Ventiak
an island somewhere in the brain
I have just got back from two days in the City of a Thousand Councillors, where the traffic flows like lard through a sclerotic artery. Pelican business mostly. The highlight was coffee with the wonderful Jennifer from Random House who has got the job of publicist for Black Earth/White Bones. We talked about how to pitch the book and the possible contents of a press release. Strange stuff for an author. It is one of those moments when you realise just how much the contents of your head have become or are about to become public property.
Jennifer thinks we may be able to broaden the potential market to include blokes of a certain age who don't normally read fiction. I hope she's right although I rather feel it might be women of a certain age that find Kit Wallace most appealing - those who don't take him for a complete no hoper, that is.
She also pointed out a similarity with with the work of Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene. Given that BE/WB involves a flawed (or perhaps floored) character in an exotic location, I could see the point but I wasn't sure we could push it too far. Conrad and Greene are firmly in a realist tradition. I am, well, kind of the opposite. Whereas they put imaginary characters in real locations, this book, at least, is more like a real character in a totally imaginary location. Maybe in the end there isn't any difference, though. If the world seems real, it is real and vice versa.
Another possible angle could be the other kind of green - the price we have to pay for our abuse of the natural world. It's curious, really, how much more topical this has become since I first started work on the book in the late nineties. Prescient? I hardly think so. In any case, I wouldn't want to push that angle too far either. I rather think the depredations of the phosphate mining are an image of a different kind of abuse than a point in themselves.
The ants, now, are another matter. After we'd finished our meeting, I wondered if I should have suggested that, if nothing else, BE/WB would be a sitter for an award for the itchiest novel of the year. Not entirely sure that's a winning tagline, though.
My friend Rupert is curious about the pelicans. Why that particular bird? he wants to know. It's hard to say really.
Part of the reason is that when I was fiddling around with the design of this site I somehow concocted that little blue and purple image up at the top left. It kind of appealed to me. Another reason is that pelicans are such comically grotesque creatures, one of the clowns of evolution and I have a soft spot for that sort of thing. I fear I'm comically grotesque myself, although not in such a dramatically obvious way. Thirdly, I've always associated the pelican with writing. When I was a lad, Pelican fountain pens were quite desirable pieces of literary equipment. I was always too poor to own one (although I don't think they were inordinately expensive) and I can remember being jealous of people who did.
There are, of course, pelicans in Ventiak, although I forgot to mention them in the book. There used to be huge flocks of them on the island of Tiavu before the phosphate mines ruined the place. Now they are mostly found on the wild north west coast. In the opinion of some Ventiakians, they are the national bird and there was a move at one time to get the image onto the Ventiakian flag. That idea foundered, as many ideas do here, in a welter of debate. The Ventiakians long ago discovered that if you talk about a problem for long enough people get so tired that you don't actually have to do anything about it.
The real point about the pelican - its symbolic significance, if you will (and I suspect this is what Rupert is after) - comes down to the fact that they are devoted followers of the philosophy of Uselessness. They have never done anything of any practical significance and are primarily interested in only four things: food, drink, sex and the Meaning of Life (possibly in that order). Hence their assiduous attendance at literary functions and book launches where they are bound to get some of the first two, could conceivably luck into the third and as to the fourth? Well, three out of four ain't bad, I guess, and a book always holds the promise of revelation even if you are too stingy to buy it.
Another well-provisioned literary occasion that brought the pelicans out in force. Steele Roberts' Xmas/Birthday party was graced by as fine a collection of notables as you could wish to see. There were at least two national treasures, a soaring of established writers, a large brood of book trade luminaries and one magnificent wreck. Not to mention a former and a current cabinet minister (the round one). Roger Steele and his wife Christine Roberts, bless their eccentric hearts, have been trying to go broke for a decade, publishing interesting, high quality books that sell in accountant-scaring quantities. They are by now arguably the third best publisher of poetry in the country and the only one of the top three not to have the backing of an academic institution. More power to their press, I say. Our world would be a smaller place without them.
Apart from the food and drink, the main focus of the evening was readings by two of the best from the Steele Roberts stable - J C Sturm and Glen Colquhoun. Sturm, who is 80 next year, still has all her wits about her and goes on producing work of grace and subtlety. Unfortunately for deaf old coots like me, who happened to be stuck at the back of the room, her diction isn't as precise as it once was. She also suffers a little from the octogenarian's forgivable failing - the fear that any public occasion might be her last and that she had therefore better make the most of it. By the end of her set, I been standing so long I felt I was approaching 80 myself. Colquhoun, who is New Zealand's answer to Billy Collins - our most commercially successful poet still breathing - gave his usual witty and perfectly pitched performance. He and Sturm both showed an appreciation and an affection for their publishers that warmed the occasion and ought to be an object lesson to those of us who suffer from commercial paranoia. The applause was heartfelt. There was not a dry eye in the house.
The odd semantic qualities of the Songs of Sisyphus are an example of an aesthetic theory that I can't get out of my head. The argument goes something like this:
Art is useless. Or, at least, whatever it is about an object that makes it a work of art has nothing to do with its utility. This is clear from the way we treat works of art. The first thing we do in order to appreciate an object's aesthetic qualities is to take it out of the context of everyday life and put it in a museum where it can be admired. The John Britten motorcycle in Te Papa and Duchamp's Fountain are cases in point.
If this is true, though, then literature must be useless, too. However, given that literature is made up of words, poems and novels must consist of words without utility.
Unfortunately, if Wittgenstein is correct and the meaning of word is its use, this in turn implies that literature consists of words with no meaning.
Weird thought. I can't escape the conclusion that it is somehow true, though.
At least, I don't want to argue that art is useful. That kind of thinking leads pretty quickly to a situation where the state or the church or the mosque thinks it is justified in interfering in the creative process. In any case, if art does have a use, what the hell use does it have? (Whether it has a function or not is a different matter - I might come back to that one.)
Similarly, I can't better Wittgenstein's theory of meaning. At least, it seems to make a whole lot more sense than reference based theories, which say, for example, that the word 'dog' represents or stands for or signifies that thing over there that is barking and wagging its tail and which are no use whatsoever when it comes to explaining literature (What does the word 'Ventiak' signify?).
On the other hand literature is clearly not nonsense. The words of a poem do have some sort of meaning. The point, I guess, is that the meaning is irrelevant to what makes the poem a work of art. Those qualities reside elsewhere.
Another notion of Wittgenstein's might be useful here. Literature, we might say, is a language game that we engage in not to fulfill a purpose or achieve a goal or learn a lesson but for its own sake. It has no significance beyond our appreciation of it.
Part of the puzzle in all this is our tendency to equate usefulness with value. In fact, utility is correlated only with the middle range of our values. The things that we value most and the things that we value least have not use at all. Sometimes, unfortunately, we can't tell the difference between these two extremes.
What better way to begin than with a piece of shameless self-promotion. I got an advance copy of my new novel the other day. I think I like the cover. 
I think I like the book. It's hard to tell because it's been so long in the writing. I first got the idea for it after I finished my second novel, Brainjoy, in 1997, so it's been around for nine years. In that time I've written and published two other novels.
When you are writing a book, expect the unexpected. Storylines can take off in unforeseen directions. Characters can develop traits or engage in seemingly trivial and innocent actions that have surprising consequences. In the case of Black Earth/White Bones, this was especially so.
Kit Wallace, the main character, is a disaffected kiwi who has run away to a South Pacific island to escape his past. For a long while, working through several drafts, I struggled to get the right mix of idealism and cynicism that I felt he needed. I tried making him a failed philosophy lecturer but that didn’t work. Then, I thought maybe he should be making a living out of writing erotic books (pornography, if you prefer). That didn’t work either. Finally, I decided he should be a poet.
Not an ordinary poet, of course. Not someone who produces moving or perceptive accounts of their personal experience. I wanted his poetry to be a little weird and sharp edged and not necessarily fully comprehensible. So I invented a literary theory that resulted in a method of composition that spliced bits of text together. This seemed to fit reasonably well with Kit’s mindset but it had a curious consequence. I realised eventually that I wasn’t just going to get away with creating a theory. I was also going to have to put the method into practice and write a poem or two. So I tried and surprisingly it worked. Well, it kind of worked. It produced something that I thought was interesting and provocative and not really like anything I was familiar with.
So, for a while, I abandoned the novel and started writing these poems. As I did so I began to realise that the pieces I was creating bore some similarity to the sort of thing a computer might produce if it had any imagination. Soon it seemed as if the poems were being written by such a computer. I called it Sisyphus 2000 and I began to think of the process of creation as the Computational Method.
The theory of computation is not only the basis for most modern information technology, it is also the latest fashionable theory about how the mind works or, at least, how the lumps of meat in our heads come to perform the mental functions they perform. The poems exist in this kind of intellectual space. Some of them seem to suggest a limited but sensitive human being struggling against the strictures of a rational system. Others feel as if they are stretching the limits of language and hinting at things beyond ordinary expression. I don’t quite feel that I’ve written them in the ordinary way. All I’ve done is set them up and let them happen.
If you want to try some, you can find them in Sport 32 or on this website under Songs of Sisyphus.