The greatest love story ever told

A new radio documentary has been broadcast on Radio New Zealand this week to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Jonathan Dennis, the first director of The New Zealand Film Archive.

24 Frames: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told (also available to listen to online) includes extracts from Janet Frame's short story 'The Pictures' read by Prue Langbein.

The Janet Frame Literary Trust was of course happy to cooperate with the producer Gareth Watkins by giving permission for the use of the Frame copyright for the purposes of this timely tribute to a much loved fellow New Zealander.

The recording of the Janet Frame story was originally made for Jonathan Dennis’s Centenary of Cinema programme in the late 1990s.

'The Pictures' was first published in The Lagoon and other Stories. It's a glorious and poignant observation of a mother and her young daughter being swept away from their daily life by the magic and romance of a trip to the movies. The story is also reproduced in several other 'best of' selections of Janet Frame's stories: You are Now Entering the Human Heart,  Prizes,  and The Daylight and the Dust.

"They stood outside the theatre, the woman in the black coat and the little girl in the red pixie-cap and they looked at the advertisements. 
    It was a wonderful picture. It was the greatest love story ever told. It was Life and Love and Laughter, and Tenderness and Tears."

“Seven thousand feet, the woman said to herself. She liked to remember the length of the picture, it was something to be sure of.
   She knew she could see the greatest love story in the world till after four o’clock. It was nice to come to the pictures like that and know how long the story would last.
    And to know that in the end he would take her out in the moonlight and a band would play and he would kiss her and everything would be all right again."

Make sure you read the small print

Janet Frame In Her Own Words

 Reviewed by John McCrystal, from Wellington

NZ Herald Saturday 10 December 2011

Excerpts:

"This book is a delight, because Frame herself is a delight"

"Janet Frame has been largely depicted as a recluse, an idea which this latest book dismantles"

"The volume is quite beautiful - small, printed on gorgeous stock in hard covers with a dust jacket featuring photographs depicting the young Frame in various moods, from stern and contemplative to whimsical and even clownish. But you have to question the decision to render the text in so piddly a font size."

"Highlights of the material presented here include her book reviews, a 1968 report on her tenure of the Burns Fellowship from Landfall, a 1987 draft report on her tenure as the inaugural Frank Sargeson Fellow, the spectacle of the diffident Frame dealing with the intrusions of interviewers, her valedictory notes to Sargeson and Brasch, and her reminiscences on the thrill of discovery when first she handled a copy of the stories by the Brothers Grimm."

Note: Most NZ Herald book reviews are accessible in an online archive but for some unknown reason this particular review has not been made available to the public.

Makers of Modern New Zealand

I was in New Zealand's capital city recently and managed to see the exhibition Makers of Modern New Zealand 1930 - 1990 that is currently showing in a most picturesque setting at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery on Wellington's waterfront. I have discussed this exhibition in an earlier post, and even though all the images and also the captions are available online, nothing beats the atmosphere of walking around a gallery and enjoying the works in person. It adds enjoyment to note the intriguing juxtapositions of the images of some of these prominent Kiwis: in the snapshot above you can see that Janet Frame's portrait hangs next to that of the influential money-man, Ron Brierly. Janet would have been amused.

Portrait of Janet Frame by Robin Morrison

Towards Another Summer in Turkey

The first of several new Janet Frame publications for 2012 is Bir Başka Yaza Doğru - the Turkish translation of Towards Another Summer. (Yapi Kredi, January 2012)

Yapi Kredi have already released Owls Do Cry in Turkish translation: Baykuşlar Öterken (2010):

"new sides to a beloved friend"

There was an excellent little notice for Janet Frame in Her Own Words in last weekend's Herald on Sunday (in the 'Living' section, 'Sunday Books' page 16).

Ngaire Atmore of the book blog BookieMonster said that "reading the non-fiction, interviews, letters and speeches is like discovering new sides to a beloved friend. A very welcome addition to the Frame oeuvre."

Herald on Sunday (15 January 2011)

Postscript: Full text of the small review may be found here.

Jenny McLeod's Janet Frame Song Cycles

Composer Jenny McLeod has released a CD of all three of the Janet Frame song cycles she has composed in recent years. In all Jenny McLeod has set 28 of Janet Frame's poems to music.

The three song cycles are:

FROM GARDEN TO GRAVE

PEAKS OF CLOUD

THE POET

The CD has been published by the Waiteata Music Press as part of the Waiteata Collection of New Zealand Music:

Volume XII. Jenny McLeod: Vocal and Choral Works.

Bloomsday or Doomsday

The carrion vultures are croaking and crawing over the corpse of the James Joyce literary estate which emerged from its copyright protection on the 1st of January 2012.

Oh Happy New Year!

"We all own Joyce now" shrieks the twitter account of a sausage factory for ready-made writers. Oh dear, duck your heads for some tedious mash-ups of Joyce with the staple fare of middle class banalities about what to wear to the jazz club. Workshopped to within an ironic inch of any vitality.

The Wikipedia version of Phenergan's Wake will be a triumph of democracy.

The unbridled exultation on the part of those whose commodifications will be unfettered at last, has led to a bit of a vituperative slagging-off of literary estates in general. How dare they be so obstructive! There has been a little more than muttering, and there's apparently a lot of resentment to express about the supposed outrages done to truth and justice. As can be seen, for instance, in this article from todays' Independent: An End to Bad-Heir Days (by Gordon Bowker, 7 January 2012).

A lot of it is fiction, and betrays the natural hostility of many academics towards literary estates The scholars project their own greed and inappropriate sense of personal entitlement onto the estates. They use these demeaning anecdotes to stir up public opinion. Perhaps they even believe this mythmaking, as legend-building appears to be their natural territory in any case. By demonising estates they attempt to take the attention off their own often unethical behaviour.

Note that Salinger is on the list of supposedly rude and obstructive 'estates'. He had been so depersonalised - as are the other great authors - that they couldn't even wait for him to die, let alone for his copyright to expire.

Anyone who tries to prevent an author's private life and work being exploited and miscontextualised is portrayed negatively, as in this article. I bet the literary estates have their own horror stories to tell too, of theft and lies and misrepresentation and misquotation on the part of unscrupulous career-builders.

Honestly your hair would stand on end at the lengths some of these people go to. Many of them do not respect an attitude of cooperation either, as I discovered personally. Their peers sneer at them apparently, if they are believed to be cooperating with an estate. Standard practice seems to be to attempt to manipulate or deceive, and some particularly unpleasant people take it further, and have been seen to bait the estates gratuitously, as is well known to have happened with the Plath Estate. In some cases, it becomes a kind of sport, and as for the obsessed scholar who has so identified him or herself with 'their' author - then it becomes a kind of madness I think.

And if my negative portrait of some academics astonishes and alarms anyone who reads this, then you need to ask yourself whether you are just as astonished and alarmed by their own attempt to assassinate the character of the major literary estates, or whether you are willing to just swallow their propaganda whole.