eat These Charges for Breakfast, Your Honour

2011-05-17T21:36:00.001+12:00

Communication from Richard Meros.
Views expressed by Meros are not necessarily held by the Lawrence & Gibson publishing collective.

" Soon there is gonna be this art exhibition at Garrett St under the title 'concerned citizens'. In that exhibition I am selling muesli with berry soaked strips of the Terrorism Suppression Act (2002) in it. People will buy these bowls for $5 apiece. The funds, minus costs, will go to helping defray expenses of people who are still being chewed up by the criminal justice system.

If I were an odd type of pun-smith I would call it the criminal just-is system. I would do that to emphasise that it seems like the procedure of these trials is as much the punishment as any additional sentencing.

If I were a liberal I would say that my muesli is to protest the erosion of civil liberties likely to occur if a judge only trial were to take place.

If I were a comedian I would focus on the berry-soaked strips coming from the fertile anti-terror terra of the USA.

If I were a realist I would focus on Tuhoe and the Urewera ranges where the alleged firearms offences took place as being part of a land that was never ceded to the crown. I would add that the crown ought to be on trial for its violations of Te Mana Motuhake o Tuhoe. I'd not even have to get into wider issues of Tino Rangatiratanga nor the Treaty. (Tuhoe did not sign the treaty).

If I were a pragmatic realist, with a bent for representative democracy I would say that these trials are a bad advertisement for clean, green 100% sanitised Aotearoa-if-you-say-so and will cost us in a Rugby World Cup year.

But I am all of these things. I truly am! And so I say them all. I say them all at once."

Four and a half Kropotkins out of five aint bad

2011-05-11T14:02:00.001+12:00

While trawling the net in my own version of the Ukrainian fisherman paid NZ$250 a month to live and work on ships off New Zealand's coasts I came across what is ostensibly the first review of RK Meros' Privatising Parts in the Worker's Party of Aotearoa/New Zealand magazine Spark. The review is by Wellington socialite (not socialist) Joel Cosgrove. It can be observed as a pdf online. Or in hard copy whereever Marxist-Leninist ideologies are lodged. Personally, I'm a Leninist-Marxist, but it is not time for another splinter group, is it? Anyhow, let's hope the far-right libertarians get their act together. Or maybe that Chap-Man would be more interested in Meros forthcoming Dating Westerners: tips for the new rich from the developing world?

Finally, it will be interesting to see how Cosgrove's erudite yet working class analysis plays against that of the forthcoming review in the booshwah media. I'd expect Cosgrove to win by TKO in the seventh, which is coming in at odds of 13-2.

Dewey Back from the Dead (back-catalogue revised!)

2011-05-09T08:52:00.003+12:00

In anticipation of June's eLaunch of two new Lawrence & Gibson titles, our tanned intern James Marr has set the following questions to William Dewey, author of a novel and short story collection through this publishing collective. Not sure what "BEAVER" has to do with it, though...

Q: Kia ora William Dewey. How is the weather wherever you are?

A: I'm in Denver, Colorado, on the brink of summer, but the weather these past few days seems determined to relapse back to winter. I'm talking bitter winds. I'm talking cold and snow.

Q: In Aotearoa/New Zealand you released stories based in cities you have lived in in the United States of America. Has Wellington since taken up such a place in your newer writings?

A: I've recently finished work on a novel called The Homeland of Pure Joy that is basically a gushing love letter to Wellington. The city is personified as a moody, tempestuous lover, given to stupid fits of gloom, but irretrievably beautiful and vibrant no matter what is pouring out of her.

Q: What is it that you suspect pours out of Wellington? I always feel that the wind is the wrong metaphor for how people relate to the city, unless taking shelter is invoked.

A: But the wind is part of it. Wind and icy rain. It's those little unpleasant things she does that make her that much harder to love.

Q: What writing are you working on at the moment? What sort of inspirations (literary or otherwise) have made these possible?

A: Most of the writing I'm doing lately is taking the form of pleas for money. Some people, you know, and some institutions, have more money than they can reasonably handle, and I feel compelled to offer solutions to ease their burden.

I've started a writing workshop for the homeless community here in Denver, and that has led me to witness some pretty remarkable things, inspiration-wise. As an aside, what does Wellington do with its homeless? That's a question that always confounded me.

Q: The homeless in Wellington either go to jail, a couple of night shelters or Auckland. In my many affected moods where I affirmation the worth of the Ancient Greek Cynic fondness for homelessness, I imagine the homeless Wellingtonian as living, uncomfortably (in a psychic sense) on High St or Wellesley St. Or I think of that great book by John A Lee called Shiner Slattery, about a bum on the road in the South Island at the start of the 20th century. I guess we also don't have as many homeless because of the whole Unemployment Benefit arrangement. Oh, and that reminds me of a James K Baxter poem from Jerusalem Sonnets where he talks about walking barefoot through Kelburn and staring at the turds and oil in the harbour, snoring off in pigeon park and a literary skirmish with the now defunct The Truth tabloid. Say, what was one of the inspiring things that writing with the homeless has taught you.

A: Let me just say I understand there's a risk here of coming across as patronising. I want to avoid that. All these men and women have remarkable stories to tell, and I'm happy to encourage them. Sometimes it's just about exorcising those stories, get them out, cleanse the soul. The writing itself is not remarkable. Sometimes it is not even comprehensible.

I should say the style is not remarkable. What does impress me is the power of metaphor so many of these writers have. It is not showy, not overly poetic like that tripe above about Wellington weather, but metaphor at its most basic as an extension of language. They're trying to convey very complex ideas about abandonment and isolation and desperation, and it comes out very organically in simple, beautiful metaphors.

Q: What are the conditions needed to be met for the possibility of your returning to the fair isles of NZ? There is, you may know, a shortfall of bouncers for the Rugby World Cup... any interest in getting involved in that?

A: I'm sort of counting on Lawrence and Gibson to keep blossoming, as it has done so remarkably over these past few years, to become what Immigration New Zealand deems "an organisation of national repute," at which point in time I expect Mr Meros will rush to sponsor me for a residence permit. I'm sort of reluctant to try the whole bouncer thing, because someone told me that bouncers aren't aloud to carry concealed weapons in New Zealand. You people are barbaric.

Q: What can you tell us, then, about what is required of immigrant writers like yourself?
Why not just marry a Kiwi (note to party people: I think we still have the Male 25-25 drought)?
Or immigrate as an IT wunderkid or nurse?
BTW, have IT wunderkids or nurses ever featured in your writings?

A: I see four questions there.
To the first, my response is: "Not much."
To the second: What I want you to understand here is that it is not enough for me to marry just "a" Kiwi; I want to wed myself to the entire race.
To the third: I lack the vital skills necessary for either nursing or IT wunderkidding.
And to the fourth: No. Not yet.

For more on William Dewey at Lawrence and Gibson. Or his own website.

Exit Interview 2

2011-04-22T13:48:00.000+12:00

The second in our 'exit interviews' catching up with our two new authors a few weeks after their book releases. Today our Lawrence and Gibson intern asks Brannavan Gnanalingam for his thoughts...

Q: Mr Gnanalingam, so you've released a book then... what was the moment when you first felt that you were 'in print'?

BG: It's quite an odd feeling. You spend so long seeing it as a word document, that seeing it as a proper, tactile thing is partly thrilling and partly terrifying because you suddenly realise it's something that people will pick up and judge. It's also nerve-wracking that the interpretation of the book is now completely out of your hands - I can't direct people anymore and say what I think the book is about because my opinion no longer matters.

Q: But do you also find that people have come to you seeking clarification (given that Getting Under Sail does mash a little fiction in with the travelogue)?

BG: Yep, it's the fictional versus travelogue aspect that I've discussed most with people who have read it. While the events for the most part happened, the characters and the way people react/interact is mostly fictional. The three main characters are my own imagination. I'd think the fact I told it from a first person point of view may have confused people into thinking the narrator is me - it's not entirely the case. I'm not as much of a snob as the narrator for a start.

Q: As a debut author, but long term arts critic, how do you see the state of publishing? How has your experience of getting published affected these views?

BG: It seems like quite a hard market to break into. There's that Catch-22 situation of no-one publishing you if you haven't published a book before, which makes it difficult for any young writer. Also, if you're not attached to a reputable publisher, it makes it difficult to get reviewed or taken seriously by a book shop, which further compounds things. As a reviewer, I've reviewed young and/or new and/or obscure artists, but never really thought about where as a reviewer I stood in the whole scheme of things - I think this process will hopefully be a spur to ensure that I don't end up playing the game of ignoring the battlers.

Q: How do you think the online retail trade and e-books will effect these small publishers?

BG: There'll be still the same issue of distribution, which has held back the small publishers for centuries. A book is an artform that requires a bit of a time commitment - it's not like a song that you can simply hear on the internet and decide if you like it. You still need either that critical assistance, or that harder to get word of mouth thing. I'm not sure if e-books will necessarily help. Do people listen to more music now that there are i-Pods with huge space, or does it simply change how people consume something they would already have consumed?

Q: If you will, describe the best state of mind that writing a book puts you into?

BG: I read this study the other day about how porn puts people into this weird trance. I guess writing does a similar kind of thing - you do lose sense of time and space and all that jazz. Though writing is much more of a slog, probably doesn't have that money shot at the end.

Q: Do you have a routine that allows you to get into this trance? Any requirements, like complete solitude or a background noise of a public transport system?

BG: I'm pretty ad hoc with my writing habits. I maintain a notebook of thoughts/observations during the day, and then if I can at night put them into whatever I'm working on at the moment. In the weekends I try to write more in the mornings - I don't like doing anything until I've bashed out a good amount.

Q: And the worst? Are their pits of horror, abysses so plural and profound you wish you'd never plucked your quill from the duck's soft underwing?

BG: It's usually a cathartic process, so usually the depths are splurged onto the page. It's more the fear that someone you know might recognise themselves in something you've just writing, and you know you'll have to try to pretend that you made it up.

Q: If you could advise on what two books should bookend Getting Under Sail what would those books be?

BG: Hmmm, I haven't read a lot of travel writing so it wouldn't be anything like specific travel writing (though Ryszard Kapuściński's The Shadow of the Sun was an influence). I'd say A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (Getting Under Sail tries to attack the racist structuring of that book - and frankly baffling critical adulation that A Bend in the River seems to have received) and Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, mainly because the narrator is such a wannabe Geoffrey Firman.

Q: Going forward, that is to say, moving forward, what would be your ideal circumstances for a writer in residence position.

BG: I'm a big city person, so somewhere like Paris, or Buenos Aires, or Accra, or Istanbul would be ideal - someplace with a lot of things going on, and enough to keep me distracted.

Q: And in that city how would you spend your days and nights? Writing by the first lights of dawn or by the reflected arc of some flickering streetlamp? What foil would keep your writing in its most trance-like state?

BG: If I didn't have to worry about making a living, I'd write in the morning, spend the afternoon wandering around, and spend the evenings trying to be social. Routine would be my best friend, but it's quite a hard/limiting thing to try and get.

Exit interviews

2011-04-17T16:47:00.000+12:00

Three weeks on from the launch of Richard Meros' Privatising Parts we check in with our stalwart author. Look out for a similar interview with Brannavan Gnanalingam in the coming days.

Q: Mr Meros, so you've released a book then... what was the moment when you first felt that you were 'in print'?

MEROS: Well, this is my fifth book, fourth as Meros, so the thrill is not as strong as it once was. One of the most important moments for me is when the collective receives a letter with the International Standard Book Number on is, or ISBN. Joy Grove has been the ISBN librarian at the National Library for every ISBN that Lawrence and Gibson gets and when I see her name I am transported to a place very similar to her name. There is also, always a special moment when I enter Rebel Press to help with the binding and splicing; that hot glue smell and patchouli.

Q: As a long time member of Lawrence and Gibson, how do you see the state of publishing?

MEROS: I would like to say that I am positive about the future of publishing. For me, and I think that I can speak for the whole collective, the publishers exist to serve the authors. I would love to see more collectives of authors establish of join small presses, extending their authorship to other areas of publishing. Writing should be a broadly conceptual activity, not a cloistered task. Well, maybe that's just me.

Q: How do you think the online retail trade and e-books will affect these small publishers?

MEROS: I see the music industry as, while obviously a different set-up, having shown the possibilities for books. Obviously there’ll never be a situation where people can bind books at home nor will print outs ever replace the bound book. But with the ability to sell and ship as well as offer e-books to those content to use e-readers, books and e-books will enjoy a relationship like vinyl and .mp3s. Smaller publishers will still serve their communities, while the major publishers will continue to market on the sides of busses.

Q: If you will, describe the best state of mind that writing a book puts you into?

MEROS: It has been caffeine. I wrote the majority of my new books in the Hotel Olumiyeh in Aleppo, Syria. Every morning I would rise with the sun (there were no curtains) use my oversize cezve to make a few cups of coffee, spread some fig jam on white buns and get into it.

Q: Do you have a routine that allows you to get into this trance? Any requirements, like complete solitude or a background noise of a public transport system?

MEROS: I was listening to a lot of hip-hop. My computer had been sent to me in Istanbul. It was the first time in months I had listened to my favourite music. I had to use headphones, though, for the walls were as thin as wallpaper. Actually, I had to get to bed early because Ahmed, next door (a former soldier in the Army, living off a sickness discharge pension, estranged from his wife) snored like the Quetta Express.

Q: If you could advise on what two books should bookend Privatising Parts what would those books be?

Oh I don’t know! Two other copies of Privatising Parts. Other Meros books – On the conditions and possibilities… for sure, as well as my forthcoming Zebulon. Perhaps the other forthcoming books Easy Whistle Solo. But of books not mine? A Lonely Planet that is more than ten years old and well thumbed, with margin notes. The 2003 one for the Middle East, with a lovely orange spine and pre-Iraq invasion notes. On the other side would be Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total Revolution, a clear, concise philosophical book.

Q: Going forward, that is to say, moving forward, what would be your ideal circumstances for a writer in residence position.

I feel like I need an assistant. Some languorous, mostly sexual entanglement that involved cigarettes, intrigues and few–very few–recriminations. There’d be thin, printed dressing gowns, unpaid hotel bills – something like Henri with Dirty in George Bataille’s Blue of Noon. And you know there would have to be something that comes afterwards… I’m not interested in oblivion, [I’m] not interested in death.

Q: An exciting book, it is. You would see yourself in Paris of London, then?

M: No. In India. Kolkatta or thereabouts.

Bhuja 4 DA Bourgeoisie

2011-04-15T14:47:00.000+12:00

Hey there,

Just read this on The Onion. Funny, really, when we packed out Temporary cafe with about a hundred people, many teeming onto the footpath of Dixon Street, drawing in perplexed passers by. Perhaps it was the bhuja mix. Or the couple of hundred of dollars on the bar. Nevertheless, what a crowd! What sales! What strategy!

Visitors to this site

2011-04-06T14:09:00.000+12:00

From most to least, people visiting this site are from the following locales. I urge you to comment loudly on this fact set:

United States
New Zealand
United Kingdom
Germany
Russia
Netherlands
China
South Korea
Canada
Thailand

May I

2011-04-01T14:04:00.002+13:00

As the two new books Getting Under Sail and Privatising Parts edge out of the warehouse and onto the shelves, a page or two fluttering out like pine needles to carpet the floor of your home or mine, may I offer a look into the future of the publishing collective for the coming month?

In May, late late May, Richard Meros will be launching his first pure novel Zebulon: a cautionary tale. But what is the Zebulon you are reffering to?

Also at that time we will be releasing the epic Giant Slugs by A D Jameson, a chap who punches above his weight and is on the ascendency in Chicago's literary community. See his bio in the aforementioned link. But what are the slugs that you are referring to?

Smacking Radio Racking

2011-03-30T09:59:00.001+13:00

Saturday April 2nd at 12.15pm New Zealand standard time Richard Meros will chat to Mark Amery on the radio programme Caffeine and Aspiring. The meeting was organised by Phil Reid via email. A pdf copy of the book Privatising Parts, which Amery is charged with discussing, has been forwarded to the host, as well as links to this website, www.lawrenceandgibson.org, that handily direct Mr Amery to the press release for the book, as well as 'a wee Q and A with Richard Meros'. The discussion is expected to be ten minutes long and to be professional in nature. People outside of the Wellington/Kapiti broadcasting zone can listen to the messages at www.radioactive.fm

Images of the people who will be speaking are below. Meros (l), Amery (c) and Reid (r).

And by the way:

http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/index.cfm?id=67562604-8280-4d56-8af4-a27f59d70de5

Lost translations refound, unscrewed

2011-03-25T09:19:00.000+13:00

O! I’m conscious

of

my state

of

being isolated

from

others!

In 2007 Lawrence and Gibson released two books at an art opening by Tom Henry and Teresa Samuels. They may have used pseudonames... I did. Above is some of Tom's new work. It is prettier than a picture. The word 'link' goes to Tom's in construction website where you can see, for yourself, his images.

West Africa meets New Zealand in polyrhythmic arts extravaganza

2011-03-22T11:22:00.000+13:00

The Lawrence and Gibson publishing collective have put together an eclectic evening of entertainment with the release of two new books, accompanied by a debut album for Thursday March 24th.

Brannavan Gnanalingam’s Getting Under Sail, a West-African travelogue will be complemented by a similarly themed DJ set by TV Disko. Richard Meros’ Privatising Parts political treatise will be complemented by Don Franks’ political songs. To top off the evening, The Phrenologist will release his debut album Tales.

Getting Under Sail chronicles Brannavan Gnanalingam and two other erstwhile Kiwis in their ill-prepared trip through West Africa. Gnanalingam may be familiar to all classes of Wellington readers from his journalistic efforts at the Listener, the Dominion Post, the Lumiere Reader, and Salient. Getting Under Sail is his first book.

Privatising Parts is the election year follow up to Richard Meros’ first book On the conditions and possibilities of Helen Clark taking me as her Young Lover. As Clark did not take Meros, he decides that it is love itself that is malfunctioning. The vivid logic of Freakonomics meets the tattle-tale polemic of I’ve Been Thinking in the first shot across the bow of the 2011 election.

Tales is the debut album by Wellington act The Phrenologist. It consists of nine songs that will drag you on a pleasant journey from the asylum to the opium den.

“With Wellington’s street-filling festivals imploding due to a lack of funds, the independent DIY arts scenes are returning to centre stage,” said James Marr of Lawrence and Gibson.

“We’re here, we veer... so get used to it!”

Attend the triple launch the Garden Bar, 13 Dixon St, Te Aro from 6pm.
Free entry. Drinks and nibblets provided.

Paper Crushes

2011-03-17T17:01:00.004+13:00

Semiotext(e) (NYC, USA)

I would say that they probably have offices with frazzled interns. They’re the best at selection and cost if one excludes those bookwallahs at Ferozsons in Lahore. You know, Chris Kraus got out of WGTN at just the right time. Or, as de Botton would say, did she?...

Make Now Press (North Hollywood, CA, USA)

I would say that they play with concepts and constraints. I like that a lot. Plus they publish Kenny G and Oulipo stuff. Smooch.

Seagull Books (Kolkata, India and London, UK)

I would say I went there and wiped my greasy kati roll fingers on their imprints. Then I spent a day in their library reading up on Marshall McLuhan and hijras. Then I went to their art gallery. Then I tried to convince a magazine that I should write an article about them. But alas, ‘twas nixed.

Dalkey Archive Press (Champaign, London, Dublin)

I found out about this press from a pal of AD. How else do crushes evolve? Crushes on presses. And how does one get over a crush? You smell that which crushes. And as I wait for a copy of book from Dalkey I also wait for the smell of perfume to waft out of the parcel. I wait for the gilt of the pages forged in dedication to literature not in dedication to waiting times at airports.

Print Pals

2011-03-17T16:52:00.001+13:00

Rebel Press (Wellington, New Zealand)

We’ve been palling around this bunch for nigh on five years. We first got tight talking about binding technique and local printshops. Then their Trades Hall locale released Valerie Morse’s Against Freedom, bought a guillotine, printer and binder and we got especially close. Lawrence & Gibson and Rebel Press are like old pals now, rocking our rocking chairs as the glue fumes dilate our souls. They have a poster of me and Will on their wall with a sign that says something like ‘the boss’, or ‘business opportunity’. I like to think that we help them too, you know, to pay the rent.

I would say that we share air, recycling bins and some (but not all) political aims and intents.

Titus Books (Auckland, New Zealand)

Me and Sarah went to Auckland so that I could say that I’d shown her around NZ a bit. I got in touch with Brett Cross and Scott Hamilton, and they suggested that we meet for a beer at the Puhoi pub, where Kendrick Smithyman used to dwell. I’d actually met Brett once before as he toured with Bill Direen and his well built backing band. I’d given Brett a copy of Richard Meros salutes the Southern Man, but that version had ‘Meros’ and ‘Salutes’ in the same font, and Bill – being a bit continental – pronounced the name Richard Meros Salutes. Pretty Epic, che. So me and Sarah, Scott and Brett drank our beers. Scott and Sarah talked about Sarah’s work in Georgia and about the Abkhazian conflict. I talked with Brett as we went through our respective catalogues. I remember feeling like we were some sort of separated and lost tribes of underground publishing, that there was a chasm between us and our approaches, but also a willingness to understand what each other were doing. He’s apparently got a guillotine now, and a printer and binder (with a roughener). I hope my advice was useful.

I would say that we share a memorandum of understanding.

Mutable Sound (Portland, OR, USA)

Our new recruit AD Jameson had his book Amazing Adult Fantasy published by Mutable Sound. They live in America, on the West Coast, in Oregon. That means doing swapsies costs way more than it would if I were just sending books to Auckland or Dunedin. But then, first up, Gabe offers to send me a book called A Survey of My Failures This Far with a nice note about how if it were a sequel he’d tag it with “This time it’s personal”.

I would say we share membership in a soon to be solidified international community of publishers, if only we can overcome the issue that Bataille found with Acéphale.

Brannavan Gnanalingam answers an intern's Q and A

2011-03-14T09:22:00.002+13:00

Brannavan Gnanalingam is a writer, traveller and will be published by Lawrence and Gibson on March 24th. He recently participated in an interview with one of our interns:

INTERN: How you doing Brannavan? Fancy a cup of coffee, or more of a tea man?

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM: I'm more a tea person. A gourd of mate would do me nicely.

I: So there you were in Wellington and you just thought you'd go to West Africa. What was the most reactionary, uninformed flailing from a friend or family member to this decision?

BG: I had people say things like, "wear a condom", "why would you want to go there?", "is Mugabe there?" and "ohmigodicantbelieveyouregoingtoafricayouguysaresocrazy". I was in Ghana when the election violence was happening in Kenya, and despite that being the other side of a continent, I had at least ten emails from friends telling me to be careful because of Kenya.

I: You mention in the book that people treated you like any other black man in West Africa, until you revealed your accent and primitive Franco-phonic abilities. Where did people guess that you were from? Anyone cop on to the NZ accent?

BG: I've had this problem most places I've travelled, and for customs people at least, I think they are going to bust some international terrorist ring when they see me - so presumably wherever they think terrorists come from? It wasn't really much of an issue with the ordinary folk because everyone of us stood out. Some people thought I had an English accent, and some people thought my accent was from South Africa. As for my French, I think it was just a confusingly anti-French accent.

I: Is West Africa known for its cuisine? Not to me it aint? What was the best thing you ate?

BG: Senegalese cuisine in particular was incredible. Despite the fact I got sick there, the food stood out. Fresh, healthy, full of flavour - Saint Louis' yassa poissons are something everybody should try. Unless you're vegetarian.

I: Do you think that you'll be going back to West Africa any time soon?

BG: I'd love to - I'd particularly love to keep going around West Africa - Cameroon and Gabon in particular appeal. I'd like to spend more time in Burkina too.

I: You said in a previous interview that you wrote the book in a Parisian cafe. How did your emotional relation to the book span the time it took you to write it?

BG: I wrote a first draft very quickly. I was writing as I was going along and when I got to Paris and was by myself for good chunks of time, I had the post-travel blues, and witnessing the complete disparity which resulted from colonial exploitation. So it kinda explains the tone of the book, but I tempered it down a little with the subsequent re-drafting, as I was able to forget I had travelled when I got back into my Wellington routine. I still think it captures some of my feelings I have about the trip - though I think my time was much more fun than I present it in the book.

I: Any more travel plans in the pipeline? Did you learn anything from the way you wrote Getting Under Sail that will help you with writing on this trip?

BG: I'd like to go through Central Asia sometime. Not sure why. I think I learnt that I need to try harder to engage with people on my travel - that created the best experiences in West Africa, and that certainly created the best experiences in a couple of trips I did since.

Meros Listener article on Pakistan train ride

2011-03-12T13:19:00.001+13:00

From behind the pay wall, three weeks since seen in paper, appears the full article of Mr Richard Meros' 28 hour train journey from Lahore to Quetta. It can be accessed at the New Zealand Listener's website. or by clicking 'here'. It is titled 'Give Me Back My Sandals'. Funny story after the jump.

So, the sandals that Meros was wearing at the time had been acquired three nights before at the backpacker-renowned Sufi music night. Meros, and three others, had been to some concert hall where all the sandals were piled up outside. The host, wanting to keep ours separate and safe, put the sandals around a corner. All was well until Meros returned and only two of the original four pairs were present, excluding Meros'. So the host looked at his feet, scoured around the area and bought back a nice pair or blue 'Made in Pakistan' sandals. And that was that!

Media Release for Privatising Parts

2011-03-11T12:00:00.008+13:00

ANTI-HERO OF 2008 ELECTION RETURNS WITH NEW BOOK
Wellington author Richard Meros returns with the first literary salvo of the 2011 election, Privatising Parts.

When Helen Clark failed to heed the logic of Meros’ On the conditions and possibilities of Helen Clark taking me as her Young Lover in 2008 she also lost the leadership of the nation. But Helen’s error does not stand alone. In 2008, according to Treasury, errors in love not only cost the New Zealand economy a whopping $600 million in lost productivity, but an immeasurable quantity of happiness.

Richard Meros is now amongst Aotearoa’s saddest of the sad. In early 2009, left wing bloggers, embittered by Helen Clark’s failure to secure a fourth term, turned on him. Like Salmon Rushdie evading his fatwah, Meros left his fixed abode for a life of freedom camping. Shaken, and with only a shonky laptop and a Toyota Townace to his name, Meros analysed Helen’s failure.

His answer came in the form of the unassailable logic of free market economics: Helen failed to take Meros as a Young Lover for she was already contractually obliged to a monogamous relationship.

“To save such future errors the National government needs to privatise love,” Meros claims.

“Only the private sector’s know-how and can-do, along with glorious technological advancements, will dissolve the nation’s heartache. Mr Key, if you are listening: privatise love or suffer the same fate as Clark!”

The problem: how can Meros convince the leader of the National Party, the Rt. Hon Key, that the policy of Privatising Parts is what the constituency needs?

“Some may think that our man’s new oeuvre maneuvers towards deep manure,” says James Marr, a co-editor of Lawrence and Gibson. “But Meros has laid diamonds in the roughage.”

Lawrence & Gibson are proud to present Richard Meros’ Privatising Parts Book Launch.
Thursday March 24th at 6pm at Garden Bar, 13 Dixon Street, Wellington.

a wee Q&A with Richard Meros

2011-03-10T12:20:00.002+13:00

One weeks ago L&G sub-editor James Marr put the following questions to Richard Meros about his new book Privatising Parts. He had this to say.

James Marr: Hi Richard. So how has life been in New Zealand since Helen left office

Richard Meros: No idea. I have been freedom camping for the last couple of years, avoiding the newspapers, bloggers and even the six o'clock news.

JM: And while you were freedom camping you wrote Privatising Parts?

RM: Amongst other things. Actually, I wrote seven books, but three of them are not publishable at this stage.

JM: Oh, yeah? Isn't that for the publishers to decide? And what were these unpublishable books about?

RM: Their titles pretty much speak for them. The three books are: Tino Rangatiratanga Motherfucker!, The History of Art and other essays and Fear of Novels.

JM: So what inspired Privatising Parts?

RM: I was escaping Wellington and the backlash against my supposed role in the fall of Helen's government. I was hurt that so few, particularly those in government, understood the book. If they had got it, Helen would still be ruling. Anyhow, I had beaten myself up enough times about how the Labourites and I had failed, when I came to the realisation that everyone always fails in love.

JM: And so love must be privatised?

RM: Of course. We've treated love as some intimate act for too long.

JM: But doesn't that mean that love is already private?
RM: Well it is private in that it is for the individual and not for the institution, but it is actually part-public and part-private. Love exists in the intimate sphere. And it was Labour's job to nationalise love by having Helen take a young lover. Once love had entered the public sphere through nationalisation (institutions for couple making and for continual assessment) then National could privatise love and make it gloriously efficient.

JM: How so?

RM: For example, you know when you have to break up with someone and you can't really give them a proper excuse apart from 'it is not working'?

JM: Sure.
RM: Well with privatised parts, there would be a company that will have assessed whether you are working well as a couple or not, and they will be the ones to provide rigorous quantitative and qualitative reasons why a relationship should end... or why a new one should begin.

JM: Sounds good to me. Thanks for your time, Richard.
RM: One last thing?

JM: One.
RM: The book will be launched along with Brannavan Gnanalingam's Getting Under Sail on March 24th at Temporary, 13 Dixon Street, Wellington. Tino Rangatiratanga Motherfucker!, The History of Art and other essays and Fear of Novels. The first has been a work in progress since December 2005, but I just can't quite get it right. The second is what it sounds like, but an art historian friend said that it was lame so I will eventually use it for something else (but what does she know? she's no economist). The final one was a novel/travelogue that felt a little pedestrian... maybe it will go somewhere, someday.

2011-03-10T10:27:00.000+13:00

"Just 15% of individuals have an efficient way of interpreting and reacting to the world. Those are the brutal statistics..."

name the scholar and be in to win! what do you win? access to the 15% that's what!

http://www.richardprebble.com/audio.asp

DEBUT BOOK FROM LONG-TIME JOURNO, FIRST-TIME AUTHOR

2011-03-09T10:46:00.000+13:00

Media Release - Tuesday March 08, 2011

After nearly a year of hibernation Wellington publishing collective Lawrence & Gibson is back with both a new book and a new author.

Brannavan Gnanalingam’s ‘Getting Under Sail’ tells the story of three New Zealanders on an ad hoc road-trip through West Africa. Starting in Morocco, the three aim to reach Ghana. Via Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo and Benin. Their general cluelessness is hampered by arrests, their stinginess, and their overall refusal to engage with the people around them.

A sly critique on stereotypes of "Africa", Getting Under Sail is at once a deeply cynical travelogue, a wistful coming-of-age tale, and comic account of snobbery and entitlement. It's also a little adventure tale, told by a narrator who thinks Kerouac, a guide book, a smattering of French, and friends are all you need to travel.
“V.S. Naipaul with a heart? Paul Theroux with a friend? Bill Bryson with cajones?,” Lawrence and Gibson junior editor Richard Meros asks.
“ No, no, no. Leave your superlatives in your valise. Gnanalingam doesn’t hype up the places he visits, the friends he loses or the characters he encounters.”
Author Brannavan Gnanalingam has won awards and been published in all sorts of places, including the Listener, the Dominion Post, and was part of the Lumiere Reader's Qantas Media award winning Film Festival team However, he has never been published by Lawrence & Gibson. All that is changing with his debut novel, Getting Under Sail which is set to be released on March 24.
Lawrence & Gibson are proud to present Brannavan Gnanalingam’s Getting Under Sail Book Launch.
Thursday March 24th at 6pm at Garden Bar, 13 Dixon Street, Wellington.
FOR MORE INFORMATION AND REVIEW COPIES CONTACT:
Murdoch Stevens
027 768 6322
lawrenceandgibson (at) gmail.com

the self-immolation of a liberal democrat

2011-03-04T14:20:00.000+13:00

This weekend, placards down, we will bind the books that are on the browser box to your left: Mero, Gnanalingam, glue and paper. covers to be reemed at 300 gram paper. double siding. the smell of a small anarchist press.

Meros says, "I am most fortunate to live in this, the best of all possible worlds"
Gnanalingam responds, "que droll, you flippant Pangloss. hey, careful with the guillotine."
Neason gleams, "shall I fetch the tacos?"
Sad Girl asks, "is it time for me to jump off the page and into your hearts?"
James Marr announces, "OK, but only for fifteen minutes.. hey weren't you the ones with the free-love theme?"

In unrelated news, but related to the following image.

I AM (insert name here)

2011-02-26T12:57:00.000+13:00

I am Kurt Cobain
I am a prophet
I am the band
I am Tom Dallow
I am Kylie Minogue
I am printing off (italics) Getting Under Sail
I am printing off (italics) Privatising Parts
I am Jesus Christ
I am Barack Obama
I am the editor of The Onion
I am Katie M
I am a pie
I am with my friends
suck on that

The Quetta Express

2011-02-21T10:25:00.002+13:00

From Meros:

The Feb 26 issue of the Listener publishes my travel story that was provisionally titled The Quetta Express. The article has been published with the title 'Give me back my sandals'.

If there were, right now, the man or woman in this shed which I use to right from (thanks Uncle Jim) then I would slap him across the face with white gloves. Then I would challenged her to a duel. Then I would get my second to not fill shot into this man's gun. I would get my second to put shot into my gun. Then I would drive her to the cliffs out on the Miramar peninsula and I would say "Listen Buck, you tell me that The Quetta Express is a simple, crystalline and classic title for a travel article and we can put all of this behind us." She would refuse to submit, putting on his shooting gloves. I would be cocky. He would be cocky. We would flip a coin for the first shot. I would get it. I would shoot. Justice would be done. Employment opportunities would open. I would retrieve the lead from his body, as it lay mangled. No writ for my gaoling would be written. Deed done.

UPDATE: Was at Pak n Save Kilbernie and showed the article to Kelly P and she laughed at the titled. It seems that my subjectivity is weak. I retract my challenge and offer my services to the Listener worker so that their satisfaction may be made (of me).

ZEBULON

2011-02-17T15:09:00.001+13:00

More "UNION" than an Operation Ivy song

2011-02-15T16:07:00.000+13:00

Just doing the final edit over Richard Meros' Privatising Parts which is to come out in late March and got my google search on. He saw this kind of gig, in Rakcham, except at night and tonnes of drunk locals. A word to the wise: polyandrous. And that's the Word for the day.

The Streets; The Sickness; The Saddle

2011-02-14T21:16:00.000+13:00

Saddled with sickness for the weekend, today I took to the streets. It rained. When wondering about why an autocrat would release Giant Slugs I remembered back to our launch for Ulrich Haarburste's Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm. Foreigner's objects become our loose leaves. Foreigners object to alienated texts, but they weren't with the collective to bind, so what can we say?

In other news, Gary McCormack is the father of twins. Better never than late, is what I have always said. That's for you Kirsty. Stay out of my life~you suffocate me!

Clowne Towne - ALEPPO

2011-02-11T14:29:00.004+13:00

Sources claim that when Timur conquered Persia, Iraq and Syria, he decimated the civilian population, raped their women and children, looted properties and converted people to Islam by force. In the city of Isfahan, he ordered several pyramids to be built each made up of 40.000 human skulls from those that his army had beheaded, and a pyramid of some 20,000 skulls was erected outside Aleppo. Timur herded thousands of citizens from Damascus into the Cathedral Mosque before setting it aflame,and had 70,000 people beheaded in Tikrit, and 90,000 more in Baghdad. As many as 17 million people may have died during his conquests.

Burlesque

2011-02-10T11:31:00.003+13:00

OH HI OH, this is a good one. Guess whom?

"I'm not worried about myself. I'm a rich gentleman who can go on to setting up hospitals for children around the world, as I have always wanted to."

The ANSWER: The Silver Haired Fox, Silvio Burlesconi!

Oulipo! Oulipo!

2011-02-06T13:28:00.000+13:00

OK OK, so Richard wasn't happy with the way he came across in the last post. I told him that I thought we were clear about the public/private distinction, but he said that any Rortyian theory is crap because he doesn't use any feminist theory...

Anyhow, he said that he wanted me to clarify that he is actually a dog. I guess he might have a fever. i told I would do him one better. and so "Richard Meros:

Meros again

2011-02-04T16:44:00.000+13:00

Richard Meros excitedly emailed me today with the following:

Collective members,

I have been making wondrous progress on my book called Dating Westerners: Tips for the New Rich from the Developing World. I have inserted the following sentence, it has taken me all morning to sculpt it just right, but here it is: "Aha - touché!"

Is it not... not beautiful?

Meros

I replied with the following:

Richard,

You've sired a champion phrase. But will the book be ready to be included in our releases for the first half of this year or is it more of something for the second half? Do you not know that you made promisary notes in our name? What happens when rent is due and we do not yet have the third and foruth parts of your tome to the presses? To the devil in the dale, bygod!

James Marr
Editorial assistant
Lawrence and Gibson Publishing Collective
Hamilton Office

Places to visit before you die: New Zealand and Australia

2011-02-01T14:53:00.007+13:00

R.I.P.

TOUR DATES, SUMMER '09

July

New Zealand/ Australia with Victoria Williams

3 - SFBH - Wellington, NZ

4 - Kings Arms - Auckland, NZ

5 - Harbour Light Theatre - Lyttleton, NZ

9 - East Brunswick Club - Melbourne, Victoria, Aus

10 - The Factory Theatre - Marrickville, NSW, Aus

11 - The Troubadour - Fortitude Valley, Queensland, Aus

(when i posted this I was aware that it was sort of off-key. the thing was that V.C. visited NZ in July and killed himself on Christmas Day of the same year. what can I say.... what can any of us say... all we can do is repeat lyrics....

"And still she sang "i can't believe you own this attitude" "
She sang "i can't believe you own this, this attitude"

But in lighter moment, V.C. ("she closer her new directions paperbook and screamed "there is no shelter in the arts" ") tells us other things.... "had she been bedding down with others in the periphery without him?"

and she replied "Hell yes! ain't it funny!" - one really needs to hear it sung:

Nip, Tuck

2011-01-30T20:01:00.001+13:00

Sooooo.... old Arts on Sunday censored some of the more vicious racial elements to the laugh tracks that I had played on the show on Sunday the 30th. They cut out a part where a radio call in show caller says that Abbie Hoffman is 'a really stupid jew'. I thought that the clip showed a great response by Hoffman who just giggled at it. The track is #2 on Hoffman's 'Wake Up America!' It can be downloaded from the Pie Man site.... about halfway down on the page.

And then they cut out the part where Amiri Baraka goes on a big old rant against Rockefeller and his ilk. The part cut was from 'rockefeller' in the following part:

cain be rockefeller, he gave amos pootbootie a
scholarship to Behavior
Modification Univ, and Genevieve Almoswhite
works for his foundation
Must be niggers! Cain be Mellon, he gave
Winky Suckass, a fellowship in
his bank put him in charge of closing out
mortgages in the lowlife
Pittsburgh Hill nigger section, caint be him.

I didn't listen to the rest because my mp3 player ran out of gusto... died right in the middle of me talking. Me! Oh wow wow!

So what's the lesson of the day? Privatise National Radio? That's what the Richard Meros of the forthcoming publication 'Privatising Parts' would suggest. Then we could call it Private Radio. Please take these comments in the context of the interview. I am not that worried about it. I wonder how Hoffman or Baraka would feel. I guess it wouldn't be too hard to ask Baraka about it. Maybe I will. Lets see...

Arts and Sundays

2011-01-28T17:12:00.001+13:00

Fluidly speaking, Meros am to appear on Arts on Sunday 'Laugh track' session on Sunday the 30th of January. But in all truthiness the show has been pre-recorded. Asides from introducing the Abbie Hoffman segment with "but....." it all went as swimmingly as if I had once hosted a student radio show.... "but...." Listen in at 2pm for a dolloping of Don Franks, Amiri Baraka, Abbie Hoffman and Joe Tex. It is what it is, a famous old man once said.

So that is two appearances on the show and not a lady in sight. I mean, at least Nick Cave dueted with women, but me.... me!... I just treat them as secondary characters. I mean, I don't just do that, but that would be the critique of certain figures got their paws on the critical review editorial positions.

Quick Quiz

2010-12-15T09:57:00.001+13:00

Q: What would you do, if you were me?

A: You'd make some popcorn and once you were finished cracking the un-popped kernels, you'd throw them from the Once window into the portentous Porteño street below...

gettin' freaky with them Tajiki across the creeky for an Afghan sneak-peeky

2010-12-09T09:46:00.003+13:00

Meros has had something published in the Dominion Post, a paper of the FairFax group. Though pictorial evidence suggests otherwise, he has never worn a beehive for a beanie. Nor is he lanky.
Sorry ladies, lads and the ambiguous love-lorn in-between aubergines (plump and crimson, how I like 'em).

also, somehow while googling "Kropotkin Mutual Aid" I came up with:

Digitising a back catalogue to the sound of Rick Roderick lectures

2010-12-04T10:14:00.000+13:00

Lily... the sound of leaves on water.

0800 4 MEROS

2010-11-08T17:33:00.000+13:00

People will be glad to know that Wellington author, Richard Meros, has returned to Wellington. He is sitting in James Marr's living room listening to the VBC 88.3fm. The year of 2011 will be an important one for Lawrence, Gibson, Lovers and Sons (the expanded formal name for L&G, used mostly on loan applications). We have about seven books for publication in 2011. Then there is the election. And the issue of Afghan refugees. And a certain beatnik beatification.

Give us an email at lawrenceandgibson(at)gmail.com to discuss all our publishing needs. xoxo

get!

2010-10-15T21:10:00.000+13:00

QUIT GAWKING AND GET BACK ON WITH YOUR WORK, YOU GUARDIAN OF OIL AND CAFFIR!

Holmes vs Henry. A lesson from BDP! Bad boyz must learn!

2010-10-11T16:45:00.000+13:00

Today's lecture is about The Racist. We're not out to exaggerate or diss him but show the symptoms and facts of racism. Understand The Racist ain't equal. There's about five different types of racist people.

First of the five different types of cases is the individual brought up racist. Here you have young men and women brought up in the Great White Way opinion. This opinion introduced by the parent to the civilised becomes transparent. The civilised man could look through the faces, make the analysis and see The Racist

Number two case, which y'all must hear, is the individual racist out of fear. Here you have people that fear the African and conjure up new ways of trappin' him.

Number three is the unconscious racist not knowin' they're racist they invade your spaces. They say, "I'm not a racist, I'm not a bigot," yet they allow it to go on and won't admit it.

Number four is the money racist. The one that used the topics of sheer economics. They say, "Owning a business isn't for the black man, he don't want that", yet they went and took his land. Damn, that's like a rock in a hard place. You don't have your land yet this ain't your space. America was built by every other race except the European that runs this place. What a waste, America's doomed to be overthrown by the righteous real soon.

But last but not least racial prejudice is the black man speakin' out of ignorance - Whitey this and Ching-Chow that is not how the intelligent man acts. You can't blame the whole white race for slavery, cos this ain't the case. A large sum of white people died with black tryin' hard to fight racial attacks. The media wants you to think that no whites really fought and died for Civil Rights but once we have a true sense of history, you'll see this too as a mystery. If black and white didn't argue the most they could clearly see the government's screwin' 'em both.

-posted by DJ Nooselicks, promo specialist, Lawrence and Gibson collective

I am beginning to like Bob Dylan some more, and returning...

2010-10-09T17:12:00.001+13:00

... to some thoughts about Straw Dogs which I told the GF about. But mostly I am into Bob Dylan lyrics:

All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home
All your reindeer armies, are all going home
The lover who just walked out your door
Has taken all his blankets from the floor
The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pure Flip-and-See

2010-10-06T01:22:00.000+13:00

Sometimes, I'll never be a regular contributor to that. Why? The axis of Romance and Satire forbids. But I admire the rationalist journalists; I admire their writings, that is to say, but I do not admire them as people. Their journalism, better than mine, when done well. But when done badly then it is a life lived badly. I'll never be a regular contributor. That's just journalism. But maybe I will find a niche. Articles: on the facade of Union buildings, on Prime Minister's libraries.

Thanks Thomas I cannot read the future.

Ho-ho-ho

2010-10-02T17:50:00.000+13:00

Pet projects persist. Soon I am home. Rich Meros: lynchpin, stud and locker, pinwheel baker.

To be released soon, or to be distributed. Oh and I wrote this. In reply to something else. I may soon write something about how I will never be a regular blogger for Thought Blog or any other blog. I am, in a word, paraphrasing David Cohen.

os

2010-09-14T23:43:00.000+12:00

behind the wall of China. The firefox not roams. the picture not upload. the website fails like yesterdays eggplant. i am so so sorry

for so so missing Xiu Xiu in Wellington

The Financier's Manifesto and discussion by Richard Meros

2010-08-14T13:33:00.004+12:00

In 2000 I was a very different man. I had moved to East London and was attempting, like so many ex-pat New Zealanders who've committed the folly of completing a BCom, to locate and then clamber up the near mythical career ladder to meet the Gods of higher wages. I traded ten thousand New Zealand dollars for three thousand pounds. Then I converted those monies into three months rent, two well tailored suits, and a healthy supply of single malt scotch.

With a few months of close observation and shrewd ingratiation I learnt that a career ladder is simply a slippery rope, greased by the oils of past climbers keen to maintain their place through nepotism and other sundry misdemeanours. I was glad that the job market was not as open as idealists would claim. You see, while my father, the youngest brother, and his oldest brother are both farmers from a long line of farmers, his two middle brothers have their feet firmly planted in the land of government and finance. My name was not quite as ubiquitous as it would have been had I been a Wakefield, but with some gentle reminding and needling I became the recipient of a low level job with the London branch of a large New Zealand company. I will not name that company as that fact is unessential to the telling of this tale.

Like any curious kiwi expatriate I revelled in London's cheap drugs, especially the prescription only fun that could be had at a quid a pill. Consider it the number eight wire mentality applied to a life that offers few challenges and begs for diversions. Cocaine and speed were good for keeping up with the workload and for keeping interested in the broad range of douche bags who populated the lower rungs of the British civil services. The best mix was codeine, whiskey plus some cough syrup I bought over the counter during my stopover in Bangkok. The codeine, downed an hour before I went to whatever facile function I was to attend, kept me calm. The whiskey gave the impression that I was one of the gents, while providing a cover for my general inebriation. The cough syrup induced sweet deliriums to counter London's oppressive grey. An added bonus, the sum of the parts, was the lucid dreams I would have once I finally made it to bed. The dreams were scenes such as those from the Jehovah's Witness magazine The Watchtower: the same pastels and menagerie of animals and races.

Seven years later, I prefer to ignore my memories of my time in London. The memories from those days are tainted with vivid images that, for my sake, were surely the height of my opiated delirium. Who was lad who called himself Ecuadorian Grey, and who turned up at my parents house in Flaxmere for New Years Eve in 2003? Are the scars selfinflicted, or did the police really act on direct orders from a praying mantis representing the Pakistani High Commision? Some images seem more likely than others, but I can subsume nearly all of them beneath more immediate concerns. The occasion of my current writing is one particular night, a peculiar memory, that I have not been able to bury beneath the urgency of everyday matters.

I was at an event sponsored by the Dairy Board (these were pre Fonterra days). I was present in an official capacity and was to be recording the details of each official speech. Now I'm no racist, but the only entertaining speech was by one Maori guy. All the other esteemed speakers were cadaverous white gents sticking to a monotonous script: "it is an honour... ...thanks to the great work of... ...New Zealand cheese has a very bright future...". At least the Maori guy tried to win us over by connecting his people's respect for the land with a similar affection shown by one or two of the best Pakeha farmers. My report would be based around one of his anecdotes of a fresh Pakeha discretely enquiring as to the viability of farming taniwha.

A short interval was announced after which the final speaker was to address the crowd. It was time to ingest a dose of cough syrup to prep me for later marauding. I had drunk a solo single malt but was well doped up on a new script of codeine. I supped two full caps of the syrup then rinsed my breath with cool water from the handbasin. I checked my pupils in the mirror, applied eye drops, cleared an unidentifiable speck of green vegetable from between my front two teeth and returned to my seat.

In my absence, a singularly intoxicating and utterly transfixing gent had appeared at our table. Before me sat an unshifting wonder, utterly devoid of the traces of ugliness that appear on even the most refined ex pat. The lines of his jaw were as clean as his stubbleless cheeks. This kind of human must exist as a rare fluke. Eugenicists could not be pushed to such limits. He was the possible wonder of mutation that all errors promised. I was like a stupefied boy, crouched in the trenches and finally aware of all that the 'war' signified. But before me, instead of mud and Germans, was the fulfilment that words like 'royalty' promise. He was more. He was vigorous youth, a dandy, an in the flesh Epicurean delight.

He inhaled, exhaled and casually made his way to the empty lectern. He opened supple lips and I fumbled for a pen. Before I could recover he remarked that he did not believe in fleecing out speeches with clichés, metaphors or anything else that covered the bare rump of pure idiom. He asked for silence and said that if there was to be any discussion, "might it take place after the thrust of my brief remarks?"

I recorded his speech in its entirety. It is listed below. It went by in a perfectly timed flash, with pauses after every statement. I have chosen not to italicise the speech and the notes are presented here just as jotted.

The financial speculator is the creator of beautiful profits.

To create wealth and hide the speculator is finance's aim.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful profits are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful profits are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elected to whom beautiful profits mean only Beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or immoral speculation. Speculations are well conducted, or badly conducted. That is all.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the financial speculator, but the morality of financial speculation consists in the perfect use of imperfect markets.

No financial speculator has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in a financier is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No financier is never morbid. The financial speculator can trade everything.

Thought and language are to the financial speculator instruments of profit making.

Vice and virtue are to the financial speculator materials for profit making.

All financial speculation is at once surface and symbol

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the common man, and not life, that finance really mirrors.

We can forgive a man for making a large profit as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a small profit is that one admires it intensely.

All financial speculation is quite useless.

He grasped the podium, and in doing so confirmed his hold over the agog audience. We were chartered and charted, chained and chosen to be his dominion. He scanned for dissent yet was met with no rebuke. The young man, like a wise general with his new empire before him, stood down, abandoned the podium and retired.

I was rattled by his contrite statements on the foundations of the financial aesthetic. I tried to make his speech the keystone of my report, but there was no way to place it with the rest of the evening. In my final report, I merely added that a stunning and charismatic speech was made by a brilliant young speculator, who was sure to go far. The cliché, in it's rasping manner, hid all that could not be claimed.

That was but one extraordinary occasion in my long northern winter. Once the report was filed, my memories of that night began to fade. By spring the evening was just another fancy entry in my diary, unremarkable except for my poor recollection of presence made the evening more tolerable than most of the other nights.

I have held something back. I have not suggested the identity of that man. I need to make some apologies, or admissions, or simply state my minor position. I have already said that I was a habitual drug user, and that these drugs had not only dulled my senses, but has also caused hallucinations that even today I am unable to reconcile with perceived reality. Drug use has ruined my pristine sense of solid life. Today I veer away from all imbibed evils, including caffeine. If I had been as wise when the Financier addressed the crowd as I am today then I might be able to conclude with conviction.

I also wish to state that what follows is at best gossip, and any conclusions drawn from my research remain innuendo. I would even go so far as to call the following reminiscence a dream if it were not for the stark detail in which the manifesto appears within my notes. That said, since I have been commissioned by the Hue and the Cry Journal, I will progress.

The man who sat before me may have been John Key, leader of the National Party and Prime Minister of New Zealand. I deduce this hypothesis from three observations: a, b, and c. Observation (a): the man who addressed the trade seminar, if he had egregiously aged, bears a striking resemblance to John Key as he appeared on both television and in print as leader of the National Party around the time of the 2008 general erection.

I am not a man who pays much attention to the trivialities of politics. I consider politics to be an ebb and flow sort of sport, akin to the tides. I take no interest in matters that undulate upon fixed factors which are entirely out of the control of an individual. Thus, I ignore petty politics as I ignore the convexes and concaves of the moon. In election years my ignorance can not hold; faces appear on billboards like sewerage in the ocean. They are ubiquitous. That is how I, perhaps again, saw Mr Key's face. I say: if it is him, he has aged! He has aged as if he had broken a Faustian pact that would keep him soft, sweet and beautiful as long as he retained the position of financial speculator, or curator of such deals.

Observation (b): in an article in the Sunday Star Times from the third of February 2008, John Key makes comments which bear striking similarity to those of the young London financier. The paragraph reads:

Key says he does not believe a moral issue arises for the traders who make these speculative attacks on currencies, or for the dealing rooms that carry out their orders. "I don't really see it as a judgemental business. You're simply executing orders for people."

While other sections of the same story point to Key's living in a family friendly suburb in London and avoiding the ritzier locales, this piece of evidence is of weight. If Key was once our dandy financier then the evolution of his logic has become worse than retarded: it has devolved. Or to speak in the frank language of economics, the growth in his thought has neither halted nor slowed, but has become negative and is likely still retreating . Where a daring young financier routed his audience with a list of epigrams, a populist now councils with ruddy provincial tones. The content of the quote fits exactly with the sentiment expressed by the young man from 2000. The tone, however, is barbarous and must never find its way into the Financiers Manifesto.

Observation (c): at the head of the notepad on which I recorded the manifesto I had doodled the title "John Quixote de la Mansion". While I am wary of the dredging up of false memories, I now recall how, amongst the din and dive of that grim winter, the financier's title appeared. The ruckus from the young financier's exit had abated, and as I was reassessing my evening's plans, I simply overheard my tablemate's inane punning. I heard the greatest minds of my generation punning, when they really ought to have been concentrating on their own ills. Shit sticks, I thought, but scribbled down the pun anyway.

I have resolved nothing, but I my time and ideas have finished. If it is acceptable to talk of probabilities then I will estimate, based on observations (a), (b), and (c), the likelihood that the man who delivered a rousing address (I do believe the address occurred) was the same man who is now John Key, Prime Minister of New Zealand.

Not one of my observations are clinchers: (a) some of the men's physical similarities are striking, but much time has passed: add 15% probability; (b) the manifesto is radical and very modern, but there is no causal link between it and Mr Keys later statement. There is an equal possibility that Mr Key learnt the : add 10% probability; (c) the most compelling evidence is the pun on this young man's name: add 20% of probability.

Computing these figures suggests there is a 45% chance that the young man of the Financier's Manifesto is John Key. Statistically there is a greater likelihood that they are not the same man. However, it is now accepted that the realms of statistical probability cannot take into account extrasensory evidence such as gut feelings and hunches. Even if we allow the entire 4% margin of error allotted for these extrasensory factors (as pioneered in the paper delivered by Carrier& Meros at the the University of Auckland's Politics, Statistics and Truth conference in 2006) it still seems more likely than not that the man from London in 2000 is not John Key. We can be quite sure nevertheless, given Mr Key's discussions of financial trading in the Sunday Star Times, that the beliefs of the young financier are beliefs held dearly by our esteemed Prime Minister.

This discussion first appeared in Hue and Cry issue 3 in 2009.

All Bran

2010-07-19T05:19:00.000+12:00

The boat sails down the harbour, and where am I... and who am I... all has become ellipsis.... all has become e-lips, sis.... kisss kisss sis kissssssszzzzzzz.... snake man....

I think google has finally got the important 'Richard Meros' searches right.... it is a shame I wil mother-bugger it all up by releasing a god-good father-buggerer of a novel in approximately one year. Or as Devendra Banhart would sing... "dogs they make up the dark surrounding mountains"...

Into the desert, minds and silly globes

2010-06-28T03:18:00.000+12:00

Of this we like:

Suck on that, corporate scum.

2010-05-26T07:52:00.000+12:00

LG005 - William Dewey's Without a Soul to Move has received an A grade from the Onion's AV Club, in the United States of, spanning from artful coast to artful coast, America. Read all about it.

Or check in on him at his website. And wait, while his hurricane builds and eventually alters this earth somewhat.

Below (1) - handsome man also named William reading Without a Soul to Move.

Below (2) - Dewey, Dewey, oh yeah, that's the way it goes, ai ai ai ai. Or: Mixing Business with Health, Tilly with Willy.

Mother

2010-05-24T01:08:00.001+12:00

Early Morning Melody, a song by Kate Wolf is a good song

2010-04-27T20:03:00.001+12:00

Miss,

I've heard it on balconies above, and through walls (above the TV's din): her wails. Coming: up for air, down with your hair. Miss: oy vey, voyeurs on display. On you, I want to have that too. But you have your right to your silence or science.

Miss,

I heard you making coffee one morning. It reminded me of a song that I then sang, though most of the original lyrics were forgotten and so i had to improvise replacements. You may have thought my song was aimed at you. But it wasn't.

The rich are buried in the church and everyone is rich and I am Rich

2010-04-26T18:00:00.000+12:00

Hello,

Mission Accomplished! Easy Whistle Solo and Privatising Parts.

Next on the agenda: The Impotence of Being and Somethingness and Fear of Novels.

The night lies in hovels.

And so I move my guts back to Kelburn,

And so I walk, barefoot at 3am past the four square.

And so my friends ask when I will or will not ensure that the Green card remains crisp.

Lord! I ask. Do you, or do you not, expect me to put up with lice? A common coincidence re: OTC&POHCTMAHYL and Baxter's 'Jerusalem Sonnets: Poems for Colin Baxter'.

Love

RM

2010-04-14T16:48:00.000+12:00

Real News! Real Book!

2010-04-01T20:53:00.000+13:00

The Lawrence & Gibson Publishing Collective, still based in Wellington, New Zealand, would like to announce that a new member to the collective has been found in AD Jameson. We will release his epic Giant Slugs later this year (late November/early December). Other writings for the Chicago author can be found at www.bigother.com, though I prefer his site

Stables/Futures

2010-03-23T20:02:00.004+13:00

Hysterical Realism - I am not sure why this category is for the long novel only. Only for the long novel. For those productionists. I like the Zadie Smith reply. She says "YES".

In the distance is Eliat. In the foreground is the port of Aqaba. In the extreme foreground, readable by zooming in on the picture (just click on it for proof), are the words 'American Spirit'. Trade, free trade, baby. Publishing in multiple languages. Quaffing like Mansfield with Lawrence. Cures for TB. Cures for Tbilisi. Boggle.

Volleys

2010-03-18T08:20:00.002+13:00

A metaphor I once used with correspondents: the game of tennis. One serves, another hits it back, another hits it back, another hits it back. Except, and even as a boy, I have enjoyed some of these absurd sports more than others. So sometimes the volleys are less like the serving of a tennis ball, and more like the cracking of rifle shot. The rifle shot, as in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, are not intended to hit the opposition in the head, though sometimes that is the result. Cracking shot.

In unrelated news, the cut in my thumb, the one that darkened the bandage in crimson, is almost healed in an entirety. I cut it removing a broken bulb from it's socket. There was a moment of slicing, after which I dropped the socket and held my thumb together, hoping it was not as deep as it was not.

who reads Me-ros

2010-03-10T06:44:00.004+13:00

The beauty of the lack of alienation that is created when one works with a publishing collective that has their hand in every little part of the production process simply magnifies the pleasure an author receives when he (me) is on the shelf of another, or better yet, being read by another. I don't care if they don't like the book (I can just say that they are morons who don't understand the nuances of the concept).

And so, this night, to know that some precocious 16 year old girl is reading her parents copy of On the conditions and possibilities of Helen Clark taking me as her Young Lover gives me great hope, enormous satisfaction and the ability to put to one side the tragedies (I suppose, having not given them any deep thoughts) of Elliot Smith and Vic Chesnutt and perhaps some who are even closer to me.

This: a romance as an obituary. An obituary as a romance. A guy, not living through the 20s, 30s, and 40s, but writing nonetheless. And by that I recall those of the greatest generation, the one going and gone, those lacking pensions, those who collect fruits and preserve them and who I am sad to say are fading from this world.

One month of Gordon Campbell

2010-03-08T22:16:00.003+13:00

Since February 9th it has been a short month. February is a short month. But it has been a month. The purpose of this post is to, in a roundabout way, inquire into the research methodology of Gordon Campbell, contributor to scoop.co.nz and in particular their Werewolf and Gordon Campbell sections.

A significant part of this analysis will be standing in awe and wonder at the breadth and depth of the topics covered by Campbell within a month and, through leaving the question open, seek a response to the methodology used by Campbell. The impetus for this search came as I was thunderstruck by the quantity of his writing in comparison to my own. I was reminded of the Colbert joke where in his interview on The O'Reilly Factor laments his own output compared to Bill, and asks how Bill does it with a question like 'is it the love of jesus christ or pat robertson's protein shakes?' I feel like asking Gordon Campbell the same question. Without international syndication, I can't imagine it would have the same impetus, but nevertheless, I wish to ask.

For the purposes of transparency, I believe I have probably seen Mr Campbell either strolling along Lambton Quay or jostling for a beer at the SFBH. But I have never consciously held a conversation with Mr Campbell.

The following are some exemplary quotes of Mr Campbell's for the past month. I wish to build a case from these quotes that requires an explanation as to how he can consider so much in a four week period. I also, knowing or expecting he does not plagiarise, wish to provoke awe and wonder in the hearts of readers of this blog as to the output of Mr Campbell.

(1) "Douglas’ choice of expert support for his views is particularly unfortunate. Greg Mankiw is an increasingly isolated and somewhat crackpot figure, even among right wing economists."

(2) "Therefore, preferences will come into play – and the feeling around town is that The Hurt Locker will score enough on second, third and fourth preferences to reach a majority some time around the third or fourth calculation."

(3) "Obviously then, the level of self defence upgrade envisaged for the ANZAC ships will be a litmus test of the Key government’s commitment to Defence. The ships need to be able to foil attacks by anti-ship missiles as well as by fast inshore attack craft – and the sky is the limit for those with an open cheque book. There are lavish options available but the likelihood is that the least will be done, on the cheap"

(4) "Eventually, Dicey comes to realize how much she loves sailing. Not just for its tactile pleasures, but for its almost spiritual qualities ."

(5) "Vile has his VU moments, but he also taps into even older music traditions – much of them learned from his father’s large collection of bluegrass, country and blues recordings."

(6) "Memo to TG: this is a negotiating tactic called messing with your mind. I’d wager that it is her particularly blunt set of personal sensors – rather than gender discrimination – that explains why a local firm recently thought twice about taking her on in a leadership role."

(7) "Right now, the leadership of Hamas appears to be deeply divided. It seems torn between a more moderate political wing led by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Hamas MPs from Gaza and the West Bank, and the exiled radical political leadership in Damascus, headed by Khaled Meshal – who is becoming increasingly close to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Note: with a few more posts left, my own methodology of copy and quote has started to dispel my own initial awe and wonder. Can awe and wonder at others productions remain when a more thorough investigation into the exact methods of style of production is attempted? I suggest that such awe and wonder diminishes the closer one gets to the subject under analysis. Nonetheless, I will continue.

(8) "In sum, it risks repeating the culture of mediocrity that the FC has consistently portrayed as being the path of hard-headed commercial realism."

(9) "A moratorium? That’s not what decisive people do. Further damage to an already maxi-stressed water resource in Canterbury? Mining in national parks? Only defeatists wring their hands about the damage this could cause to our $18 billion a year tourism industry, and to the natural heritage of future generations."

(10) "The ‘low budget mindset’? Spare me. Lets go through what else is wrong with this approach. Low budget film-making of any creative worth is not some kind of lark where teams slam together concepts to meet an artificial deadline in a daggy Survivor-type boot camp setting."

(11) "For starters, the Shia–run Electoral Commission has ruled out a large array of 515 electoral candidates – ostensibly because of for their past links to the old Baath Party of Saddam Hussein – in a move widely seen as targeted at the secular Sunni political bloc led by Iyad Allawi, a former CIA asset and former Prime Minister."

(12) "The trouble with that scenario is that depreciation is not worked out on the current rateable value. More accurately, it is based year by year on the residue of the historic cost of the buildings. Meaning: if that $213 billion is the current rateable value, it is somewhat irrelevant to how much money Finance Minister Bill English would actually get from scrapping the current depreciation rules"

(13) "The cleanest and most bang-for-the-buck method of doing so would be the one that has been advocated by the Greens and the Maori Party for years – namely, to exempt a band of initial earnings from tax altogether for those on the bottom rung of the income ladder."

And that is all. While I maintain my interest in the methodology of information collecting for a blogger such as Campbell, (I don't find the prolific blogs of some to be worthy of such attention, give that they just spout their own tired ideological bend on various mildly interesting tidbits of the day), I no longer stand in awe and wonder. Why? I cannot say, it dissipated throughout the course of this post. Perhaps there is something in the two older posts about married socialist bloggers and the perpetual sense making of journalism (or was that one an email?)

Nevertheless, I stand back, recollect myself, wonder if this will be the last snow of the year and think of a photo to post. At the least, I would like to know what resources Mr Campbell uses on the internet to facilitate his information gathering. I fear it, though, as it may be an enormous compilation of links, news feeds, blogs, subscriptions cribbed from student friends, all met with an office of folios and cardboard boxes all labeled and dated.

those who died when we weren't on watch

2010-03-08T05:20:00.004+13:00

Someone used to say that if you got past 27 then you were past the suicide rock star age. and then there is the six years until Jesus H. Christ died at 33. Once you are past those days then all is blue skies and tweeting birds. But with the improvement in telecommunication abilities the world is a more accessible place. A more accessible world means that we don't get so bored so quickly. If we do not get so bored so quickly then the age of suicides will get older. All those who died at 27 were dead in the 1960s. I sort of feel like some time between 35 and 45 will be the age of suicides for those of these generations.

That is how I felt when I read that the Sparklehorse guy had killed himself and that their website still had a Vic Chesnutt memorial on it. When did Vic Chesnutt kill himself!!!??? He killed himself on Christmas Day with an overdose of muscle relaxants. Assuming he killed himself. All is hints and winces. 'Danny Carlisle'......... ughh....

Sarah, my girlfriend, and I had just been talking about the press and the reporting fo suicides in New Zealand and about those little pockets of suicides that happen in small, boring towns and which, in the 1990s conspired to make NZ the youth suicide capital of the world. I read about that sort of thing happening in Australia and Wales last year. How sad.....

Married Socialist Bloggers

2010-03-07T08:01:00.004+13:00

Over the last couple of weeks I have had a startling amount of time on the internet. I have gravitated from emails to New York Times and The Guardian to blogs. And when I find an interesting debate on a blog I try and find out a little bit about the people writing on these blogs. Invariably, I am attracted to those who seek reasonable dialogue with questions of societal justice as the basis of their ethos. Yet when I try to find out about the people who write these posts, I find that they are married.

Why are these intelligent people married? Did they not adequately tie their class, gender and race critiques to a solid praxis of resistance? I suppose they probably did at one point in time, but it is always the 'love' that leads our wisest away from their commitment to more interesting forms of life.

Now that I have said this, I would like to say that I am less interested in the world of blogs. There are too many ossified positions. There is, like on any broadsheet, too much sense making. Fervent sense making creates a dryness and an apathy in me. I would prefer some passion and some new letters.

The man who bought you the hamburger

2010-02-28T00:26:00.003+13:00

In America, there is a state called Georgia, made famous by the Otis Redding refrain '... I left my home in Georgia, heading for the Frisco bay...'

This man makes hamburgers for a loving. He made one out of everything that some people said about something I once said/or wrote.

Do it right the first time.

2010-02-25T20:41:00.001+13:00

There are more things left to do than sit around here and get fit.

Editing - a communication from Richard Meros in Tbilisi, Georgia

2010-02-25T05:56:00.004+13:00

13.05 lari for 87 pages of 11 point bliss.

I am editing: Easy Whistle Solo and Privatising Parts.

For those in the know: yes!
For those in the snow: brrr!
For those who pass go: why?
For your local NGO: OK!

And I am thinking of photos of lives past and still going, of breeding and ends, and I am thinking about institutions and about the turn that Peter Sloterdijk seems to have made from his Critique of Cynical Reason to his more recent comments of kleptocracy. Am I alone?

Gary Higgins: a communist?

2010-02-17T01:09:00.002+13:00

Non-Sequiter press advocates the freedom of reading for the elderly.

"I pick notes from the sky"

EDWARD SAID

2010-02-09T00:39:00.002+13:00

Edward Said, I'm done with Sergio, he treats me like a ragdoll. He hides the Marquee Moon. Come home Edward, come home.

The Guardian

2010-02-08T07:52:00.002+13:00

I have been thinking about the Guardian, guardianship and not for profits.

a chevy

2010-02-01T06:19:00.003+13:00

I regret to inform you that the name of the forthcoming book is unlikely to be 2029: A Foucauldian Analysis of Your Mother. It has a new, catchier name, with less emphasis on the works of Michel Foucault. "Then why write?" Then why write, indeed.

Today, I bought Sons and Lovers and some Edgar Allan Poe collection. Cruising down the freeway in a Chevy '69. Sad times in polynesia.