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The Oceanic Feeling on Paula Green's NZ Poetry Shelf
Paula GreenLocal poet and longtime poetry supporter Paula Green has just posted a series of readings by me from my latest poetry book on her blog the NZ Poetry Shelf:NZ Poetry ShelfJack Ross reads four...
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The Wizard of Helensville: John Perry (1943-2021)
Any Given Day: John Perry (2016)It was a real shock to hear, earlier this week, that art historian, curator and antique dealer John Perry had died. It seems like forever that I've been driving up to...
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Fifteenth Anniversary (Crystal)
CrystalI started this blog on the 14th of June, 2006, so this is the fifteenth anniversary of The Imaginary Museum. Ten years ago I put up a post which listed five major web projects I'd undertaken in...
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Henry Torrens: The Forgotten Man of the 1001 Nights
Henry Whitelock Torrens (1806-1852)Should you ever have occasion to look up the name of Henry Torrens on Wikipedia, you may have some difficulty actually locating him. You'll find Major-General Sir...
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The Mysteries of Auckland: Jules Verne
Jules Verne: Deux ans de vacances (1888)As I remarked in my earlier post on Jules Verne, I recall being much entertained by his 1888 novel A Long Vacation, which I ran across in the Murrays Bay...
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A Memorial Brass: i.m. Ted Jenner (1946-2021)
Ted Jenner and friends[l-to-r: Hamish Dewe, Jack Ross, Ted Jenner, Brett Cross]Edward [Ted] Jenner (1946-8 July 2021) was a friend of mine. I guess one of the things I appreciated most about Ted was...
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The Enigma of George Borrow
Henry Wyndham Phillips: George Borrow (1843)The Works of George Borrow: Edited with Much Hitherto Unpublished Manuscript. Ed. Clement Shorter. Norwich Edition (limited to 775 copies). 16 vols. London:...
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Jane Langton's The Swing in the Summerhouse
Jane Langton: The Swing in the Summerhouse (1967)We were always on the lookout for good fantasy novels when we were kids, and after reading all about C. S. Lewis's Narnia, Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea,...
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Fast Thinkers and Ghost Writers
Britannica: Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)A bit of wisdom here from Pierre Bourdieu: Fast-thinkers ... think in clichés, in the "received ideas" that Flaubert talks about - banal, conventional, common...
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Seven Stages of Book Collecting
Avow: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross book collection (2019)In her 1969 book On Death and Dying Swiss-German psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed the celebrated "five stages of grief":...
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Taking Early Retirement
Philip van Doren Stern, ed.: The Annotated Walden (1970)Lately I've been renewing my acquaintance with one of my favourite books, The Annotated Walden. Why? Because I can. Because I'm taking early...
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A Mann for All Seasons: The Magic Mountain
Hans W. Geissendörfer, dir: Der Zauberberg (1982)[based on the novel by Thomas Mann]As we move into the fourth week of our fourth COVID-19 lockdown up here in Auckland (still stuck at level 4, though...
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Franz Kafka: Parables and Paradoxes
Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis (1915)When I was but thirteen or soI went into a golden land,Chimborazo, CotopaxiTook me by the hand.- W. J. Turner, "Romance" (1920)It wasn't quite like that for me. I'd...
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Magister Ludi: Hermann Hesse
Nobel Prize Archive: Hermann Hesse (1946)The Nobel Prize in Literature 1946 was awarded to Hermann Hesse "for his inspired writings which, while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the...
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Michele 2021
Michele Leggott with OliveWikipedia informs me that there's now a specific term for a Festschrift compiled and published by electronic means on the internet. It's called a Webfestschrift.They also...
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Levi the Memorious: A Survivor's Tale
The Complete Works of Primo Levi (2015)I think that the first time I actually read anything by Primo Levi was around the turn of the millennium, when a colleague of mine extracted a chapter from If...
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SF Luminaries: John Wyndham
John Wyndham: Plan for Chaos (1951 / 2009)Plan for Chaos is a very odd book. It's certainly not without interest. However, I think one can see why no publishers actually leapt at the chance of putting...
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Classic Ghost Story Writers: Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White (1982)Recently Bronwyn and I rewatched this old British miniseries from the 1980s - The Woman in White. I remember back in the day experiencing ever increasing anxiety and horror as...
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SF Luminaries: Frank Herbert
Denis Villeneuve, dir.: Dune: Part One (2021)Dunes"These memories, which are my life"- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)I see that my old paperback copy of Dune is dated 1973. I think that I...
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Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio
Herbert A. Giles, trans. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880)I remember, back in the 1980s, trotting off one day to my regular haunt the Edinburgh Filmhouse to see a film called A Chinese Ghost...
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