No place like Holmes

NZ broadcaster Paul Holmes is retiring, and the press is full of reminiscences of his eventful life lived in the public eye (and ear) in NZ.

One such 'signing off from the airwaves' interview, in yesterday's Sunday Star-Times, refers to a brief meeting between Paul Holmes and Janet Frame.

He'd been in Dunedin promoting his one-off easy-listening CD and she approached him to sign a copy, using the pretext that she was buying it not for herself, but for her niece.

I still have the Paul Homes CD she used as the excuse to meet him, that he kindly signed "For Pamela, with love, Paul". The CD did not kick off a singing career, but it sold well I think.

One of the things that Paul and Janet had in common was they'd both very publicly survived a brush with cancer (she'd had ovarian cancer in the early 1990s and "beaten" it, and he'd been successfully treated for prostate cancer).

I wasn't at the meeting, which took place at the Meridian Mall in Dunedin, but I met Janet and the friend she was with later for coffee at the Meridian food court (we could still see Paul Holmes at his signing table on the other side of the mall), and heard there'd been a warm mutually flummoxed conversation, as can occur when celebrities collide, and a photo taken, and I was presented with my CD!

The Star-Times interviewer spotted the photo:

"Among the photographs on the sideboard (Kiri Te Kanawa, Bill Clinton, family, family, family) is a picture of a dark-suited Holmes with an old woman with wild white hair. Janet Frame approached the broadcaster at a CD signing session in Dunedin. He says she told him they were both survivors."

One thousand and one great books

The second edition of the popular 1001 books you must read before you die has been released.

The list of 1001 books appears all around the internet and many readers challenge themselves to catch up with some of the great classics of world literature listed there.

Janet Frame's FACES IN THE WATER featured on the list in the first edition, and it's not surprising to see this powerful and influential novel listed again in the second edition.

Here are a couple of highlights from the 1001 Books article on FACES IN THE WATER:

'Faces in the Water is one of the most powerful descriptions of mental illness ever written. Although a work of fiction, the novel is informed by Janet Frame's own experience as a patient (wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia) in a New Zealand mental asylum.'

'The book is a biting critique of the gross power differential between medical "professional" and patient. While the skillful way in which the novel makes this point is enough to make it memorable, the prose's striking quality elevates it to a truly great novel. Istina's thoughts and narrative descriptions combine an accomplished lyricism with the fractured digressions symptomatic of psychological trauma.'

The current Random House New Zealand edition, paired with another early Frame novel

The current Australian edition, from Vintage Australia.

A new edition of Faces in the Water is soon to be released by Virago in the UK.

Novelist Hilary Mantel has written an exquisitely beautiful and perceptive introduction for this volume that really must not be missed.

Name Change

Today the name of this blog changes from SLIGHTLY FRAMOUS to JANET ON THE PLANET.

Why? Because the former is perhaps a little too subtle, and has been leading to some misinterpretations.

The new name is a name Janet used to sign herself, not to everybody she corresponded with I guess, but she used it when she wrote to me, and the copy above is taken from a fax she sent once.

I had been saving the expression 'Janet on the Planet' in case I ever got around to writing a memoir about my life with (and without) Janet Frame.

Just the other day while visiting Wellington, I was spending some time with my chum Roger Steele of Steele Roberts publishing, and he was the latest in a long line of people to ask whether I was working on a memoir.

No, I said, but I have got a blog.

I realised then that this blog is probably as close as I'll get in the meantime, to making a first pass at a memoir, so why not give it a name I like better, and one that Janet herself invented.

Paying it Forward

Another New Zealand writer to benefit from Janet Frame's legacy is Emma Neale, poet and novelist of Dunedin. Emma has recently been awarded the inaugural NZ Society of Authors Janet Frame Memorial Award. This biannual award was funded by the Janet Frame Literary Trust and Emma will receive a $3000 grant with which she intends to purchase some much needed computer equipment.

Here's a link to some of Emma's books and to her profile on the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre.

Perkins picks TAS

This week's New Zealand Listener provides the usual list - ubiquitous at this festively consumer season - of best books of the year. Janet Frame's posthumous novel Towards Another Summer is not of course eligible for the 2008 line up, having been first published in this country last year, in 20o7.

However many New Zealand literary bright lights were also asked to provide a list of the best books they actually read in 2008, not necessarily that were published this year. One of these lists featured the great classic MOBY-DICK read for the first time by that commentator, and not surprisingly the conclusion was that "if this book had been published in 2008, it would have been hailed as astonishingly modern".

Most definitely - because the greatest works of literature remain always fresh, and they don't date, and they don't fade away. (And sometimes, as in the case of Moby-Dick, it takes a little while for their worth to be recognised by the list-makers!)

So I was delighted to see that one of the other lists in the LISTENER highlighted the Janet Frame novel which has been received so well all around the world, having been published separately in Australia as well as in New Zealand, and by VIRAGO in the UK and Canada, and that will be published in the USA next year by Counterpoint. Translation rights are also selling steadily (12 languages so far, including most recently Turkish, Finnish, and Brazilian Portuguese). It's a deceptively simple and accessible but beautifully written and piercing book that is muscling its way in amongst the powerful canon of Janet Frame's other work and demanding a place as one of the best-loved.

NZ author and recently returned expatriate Emily Perkins chose TAS as one of her favourites of the year's reading.

Emily says: "I loved Janet Frame's posthumously published novel Towards Another Summer (Vintage 2007). There can be the chilly whiff of the open grave about work brought to the public by literary executors, but this book dispels any creeping voyeurism the reader might feel. It's a very funny story about homesickness and heartache, full of doom and dread, written in Frame's exquisite new-made language."

Earlier this year I heard Emily Perkins praising Towards Another Summer in an interview with the BBC. She was speaking live from Christchurch, and the occasion was the much heralded UK launch of the Virago hardback copy of Towards Another Summer, which since July has already had two reprints and the paperback edition has been set in production for release in 2009.
It's looking pretty clear that like Moby Dick, Towards Another Summer will be around for a very long time.

Nurturing a New Generation

Warmest congratulations to Jo Randerson of Wellington, for being awarded an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award for 2008, worth $25,000.

The multi-talented Jo Randerson is a poet, author, comedian, actor, director and playwright with seemingly boundless energy and creativity.

Jo has also been awarded the 2008-9 New Zealand Society of Authors Foxton Fellowship. The recipient of this fellowship is entitled to stay for a month at a writer's retreat house in Foxton owned by Peter and Dianne Beatson. The Beatsons also provide a stipend to the lucky author, so it's not surprising that from next year the fellowship will be renamed "The NZSA Beatsons Fellowship".

Jo was a Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 2001 and attended the 50th anniversary celebrations held in Dunedin in October. She chaired a deeply moving tribute session to all the deceased Burns Fellows, in which their words and their memory came alive, causing many tears especially as 2008 has seen the loss of three dearly loved former Fellows who had all lived in Dunedin: Hone Tuwhare, Ruth Dallas and Dianne Pettis.

The memorial hour was called "Bright in Memory" and Jo gave an "introductory peroration" in which she listed and considered the treasury of New Zealand's departed literary heroes. Then she and her fellow panellists each gave an individual tribute to one fellow, by speaking about and reading from that author's work. Hone Tuwhare was commemorated by Cilla McQueen, James K Baxter by Brian Turner, Ruth Dallas by Bernadette Hall, and Dianne Pettis by Christine Johnston.

And Jo Randerson gave the tribute to Janet Frame. Jo told us that Janet Frame was the first writer that ever made her "shudder". Jo read out Janet Frame's marvellous fable "Two Sheep".

Janet Frame herself had also once chosen to read that same story out during her session at an author's festival, held in Toronto in 1984. While at the week-long festival Janet Frame also attended every one of the major sessions given by the other special guests (who included Margaret Attwood, Yevgeny Yevtuschenko, Nadine Gordimer and VS Naipaul).

And so the new generations are nourished by the words and the example of the great writers of the past who never really leave us, as their words stay as fresh and powerful on the page and in the ear, as the day they were written.

Dunedin Public Library

Dunedin Public Library is 100 years old today. To mark the milestone, a Centennial History called Freedom to Read has been released. This book includes reproductions of both sides of the application card Janet Frame filled out on the 24th of May 1954, when she had just secured a live-in job at the Grand Hotel Dunedin.

While Janet Frame was living at the Grand Hotel, she wrote stories and poems, including the story GORSE IS NOT PEOPLE first published this year in the NEW YORKER.

The Grand Hotel is now The Southern Cross Hotel, housing the Dunedin Casino. The staff lived in small rooms on the top floor.