Tag: Obituary

Author and playwright Renée dies, aged 94

Neil

We at the library were deeply saddened to hear of the recent passing of Aotearoa author Renée, born in 1929 in Napier of Ngāti Kahungunu and Irish-English-Scots ancestry. After a hard start “she left school at twelve and worked in various jobs” before she found her true vocation in life as a writer, gaining a BA at the University of Auckland in 1979.

Much of her work championed the oppressed and the disenfranchised; humanising working-class people and often having women in leading roles. She wrote over twenty highly acclaimed plays and published many fiction works including The Wild Card, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Ngaio Marsh Awards.

Her last book, “one of her recent forays into the crime genre,” was Blood Matters, published in 2022.

She documented her own amazing life in her autobiography These Two Hands.

She was a driven author, writing and creating work well into her nineties and beyond, and was as passionate about the things that interested her in those later years as ever.

She has described herself as a ‘lesbian feminist with socialist working-class ideas’ and expressed these convictions strongly and clearly in many of her powerful works.

We at the library were proud, honoured and privileged to do several library events with Renée, some of the recordings of which can be viewed on the library YouTube channel. You can find an extensive range of her wonderful work in our library collection.

We wish to extend our deepest sympathies to her family at this time.

In Remembrance of William Friedkin

Sam

william friedkin exorcism GIF by gifnews

Image via Giphy

William Friedkin, an American film director with a prolific career that spanned several decades, sadly passed away last week at the age of 87. Having been closely aligned with the ‘New Hollywood’ movement of the 1970’s, his formative work included direction of an episode of the anthology series ‘The Alfred Hithcock Hour’ in 1965. He found initial success with the 1971 neo-noir action/thriller ‘The French Connection’, which went on to win 5 Academy Awards. He then directed his most famous film ‘The Exorcist’ in 1973, which has gone down in history as one of the most iconic and influential horror films of all time. Over the next few decades, he made several further films within a variety of genres that received varying levels of critical and commercial success. Check out some of his works from within our catalogue below.

Continue reading “In Remembrance of William Friedkin” →

Cormac McCarthy, a leading literary figure, has passed

Neil

The American author Cormac McCarthy passed recently. He was widely recognised as one of the finest writers of his generation. He wrote twelve novels, five screenplays, two plays, and short stories. His body of work was widely acclaimed both in his home country and internationally, with his 2006 apocalyptical novel The Road “simultaneously harrowing, bleak, powerful and humane” winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. One reviewer even described it as the best book on parenting ever written! Just before his death and sixteen years after his previous novel, he released two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, almost back-to-back. Both are superb examples of his writing. Many of his works were adapted for the screen such as No Country for Old Men which won four Oscars. All the Pretty Horses, Child of God and The Road were also made into notable movies.

It is very difficult to pigeonhole his whole body of work, but he did write books that can in places be described as southern gothic, post-modern westerns, and sometimes with overt apocalyptical overtones. His books are superbly written using sparse attribution and punctuation and often employ graphic descriptions of violence.

He was also a member of American Philosophical Society and even wrote a paper on the nature of human unconscious and the origin of language. He kept his political opinions private, and his books can be interpreted in many ways. One hint as to his political leanings was his secret plan to reintroduce wolves into southern Arizona. He was a deeply private writer who rarely gave interviews or attended public events.

No country for old men / McCarthy, Cormac
“A harrowing novel set in the American West, now an Academy Award winning film starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

 

 

All the pretty horses / McCarthy, Cormac
“John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood. “All the Pretty Horses” is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about childhood passing, along with innocence and a vanished American age. Steeped in the wisdom that comes only from loss, it is a magnificent parable of responsibility, revenge and survival.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Child of God / McCarthy, Cormac
“‘McCarthy is a master stylist, perhaps without equal in American letters’ Village Voice” (Adapted from Catalogue)

 

 

 

The road / McCarthy, Cormac
“Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, The Road tells the story of a father and son as they journey across a post-apocalyptic landscape that has destroyed most of civilization.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

 

The passenger / McCarthy, Cormac
“Pass Christian, Mississippi, 1980: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips up the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from a Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit–by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, an inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

Stella Maris / McCarthy, Cormac
“Black River Falls, Wisconsin, 1972: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see.” (Adapted from Catalogue) Also available as an eBook.

Blood meridian, or, The evening redness in the West / McCarthy, Cormac
“Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, “the kid,” a boy of fourteen.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

 

 

Suttree / McCarthy, Cormac
“‘Suttree contains a humour that is Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’ Times Literary Supplement” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Nobel prize-winning author Kenzaburō Ōe has passed

Neil

The dead can survive as part of the lives of those that still live.

One of the giants of Japanese literature, Kenzaburō Ōe, died recently. His writing dealt with a wide range of ‘big question’ subjects — both on a personal and on a wider societal level. He wrote on subjects such as nuclear disarmament, militarism, and also his disabled son, who in later life became a musical prodigy and an award-winning composer. He said of his son “I was trained as a writer and as a human being by the birth of my son.”

Much of his work had its origins in his own life, such as The silent cry, which is about the impact of war on post-war Japanese society and is widely regarded as his masterpiece. His novel A Quiet Life is loosely about his relationship with his son .

Born in 1935 as the fifth of seven children into an age where the emperor was still regarded as a living god, he lived through the second World War, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent post-war collapse in Japanese society and its economy. In the 1960s, he became more political and was a highly acclaimed cult writer for Japan’s post-war youth. He continued writing late into his seventies, railing against any revival of  Japanese nationalism, nuclear power and war.

Henry Miller once said that in his “range of hope and despair” he was like Dostoevsky. Several critics said of him that, like Faulkner, he created a language of his own.

We have a wide range of his works available in both English and Japanese:

Browse works by Kenzaburō Ōe


Rouse up o young men of the new age / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“K is a famous writer living in Tokyo with his wife and three children, one of whom is mentally disabled. K’s wife confronts him with the information that this child, Eeyore, has been doing disturbing things — behaving aggressively, asserting that he’s dead, even brandishing a knife at his mother — and K, given to retreating from reality into abstraction, looks for answers in his lifelong love of William Blake’s poetry. As K struggles to understand his family and assess his responsibilities within it, he must also reevaluate himself — his relationship with his own father, the political stances he has taken, the duty of artists and writers in society. ” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Somersault / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“Kenzaburo Oe is internationally recognized as one of the world’s finest writers. When he won the Nobel Prize nearly ten years ago, he announced that he would no longer be writing fiction–or, if he did, that his future work would be radically different from the highly autobiographical fiction he was known for. Now, with Somersault, Oe has broken his silence and shared with us the result of his artistic reorientation, in a magnificent story of the charisma of leaders, the danger of zealotry, and the mystery of faith.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Death by water / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“[Kogito Choko] returns to his hometown village in search of a red suitcase rumored to hold documents revealing the details of his father’s death during World War II, details that will serve as the foundation for his new, and final, novel. Since his youth, renowned novelist Kogito Choko planned to fictionalize his father’s fatal drowning in order to fully process the loss. Stricken with guilt and regret over his failure to rescue his father, Choko has long been driven to discover why his father was boating on the river in a torrential storm…” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Hiroshima notes / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“Hiroshima Notes is a powerful statement on the Hiroshima bombing and its terrible legacy by the 1994 Nobel laureate for literature. Oe’s account of the lives of the many victims of Hiroshima and the valiant efforts of those who cared for them, both immediately after the atomic blast and in the years that follow, reveals the horrific extent of the devastation. It is a heartrending portrait of a ravaged city — the “human face” in the midst of nuclear destruction.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

A quiet life / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“A Quiet Life is narrated by Ma-Chan, a young woman who at the age of twenty finds herself in an unusual family situation. Her father is a famous and fascinating novelist; her older brother, though mentally handicapped, possesses an almost magical gift for musical composition. The lives of both father and son revolve around their work and each other, and her mother’s life is devoted to the care of them both. She and her younger brother find themselves emotionally on the outside of this oddly constructed nuclear family. But when her father leaves Japan to accept a visiting professorship from a distinguished American university, Ma-Chan finds herself suddenly the head of the household and the center of family relationships that she must begin to redefine.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

The silent cry / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“The Silent Cry traces the uneasy relationship between two brothers who return to their ancestral home, a village in densely forested western Japan. While one brother tries to sort out the after-effects of a friend’s suicide and the birth of a retarded son, the other embarks on a quixoticmission to incite an uprising among the local youth. Oe’s description of this brother’s messianic struggle to save a disintegrating local culture and economy from the depredations of a Korean wheeler-dealer called “The Emperor of the Supermarkets” is as chillingly pertinent today as it was when first published in 1967. ” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Nip the buds, shoot the kids / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids recounts the exploits of 15 teenage reformatory boys evacuated in wartime to a remote mountain village where they are feared and detested by the local peasants. When plague breaks out, the villagers flee, blocking the boys inside the deserted town. Their brief attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love, and tribal valour is doomed in the face of death and the adult nightmare of war.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Teach us to outgrow our madness : four short novels / Ōe, Kenzaburō
“Four stories which offer insights into Japanese society are contained in this work by the winner of Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature. The title story is a semi-autobiographical account of a father coming to terms with his brain-damaged son.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Pioneering Reggae musician and producer Lee Scratch Perry has passed at 85

Neil

The unpredictable, eccentric, maverick, pioneering Reggae producer, and musical genius Lee Scratch Perry has passed at 85.

Lee Scratch Perry was born into harsh poverty in rural Jamaica and throughout his life walked a very thin line between genius and insanity. He worked in various menial jobs before moving to Kingston in the early 60’s where he eventually started working with Clement “Coxsone” Dodd and his touring sound system. Dodd and Perry eventually expanded into record production and, beginning a pattern that would follow Perry his whole life, Perry subsequently fell out with Dodd and went on to form his own Upsetter label.

Around this time, he produced many of  Bob Marley’s key early works, such as African Herbsman and had a profound effect on the young Marley’s creative vision and approach. Following the now clearly emerging pattern, the pair fell out after Lee Scratch Perry sold the master tapes of this early classic without Marley’s knowledge or consent.

His adventurous, ever-exploring production work in his legendary four track twelve-foot square Black Ark Studio in the mid to late 70’s cemented his reputation with a string of critically and commercially albums. And along the way with fellow sonic pioneer King Tubby, he was one of the key creative forces to create Dub music. However, his eccentric behaviour continued and came to a head in 1979, when fuelled by huge amounts of work, ganga and rum, he burnt the studio to the ground, believing it possessed and walked off into the wilderness. He eventually moved to Switzerland after spending time in the U.S, Amsterdam, and London, and only last year returned to Jamaica.

His later work was inconsistent but did include some fabulous collaborations with the likes of The Ord, The Beastie Boys and The  Clash, as well as fellow producers Adrian Sherwood and Mad Professor as well as several excellent solo albums. He also picked up a Grammy in 2003. During these later years was a failed attempt to rebuild the Black Ark studio, a plan which included a duck pond in the drum booth. It is an understatement to say we shall not see the likes of Lee Scratch Perry again.

We have an extensive selection of Lee Scratch Perry produced and created albums in our collection; below are just a few of our personal favourites. To see all of the Lee Scratch Perry works we have in our collection click here.

Arkology. / Perry, Lee
“Purportedly the definitive Lee “Scratch” Perry compilation, the three-CD set Arkology is loaded with good intentions and is carefully constructed, but with a back catalog like Perry’s — where it’s nearly impossible to find out what’s what — definitive in this case is a dream. Still, the compilers have done a fine job of providing an overview of Perry’s career that makes sense musically, historically, and culturally. For those who want to jump headlong into Perry’s world, this is the way to go.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

African herbsman / Marley, Bob
“The legendary Bob Marley and the Wailers album produced by Lee Scratch Perry.” ( Adapted from Catalogue)

 

 

 

Lee Perry and King Tubby in dub confrontation. / Perry, Lee
“King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry deep in the cauldron of creativity that invented Dub reggae” ( Adapted from Catalogue)

 

 

The sound doctor : Lee Perry and the sufferers’ Black Ark singles and dub plates, 1972-1978. / Perry, Lee
“The Sound Doctor is one in a series of U.K. label Pressure Sounds compilations unearthing obscured sounds from Perry’s short-lived but intensely innovative Black Ark years. Much of the music here is transferred from dub plates, hissy acetate discs made directly from the soundboard in single editions to test how a mix would translate to vinyl.” (adapted from catalogue)

Super ape / Perry, Lee
” Often arguably cited as one of Lee Scratch Perry’s finest outings, but with so many exceptional albums it is a hard call to make. What there is no argument about is that  Super Ape is without any question an unparalleled dub and psychedelic reggae classic.” (Adapted from Catalogue). This is the vinyl copy; to check availability of the CD click here.

 

Scratch came Scratch saw Scratch conquered. / Perry, Lee
“Highly-regarded late period (2008) album from dub and reggae legend Lee Scratch Perry’. (Adapted from catalogue).

 

 

 

Blackboard jungle dub / Upsetters
“Essential Dub reggae album from Lee Scratch Perry and the Upsetters”(Adapted from catalogue)

 

 

 

Rootz reggae dub. / Perry, Lee
“On Rootz Reggae Dub Perry is doing his typical free-associative muttering over tasteful, slightly echoey backing tracks, featuring rudimentary percussion by Perry himself, as well as spirited backing vocals by Detroit trio Dames Brown and the Groovematist.  Essentially, it’s a lot of touching on past glories without really creating anything that stands up to them. Nevertheless, there are a few standout moments  which are calm, spacious, and pleasantly weird. ” (adapted from catalogue)

Rainford. / Perry, Lee
“Rainford contains all of Lee Perry’s unique stylings his wonderful iconic unmistakable vocal drawl and his trade mark free form lyrical style superbly combined with U Sounds musical production. The later dub remixed version Heavy rain is also worth a mention it is weirder and warmer and arguably an even better version of the material in Rainford.” (adapted from catalogue)
Click here for the availability of Heavy Rain.

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti poet, has passed aged 101

Neil

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!” ― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, the founder of World-famous and hugely influential City lights Bookstore, has passed aged 101. Ferlinghetti and the City Lights Bookstore had close ties and associations with the American, radical, romantic and often perceived as hedonistic Beat generation.

Ferlinghetti disliked the association despite publishing the famous Howl and other poems by Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was one of the three very different writers that came to epitomise the Beat movement the others being Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Each in their own way explored ideas of individual freedom, views on sexuality, and questioned the mainstream values and norms of the time such as ecological issues or the destructive ideas that underpin modern capitalism.

The Beat generation made many of these at the time minority views acceptable allowing them to percolate into mainstream culture and paved the way for the 1960s counterculture, and many of their ideas are now regarded as the norm today.

Ferlinghetti was also a poet (A Coney Island of the mind sold over one million copies), an artist and self-confessed Anarchist activist who avoided personal publicity and biographical details as much as possible. Often making up different versions of his past when asked. In later years the City Lights bookstore became a tourist attraction and a cultural focal point in San Francisco. So much so that the City proclaimed March the 23rd, his birthday, “Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day”.

We have a wide collection of Beat generation titles and even some City Light published books in our collection. For a small selection see below.


A Coney Island of the mind : poems / Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
“Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind has become a modern classic. It has been translated into nine languages and there are now three-quarters of a million copies in print. The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller’s “Into the Night Life” and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950’s as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Collected poems, 1947-1997 / Ginsberg, Allen
“The only volume of collected poems to cover the entire 50-year career of the poet “responsible for loosening the breath of American poetry at mid-century” (Helen Vendler). Here, for the first time, is a volume that gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half century of brilliant work from one of America’s great poets. The chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse in the tradition of Walt Whitman, Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. ” (Adapted from Catalogue)

On the road / Kerouac, Jack
“On the Road is the classic story of two characters who set off on an odyssey through 1950s underground America. On the Road chronicles Kerouac’s years traveling the North American continent, from East Coast to West Coast to Mexico, with his friend Neal Cassady, “a sideburned hero of the snowy West.” As “Sal Paradise” and “Dean Moriarty,” the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

The voice is all : the lonely victory of Jack Kerouac / Johnson, Joyce
” In The Voice is All, Joyce Johnson, author of her classic memoir, Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac, brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac’s French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider’s vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road, followed by Visions of Cody.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Cities of the red night / Burroughs, William S.
“While young men wage war against an evil empire of zealous mutants, the population of this modern inferno is afflicted with the epidemic of a radioactive virus. An opium-infused apocalyptic vision from the legendary author of Naked Lunch is the first of the trilogy with The Places of the Dead Roads and his final novel, The Western Plains.” (Catalogue)

Literary outlaw : the life and times of William S. Burroughs / Morgan, Ted
“Almost indecently readable . . . captures [Burroughs’s] destructive energy, his ferocious pessimism, and the renegade brilliance of his style.”–Vogue With a new preface as well as a final chapter on William S. Burroughs s last years, the acclaimed Literary Outlaw is the only existing full biography of an extraordinary figure. Anarchist, heroin addict, alcoholic, and brilliant writer, Burroughs was the patron saint of the Beats. His avant-garde masterpiece Naked Lunch shook up the literary world with its graphic descriptions of drug abuse and illicit sex and resulted in a landmark Supreme Court ruling on obscenity.” (Catalogue)

Women of the Beat generation : the writers, artists, and muses at the heart of revolution
“An anthology of the lives, writings and secrets of the women of the Beat Generation, this book contains biographies poetry and prose by Hettie Jones, Joyce Johnson, Ruth Weiss, Jan Kerouac, and others. It contains commentary by American poet of the year Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg.” (Catalogue)

The Beat Hotel : Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963 / Miles, Barry
“The Beat Hotel has been closed for nearly forty years. But for a brief period–from just after the publication of Howl in 1957 until the building was sold in 1963–it was home to Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Peter Orlovsky, Harold Norse, and a host of other luminaries of the Beat Generation. Now, Barry Miles–acclaimed author of many books on the Beats and a personal acquaintance of many of them–vividly excavates this remarkable period and restores it to a historical picture that has, until now, been skewed in favour of the two coasts of America.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

The best minds of my generation : a literary history of the Beats / Ginsberg, Allen
“A unique and compelling history of the Beats, in the words of the movement’s most central member, Allen Ginsberg, based on a seminal series of his lectures In summer 1977, Ginsberg thought it was time for a literary history of what he, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and others had accomplished and designed a course he taught five times, first at the Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College. Compiled and edited by renowned Beat scholar Morgan, this book presents those lectures, complete with notes. .” (Adapted from Catalogue)