Reader's Voice aims to give people a few good reading tips. For this issue I interviewed Gary Panter, who has had a big influence on comics, painting, set design, graphic design and other media. His comics include Jimbo, and the Dal Tokyo comic strip. He was also one of 15 comics artists featured in the Masters of American Comics exhibition, which featured some of the all-time greats of U.S. comics.
While looking through Gary Panter’s website, I saw two lists of books he had intended to read. They were interesting books, and I asked him how he found out about books like these.
See Gary Panter’s website at www.garypanter.com.
READER'S VOICE: On the blog on your website you had a couple of lists of interesting books you were planning on reading. I was wondering how you find out about books like these, maybe giving a couple of examples.
GARY PANTER: I read all those books. Books with footnotes lead to many other books. And also I look at the people who write blurbs for writers I like, and read their books. For example, my wife gave me Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino. I loved it and it was a bit of an homage to Flann O'Brien whom I love. The cover blurbs were by Robert Coover. So I read The Public Burning and loved it.
Coover's book had a blurb by William Gass on the back so I read The Tunnel --fantastic. Then I figured I might as well jump into Gaddis since I was reading all these experimental novelists from the 70s. [William Gaddis, author of novels like JR; Carpenter's Gothic; The Recognitions; and A Frolic of His Own].
RV: Which books on the lists did you particularly enjoy and can you say a bit about why you liked them?
GP: I liked them all. At Swim Two Birds -- Flann O'Brien. I almost died laughing reading this. Contrasting beautiful and stupid writing.
The Divine Comedy -- Dante. A study in itself, and referred to in so many other books and useful to personal psychology.
The Knight of the Burning Pestle -- Francis Beaumont, 1607- early English comedy-experimental deconstructionist prototype.
RV: Could you give a bit of a general history of your reading from maybe your teenage years on; were there particular tributaries of books you followed, or phases you recall?
GP: I was crazy about dinosaurs and art and robots and forced to read the Bible, in childhood. I didn't really read until the 4th grade. I sat in the car and taught myself to read on the OZ books of Baum.
Read Swift, Poe and Twain. At 12 I decided it was time to read an adult book and so I checked out Fowles -- The Magus, because it had a minotaur on the cover and I was into Picasso heavily by then.
In college read everything by Phil Dick, J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon and not much else.
RV: Could you recommend some of your favorite books of all time, and maybe say why you liked them?
GP: Through the Looking Glass -- Lewis Carroll -- my first favorite book!!!!! Tristram Shandy -- Laurence Sterne - experimental novel -funny - loves language. Finnegans Wake -- James Joyce - experimental novel - loves language. Gargantua and Pantagruel --Rabelais - experimental proto-novel - loves language. The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit-- Swift - encoded experimental operation. Mason and Dixon -- Thomas Pynchon - great and silly. The Unlimited Dream Company -- J.G. Ballard - amazing and moving. The Zap Gun -- Philip K. Dick - simple and amazing and moving. The plays of Ben Jonson and Molliere.
RV: What kind of ratio of time do you spend on reading compared to creating art, like Jimbo, and Dal Tokyo?
GP: I read 1 to 20 pages a day. I make art many hours.
RV: Can you describe your daily routine in Brooklyn?
GP: Get up at 7:30 in the morning -- feed cats, drive daughter to school, read the NY Times and drink chocolate milk. Do chores and tasks and try to get time to make art. Make art. Take naps. Before each 5 minute nap I read a page or two. Right now I'm reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. Make art.
Go to sleep at 3:00 in the morning.
RV: What books or other projects do you have planned?
GP: In 2007 Fantagraphics books will publish a collection of my Dal Tokyo comic strips, which I have been drawing for 10 years for Riddim magazine in Japan.
Overheat records (Tokyo) is about to release my early 80s lp album Pray for Smurph on CD.I am working on new music with my friend Devin Flynn.
In 2008 a giant (650 pp.) 2 volume book on my paintings will come out from Picturebox Press. This will be about the coolest thing ever, from my corner.
Joshua White and I are planning a light show for the Rhode Island School of Design for this year. My new New York gallery is Clementine and I will show there in early 2008.
-copyright Simon Sandall.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Amy Bennett
For her latest narrative paintings, Amy Bennett imagined families living in a fictional small town: their pasts, their interactions, and dramas. To help her imagine scenarios in their lives, Amy Bennett constructed a 1:87 scale model of their neighborhood, using model railroad miniatures, landscape supplies, and dollhouse lighting. I asked Amy Bennett about her paintings and her reading.
******
For a look at Amy Bennett’s paintings, see www.amybennett.com.
READER'S VOICE: I was wondering if you'd ever done any writing. Your exhibition Stories, at the Linda Warren Gallery in Chicago, created a setting with anxious characters in a country farmhouse; and your current exhibition Neighbors, at the Richard Heller Gallery, kind of reminds me of some movies, like To Kill a Mockingbird, with sinister events unfolding in darkness in a small town.
AMY BENNETT: I enjoyed taking some fiction writing classes as an undergrad, but the only writing I do these days is to flesh out painting ideas. An image or character or scene might start to develop in my mind, and writing helps to make it something more concrete. It also helps me remember!
RV: Do your favorite books tend to deal with themes like your paintings, such as family life, small town America, loneliness, anxiety or obsession?
AB: Yes, I hate to be so predictable but they definitely do. I love JD Salinger, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates, so relationships are another common theme. I also like books that use language in the same way a beautiful painting uses light. Words or light can describe a very ordinary object or scene in a way that makes you see it very clearly as if for the first time.
RV: Do you get ideas for paintings from your reading, or movies, or stories you've heard, or do ideas just come from thinking about the scale models you build of houses and towns?
AB: All of the above. I get a lot of ideas from reading. It's not that I'll read a description of a place or situation and then feel compelled to illustrate it, although that has happened before, but usually I'll be reading and then find that my mind has wandered off and I suddenly have a wonderful idea that I have to write down. But I usually have to turn back several pages, which makes for very slow reading. The same is true with movies, but books are better triggers for daydreams because your mind is already involved in inventing images. I get a lot of ideas from playing with my model.
In making the model neighborhood I had to consider who lived in each house, what their relationships and habits were, and how they related to their neighbors. Plus, I might have an idea for a specific image, but I have to experiment with my model first to see what actually looks the most interesting. I am often surprised, because through arranging the model, I usually discover something better than my original idea. And there are some times that I can't get my idea to come to life in the model, so I have to shelf the idea and develop a different image.
RV: Do memories come into your paintings much, like childhood images that have stuck in your head for decades? Or do family events or relatives inspire some pictures?
AB: There are moments and people that will stay with me for my entire life. They are certainly inspiring, and I am often working with closely related material, but I am not interested in recreating images of the past. A couple of the houses in my neighborhood are loosely based on the homes of my grandparents in two different stages of their lives. It gives me a framework to filter through some of the things I experienced with them and saw them go through as they aged.
It also provides a stage for my imaginings of what their lives were like when they were young and raising a family. By translating my own experiences through the model, it becomes something different and new. It's no longer a personal, internal thing, but a toy onto which I'm trying to impose some aesthetics. The model helps keep me from getting too embarrassed or bored.
******
READER'S VOICE: Could you recommend about four or five books you've really liked and maybe say why you liked them?
AMY BENNETT: I enjoyed Justin Spring's biography, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art. He was not only a painter, but an intellectual, an art critic, and a teacher. Plus, he grew up in a strange family and then created an even stranger one of his own. I usually have a strong preference for fiction, but Spring writes with a narrative sensibility that recreates a world populated by the likes of painters Willem DeKooning and Larry Rivers, and poets James Schuyler and John Ashberry.
Another non-fiction book I'd recommend is Vermeer in Bosnia by Lawrence Weschler. Weschler finds connections between seemingly disparate things.
Shortcuts, by Raymond Carver, is a favorite and has been an influence, of course.
I read Alice Munro's collection of stories, Runaway, most recently, but you probably can't go wrong with any of her work.
My last recommendation is one my husband recommended to me: Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library. It is funny and heartbreaking and beautiful.
RV: Do you think the pendulum is starting to swing back to realistic paintings now, after the many years of seeming critical and academic preference for abstract art?
AB: The art world is big enough at the moment to embrace both representational and abstract art, isn't it? I think the resurgence of figurative and representational painting is making anyone who proclaimed the death of painting at the final reduction of abstraction look a bit silly and deficient of imagination. Painters are proving every day that there isn't a finite path for abstraction or representation. But yes, representational painting is finally seeing a resurgence in appreciation.
RV: In 2002 you received an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. I was wondering what new things you learned at this institution, and what you remember about your time there.
AB: The New York Academy of Art focuses on the human figure to develop skills for the creation of representational artwork. The curriculum is intensively focused on anatomy, perspective, and traditional drawing and painting techniques. When I first went there, I needed to have something in front of me in order to draw it, but by the time I left, I was able to paint the figure from my imagination or memory. That has freed me up to do whatever I want.
RV: What's your daily routine in Brooklyn?
AB: I try to get to my studio in DUMBO by around 9/9:30. Luckily, I get to walk there, which is a wonderful way to start the day. I break for lunch, which I eat in my studio. If the weather's nice, I usually take another break in the late afternoon to go for a walk along the waterfront between the bridges or through Cadman Plaza Park. I try to make it coincide with when the sun is beginning to set. I usually head home around 6/6:30. I prepare dinner for my husband and myself and then read or email or watch a movie in the evening while my husband works on his comics.
RV: Do you spend all your creative time painting new works, or do you spend time on other projects, like drawing, or sketching around New York?
AB: I'm very focused. I love painting so much more than working with any other medium. Whenever I start drawing, I always wish I was using a brush instead of a pencil. I guess I just think more in terms of shapes of light rather than line. I was a printmaking major in undergrad, though, and I hope to get back into a shop soon to try my hand at it again.
RV: What comments about your work did you get from people at the current Neighbors exhibition at the Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles?
AB: I had a couple of memorable comments. One woman told me that the work looked "soulless" and another woman said the work "looked like it had been done by a man," but that I should "take it as a compliment, because whenever something is done with competence, you assume it was done by a man."
I've tried to forget those words (obviously without much success) and instead focus on all of the positive and generous things people had to say. People seemed to respond favorably to the mood and lighting and detail.
I enjoyed seeing people get up close to the work and try to figure out what was going on. I also received a lot of comments on the surface of the paintings, which is flat and somewhat glossy, and seems to remind people of a photo's surface.
*******
READER'S VOICE: I read that you were married to comics artist Jonathan Bennett, and I was wondering how you met. Does your work or working methods influence his or vice versa?
AMY BENNETT: Jon and I met at art school. We were both printmaking majors who worked in the shop all of the time so we got to know each other really well. It's wonderful having an artist for a husband because we can share enthusiastically and offer each other criticism. It's helpful that the comics and art worlds are pretty distinct from one another.
There's no doubt that comics have influenced my thinking. I recently started developing sequential images. A couple of years ago, I was making paintings that looked down into apartments without perspective. Jon showed me lots of cartoonists who had explored similar concepts: Frank King, Richard McGuire, Chris Ware, etc. It's an exciting medium that has a lot of common concerns with narrative painting.
RV: How did you get the idea to make the scale models of the houses and towns on which many of your paintings have been based, and how did you learn the skills to create these?
AB: I have always enjoyed painting from life, so up through graduate school, I always painted from a still life or a model (a person posing for me) or the landscape. I used to like painting old toys because they seemed like characters you could project a lot onto. When I had the idea of looking down into apartments to relate the dramas of residences in close proximity, it was natural to use dollhouse furniture. I created foam core walls to construct invented floor plans. I decorated the rooms and lit them as the narratives dictated. The still life became an environment that I could incorporate figures into. I made a different model for each painting. My next project was to build a dollhouse-scale house made of wood that I could use for several paintings. My sister, Laura Kinney, generously loaned her expertise during a weekend-long crash course in woodworking in my living room. We had quarter-inch plywood and a dremel. It was bare bones, but it got the job done. I decided to zoom out from 1/12 scale to 1/87 scale for my model neighborhood. I bought a book on model railroading and figured it out. My parents are both very crafty people, so I must have a bit of that in me. Model making is super fun. It's scary how quickly time goes by when I'm working on a project.
RV: How will you go about preparing the Galleri Magnus Karlsson solo exhibition in Sweden in September? What things do you have to do between now and then, and how do you organise transportation of the paintings and other logistical matters?
AB: I think the show will be mostly winter scenes made from the neighborhood. Since I grew up in Maine, a snowy landscape triggers lots of ideas. I've been dying to winterize my model, but there's no going back, so I needed to do all of my non-snow images first. I'll need to replace all of the leafy trees with bare-branched ones, replace the lawns with snow, and model snowbanks and ice puddles. Then I'll get to start the paintings. I'm not sure how the paintings will be shipped to Stockholm. I've shipped individual paintings there via FedEx, and I've shipped shows within the US using art shippers. I imagine I'll have to build a crate and leave plenty of time. I'm sure the gallery will offer some guidance in that department.
RV: What are some of your long-term plans?
AB: I have an idea for another model that I'm really excited about. I think I'll begin making it after my show this September. It's good to let an idea mull for a while.
-copyright Simon Sandall.
******
For a look at Amy Bennett’s paintings, see www.amybennett.com.
READER'S VOICE: I was wondering if you'd ever done any writing. Your exhibition Stories, at the Linda Warren Gallery in Chicago, created a setting with anxious characters in a country farmhouse; and your current exhibition Neighbors, at the Richard Heller Gallery, kind of reminds me of some movies, like To Kill a Mockingbird, with sinister events unfolding in darkness in a small town.
AMY BENNETT: I enjoyed taking some fiction writing classes as an undergrad, but the only writing I do these days is to flesh out painting ideas. An image or character or scene might start to develop in my mind, and writing helps to make it something more concrete. It also helps me remember!
RV: Do your favorite books tend to deal with themes like your paintings, such as family life, small town America, loneliness, anxiety or obsession?
AB: Yes, I hate to be so predictable but they definitely do. I love JD Salinger, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates, so relationships are another common theme. I also like books that use language in the same way a beautiful painting uses light. Words or light can describe a very ordinary object or scene in a way that makes you see it very clearly as if for the first time.
RV: Do you get ideas for paintings from your reading, or movies, or stories you've heard, or do ideas just come from thinking about the scale models you build of houses and towns?
AB: All of the above. I get a lot of ideas from reading. It's not that I'll read a description of a place or situation and then feel compelled to illustrate it, although that has happened before, but usually I'll be reading and then find that my mind has wandered off and I suddenly have a wonderful idea that I have to write down. But I usually have to turn back several pages, which makes for very slow reading. The same is true with movies, but books are better triggers for daydreams because your mind is already involved in inventing images. I get a lot of ideas from playing with my model.
In making the model neighborhood I had to consider who lived in each house, what their relationships and habits were, and how they related to their neighbors. Plus, I might have an idea for a specific image, but I have to experiment with my model first to see what actually looks the most interesting. I am often surprised, because through arranging the model, I usually discover something better than my original idea. And there are some times that I can't get my idea to come to life in the model, so I have to shelf the idea and develop a different image.
RV: Do memories come into your paintings much, like childhood images that have stuck in your head for decades? Or do family events or relatives inspire some pictures?
AB: There are moments and people that will stay with me for my entire life. They are certainly inspiring, and I am often working with closely related material, but I am not interested in recreating images of the past. A couple of the houses in my neighborhood are loosely based on the homes of my grandparents in two different stages of their lives. It gives me a framework to filter through some of the things I experienced with them and saw them go through as they aged.
It also provides a stage for my imaginings of what their lives were like when they were young and raising a family. By translating my own experiences through the model, it becomes something different and new. It's no longer a personal, internal thing, but a toy onto which I'm trying to impose some aesthetics. The model helps keep me from getting too embarrassed or bored.
******
READER'S VOICE: Could you recommend about four or five books you've really liked and maybe say why you liked them?
AMY BENNETT: I enjoyed Justin Spring's biography, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art. He was not only a painter, but an intellectual, an art critic, and a teacher. Plus, he grew up in a strange family and then created an even stranger one of his own. I usually have a strong preference for fiction, but Spring writes with a narrative sensibility that recreates a world populated by the likes of painters Willem DeKooning and Larry Rivers, and poets James Schuyler and John Ashberry.
Another non-fiction book I'd recommend is Vermeer in Bosnia by Lawrence Weschler. Weschler finds connections between seemingly disparate things.
Shortcuts, by Raymond Carver, is a favorite and has been an influence, of course.
I read Alice Munro's collection of stories, Runaway, most recently, but you probably can't go wrong with any of her work.
My last recommendation is one my husband recommended to me: Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library. It is funny and heartbreaking and beautiful.
RV: Do you think the pendulum is starting to swing back to realistic paintings now, after the many years of seeming critical and academic preference for abstract art?
AB: The art world is big enough at the moment to embrace both representational and abstract art, isn't it? I think the resurgence of figurative and representational painting is making anyone who proclaimed the death of painting at the final reduction of abstraction look a bit silly and deficient of imagination. Painters are proving every day that there isn't a finite path for abstraction or representation. But yes, representational painting is finally seeing a resurgence in appreciation.
RV: In 2002 you received an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. I was wondering what new things you learned at this institution, and what you remember about your time there.
AB: The New York Academy of Art focuses on the human figure to develop skills for the creation of representational artwork. The curriculum is intensively focused on anatomy, perspective, and traditional drawing and painting techniques. When I first went there, I needed to have something in front of me in order to draw it, but by the time I left, I was able to paint the figure from my imagination or memory. That has freed me up to do whatever I want.
RV: What's your daily routine in Brooklyn?
AB: I try to get to my studio in DUMBO by around 9/9:30. Luckily, I get to walk there, which is a wonderful way to start the day. I break for lunch, which I eat in my studio. If the weather's nice, I usually take another break in the late afternoon to go for a walk along the waterfront between the bridges or through Cadman Plaza Park. I try to make it coincide with when the sun is beginning to set. I usually head home around 6/6:30. I prepare dinner for my husband and myself and then read or email or watch a movie in the evening while my husband works on his comics.
RV: Do you spend all your creative time painting new works, or do you spend time on other projects, like drawing, or sketching around New York?
AB: I'm very focused. I love painting so much more than working with any other medium. Whenever I start drawing, I always wish I was using a brush instead of a pencil. I guess I just think more in terms of shapes of light rather than line. I was a printmaking major in undergrad, though, and I hope to get back into a shop soon to try my hand at it again.
RV: What comments about your work did you get from people at the current Neighbors exhibition at the Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles?
AB: I had a couple of memorable comments. One woman told me that the work looked "soulless" and another woman said the work "looked like it had been done by a man," but that I should "take it as a compliment, because whenever something is done with competence, you assume it was done by a man."
I've tried to forget those words (obviously without much success) and instead focus on all of the positive and generous things people had to say. People seemed to respond favorably to the mood and lighting and detail.
I enjoyed seeing people get up close to the work and try to figure out what was going on. I also received a lot of comments on the surface of the paintings, which is flat and somewhat glossy, and seems to remind people of a photo's surface.
*******
READER'S VOICE: I read that you were married to comics artist Jonathan Bennett, and I was wondering how you met. Does your work or working methods influence his or vice versa?
AMY BENNETT: Jon and I met at art school. We were both printmaking majors who worked in the shop all of the time so we got to know each other really well. It's wonderful having an artist for a husband because we can share enthusiastically and offer each other criticism. It's helpful that the comics and art worlds are pretty distinct from one another.
There's no doubt that comics have influenced my thinking. I recently started developing sequential images. A couple of years ago, I was making paintings that looked down into apartments without perspective. Jon showed me lots of cartoonists who had explored similar concepts: Frank King, Richard McGuire, Chris Ware, etc. It's an exciting medium that has a lot of common concerns with narrative painting.
RV: How did you get the idea to make the scale models of the houses and towns on which many of your paintings have been based, and how did you learn the skills to create these?
AB: I have always enjoyed painting from life, so up through graduate school, I always painted from a still life or a model (a person posing for me) or the landscape. I used to like painting old toys because they seemed like characters you could project a lot onto. When I had the idea of looking down into apartments to relate the dramas of residences in close proximity, it was natural to use dollhouse furniture. I created foam core walls to construct invented floor plans. I decorated the rooms and lit them as the narratives dictated. The still life became an environment that I could incorporate figures into. I made a different model for each painting. My next project was to build a dollhouse-scale house made of wood that I could use for several paintings. My sister, Laura Kinney, generously loaned her expertise during a weekend-long crash course in woodworking in my living room. We had quarter-inch plywood and a dremel. It was bare bones, but it got the job done. I decided to zoom out from 1/12 scale to 1/87 scale for my model neighborhood. I bought a book on model railroading and figured it out. My parents are both very crafty people, so I must have a bit of that in me. Model making is super fun. It's scary how quickly time goes by when I'm working on a project.
RV: How will you go about preparing the Galleri Magnus Karlsson solo exhibition in Sweden in September? What things do you have to do between now and then, and how do you organise transportation of the paintings and other logistical matters?
AB: I think the show will be mostly winter scenes made from the neighborhood. Since I grew up in Maine, a snowy landscape triggers lots of ideas. I've been dying to winterize my model, but there's no going back, so I needed to do all of my non-snow images first. I'll need to replace all of the leafy trees with bare-branched ones, replace the lawns with snow, and model snowbanks and ice puddles. Then I'll get to start the paintings. I'm not sure how the paintings will be shipped to Stockholm. I've shipped individual paintings there via FedEx, and I've shipped shows within the US using art shippers. I imagine I'll have to build a crate and leave plenty of time. I'm sure the gallery will offer some guidance in that department.
RV: What are some of your long-term plans?
AB: I have an idea for another model that I'm really excited about. I think I'll begin making it after my show this September. It's good to let an idea mull for a while.
-copyright Simon Sandall.
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Barry Andrews
Reader's Voice aims to give people a few good reading tips. For this back issue (February, 2006) of readersvoice.com I caught up on what Barry Andrews from Shriekback had been reading, plus I asked him about the new Shriekback album Cormorant, on the Malicious Damage label.
Cormorant features Barry Andrews’ trademark taste, intensity, and sense of beauty.
He said the death of his father Bill Andrews in 2004 had a massive influence on the album, indicated by the image on the cover of the Cormorant CD. “The idea of the lone sea bird in a waste of water seemed like a good image to describe the feeling.”
But there’s light and humor in the album, too. And some songs, like Ronny, Sea Theory and Waterbaby, get stuck in your mind.
READERSVOICE: Could you list some of the things you’ve been reading of late, in particular any out of the way stuff people might not have heard of?
BARRY ANDREWS: Books wot I have read: Had a bit of a Vonnegut jag recently starting with a re-reading of Galapagos which is hugely entertaining and made me very excited about Natural Selection (the human race, a million years in the future, have evolved into furry seal-like creatures with minimal intelligence because our big brains just got us into trouble ie: were inimical to our survival - having invented nuclear war, pollution etc)
-which led me onto trying out the real thing as it were (tentatively, cos I've feared science since school): Richard Dawkins and his Ancestor's Tale - interesting certainly but not as much as I wanted it to be.
A Field Guide to Sprawl by Dolores Hayden - a great little book to read after a U.S. tour when you see all these new -mostly upsetting- landscape features first hand (though even we space-impaired Brits seem to be getting the hang of Sprawl now). Wonderful new locutions: Boomburb ; Alligator TOAD (Temporary, Obsolete, Abandoned or Derelict) Snout House, Pork Chop Lot. And the description of how these things come to be is delivered with a stone-cold, economic logic.
The Monumental Impulse by George Hersey. About how the impulse to build may be hardwired into humans in the same way as birds build nests or termites hills.
And never get tired of London Fields by Martin Amis. So very horrible and great.
Smoke -a magazine full of things about London (Matt Haynes and Jude Rogers) -hilarious (they have a website).
RV: I was wondering how you go about writing the lyrics for your songs. Do you sit down and let each song come out in one hit; or do you also use a diary full of interesting phrases you’ve heard or thought up, which you somehow add to the songs?
BA: It's a process akin to apple bobbing: you have to will the things into your mouth but not forcefully or they get away. It's a bit of a bastard mostly: sometimes -rarely- they do just appear, then it's a very sexy feeing. I remember Arthur Sullivan (yes, him) writing that a coal miner doesn't sit at the top of the mine waiting for the coal, he goes down and digs the motherfucker out (I paraphrase freely) and so I find it (except without the physical effort and the silicosis, obviously).
RV: You played keyboards on Brian Eno’s album Another Day on Earth (2004). What do you like about his approach to making music?
BA: I think he pushes you away from your usual tricks and that can be unnerving, but it can lead you to unprecedented places. Also, it may not. Last time I saw him he was playing an effects unit with his face. That's what it's all about.
RV:You also worked with Iggy Pop in 1979 on Soldier. How did that come about and what did you pick up from the way he went about writing and making music?
BA: He was in London looking to draft in a few of the 'punk' brigade, his people talked to my people etc. I guess the main feeling that album left me with was how clever and hard working XTC were in comparison for it was a very slack and rudderless project. Iggy's great but not quite firing on all cylinders at the time I would say.
RV: Where was the improvisation you performed recently with Andy Partridge and how did that go? Will that be released as a cd?
BA: Dont want to say too much about that yet. It was very creative though and may very well surface.
RV: Had you been in touch with Andy Partridge since your days in XTC, or was there some kind of reunion, with the Cormorant album, on which he played guitar?
BA: Only to occasionally eat curry and drink beer. And write sleeve notes for their retro compilation. It was all part of a slow recalibration of our relationship after the turbulence of youth.
RV: Cormorant is dedicated to your father Bill Andrews who died in 2004. I was wondering what influences he had on your character.
BA: Wow, there's a big question. He was extremely down to earth; never listened to music and rarely read anything except the paper. He liked objects though -buildings, structures, solid things. I guess I absorbed that side of him and reacted against the other side. He did have a great way with words though and a very dry wit which I admired and tried to copy.
READERSVOICE.COM: Time is a big theme on Cormorant. One of your lines in Ronny says “and you know what they say: nothing real’s ever lost/ throw the thing away every night hereafter…” and in Load the Boat: “Back there in ’85 – that whole scene”. Plus there’s the song Il Mystera del Tempo. How do you get your head around the world of the past, musically and personally? Or do you just discard it and keep moving?
BARRY ANDREWS: 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake'. I get temporal vertigo quite often. We're alone in an indifferent universe where the only certainty is death. Let the Good Times Roll.
RV: Was Waterbaby the first song written that appeared on Cormorant, performed in your live shows in early 2003?
BA: As a finished song, yes.
RV: What sort of logistics and arrangements are required to record an album like this? What were the first steps you took, and what choices did you have to make to get it organized?
BA: The New Machines make it possible for you to work more as a writer or a painter would work: do some sketches when you feel inspired; stick 'em in a pile; come back to them when you have some perspective; edit, transform, cross-breed. Some of the grooves for instance (Huytfi, True Passage,Troublemeat) were part of the Stic Basin recordings back in 03. People turn up sometimes; sometimes you have to ring them up. It was all dead organic.
And the record company, in the shape of Mike Coles, came along half way through. Which is rather cool I think- the thing gathering energy as it goes instead of all being predicated on a yes/no before anything can happen.
RV: Cormorant was recorded in the “on-the-hoof mobile in London and Swindon between April ’04 and September ‘05”. What’s the on-the-hoof mobile?
BA: It's a name for my laptop running some sequencing software and some virtual instruments, a mixing desk and a sound system. And a mike. That's it. Elegant, no?
RV: What instruments, electronic elements, and vocal effects are used in Cormorant that weren’t present in previous Shriekback albums?
BA: Well all of the above. Plus the strange synergy that happens when you plug everything into everything else: the stew effect. There's been much more time to fool around, explore tangents; poke around in God's broom cupboard.
RV: Did your recording methods with Cormorant differ from earlier Shriekback albums? One article kind of joked that Cormorant was you with a laptop in a home studio (the one you built in 2000-2001?).
BA: No joke (see above) but the next generation on from that studio (that one was rubbish).
RV: Why did you use other studios, too, like Panic Studios for Martyn Barker’s drums, and Alchemy Studios for mastering by Kenny Jones?
BA: Panic for drums because you need lots of mikes and quite a bit of room and it makes a big racket, Alchemy for mastering because a 2nd pair of ears (especially Kenny's) and some expensive plug-ins can make a big difference when you're sick to death of hearing your tunes and dont know what's good or crap anymore.
RV: What sort of things and directions do you want to try in future in your music?
BA: I'd like to try using other voices, to write a large scale piece to be sung by other people. Something with a narrative but not shit. Shouldn't be hard eh ...well you just try it.
RV: There are two ambient tracks on Cormorant, and electronic music plays a big part in the album. Also you’ve worked with Brian Eno. I was wondering if you could list some of your favorite ambience or electronic albums of all time, and which new releases of electronica or ambience you have liked.
BA: Well, there are 2 instrumental tracks which is not the same thing as 'ambient' I would suggest. I think 'ambient' means that nothing's foregrounded; that the music is content to serve as atmosphere. 'Huytfi' and 'Passage' have narratives, protagonists, and demand you get comfy, turn the lights off, maybe even order in a pizza, and give them your full attention. Recently: the Books, God Speed you Black Emperor.
Formatively in the past: Terry Riley dub reggae Aphex Twin; I saw Steve Beresford and Steve Noble with a trombonist at the 12 Bar a couple of years back. Very exciting. I had a phase of listening to late night pirate shows in London when Drum n'Bass was 'Hardcore' and found that kinda toxic but very interesting. Afrikaa Bambatta and all those NYC chaps.
RV: What happened after you finished recording Cormorant? What did you have to do then as far as getting the album up and running and marketing it?
BA: Had a bit of a lie down. Fought off feelings of self hatred and disappointment. Began a punishing drinking schedule. Started bugging Mike [Coles] about press and artwork. You know.
RV: What’s your daily routine these days?
BA: So unutterably mundane I can't express it.
RV: What are some of your plans with tours or future recordings, or any other activities?
BA: Firstly to get 'the Eggs' out: collectors edition 50 numbered polished resin cormorant eggs which have a memory stick in them unloading the album, 4 extra tracks and an interview. Coming at you with many extras in a nice cardboard box. I shall be undertaking a series of accompanying artworks called: '50 Ways of Looking at a Cormorant' featuring Vile Homunculus. And writing towards the next album -I have half a dozen really quite decent grooves bubbling up. I may be putting them up one a month for download. And, of course, seeing where the Andy and Mart thing goes.
- Cormorant by Shriekback is released by the Malicious Damage music label.
- copyright Simon Sandall.
Cormorant features Barry Andrews’ trademark taste, intensity, and sense of beauty.
He said the death of his father Bill Andrews in 2004 had a massive influence on the album, indicated by the image on the cover of the Cormorant CD. “The idea of the lone sea bird in a waste of water seemed like a good image to describe the feeling.”
But there’s light and humor in the album, too. And some songs, like Ronny, Sea Theory and Waterbaby, get stuck in your mind.
READERSVOICE: Could you list some of the things you’ve been reading of late, in particular any out of the way stuff people might not have heard of?
BARRY ANDREWS: Books wot I have read: Had a bit of a Vonnegut jag recently starting with a re-reading of Galapagos which is hugely entertaining and made me very excited about Natural Selection (the human race, a million years in the future, have evolved into furry seal-like creatures with minimal intelligence because our big brains just got us into trouble ie: were inimical to our survival - having invented nuclear war, pollution etc)
-which led me onto trying out the real thing as it were (tentatively, cos I've feared science since school): Richard Dawkins and his Ancestor's Tale - interesting certainly but not as much as I wanted it to be.
A Field Guide to Sprawl by Dolores Hayden - a great little book to read after a U.S. tour when you see all these new -mostly upsetting- landscape features first hand (though even we space-impaired Brits seem to be getting the hang of Sprawl now). Wonderful new locutions: Boomburb ; Alligator TOAD (Temporary, Obsolete, Abandoned or Derelict) Snout House, Pork Chop Lot. And the description of how these things come to be is delivered with a stone-cold, economic logic.
The Monumental Impulse by George Hersey. About how the impulse to build may be hardwired into humans in the same way as birds build nests or termites hills.
And never get tired of London Fields by Martin Amis. So very horrible and great.
Smoke -a magazine full of things about London (Matt Haynes and Jude Rogers) -hilarious (they have a website).
RV: I was wondering how you go about writing the lyrics for your songs. Do you sit down and let each song come out in one hit; or do you also use a diary full of interesting phrases you’ve heard or thought up, which you somehow add to the songs?
BA: It's a process akin to apple bobbing: you have to will the things into your mouth but not forcefully or they get away. It's a bit of a bastard mostly: sometimes -rarely- they do just appear, then it's a very sexy feeing. I remember Arthur Sullivan (yes, him) writing that a coal miner doesn't sit at the top of the mine waiting for the coal, he goes down and digs the motherfucker out (I paraphrase freely) and so I find it (except without the physical effort and the silicosis, obviously).
RV: You played keyboards on Brian Eno’s album Another Day on Earth (2004). What do you like about his approach to making music?
BA: I think he pushes you away from your usual tricks and that can be unnerving, but it can lead you to unprecedented places. Also, it may not. Last time I saw him he was playing an effects unit with his face. That's what it's all about.
RV:You also worked with Iggy Pop in 1979 on Soldier. How did that come about and what did you pick up from the way he went about writing and making music?
BA: He was in London looking to draft in a few of the 'punk' brigade, his people talked to my people etc. I guess the main feeling that album left me with was how clever and hard working XTC were in comparison for it was a very slack and rudderless project. Iggy's great but not quite firing on all cylinders at the time I would say.
RV: Where was the improvisation you performed recently with Andy Partridge and how did that go? Will that be released as a cd?
BA: Dont want to say too much about that yet. It was very creative though and may very well surface.
RV: Had you been in touch with Andy Partridge since your days in XTC, or was there some kind of reunion, with the Cormorant album, on which he played guitar?
BA: Only to occasionally eat curry and drink beer. And write sleeve notes for their retro compilation. It was all part of a slow recalibration of our relationship after the turbulence of youth.
RV: Cormorant is dedicated to your father Bill Andrews who died in 2004. I was wondering what influences he had on your character.
BA: Wow, there's a big question. He was extremely down to earth; never listened to music and rarely read anything except the paper. He liked objects though -buildings, structures, solid things. I guess I absorbed that side of him and reacted against the other side. He did have a great way with words though and a very dry wit which I admired and tried to copy.
READERSVOICE.COM: Time is a big theme on Cormorant. One of your lines in Ronny says “and you know what they say: nothing real’s ever lost/ throw the thing away every night hereafter…” and in Load the Boat: “Back there in ’85 – that whole scene”. Plus there’s the song Il Mystera del Tempo. How do you get your head around the world of the past, musically and personally? Or do you just discard it and keep moving?
BARRY ANDREWS: 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake'. I get temporal vertigo quite often. We're alone in an indifferent universe where the only certainty is death. Let the Good Times Roll.
RV: Was Waterbaby the first song written that appeared on Cormorant, performed in your live shows in early 2003?
BA: As a finished song, yes.
RV: What sort of logistics and arrangements are required to record an album like this? What were the first steps you took, and what choices did you have to make to get it organized?
BA: The New Machines make it possible for you to work more as a writer or a painter would work: do some sketches when you feel inspired; stick 'em in a pile; come back to them when you have some perspective; edit, transform, cross-breed. Some of the grooves for instance (Huytfi, True Passage,Troublemeat) were part of the Stic Basin recordings back in 03. People turn up sometimes; sometimes you have to ring them up. It was all dead organic.
And the record company, in the shape of Mike Coles, came along half way through. Which is rather cool I think- the thing gathering energy as it goes instead of all being predicated on a yes/no before anything can happen.
RV: Cormorant was recorded in the “on-the-hoof mobile in London and Swindon between April ’04 and September ‘05”. What’s the on-the-hoof mobile?
BA: It's a name for my laptop running some sequencing software and some virtual instruments, a mixing desk and a sound system. And a mike. That's it. Elegant, no?
RV: What instruments, electronic elements, and vocal effects are used in Cormorant that weren’t present in previous Shriekback albums?
BA: Well all of the above. Plus the strange synergy that happens when you plug everything into everything else: the stew effect. There's been much more time to fool around, explore tangents; poke around in God's broom cupboard.
RV: Did your recording methods with Cormorant differ from earlier Shriekback albums? One article kind of joked that Cormorant was you with a laptop in a home studio (the one you built in 2000-2001?).
BA: No joke (see above) but the next generation on from that studio (that one was rubbish).
RV: Why did you use other studios, too, like Panic Studios for Martyn Barker’s drums, and Alchemy Studios for mastering by Kenny Jones?
BA: Panic for drums because you need lots of mikes and quite a bit of room and it makes a big racket, Alchemy for mastering because a 2nd pair of ears (especially Kenny's) and some expensive plug-ins can make a big difference when you're sick to death of hearing your tunes and dont know what's good or crap anymore.
RV: What sort of things and directions do you want to try in future in your music?
BA: I'd like to try using other voices, to write a large scale piece to be sung by other people. Something with a narrative but not shit. Shouldn't be hard eh ...well you just try it.
RV: There are two ambient tracks on Cormorant, and electronic music plays a big part in the album. Also you’ve worked with Brian Eno. I was wondering if you could list some of your favorite ambience or electronic albums of all time, and which new releases of electronica or ambience you have liked.
BA: Well, there are 2 instrumental tracks which is not the same thing as 'ambient' I would suggest. I think 'ambient' means that nothing's foregrounded; that the music is content to serve as atmosphere. 'Huytfi' and 'Passage' have narratives, protagonists, and demand you get comfy, turn the lights off, maybe even order in a pizza, and give them your full attention. Recently: the Books, God Speed you Black Emperor.
Formatively in the past: Terry Riley dub reggae Aphex Twin; I saw Steve Beresford and Steve Noble with a trombonist at the 12 Bar a couple of years back. Very exciting. I had a phase of listening to late night pirate shows in London when Drum n'Bass was 'Hardcore' and found that kinda toxic but very interesting. Afrikaa Bambatta and all those NYC chaps.
RV: What happened after you finished recording Cormorant? What did you have to do then as far as getting the album up and running and marketing it?
BA: Had a bit of a lie down. Fought off feelings of self hatred and disappointment. Began a punishing drinking schedule. Started bugging Mike [Coles] about press and artwork. You know.
RV: What’s your daily routine these days?
BA: So unutterably mundane I can't express it.
RV: What are some of your plans with tours or future recordings, or any other activities?
BA: Firstly to get 'the Eggs' out: collectors edition 50 numbered polished resin cormorant eggs which have a memory stick in them unloading the album, 4 extra tracks and an interview. Coming at you with many extras in a nice cardboard box. I shall be undertaking a series of accompanying artworks called: '50 Ways of Looking at a Cormorant' featuring Vile Homunculus. And writing towards the next album -I have half a dozen really quite decent grooves bubbling up. I may be putting them up one a month for download. And, of course, seeing where the Andy and Mart thing goes.
- Cormorant by Shriekback is released by the Malicious Damage music label.
- copyright Simon Sandall.
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Nancy Pearl
Reader's Voice aims to give people a few good reading tips.
I've started 2007 by moving here to the blogosphere. My website is still running, but I'm running a blog version as well from now on.
The January issue of Reader's Voice features the books of Nancy Pearl, in which she recommends thousands of other books. I went along to see Nancy Pearl speak at the Brisbane Square Library, Brisbane, on December 16.
Also I give a few reading tips for people who are fans of authors like Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac, and are maybe looking for more books along these lines.
*****
The city was full of Christmas shoppers on the Saturday morning of December 16. But about a hundred people were seated on several rows of chairs on the ground floor of the new Brisbane Square Library. At least 90 per cent of the audience were women, mostly aged 50-plus.
They watched as one of the librarians walked up to a plinth and spoke into a microphone, welcoming the audience to the new library which she said had about 110,000 books. She talked about Nancy Pearl, the Seattle-based librarian and author, who had traveled to Brisbane by ship from Auckland, and who was heading to Melbourne after this appearance. The librarian told everyone to welcome Ms Pearl, and the audience applauded as Ms Pearl stood up from one of the seats in the front row of the audience, and went up to the mic.
Ms Pearl told stories about her life as a librarian, broadcaster, and reader. She said one of the roles of a librarian was to preserve the best of the books of the past, and she talked about her books, Book Lust, and More Book Lust in which she recommends thousands of books.
She said she wrote Book Lust after being contacted by a publisher at Sasquatch Books with the idea. Book Lust featured a list of 1800 books she recommended, in 175 quirky categories. She said the manuscript of the book went through the usual process of going to the copy editors and content editors, but that she kept adding more books to the manuscript. Finally the publisher said enough, and that the book was going to press. Sasquatch Books published Book Lust in 2003. But Nancy Pearl said that after the book was published, she’d wake up at three a.m. remembering books she’d left out. And on book tours people would ask her why she had omitted certain books. Plus the publisher asked for a Book Lust 2, so she wrote More Book Lust which recommended another 1200 titles.
During her speech, Ms Pearl mentioned a few titles of books she’d loved over the years. She said she had been on the 20-minute bus ride from Seattle to the university for her radio book show when she read the opening line of The Paperboy (1995), a first person novel by Pete Dexter. She said she literally fell in love with the book, almost experiencing physical symptoms to that effect. Ms Pearl said The Paperboy had real characters, and was grungy, awful, and scary. Even though Pete Dexter’s novel Paris Trout (1988) won the National Book Award for fiction, it was The Paperboy she loved, she said.
Ms Pearl said Rose Macaulay was one of her all-time-favorite authors, and she mentioned The Towers of Trebizond which combined all three of Ms Macaulay’s great loves: travel, the Anglican Church, and animals. It was her final novel, and strongly autobiographical, dealing with the conflict between adulterous love and the Christian faith. Regarded by some as her masterpiece, the novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1956.
Ms Pearl said she was also fond of Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson.
And she recommended the Civil War novel Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor.
Also in her speech she talked about the four potential doorways readers have into a book: story, language, character, and setting; every reader will enter through one doorway. She said books with the most doorways were usually the ones that lasted as there were so many ways for readers to enter it.
With The Da Vinci Code, story was the entry point or doorway - with lots of action and thrills. The same went for books by Lee Child or Matthew Reilly. She said with most literary awards, like the Booker, the door to the novels was language. But she said the majority of readers entered books through the story doorway.
If you remembered what doorway you liked, it would help you find books you enjoyed, Ms Pearl said. After the talk and question time, the audience were invited to morning tea set up a few metres away, where they had a chance to meet Ms Pearl and buy her books. Then there was the new library to check out, and the librarian's promise of 110,000 books.
-copyright Simon Sandall.
I've started 2007 by moving here to the blogosphere. My website is still running, but I'm running a blog version as well from now on.
The January issue of Reader's Voice features the books of Nancy Pearl, in which she recommends thousands of other books. I went along to see Nancy Pearl speak at the Brisbane Square Library, Brisbane, on December 16.
Also I give a few reading tips for people who are fans of authors like Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac, and are maybe looking for more books along these lines.
*****
The city was full of Christmas shoppers on the Saturday morning of December 16. But about a hundred people were seated on several rows of chairs on the ground floor of the new Brisbane Square Library. At least 90 per cent of the audience were women, mostly aged 50-plus.
They watched as one of the librarians walked up to a plinth and spoke into a microphone, welcoming the audience to the new library which she said had about 110,000 books. She talked about Nancy Pearl, the Seattle-based librarian and author, who had traveled to Brisbane by ship from Auckland, and who was heading to Melbourne after this appearance. The librarian told everyone to welcome Ms Pearl, and the audience applauded as Ms Pearl stood up from one of the seats in the front row of the audience, and went up to the mic.
Ms Pearl told stories about her life as a librarian, broadcaster, and reader. She said one of the roles of a librarian was to preserve the best of the books of the past, and she talked about her books, Book Lust, and More Book Lust in which she recommends thousands of books.
She said she wrote Book Lust after being contacted by a publisher at Sasquatch Books with the idea. Book Lust featured a list of 1800 books she recommended, in 175 quirky categories. She said the manuscript of the book went through the usual process of going to the copy editors and content editors, but that she kept adding more books to the manuscript. Finally the publisher said enough, and that the book was going to press. Sasquatch Books published Book Lust in 2003. But Nancy Pearl said that after the book was published, she’d wake up at three a.m. remembering books she’d left out. And on book tours people would ask her why she had omitted certain books. Plus the publisher asked for a Book Lust 2, so she wrote More Book Lust which recommended another 1200 titles.
During her speech, Ms Pearl mentioned a few titles of books she’d loved over the years. She said she had been on the 20-minute bus ride from Seattle to the university for her radio book show when she read the opening line of The Paperboy (1995), a first person novel by Pete Dexter. She said she literally fell in love with the book, almost experiencing physical symptoms to that effect. Ms Pearl said The Paperboy had real characters, and was grungy, awful, and scary. Even though Pete Dexter’s novel Paris Trout (1988) won the National Book Award for fiction, it was The Paperboy she loved, she said.
Ms Pearl said Rose Macaulay was one of her all-time-favorite authors, and she mentioned The Towers of Trebizond which combined all three of Ms Macaulay’s great loves: travel, the Anglican Church, and animals. It was her final novel, and strongly autobiographical, dealing with the conflict between adulterous love and the Christian faith. Regarded by some as her masterpiece, the novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1956.
Ms Pearl said she was also fond of Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson.
And she recommended the Civil War novel Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor.
Also in her speech she talked about the four potential doorways readers have into a book: story, language, character, and setting; every reader will enter through one doorway. She said books with the most doorways were usually the ones that lasted as there were so many ways for readers to enter it.
With The Da Vinci Code, story was the entry point or doorway - with lots of action and thrills. The same went for books by Lee Child or Matthew Reilly. She said with most literary awards, like the Booker, the door to the novels was language. But she said the majority of readers entered books through the story doorway.
If you remembered what doorway you liked, it would help you find books you enjoyed, Ms Pearl said. After the talk and question time, the audience were invited to morning tea set up a few metres away, where they had a chance to meet Ms Pearl and buy her books. Then there was the new library to check out, and the librarian's promise of 110,000 books.
-copyright Simon Sandall.
Fear and Loathing-kinds of books
Sometimes readers will discover authors like Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac, and will start looking for books in a similar vein. In fact it's almost like there's an unwritten list of "cool" books that people seem to read; as though some kind of anonymous committee of old hippies, backpackers and university students got together and drew it up. Some of these books are actually worth reading; but it can take years to find out about them, so I've listed a few here.
******
Fans of the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might try Danny Sugarman’s memoir, Wonderland Avenue. This is a Fear and Loathing-style book about Sugarman’s friendship with Jim Morrison, his career as the teenage manager of The Doors, and his excessive lifestyle in L.A..
The Hawkline Monster, by Richard Brautigan. Two cowboy hitmen are hired to kill a monster under a house in Oregon. Brautigan had a unique writing style, which was funny and beautiful. Other titles include Sombrero Fallout; and An Unfortunate Woman.
Post Office, by Charles Bukowski. Most of Bukowski’s novels are based on the alcoholic author’s life in L.A.. A contagious, chatty writing style, funny and fearless, with profound insights into life. Other titles include Factotum; Hollywood, and Ham on Rye.
Ask the Dust, by John Fante. An author who inspired Charles Bukowski.
Pop. 1280; and The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson. Amoral crime fiction with a sense of humor. Jim Thompson turns hard-boiled crime fiction, or pulp fiction, into literature.
There is also a good biography of Jim Thompson, called Savage Art, by Robert Polito.
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy. Probably the best crime writer since Chandler and Thompson, James Ellroy knows police and the history of L.A. back to front. His narrators often speak in a 1940s and ‘50s hipster lingo, which adds another dimension to his novels. An amoral writer concerned with perennial evils.
Blood Meridian; and No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. The first is a tale of 19th century Indian-hunters, featuring the diabolic Judge Holden. The second is more of a crime genre novel set in modern times, with some western elements and another psychopath running loose and causing mischief. It showed that page-turning plots and literary novels don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Fevre Dream, by George R. R. Martin. I couldn’t wait to get back to this book each day. Vampires on a Mississippi river boat, featuring a touching friendship between a vampire (who reminded me a lot of actor Julian Sands) and a river boat captain.
Tropic of Capricorn, by Henry Miller. A writer with a love of words and life, advocating self-liberation. Tropic of Capricorn, first published in Paris in 1938, is a sexually explicit novel set in 1920s New York, where the narrator works for the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. (Henry Miller worked for the Western Union Telegraph Company in New York.)
Other great novels include Tropic of Cancer, and Plexus.
Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald. Written like a travel memoir of a guy wandering around England, but also a work of fiction, the book has a haunting and nostalgic tone. He uses photos in the text, and has an interesting style: the narrator will come across a herring fisherman and then there’ll be pages of exposition about the history of herring fishing. Austerlitz is another fine novel by the same author.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe. A work of “New” Journalism where the author travels with Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the Merry Pranksters on a psychedelic bus trip in the 1960s.
Skywriting by Word of Mouth, by John Lennon. Brilliant wordplay. Earlier books include A Spaniard in the Works, and In His Own Write.
Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan. See the love of folk music and reading that went into making the song-writing genius. A well-structured book, too.
***** *****
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick. Published in 1965, this science fiction novel features corporate psychics and satanic takeover artists. An author with a profound philosophical mind and wit.
Diary of a Mad Old Man, by Junichiro Tanizaki. Published in 1965, the novel is the journal of Utsugi, a 77-year-old man of refined tastes who is recovering from a stroke. Other great books include The Key. Richard Brautigan dedicated one of his novels to this author.
The Tin Drum, by Gunther Grass. The autobiography of 30-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who at age three is given a tin drum and also, disgusted at the obtuseness of the adult world, decides to stop growing. He experiences the Nazi era, all the while treasuring his tin drum.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Published in 1980, 11 years after the suicide of the author, the novel is set in New Orleans in the early 1960s. Ignatius J.Reilly, a slothful, intelligent 30-year-old living with his mother, sets out to get a job. Along the way he has adventures with colorful characters from the French Quarter.
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. A semi-autobiographical novel about a young girl working as a guest editor at a New York fashion magazine, whose mental breakdown and suicide attempt parallel the author’s own.
Ice, by Anna Kavan. (1967) A dream-like novel about a man on a quest for a woman he sees in dreams and hallucinations, while a doomed world heads into a new ice age.
Complete Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor. A Southern Gothic writer.
Comics: Viz (the English satirical comic). Sometimes a bit hit-and-miss, occasionally puerile, yet often intelligent satire. It's also refreshingly non-partisan. Viz has taken swipes at the follies and vices, ideological and otherwise, of all kinds of people - Left, Right and anything else.
A lot of so-called satire these days is biased. It aims to degrade and destroy the opposition more than to remedy the follies and vices of all people or groups: Party A will make fun of Party B, but when someone makes fun of Party A they quickly lose their sense of humor. This sort of one-sided, selective satire is just propaganda from "ideological opportunists and moral hypocrites" to borrow a phrase. It's mundane at best. Viz puts the boot into everyone and it's a lot funnier.
Robert Crumb anthologies, like Carload O’ Comics. Autobiographical and other comics drawn in an old fashioned style. He pulls no punches with his honesty about his life and in his social criticism.
Underworld by Kaz.
Schizo by Ivan Brunetti.
Eightball by Dan Clowes. These three comics artists are some of the best comics artists of modern times, although there are a lot of other great comics artists. Fantagraphics seems to have the pick of them.
Raw. Anthologies of interesting comics, published by Penguin.
Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, by Suehiro Maruo. A grim manga about a little orphan ensnared in a traveling freak show.
Biographies: Wired, The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, by Bob Woodward. This has been criticized by some close to John Belushi, but it’s still good.
No-one Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman. The Jim Morrison story.
Dylan Thomas in America, by J.M. Brinnin. An account of the great poet’s reading tour of the U.S., up to his last days.
Poetry: French Symbolists. Many rock musicians, including Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Steve Kilbey and Patti Smith, have been greatly influenced by the French Symbolist poets. These believed that words could not adequately express reality, as the realists believed, and they sought to recreate reality through symbols to express what is seen and felt. The best-known Symbolists include Arthur Rimbaud (A Season in Hell) and Charles Baudelaire (The Flowers of Evil).
At the risk of sounding like an old Catholic, The Bible (maybe starting with The New Testament). This also is a favorite of some rock musicians known for the quality of their lyrics. Nick Cave has a very Old Testament tone in a lot of his lyrics and in his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. Steve Kilbey of The Church said the New Testament was one of his favorite books.
But besides the great language, it’s an inspiring and wise guide to living and thinking.
- copyright Simon Sandall.
******
Fans of the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas might try Danny Sugarman’s memoir, Wonderland Avenue. This is a Fear and Loathing-style book about Sugarman’s friendship with Jim Morrison, his career as the teenage manager of The Doors, and his excessive lifestyle in L.A..
The Hawkline Monster, by Richard Brautigan. Two cowboy hitmen are hired to kill a monster under a house in Oregon. Brautigan had a unique writing style, which was funny and beautiful. Other titles include Sombrero Fallout; and An Unfortunate Woman.
Post Office, by Charles Bukowski. Most of Bukowski’s novels are based on the alcoholic author’s life in L.A.. A contagious, chatty writing style, funny and fearless, with profound insights into life. Other titles include Factotum; Hollywood, and Ham on Rye.
Ask the Dust, by John Fante. An author who inspired Charles Bukowski.
Pop. 1280; and The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson. Amoral crime fiction with a sense of humor. Jim Thompson turns hard-boiled crime fiction, or pulp fiction, into literature.
There is also a good biography of Jim Thompson, called Savage Art, by Robert Polito.
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy. Probably the best crime writer since Chandler and Thompson, James Ellroy knows police and the history of L.A. back to front. His narrators often speak in a 1940s and ‘50s hipster lingo, which adds another dimension to his novels. An amoral writer concerned with perennial evils.
Blood Meridian; and No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. The first is a tale of 19th century Indian-hunters, featuring the diabolic Judge Holden. The second is more of a crime genre novel set in modern times, with some western elements and another psychopath running loose and causing mischief. It showed that page-turning plots and literary novels don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Fevre Dream, by George R. R. Martin. I couldn’t wait to get back to this book each day. Vampires on a Mississippi river boat, featuring a touching friendship between a vampire (who reminded me a lot of actor Julian Sands) and a river boat captain.
Tropic of Capricorn, by Henry Miller. A writer with a love of words and life, advocating self-liberation. Tropic of Capricorn, first published in Paris in 1938, is a sexually explicit novel set in 1920s New York, where the narrator works for the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. (Henry Miller worked for the Western Union Telegraph Company in New York.)
Other great novels include Tropic of Cancer, and Plexus.
Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald. Written like a travel memoir of a guy wandering around England, but also a work of fiction, the book has a haunting and nostalgic tone. He uses photos in the text, and has an interesting style: the narrator will come across a herring fisherman and then there’ll be pages of exposition about the history of herring fishing. Austerlitz is another fine novel by the same author.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe. A work of “New” Journalism where the author travels with Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the Merry Pranksters on a psychedelic bus trip in the 1960s.
Skywriting by Word of Mouth, by John Lennon. Brilliant wordplay. Earlier books include A Spaniard in the Works, and In His Own Write.
Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan. See the love of folk music and reading that went into making the song-writing genius. A well-structured book, too.
***** *****
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick. Published in 1965, this science fiction novel features corporate psychics and satanic takeover artists. An author with a profound philosophical mind and wit.
Diary of a Mad Old Man, by Junichiro Tanizaki. Published in 1965, the novel is the journal of Utsugi, a 77-year-old man of refined tastes who is recovering from a stroke. Other great books include The Key. Richard Brautigan dedicated one of his novels to this author.
The Tin Drum, by Gunther Grass. The autobiography of 30-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who at age three is given a tin drum and also, disgusted at the obtuseness of the adult world, decides to stop growing. He experiences the Nazi era, all the while treasuring his tin drum.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Published in 1980, 11 years after the suicide of the author, the novel is set in New Orleans in the early 1960s. Ignatius J.Reilly, a slothful, intelligent 30-year-old living with his mother, sets out to get a job. Along the way he has adventures with colorful characters from the French Quarter.
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. A semi-autobiographical novel about a young girl working as a guest editor at a New York fashion magazine, whose mental breakdown and suicide attempt parallel the author’s own.
Ice, by Anna Kavan. (1967) A dream-like novel about a man on a quest for a woman he sees in dreams and hallucinations, while a doomed world heads into a new ice age.
Complete Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor. A Southern Gothic writer.
Comics: Viz (the English satirical comic). Sometimes a bit hit-and-miss, occasionally puerile, yet often intelligent satire. It's also refreshingly non-partisan. Viz has taken swipes at the follies and vices, ideological and otherwise, of all kinds of people - Left, Right and anything else.
A lot of so-called satire these days is biased. It aims to degrade and destroy the opposition more than to remedy the follies and vices of all people or groups: Party A will make fun of Party B, but when someone makes fun of Party A they quickly lose their sense of humor. This sort of one-sided, selective satire is just propaganda from "ideological opportunists and moral hypocrites" to borrow a phrase. It's mundane at best. Viz puts the boot into everyone and it's a lot funnier.
Robert Crumb anthologies, like Carload O’ Comics. Autobiographical and other comics drawn in an old fashioned style. He pulls no punches with his honesty about his life and in his social criticism.
Underworld by Kaz.
Schizo by Ivan Brunetti.
Eightball by Dan Clowes. These three comics artists are some of the best comics artists of modern times, although there are a lot of other great comics artists. Fantagraphics seems to have the pick of them.
Raw. Anthologies of interesting comics, published by Penguin.
Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, by Suehiro Maruo. A grim manga about a little orphan ensnared in a traveling freak show.
Biographies: Wired, The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, by Bob Woodward. This has been criticized by some close to John Belushi, but it’s still good.
No-one Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman. The Jim Morrison story.
Dylan Thomas in America, by J.M. Brinnin. An account of the great poet’s reading tour of the U.S., up to his last days.
Poetry: French Symbolists. Many rock musicians, including Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Steve Kilbey and Patti Smith, have been greatly influenced by the French Symbolist poets. These believed that words could not adequately express reality, as the realists believed, and they sought to recreate reality through symbols to express what is seen and felt. The best-known Symbolists include Arthur Rimbaud (A Season in Hell) and Charles Baudelaire (The Flowers of Evil).
At the risk of sounding like an old Catholic, The Bible (maybe starting with The New Testament). This also is a favorite of some rock musicians known for the quality of their lyrics. Nick Cave has a very Old Testament tone in a lot of his lyrics and in his novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. Steve Kilbey of The Church said the New Testament was one of his favorite books.
But besides the great language, it’s an inspiring and wise guide to living and thinking.
- copyright Simon Sandall.
Karen Murphy
Readersvoice.com aims to give people some good reading tips. Check the article list for even more interviews and reading suggestions.
This issue is all about archeology. Karen Murphy is one of a team of archeologists excavating the site of the town of Mill Point, trying to piece together the layout of Mill Point and the lives of the townspeople.
Mill Point was a small town based around a timber mill on the shores of Lake Cootharaba, on the Sunshine Coast, north of Brisbane. The mill and the town packed up and left in 1892 when they ran out of timber in the surrounding bushland.
Artefacts uncovered include slate pencils from the school, fragments of dolls, bottles for hair tonic and sauce, broken ceramics, and earrings.
I asked Karen Murphy about colonial archeology and Mill Point, and I picked up a lot of interesting titles on archeology.
READERSVOICE.COM: How long have you been interested in colonial archaeology and what interests you about this type of archaeology in particular?
KAREN MURPHY: I’ve been interested in archaeology in general since I was about eight years old and read about the Incas and the Egyptians. Once I started studying archaeology at university seven years ago I became much more interested in Australian archaeology both Indigenous and historical. I have focussed my research more on the historical archaeology of Australia over the past few years. I’ve always been interested in Australian and Queensland history, even researching my own family history, and I think there is so much of Queensland’s and Australia’s history and archaeology that has yet to be examined. Looking at our more recent past enables us to learn more about ourselves and where our society is now, and also to better understand where we want to go.
RV: What was the Tennessee Hollow project you were working on in the U.S.? What similarities were there to Mill Point, Lake Cootharaba?
KM: Tennessee Hollow is part of El Presidio de San Francisco which was the first European settlement in the City of San Francisco. The Presidio was the fort set up by the Spanish in 1776. The project is a collaboration between Stanford University, U.S. National Parks Service and the Presidio Trust. I worked as a field assistant on the project for five weeks in 2004. The project is a study of how the valley was used during the Spanish-colonial and the Mexican periods of the Presidio (ca. 1776-1847). At a broad level, the project is similar to Mill Point as they both investigate the daily lives of the community that lived at the site in a time when outsiders were moving to new places and new frontiers.However in other ways the site is quite different.The Presidio was a military community and the people were culturally diverse including Native Californians, Mesoamerican, African and European people. At Mill Point the settlement was a company town run as a capitalist enterprise with mostly European people in the community.
RV: When did interest in the Mill Point, Lake Cootharaba, sawmill site start?
KM: The site has been of great interest to the local community for many years, more particularly once the land was taken over by the Queensland Government as a national park in the early 1980s. A plaque was installed near the site for Australia’s Bicentenary, and The National Trust installed a memorial stone at the settlement’s cemetery in 1993. The first archaeological investigations were undertaken by Dr Eleanor Crosby and Anne Hibbard in 1991 to develop a conservation plan for the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. The Cooroora Historical Society has also had a long interest in the site with a display about Mill Point housed in the Noosa Shire Museum at Pomona. The more recent Mill Point Archaeological Project began in late 2003 following community concern about the site, in particular the cemetery. A collaborative project was set up between the Environmental Protection Agency, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, University of Queensland and Noosa Shire Council. The first field season was held in early 2004 with the main components of the site being surveyed and recorded by archaeologists and archaeology students, in order to have the site entered on the Queensland Heritage Register.
RV: When did you hear about it and start getting involved in archaeological research there?
KM: I first heard about the project when the 2004 field season was undertaken by some of my colleagues at the Cultural Heritage Branch of the Environmental Protection Agency (where I was working at the time). When I decided to do my PhD in archaeology in 2005 I wanted to focus on doing historical archaeological research in Queensland, and was interested in the great potential that the Mill Point site provided to help tell us about the early residents of Queensland.
RV: Before actual excavation started at the site, what sorts of records or reading was done to get as much background on the site as possible?
KM: A lot of historical research about the site had already been done by Dr Eleanor Crosby (during her 1991 work at the site) and by local historian Dr Elaine Brown who had undertaken a detailed history of the early timber industry of the entire region. Irene Christie, another local historian, had also done an immense amount of research into the mill. The historical documentation that they had consulted included newspaper reports from the period, photographs of the settlement, personal letters from mill residents, and oral histories from mill descendents. Before excavation started, the project team also did extensive surface survey investigations to identify the materials left behind from the mill. Because the site of the settlement is so large, survey investigations help us to identify different areas without the need for excavation, and also to identify areas that might be best targeted for excavation.
RV: Research discovered news of a cricket match, and school trips to the beach. Can you talk about these and where researchers found out about them?
KM: There are descriptions in the newspapers of the day by various visitors to the mill settlement. Published in The Brisbane Courier, the Gympie Times and The Queenslander, there are detailed accounts of the trip up from Brisbane by boat to the settlement and descriptions of the people, the industry, the facilities, the forests and the activities undertaken at the settlement. In 1876 a correspondent from the Gympie Times spent his Christmas holiday at Elanda Point. The sawmilling stopped for the week and the community celebrated with a range of activities including hunting and fishing, excursions to the ocean beach, a regatta on the lake on Boxing Day, and a cricket match on New Year’s Day with the timber-getters and bullock drivers versus the sawmill hands.
RV: Can you briefly tell the story of the founding of the site, with the Gympie gold rushes and the four businessmen who started the venture?
KM: In 1865, Queensland had only been open to free settlers for a little over 20 years, and had only been separated from New South Wales as its own state for six years. It was facing financial crisis – banks were failing, unemployment was high and there was civil unrest. The outlook was bleak until an important discovery in 1867 on the Mary River by James Nash – he found gold. Within six months there were over 15000 men on the Gympie goldfields. Even today, Gympie is often called “the town that saved Queensland”. People were drawn to the Gympie goldfields from all over Australia and the world. Elsewhere in the region, the speculator, Charles Samuel Russell had noted rich timber resources in the Noosa district.He travelled to Gympie in 1869 looking for newly rich miners as partners to join him in his new business venture. He found four wealthy men to join the enterprise - James McGhie, Abraham Luya, Frederick Goodchap and John Woodburn. Russell proposed to apply for a large block of land at Lake Cootharaba in the Noosa district and develop it as a farm to fulfil the selection requirements. The main attraction however was the area’s rich timber. The partners, first known as A.F. Luya and Co., built the sawmill on the property in 1870 and began milling timber. After the required two years of residence and improvements, the company acquired the title to the land. Russell left after this time, handing over his interests to the other partners, who then became, McGhie, Luya and Co. from 1873.
RV: What would the population of Mill Point have been, at a typical moment from 1869-1892?
KM: There are various estimations of the population but they are just that – estimations. The company records have not been found so we can only go by other records such as the census, and school records of the number of children, to try and estimate the numbers. There are descriptions of 24 two-roomed cottages, and mention of 150 employees and their wives and children farewelling one of the owners. The school records show up to 40 children enrolled at any one time. So estimations of the population at its height vary between about 150-200 people.
RV: Have there been relatively few artefacts found at the site or enough to paint a picture of life there?
KM: We have found thousands of artefacts left behind by the residents of the mill settlement. A lot of these consist of the everyday rubbish left behind, and other items lost or discarded – broken bottles, broken ceramic plates, cups and bowls, buttons, beads, nails, and slate pencils. Even though the evidence is fragmented it still provides us with plenty of material with which to paint a picture of the everyday lives of the people of Mill Point.
RV: How many field excavations have you been on at the site?
KM: As part of the Mill Point Archaeological Project we have done fieldwork at the site since 2004. There has been two weeks of surveying in February 2004 and again in February 2005. Excavations began with two weeks in July 2005. This year we have spent eight weeks excavating at the site over the course of the entire year.
RV: What did the site look like when field work began there?
KM: The site is very overgrown with vegetation both native and exotic, including the original melaleuca swamp species as well as weeds such as lantana.We have done extensive clearing of weed vegetation in order to be able to look for archaeological remains, however in the Queensland climate the battle against weeds in National Parks is constant. There are numerous physical remains from the mill and later periods that were able to be seen including the tramways embankments, chimney and farmhouse remains, fenceposts, and pylons from the wharves in the lake.
RV: What might you do in a day of field work at the Mill Point site?
KM: On a typical day of excavation the crew is up and heading to the site by 7.00am. We drive to the National Park and then the crew walks into the site while the equipment is driven in by four wheel drive.The crew rotates through various tasks, being assigned one particular job each day. We usually have two or three people working on excavating in specific 1 metre by 1 metre squares. Everything needs to be carefully recorded as we go because once we dig it up the archaeology is destroyed. We take lots of photographs, make lots of notes, and describe everything we see and do. The excavators take the sediment that is excavated to the wet-sieving station set up down by the lake. With two people operating the hose and sieves, all of the sediment is put through 3mm and 6mm sieves so that we can recover the artefacts. The sediment at Mill Point is very gravelley so the sieved material then goes up to the sorting tent where we have two or three crew members working on going through the gravel to remove the artefacts. T he artefacts are sorted by material type as we go so that it makes analysis back in the lab easier. At the end of the day the sorters pack the artefacts into plastic bags to take back to the lab in Brisbane. Then it’s a nice walk back out of the National Park about 5.00pm for some hot showers and cold drinks. You can check out our activities on our daily fieldwork diary on our website at http://www.atsis.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=42042&pid=42037
RV: What are the problems you encounter living on-site?
KM: When we are working in the field we don’t actually stay at the site itself as it is a National Park and the designated camping areas are away from the site of the settlement. We stay in nearby Boreen Point at the Apollonian Hotel in quite comfortable share accommodation. The publican looks after us well with plenty of food and drink to keep our energy going. Having all the volunteers sharing the accommodation is part of the fieldwork experience and we try to always make it a both a social and educational experience. We usually have talks on archaeology in the evenings, along with pizza and movie nights, and very competitive games of Trivial Pursuit.
RV: What is the layout of the site, with buildings, houses, shops, a church, the mill itself?
KM: Because we don’t have any of the original company records and the remains of the settlement have deteriorated so much, the layout of the site still has a lot of pieces missing. There are written descriptions of the layout at the time, and a map sketched by a man whose ancestors worked at the site. From our survey we have been able to identify the location of the mill itself right on the point beside the lake, and the location of some of the workers’ housing, the tramway and the cemetery. But we only have one photograph of the entire settlement viewed from the top of the main mill building to show us where other buildings were located. Further archaeological investigations may help us to identify the location of such places as the school, and the blacksmiths. Because the buildings would mostly have been made of timber though, there will be little remaining of the structures themselves.
RV: At your talk you spoke of the discovery of sauce bottles, and how they differed from brands at another site. Also you found hair tonic bottles from the U.S. Can you explain how the discovery of these artefacts led to other questions?
KM: One of the most common products we have found is Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce – which of course you can still buy in the shops today.What is interesting is that Lea and Perrins is the only brand of Worcestershire Sauce we have found. Holbrook’s sauce was also popular at this time, but there is no evidence of it in the Mill Point settlement. This directly contrasts with the archaeology at the gold-mining towns of Paradise and Mount Shamrock in the Upper Burnett region – where the only sauce bottles the archaeologists found were Holbrook’s – no Lea and Perrins. This leads us to questions about the transfer of goods into the settlement. Was the company dictating what was available for the workers? Did they have any choice as to what could be ordered? It also leads to questions of broader patterns of global distribution of goods and patterns of consumption. Or was it just the storekeeper’s favourite brand? We have also found hair tonic bottles such as St Jakobs Oel from the Charles A. Vogeler Co in Baltimore, in the USA which was popular from the 1880s for treating hair loss. They also had the competing preparation for hair loss at the settlement – Barry’s Tricopherous from New York – which was popular from the very early 1800s. I find it interesting that they only had one brand of Worcestershire sauce but two brands of hair loss tonic!
RV: What were the squares found there on the last day of one field excavation?
KM: In keeping with one of the “rules” of archaeology – that is, you always find the most exciting things on the last day – we revealed our first possible structural evidence of the workers' houses at the end of the February field season this year. The concentration of bricks we found in two of the 1 metre by 1 metre squares that we excavated left us with a promising place to start excavating in June and July. During the June-July season we revealed a large concentration of bricks around 3 metres by 2 metres in diameter along with a high concentration of artefacts. We are not yet sure what the brick concentration indicates - perhaps a fireplace, or they were used for helping with soggy ground in front of a house, or perhaps related to the footings or stumps of the house itself. We’ll need to do some more analysis for a clearer picture, but based on the artefacts, it does appear to be the location of a house belonging to a family.
RV: Would people who lived there have travelled to Brisbane or anywhere else? How would they have got there and by what route?
KM: The company’s steamer the Culgoa made regular trips up and back to Brisbane from nearby Tewantin. The boat would take shipments of timber and passengers to Brisbane, and would return with goods and passengers. Smaller paddle-wheel boats then made their way from Tewantin to the settlement for both passengers and goods. The Brisbane Courier often had a front page advertisement for passage to Gympie via Noosa on the Culgoa, calling it the “shortest route”. This was before the completion of the Brisbane-Gympie rail line so the trip by boat was no doubt much quicker and more comfortable then trying to get through on the rough roads from Brisbane. There was also a route from the settlement to Gympie along Cootharaba Road which would also have been used by the residents either by horseback, coach or bullock dray. There is one story of a sawmill worker, from a personal letter from the time, who used to row a small boat from the settlement all the way down to Tewantin on his days off, to visit his fiancée, and then he would row all the way back overnight to start work first thing the next morning. Finally, Mr Luya, one of the owners, suggested that if he married the girl he would provide the timber for him to build a house for the couple at the settlement and he wouldn’t have to row to Tewantin all the time.-continued next page.
RV: By what route and means would their supplies have arrived at Mill Point?
KM: Most of the supplies would have arrived from Brisbane via the steamship the Culgoa. It would have supplied the township at Tewantin and surrounding areas, as well as the settlement itself.
RV: What sorts of accidents occurred at the sawmill at Mill Point?
KM: Although the steam-driven equipment at the mill was described as the latest technology, that didn’t stop it from being dangerous. On a cold July morning in 1873 the men had just finished their breakfast and were standing with their backs to the boiler to warm themselves and have a smoke. They noticed a bulge in the boiler moments before it exploded. The five men were injured – Phelim Molloy had one of his feet blown off, his brother Patrick was scalded, Charles Long was killed instantly, Joseph White had his leg blown off and was seriously scalded, and Patrick Tierney was also badly scalded. The doctor was called immediately from Gympie and arrived several hours later, but it is likely there was little he could do for the badly injured men. Three more of the men died of their injuries over the following week at Cootharaba, and the fifth Patrick Molloy died of his injuries a month later in Gympie. All of them were in their twenties. There had been another boiler explosion in Maryborough earlier that year (in which a third Molloy brother had been killed). This lead to an official enquiry which resulted in regulations being put in place about the operation of boilers and licensing those who could operate them. Details from the cemetery records also reveal other accidents including such descriptions as “accidentally killed by log” and “injuries at Cootharaba sawmill”. Other men who died may also have had work-related conditions including “rupture of intestines” which may have been an untreated hernia condition aggravated by heavy manual labour. Not only was it dangerous for the working men but also the children – one ten-year-old boy was killed after his left leg was torn from his body by a timber wagon.
RV: Can you describe the tramways and how they would have transported logs to the mill from the hinterland?
KM: The company built over four miles of tramway inland from the mill to bring the giant logs in from the forest. The tramway was built on raised earthen mounds through the swamp, enabling teams to work continuously, even in wet weather, bringing logs out of the forest to the nearest point on the tramway. Logs were loaded onto carts using a winch on a trolley, anchored to the tramway sleepers. Horses pulled the carts, each carrying a four ton log, down a steady gradient to the mill on the lake shore.
RV: What sorts of trees did they cut down and how tall or old would they have been? Are there any left?
KM: The timber that they were felling was what today we would call “old growth forests”; they would have been growing for centuries. They were focussed on the softwood species of trees including red cedar, white cedar, cypress and kauri pines. One worker described the majesty of the forests in 1883 in a letter back to England - “Anyone who has not seen the Australian scrub can have no idea of its grandeur; the timber seems endless….”. Of course the timber wasn’t endless and there are no trees of the size they were cutting down left anywhere in the district today.
RV: How was the timber transported from the mill to other towns?
KM: At first the timber planks were transported to the Gympie goldfields by bullock dray along the Cootharaba Road. This was not very successful due to the rough road and the steepness of some sections.They built a wharf beside the mill so they could load the timber onto punts. The partners designed and built flat-bottomed paddle-wheel boats called droghers to tow the punts of sawn timber from the mill, through Lake Cootharaba and Lake Cooroibah to Colloy, near Tewantin. They also bought the steamer – the Culgoa - to transport the timber out over the Noosa River bar and down to South Brisbane where they also set up an office and another mill in the mid-1870s. The owners, McGhie, Luya and Co, distributed and sold their timber from their timber yard in South Brisbane (which was located close to today’s Goodwill Bridge). They often had full page advertisements in the Post Office Directory (the Yellow Pages of the day) of various timber products including doors, window sashes, joinery, mouldings and architraves. Most of the timber from Cootharaba would have serviced the Brisbane market, and a lot of the timber would likely be found throughout old Queenslander houses and public buildings in Brisbane even today.
RV: What evidence has been found of the Aboriginal inhabitants in the area?
KM: During the Mill Point Archaeological Project excavations we have found a couple of flaked stone tools belonging to the Aboriginal people of the area. These have been found in deposits deeper in the ground than the mill period artefacts so are likely to have been left by people prior to the mill being set up. There is some historical evidence from photos and documents that local Aboriginal people worked for the mill, and there is much more investigation into the Aboriginal inhabitants in the immediate area of the Cootharaba Mill that can be done. Dr Ian McNiven has done extensive investigations in to the Aboriginal occupation of the surrounding Cooloola region.Archaeological evidence indicates that Aboriginal people have been using the region for at least 5500 years. There are shell middens throughout the region including on nearby Teewah Beach, the Cooloola sandmass and along the Noosa River. There are also stone artefact scatters in the Cooloola sandblows, and evidence of burials in the region. Other evidence of the Aboriginal inhabitants include a bora ring and scarred trees.
RV: Can you recommend a few books, whether or not on archaeology, especially any out of the way stuff people might not have heard of, and maybe say why you liked them?
KM: Some books of relevance to Mill Point:Cooloola Coast: Noosa to Fraser Island: The Aboriginal and settler histories of a unique environment, by Elaine Brown, 2000, University of Queensland Press. An excellent and enjoyable volume of the whole history of the region and its people.
Struggle of Memory, by Joan Dugdale, 1991, University of Queensland Press. A novel which begins at the Cootharaba mill settlement.
Some Australian historical archaeology books which show the variety of research that has been done in this country: Many Inventions: The Chinese in the Rocks, 1890-1930, by Jane Lydon, 1999, Monash Publications in History.
Inside the Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood, by Grace Karskens, 1999, Hale and Iremonger Publishers.
Dolly’s Creek: An Archaeology of a Victorian Goldfields Community, by Susan Lawrence, 2000, Melbourne University Press.
Paradise: Life on a Queensland goldfield, by Jonathon Prangnell, Lynda Cheshire and Kate Quirk, 2005, UQASU and Burnett Water Pty Ltd.
Valleys of Stone: The Archaeology and History of Adelaide’s Hills Face, by Pam Smith and Donald Pate, 2006, Koppi Books and Miln Walker and Associates.
And Indigenous Australian archaeology: Archaeology of the Dreamtime: the story of prehistoric Australia and its people, by Josephine Flood, 2004, JB Publishing.
And archaeology in general: The Archaeologist’s Field Handbook, by Heather Burke and Claire Smith, 2004, Allen and Unwin Publishers. This is like my bible, full of great hints and tips, and details of how to do archaeology in the field. I never go into the field without it.
-copyright Simon Sandall.
This issue is all about archeology. Karen Murphy is one of a team of archeologists excavating the site of the town of Mill Point, trying to piece together the layout of Mill Point and the lives of the townspeople.
Mill Point was a small town based around a timber mill on the shores of Lake Cootharaba, on the Sunshine Coast, north of Brisbane. The mill and the town packed up and left in 1892 when they ran out of timber in the surrounding bushland.
Artefacts uncovered include slate pencils from the school, fragments of dolls, bottles for hair tonic and sauce, broken ceramics, and earrings.
I asked Karen Murphy about colonial archeology and Mill Point, and I picked up a lot of interesting titles on archeology.
READERSVOICE.COM: How long have you been interested in colonial archaeology and what interests you about this type of archaeology in particular?
KAREN MURPHY: I’ve been interested in archaeology in general since I was about eight years old and read about the Incas and the Egyptians. Once I started studying archaeology at university seven years ago I became much more interested in Australian archaeology both Indigenous and historical. I have focussed my research more on the historical archaeology of Australia over the past few years. I’ve always been interested in Australian and Queensland history, even researching my own family history, and I think there is so much of Queensland’s and Australia’s history and archaeology that has yet to be examined. Looking at our more recent past enables us to learn more about ourselves and where our society is now, and also to better understand where we want to go.
RV: What was the Tennessee Hollow project you were working on in the U.S.? What similarities were there to Mill Point, Lake Cootharaba?
KM: Tennessee Hollow is part of El Presidio de San Francisco which was the first European settlement in the City of San Francisco. The Presidio was the fort set up by the Spanish in 1776. The project is a collaboration between Stanford University, U.S. National Parks Service and the Presidio Trust. I worked as a field assistant on the project for five weeks in 2004. The project is a study of how the valley was used during the Spanish-colonial and the Mexican periods of the Presidio (ca. 1776-1847). At a broad level, the project is similar to Mill Point as they both investigate the daily lives of the community that lived at the site in a time when outsiders were moving to new places and new frontiers.However in other ways the site is quite different.The Presidio was a military community and the people were culturally diverse including Native Californians, Mesoamerican, African and European people. At Mill Point the settlement was a company town run as a capitalist enterprise with mostly European people in the community.
RV: When did interest in the Mill Point, Lake Cootharaba, sawmill site start?
KM: The site has been of great interest to the local community for many years, more particularly once the land was taken over by the Queensland Government as a national park in the early 1980s. A plaque was installed near the site for Australia’s Bicentenary, and The National Trust installed a memorial stone at the settlement’s cemetery in 1993. The first archaeological investigations were undertaken by Dr Eleanor Crosby and Anne Hibbard in 1991 to develop a conservation plan for the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. The Cooroora Historical Society has also had a long interest in the site with a display about Mill Point housed in the Noosa Shire Museum at Pomona. The more recent Mill Point Archaeological Project began in late 2003 following community concern about the site, in particular the cemetery. A collaborative project was set up between the Environmental Protection Agency, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, University of Queensland and Noosa Shire Council. The first field season was held in early 2004 with the main components of the site being surveyed and recorded by archaeologists and archaeology students, in order to have the site entered on the Queensland Heritage Register.
RV: When did you hear about it and start getting involved in archaeological research there?
KM: I first heard about the project when the 2004 field season was undertaken by some of my colleagues at the Cultural Heritage Branch of the Environmental Protection Agency (where I was working at the time). When I decided to do my PhD in archaeology in 2005 I wanted to focus on doing historical archaeological research in Queensland, and was interested in the great potential that the Mill Point site provided to help tell us about the early residents of Queensland.
RV: Before actual excavation started at the site, what sorts of records or reading was done to get as much background on the site as possible?
KM: A lot of historical research about the site had already been done by Dr Eleanor Crosby (during her 1991 work at the site) and by local historian Dr Elaine Brown who had undertaken a detailed history of the early timber industry of the entire region. Irene Christie, another local historian, had also done an immense amount of research into the mill. The historical documentation that they had consulted included newspaper reports from the period, photographs of the settlement, personal letters from mill residents, and oral histories from mill descendents. Before excavation started, the project team also did extensive surface survey investigations to identify the materials left behind from the mill. Because the site of the settlement is so large, survey investigations help us to identify different areas without the need for excavation, and also to identify areas that might be best targeted for excavation.
RV: Research discovered news of a cricket match, and school trips to the beach. Can you talk about these and where researchers found out about them?
KM: There are descriptions in the newspapers of the day by various visitors to the mill settlement. Published in The Brisbane Courier, the Gympie Times and The Queenslander, there are detailed accounts of the trip up from Brisbane by boat to the settlement and descriptions of the people, the industry, the facilities, the forests and the activities undertaken at the settlement. In 1876 a correspondent from the Gympie Times spent his Christmas holiday at Elanda Point. The sawmilling stopped for the week and the community celebrated with a range of activities including hunting and fishing, excursions to the ocean beach, a regatta on the lake on Boxing Day, and a cricket match on New Year’s Day with the timber-getters and bullock drivers versus the sawmill hands.
RV: Can you briefly tell the story of the founding of the site, with the Gympie gold rushes and the four businessmen who started the venture?
KM: In 1865, Queensland had only been open to free settlers for a little over 20 years, and had only been separated from New South Wales as its own state for six years. It was facing financial crisis – banks were failing, unemployment was high and there was civil unrest. The outlook was bleak until an important discovery in 1867 on the Mary River by James Nash – he found gold. Within six months there were over 15000 men on the Gympie goldfields. Even today, Gympie is often called “the town that saved Queensland”. People were drawn to the Gympie goldfields from all over Australia and the world. Elsewhere in the region, the speculator, Charles Samuel Russell had noted rich timber resources in the Noosa district.He travelled to Gympie in 1869 looking for newly rich miners as partners to join him in his new business venture. He found four wealthy men to join the enterprise - James McGhie, Abraham Luya, Frederick Goodchap and John Woodburn. Russell proposed to apply for a large block of land at Lake Cootharaba in the Noosa district and develop it as a farm to fulfil the selection requirements. The main attraction however was the area’s rich timber. The partners, first known as A.F. Luya and Co., built the sawmill on the property in 1870 and began milling timber. After the required two years of residence and improvements, the company acquired the title to the land. Russell left after this time, handing over his interests to the other partners, who then became, McGhie, Luya and Co. from 1873.
RV: What would the population of Mill Point have been, at a typical moment from 1869-1892?
KM: There are various estimations of the population but they are just that – estimations. The company records have not been found so we can only go by other records such as the census, and school records of the number of children, to try and estimate the numbers. There are descriptions of 24 two-roomed cottages, and mention of 150 employees and their wives and children farewelling one of the owners. The school records show up to 40 children enrolled at any one time. So estimations of the population at its height vary between about 150-200 people.
RV: Have there been relatively few artefacts found at the site or enough to paint a picture of life there?
KM: We have found thousands of artefacts left behind by the residents of the mill settlement. A lot of these consist of the everyday rubbish left behind, and other items lost or discarded – broken bottles, broken ceramic plates, cups and bowls, buttons, beads, nails, and slate pencils. Even though the evidence is fragmented it still provides us with plenty of material with which to paint a picture of the everyday lives of the people of Mill Point.
RV: How many field excavations have you been on at the site?
KM: As part of the Mill Point Archaeological Project we have done fieldwork at the site since 2004. There has been two weeks of surveying in February 2004 and again in February 2005. Excavations began with two weeks in July 2005. This year we have spent eight weeks excavating at the site over the course of the entire year.
RV: What did the site look like when field work began there?
KM: The site is very overgrown with vegetation both native and exotic, including the original melaleuca swamp species as well as weeds such as lantana.We have done extensive clearing of weed vegetation in order to be able to look for archaeological remains, however in the Queensland climate the battle against weeds in National Parks is constant. There are numerous physical remains from the mill and later periods that were able to be seen including the tramways embankments, chimney and farmhouse remains, fenceposts, and pylons from the wharves in the lake.
RV: What might you do in a day of field work at the Mill Point site?
KM: On a typical day of excavation the crew is up and heading to the site by 7.00am. We drive to the National Park and then the crew walks into the site while the equipment is driven in by four wheel drive.The crew rotates through various tasks, being assigned one particular job each day. We usually have two or three people working on excavating in specific 1 metre by 1 metre squares. Everything needs to be carefully recorded as we go because once we dig it up the archaeology is destroyed. We take lots of photographs, make lots of notes, and describe everything we see and do. The excavators take the sediment that is excavated to the wet-sieving station set up down by the lake. With two people operating the hose and sieves, all of the sediment is put through 3mm and 6mm sieves so that we can recover the artefacts. The sediment at Mill Point is very gravelley so the sieved material then goes up to the sorting tent where we have two or three crew members working on going through the gravel to remove the artefacts. T he artefacts are sorted by material type as we go so that it makes analysis back in the lab easier. At the end of the day the sorters pack the artefacts into plastic bags to take back to the lab in Brisbane. Then it’s a nice walk back out of the National Park about 5.00pm for some hot showers and cold drinks. You can check out our activities on our daily fieldwork diary on our website at http://www.atsis.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=42042&pid=42037
RV: What are the problems you encounter living on-site?
KM: When we are working in the field we don’t actually stay at the site itself as it is a National Park and the designated camping areas are away from the site of the settlement. We stay in nearby Boreen Point at the Apollonian Hotel in quite comfortable share accommodation. The publican looks after us well with plenty of food and drink to keep our energy going. Having all the volunteers sharing the accommodation is part of the fieldwork experience and we try to always make it a both a social and educational experience. We usually have talks on archaeology in the evenings, along with pizza and movie nights, and very competitive games of Trivial Pursuit.
RV: What is the layout of the site, with buildings, houses, shops, a church, the mill itself?
KM: Because we don’t have any of the original company records and the remains of the settlement have deteriorated so much, the layout of the site still has a lot of pieces missing. There are written descriptions of the layout at the time, and a map sketched by a man whose ancestors worked at the site. From our survey we have been able to identify the location of the mill itself right on the point beside the lake, and the location of some of the workers’ housing, the tramway and the cemetery. But we only have one photograph of the entire settlement viewed from the top of the main mill building to show us where other buildings were located. Further archaeological investigations may help us to identify the location of such places as the school, and the blacksmiths. Because the buildings would mostly have been made of timber though, there will be little remaining of the structures themselves.
RV: At your talk you spoke of the discovery of sauce bottles, and how they differed from brands at another site. Also you found hair tonic bottles from the U.S. Can you explain how the discovery of these artefacts led to other questions?
KM: One of the most common products we have found is Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce – which of course you can still buy in the shops today.What is interesting is that Lea and Perrins is the only brand of Worcestershire Sauce we have found. Holbrook’s sauce was also popular at this time, but there is no evidence of it in the Mill Point settlement. This directly contrasts with the archaeology at the gold-mining towns of Paradise and Mount Shamrock in the Upper Burnett region – where the only sauce bottles the archaeologists found were Holbrook’s – no Lea and Perrins. This leads us to questions about the transfer of goods into the settlement. Was the company dictating what was available for the workers? Did they have any choice as to what could be ordered? It also leads to questions of broader patterns of global distribution of goods and patterns of consumption. Or was it just the storekeeper’s favourite brand? We have also found hair tonic bottles such as St Jakobs Oel from the Charles A. Vogeler Co in Baltimore, in the USA which was popular from the 1880s for treating hair loss. They also had the competing preparation for hair loss at the settlement – Barry’s Tricopherous from New York – which was popular from the very early 1800s. I find it interesting that they only had one brand of Worcestershire sauce but two brands of hair loss tonic!
RV: What were the squares found there on the last day of one field excavation?
KM: In keeping with one of the “rules” of archaeology – that is, you always find the most exciting things on the last day – we revealed our first possible structural evidence of the workers' houses at the end of the February field season this year. The concentration of bricks we found in two of the 1 metre by 1 metre squares that we excavated left us with a promising place to start excavating in June and July. During the June-July season we revealed a large concentration of bricks around 3 metres by 2 metres in diameter along with a high concentration of artefacts. We are not yet sure what the brick concentration indicates - perhaps a fireplace, or they were used for helping with soggy ground in front of a house, or perhaps related to the footings or stumps of the house itself. We’ll need to do some more analysis for a clearer picture, but based on the artefacts, it does appear to be the location of a house belonging to a family.
RV: Would people who lived there have travelled to Brisbane or anywhere else? How would they have got there and by what route?
KM: The company’s steamer the Culgoa made regular trips up and back to Brisbane from nearby Tewantin. The boat would take shipments of timber and passengers to Brisbane, and would return with goods and passengers. Smaller paddle-wheel boats then made their way from Tewantin to the settlement for both passengers and goods. The Brisbane Courier often had a front page advertisement for passage to Gympie via Noosa on the Culgoa, calling it the “shortest route”. This was before the completion of the Brisbane-Gympie rail line so the trip by boat was no doubt much quicker and more comfortable then trying to get through on the rough roads from Brisbane. There was also a route from the settlement to Gympie along Cootharaba Road which would also have been used by the residents either by horseback, coach or bullock dray. There is one story of a sawmill worker, from a personal letter from the time, who used to row a small boat from the settlement all the way down to Tewantin on his days off, to visit his fiancée, and then he would row all the way back overnight to start work first thing the next morning. Finally, Mr Luya, one of the owners, suggested that if he married the girl he would provide the timber for him to build a house for the couple at the settlement and he wouldn’t have to row to Tewantin all the time.-continued next page.
RV: By what route and means would their supplies have arrived at Mill Point?
KM: Most of the supplies would have arrived from Brisbane via the steamship the Culgoa. It would have supplied the township at Tewantin and surrounding areas, as well as the settlement itself.
RV: What sorts of accidents occurred at the sawmill at Mill Point?
KM: Although the steam-driven equipment at the mill was described as the latest technology, that didn’t stop it from being dangerous. On a cold July morning in 1873 the men had just finished their breakfast and were standing with their backs to the boiler to warm themselves and have a smoke. They noticed a bulge in the boiler moments before it exploded. The five men were injured – Phelim Molloy had one of his feet blown off, his brother Patrick was scalded, Charles Long was killed instantly, Joseph White had his leg blown off and was seriously scalded, and Patrick Tierney was also badly scalded. The doctor was called immediately from Gympie and arrived several hours later, but it is likely there was little he could do for the badly injured men. Three more of the men died of their injuries over the following week at Cootharaba, and the fifth Patrick Molloy died of his injuries a month later in Gympie. All of them were in their twenties. There had been another boiler explosion in Maryborough earlier that year (in which a third Molloy brother had been killed). This lead to an official enquiry which resulted in regulations being put in place about the operation of boilers and licensing those who could operate them. Details from the cemetery records also reveal other accidents including such descriptions as “accidentally killed by log” and “injuries at Cootharaba sawmill”. Other men who died may also have had work-related conditions including “rupture of intestines” which may have been an untreated hernia condition aggravated by heavy manual labour. Not only was it dangerous for the working men but also the children – one ten-year-old boy was killed after his left leg was torn from his body by a timber wagon.
RV: Can you describe the tramways and how they would have transported logs to the mill from the hinterland?
KM: The company built over four miles of tramway inland from the mill to bring the giant logs in from the forest. The tramway was built on raised earthen mounds through the swamp, enabling teams to work continuously, even in wet weather, bringing logs out of the forest to the nearest point on the tramway. Logs were loaded onto carts using a winch on a trolley, anchored to the tramway sleepers. Horses pulled the carts, each carrying a four ton log, down a steady gradient to the mill on the lake shore.
RV: What sorts of trees did they cut down and how tall or old would they have been? Are there any left?
KM: The timber that they were felling was what today we would call “old growth forests”; they would have been growing for centuries. They were focussed on the softwood species of trees including red cedar, white cedar, cypress and kauri pines. One worker described the majesty of the forests in 1883 in a letter back to England - “Anyone who has not seen the Australian scrub can have no idea of its grandeur; the timber seems endless….”. Of course the timber wasn’t endless and there are no trees of the size they were cutting down left anywhere in the district today.
RV: How was the timber transported from the mill to other towns?
KM: At first the timber planks were transported to the Gympie goldfields by bullock dray along the Cootharaba Road. This was not very successful due to the rough road and the steepness of some sections.They built a wharf beside the mill so they could load the timber onto punts. The partners designed and built flat-bottomed paddle-wheel boats called droghers to tow the punts of sawn timber from the mill, through Lake Cootharaba and Lake Cooroibah to Colloy, near Tewantin. They also bought the steamer – the Culgoa - to transport the timber out over the Noosa River bar and down to South Brisbane where they also set up an office and another mill in the mid-1870s. The owners, McGhie, Luya and Co, distributed and sold their timber from their timber yard in South Brisbane (which was located close to today’s Goodwill Bridge). They often had full page advertisements in the Post Office Directory (the Yellow Pages of the day) of various timber products including doors, window sashes, joinery, mouldings and architraves. Most of the timber from Cootharaba would have serviced the Brisbane market, and a lot of the timber would likely be found throughout old Queenslander houses and public buildings in Brisbane even today.
RV: What evidence has been found of the Aboriginal inhabitants in the area?
KM: During the Mill Point Archaeological Project excavations we have found a couple of flaked stone tools belonging to the Aboriginal people of the area. These have been found in deposits deeper in the ground than the mill period artefacts so are likely to have been left by people prior to the mill being set up. There is some historical evidence from photos and documents that local Aboriginal people worked for the mill, and there is much more investigation into the Aboriginal inhabitants in the immediate area of the Cootharaba Mill that can be done. Dr Ian McNiven has done extensive investigations in to the Aboriginal occupation of the surrounding Cooloola region.Archaeological evidence indicates that Aboriginal people have been using the region for at least 5500 years. There are shell middens throughout the region including on nearby Teewah Beach, the Cooloola sandmass and along the Noosa River. There are also stone artefact scatters in the Cooloola sandblows, and evidence of burials in the region. Other evidence of the Aboriginal inhabitants include a bora ring and scarred trees.
RV: Can you recommend a few books, whether or not on archaeology, especially any out of the way stuff people might not have heard of, and maybe say why you liked them?
KM: Some books of relevance to Mill Point:Cooloola Coast: Noosa to Fraser Island: The Aboriginal and settler histories of a unique environment, by Elaine Brown, 2000, University of Queensland Press. An excellent and enjoyable volume of the whole history of the region and its people.
Struggle of Memory, by Joan Dugdale, 1991, University of Queensland Press. A novel which begins at the Cootharaba mill settlement.
Some Australian historical archaeology books which show the variety of research that has been done in this country: Many Inventions: The Chinese in the Rocks, 1890-1930, by Jane Lydon, 1999, Monash Publications in History.
Inside the Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood, by Grace Karskens, 1999, Hale and Iremonger Publishers.
Dolly’s Creek: An Archaeology of a Victorian Goldfields Community, by Susan Lawrence, 2000, Melbourne University Press.
Paradise: Life on a Queensland goldfield, by Jonathon Prangnell, Lynda Cheshire and Kate Quirk, 2005, UQASU and Burnett Water Pty Ltd.
Valleys of Stone: The Archaeology and History of Adelaide’s Hills Face, by Pam Smith and Donald Pate, 2006, Koppi Books and Miln Walker and Associates.
And Indigenous Australian archaeology: Archaeology of the Dreamtime: the story of prehistoric Australia and its people, by Josephine Flood, 2004, JB Publishing.
And archaeology in general: The Archaeologist’s Field Handbook, by Heather Burke and Claire Smith, 2004, Allen and Unwin Publishers. This is like my bible, full of great hints and tips, and details of how to do archaeology in the field. I never go into the field without it.
-copyright Simon Sandall.
Robert Orben
Readersvoice.com aims to give people a few good reading tips. You might want to check out previous issues for some more interviews and reading suggestions. For this issue (August, 2004) I phoned humorist Robert Orben, who has written 47 books of humor, most recently the Speaker's Handbook of Humor (Merriam-Webster).
Robert Orben used to write the monologue for the Red Skelton Show, wrote gags for comedians like Dick Gregory, and flew around in Air Force One with President Gerald R. Ford when he was writing the U.S. president's speeches.
Robert Orben's mind is like a bubble gum machine that has churned out thousands of gags since his first book in 1946.
When Steve Martin wrote a column about his favorite 100 books, number five was a book by gag writer Robert Orben."Steve Martin was kind enough in a magazine called the New Yorker, oh, a couple of years ago," Mr Orben said."He had 'The 100 Best Books I've read'. And 19 were gag titles of one sort or another. But one was Patter for Standard Tricks by Robert Orben, because he started as a kid as a magician and used my books and I was always very grateful he was kind enough to put it in."
Robert Orben published his first gag book at the age of 18 in 1946, when he was working in a New York magic store. Professional magicians bought gag books to add humor to their acts.And comedians would go to magic stores to buy props for their stand-up acts, so they'd pick up gag books, too.
When Robert Orben wrote his first gag book, Encyclopedia of Patter, it proved very popular, and he started publishing more books of gags, complete with sketches, ad libs, bits of business and routines. Titles included Patter Parade, Laugh Package, Sight Bits, and Screamline Comedy. By the 1950s Orben gag books were ubiquitous in the comedy profession and were probably overused by stand-up comedians.
In addition to his gag and humor books he started publishing a regular newsletter of topical humor. Also he started writing custom-made gags for comedian Dick Gregory for six years, and wrote for the Jack Paar Show in New York (1962-63), and the Red Skelton Show in Hollywood (1964-70). Late he moved into politics, and in 1974 he became a speech consultant to Vice- President Gerald R. Ford. In August, 1974, he became a speechwriter for President Ford and in January 1976 he was appointed Special Assistant to President Ford and Director of the White House Speechwriting Department. These days he gives speeches on humor for corporate events.
READERSVOICE.COM: I've got these old books of yours. I've been collecting them.
ROBERT ORBEN: Oh, really? Hold on to them because the first 40, maybe ten years ago an antiquarian book seller got a thousand dollars for 40 of them. Now I have a feeling they would go for far more.
RV: I've got Boff Bundle. Crack Comedy.
RO: Oh, yeah, that all goes back to the 1950s, probably.
RV: Yeah that's right. Ad Libs.
RO: Uh-huh.
RV: And the Joke Tellers Handbook for 1999 Belly Laughs...This one's '76.
RO: That's right. I've been around a long time (laughs).
RV: I was wondering how old you were when you started writing comedy.
RO: Well, err, I was 18 when the first book was published. It had the grandiose title of The Encyclopedia of Patter. And that came out in 1946. And I just kept going.
Actually the books gave me sort of a calling card into every other good thing that ever happened to me so err I've been very grateful to them. In fact in the early days the books sold as well if not better in the UK and perhaps in Australia as they did in the United States.
RV: And what would be your five favorite books of all time?
RO: Well, you know, it's an interesting thing. I had a discussion with my wife after that (initial phone enquiry-ed). I was an omniverous reader in my teens and as soon as I got involved in writing I switched almost entirely to periodicals. I used to get five or six different newspapers each day and the news magazines and other magazines because I was writing topical kind humor and I had to keep up on things. There was no time...at one time... I marvel to this day at people who have time to read books. I'm all for books but at one time in 1962...Is that right..1964 maybe, I was a writer on the Red Skelton Show, a tv show, and was writing the monologue on the show. I was churning out a humor service that came out twice a month that consisted of a few hundred topical jokes; I was doing material for a black activist very popular comedian by the name of Dick Gregory sending him a page of material a day; and I was sending a page of material a day to Senator Barry Goldwater who was then running for president of the United States. So how I ever found time to even bathe and shave much less read books I don't know. But in thinking about it, my favorite books, beyond Winnie the Pooh, were fantasy books of one sort or another. Jules Verne, H.G.Wells. And I certainly read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories from front to back.
And something you may not be familiar with. As a teenager I used to love a series called Tom Swift. To give you an idea how antiquated this is it was probably written in the twenties. Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout. (laughs) But there may have been 35 or 40 of them. Books for young people and Tom Swift was a young inventor always doing creative things.
RV: It rings a bell.
RO: Oh, well, it was very popular. And in fact now I think they've resurrected it and they have more up-to-date things to invent other than an electric runabout. There was a also a series by the author William Seabrook who was involved with all manner of interesting psychical research, unusual things. And I read all of those books.
I never read classics. Jane Austen and such. I never had the time, and, until recently, the interest.
READERSVOICE.COM: Have you read many biographies of comedians?
ROBERT ORBEN: Oh yes. I have. Many of those. Groucho Marx. I wrote for Red Skelton for six years and Arthur Marx wrote a book about Red and I certainly.. (read that) and other books on comedians, yes. The Woody Allen books...I'm looking here at some of the things I've got on my shelf that I know I've read. Uh.. books about Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Lenny Bruce.
-There were many other performers Robert Orben had liked over the years:
RO: ..But of current performers I like Ellen Degeneres very much, and obviously Robin Williams. And there's so many others. There's so many wonderful performers.
But it's changed. What I don't like about modern humor: One, I don't like the off color aspect of it. It has gone too far. Too far. There's nothing I haven't heard but I don't want to hear it in a theatre or a nightclub so I don't go to comedy clubs anymore.And most of the writers my age have the same feeling.
But what changed substantially from when I was very active 30 years ago before I got involved with politics and things of that sort was the fact that in those days an act had a beginning, middle and end. There was almost a story line and now the comedians have no storyline at all. In fact some of them don't even have a beginning. They come out and say "Where are you from?" When I hear "Where are you from?" I realise they don't have an act. And they don't have a finish. They sometimes finish on a strong joke, sometimes on a weak joke and then they just walk off.
RV: It's funny you should mention that because the same thing happens in movies and novels. The whole skill of plotting seems like a craft that's being lost.
RO: That's very true. Very true...
RV: Did you ever perform magic and comedy?
RO: No, I demonstrated magic in a magic shop, a professional magic shop. Stuart Robson's (stage manager for Florenz "Flo" Ziegfeld) conjuror's shop in New York.
But I was never a very good magician and only in the last 25 years have I been doing humor and that in the form of speeches. I give workshops and speeches on how to use humor in communication. That's been a very successful thing with corporations.Teaching their executives, teaching their salesmen. And then for recognition events, just arr, rather than have somebody give a corporate speech to the best salesman or for people who've done well for the corporation, they would have me as the after dinner speaker, and ostensibly teach them how to use humor but essentially to do a half hour, three quarters of an hour of jokes.
RV: How old were you when you started working in Stuart Robson's magic shop?
RO: I was, err, well, I can tell you precisely I was 17, 18 years old. That's how I got involved in writing humor. When I went to work in Stuart's shop, I was 17 years old at that point, a very successful book in magic was something called Smart Talk For Magicians by George McAthy and I looked at that book and I thought well I can do that. When you're 17 years old you think you can do everything.
So I went to work and I put out Encyclopedia of Patter and that was essentially the start of the writing.
RV: How did you get that book published?
RO: I err...When you're 18 years old nobody's going to pay attention to an 18 year old kid. So I borrowed money from my mother and I printed it and published it myself and that was kind of interesting.(I) went out on a limb to do this, and we printed 2000 copies, and sent out a circular to the various magic shops at that time because that would have been the market.
And for about two or three weeks we'd get an order for three copies or one copy or six copies and I've got 2000 copies sitting there, and I'm thinking "This is a disaster". And then after about three weeks we started to get copies..or rather orders for three dozen, four dozen or a gross, and the 2000 went within the month and that went through something like 20 reprintings, so, uh that started me on the way.RV: Did you do any other jobs after the magic shop?
RO: No, pretty much the books carried me along and then it dawned on me maybe there was a way to go beyond this and then out of the blue I got an enquiry, essentially. Dick Gregory, who was just beginning to make a huge name for himself as the first black American comedian that paved the way for Cosby and all the rest back in 1962.
He had used the books. He had written to me, oh, maybe in 1955, and said he was a black comedian working on the South side of Chicago, and he feels if he had special material, he had been using my books, he would be able to move ahead very fast. And he had seen a very small amount of money.He had been working in odd jobs in Chicago to keep alive and I wrote back and I said, "Unless you really have a persona, a special approach, all I can do is give you more of the same material that you find in the books so save your money."
And in 1962 I got a telegram at maybe one o'clock in the morning where we were living and he said, "I've found", essentially "my voice, who I am. And Wednesday there's going to be a two page article about me in Time Magazine. And you and me are going places, Bob."
And I still remember the conversation this was like at three o'clock in the morning when I reached him at the Playboy Club, which is where he was working in Chicago, and I said "I'll tell you what, Mr Gregory, I've heard a lot of 'You and me are going places, Bob' ...I'll spring for 35 cents, I'll buy a copy of Time Magazine, and if the two page article is in there I'll call you back" (laughs).
So the two page article was there, Thursday I flew out to Chicago, Friday we flew back to New York and we signed a contract at that point and I wrote for him for a number of years and I must say he was one of the best employers I've ever had.
Robert Orben turned his hand to politics in the 1970s...
ROBERT ORBEN: I don't know whether you're aware of this from whatever you've found but after I migrated to six years on the Red Skelton Show I started to write for political people, politicians, and it eventually brought me to 1973 when I became a consultant to Vice President Gerald R. Ford.
And in 1974 I joined the White House staff and in 1976 I became director of the White House speech writing department. For Gerald R. Ford.
RV: So, what was the procedure when you were writing a speech?
RO: Well the speechwriting is a rather large part of the White House operation. There's usually about six speech writers, Nixon had 14. I don't know how many Bush has, probably seven or eight of them, I'm sort of guessing at that, but we had about six and what would happen is you'd get a schedule of the speeches that had been committed to, and I'd meet with the president, and go over each of the speeches.
He would tell me what areas he wanted to cover and since we were pretty well familiar with the administration policy then we'd sit down and write the speeches. There were six of us. And then what was unusual, and I didn't realise how unusual it was having met with other White House speechwriters, I had enormous access to the president. I would say I spent two to three hours a week in the Oval Office working with the president on speeches and then when we'd fly out to do the speeches, on Air Force One, I would work with him a little more and we'd go over the speech in a sort of rehearsal, and so for most of the domestic speeches I was with him. And that sort of access to the president hasn't been the case since Gerald R. Ford, and I personally don't feel you can do a totally adequate job for anybody whether it's a comedian, a business executive or a president without having one on one access.
RV: What was he like?
RO: He is wonderful. He is a totally down to earth individual and he is to this day. I went to the White House last year at a dinner celebrating his 90th birthday and in another couple of months on August 9th we'll be going to the capital for a dinner and reception honoring Gerald R. Ford for the, arr, it's the 30th anniversary of when he assumed office.
And there's no imperial presidency with Gerald R. Ford. He is just a down-to-earth and an extremely capable person and what's giving me great satisfaction having lived to my mature age is that all of the criticism that he got at the time for pardoning Nixon and the put-downs he got.Those same people are now writing articles and books and appearing on television saying that the Nixon pardon was right. It saved our country from a debacle of arrr...a political debacle, and that Gerald R. Ford was a very capable and good president.
RV: When you were with him did he seem kind of, um, to take the presidency in his stride, like it was just another job?
RO: Well, remember he had been in the Congress for 24 years, where he was minority leader, that's the leader of the party out of (power), the Shadow/ Opposition in England. So he was a very astute politician.
I remember him talking. We were going over a speech when I was the consultant, he was Vice- President, and I remember late at night, one night. There was all the furore about "Is Nixon going to resign? Is Nixon going to be impeached?" And ahh, Vice-President Ford was saying to me, he said, "You know I promised my wife Betty that this would be my last year in Congress, and arr, I don't wish to be president." And, ahh, but when he was asked obviously he had to take the role.
RV: Right. And um, just jumping back to the humor now, again, arr I've got maybe five more questions...
RO: Well, I'll tell you, arr, before we..speaking of humor. Ford had a very great appreciation of humor and in the very second speech he did as president...ahh, there was tremendous uncertainty in the country whether our constitution was going to work.
Here was a non-elected vice president and now a non-elected president and there were all manner of rumours about the troops being on alert and whether the system was going to work.And Ford was very much aware of that so for his second speech, it was at the Ohio State University, there were...it was to 15000 people in the Field House, huge audience, and he started out by saying "So much has happened since I accepted your kind invitation to be here today. "At that point I was America's first instant vice president and now I find myself America's first instant president. "The U.S. marine corps band is so confused they don't know whether to play Hail to the Chief or You've Come a Long Way, Baby."
It was an interesting crowd reaction. Nobody knew Gerald R. Ford. There was a split second of silence when I almost died there. And then suddenly the place was up for grabs. A roar of laughter.
RV: That was your gag?
RO: Well, it was the president... the president said it.
RV: What people or styles of humor influenced your style of humor?
RO: Oh, certainly Bob Hope and Groucho Marx.In fact there have been times in the past when people have said I've sounded a little like Groucho Marx. I don't agree with that. But that short one-liner to the point, that's strictly Bob Hope and Groucho Marx.
RV: Are you still doing that newsletter?
RO: No, I did that for about 30 years and I stopped doing that in 1989 when I turned 62. I felt it was time to spend more time doing what I want to do.When you do current material, someone once said, with the next deadline it's out of date. Well, not totally, but I did it twice a month and it was about a hundred jokes an issue and it was all very topical so I had to read and read and read. Unfortunately as we've discussed, not books, but everything else to keep up to date.
RV: What sort of things magazine wise do you read today and newspapers?
RO: Well, the same thing I did then. I got a few newspapers. I get all three news magazines, Time, Newsweek and the U.S. News. And maybe 15 or 20 other magazines that I still get... magic magazines to know what's going on. In fact I just turned down an offer to go out to a magic convention and be interviewed on stage akin to what you're doing now but I had a conflict with a speakers' conference.I still do speeches and workshops.
RV: What's your general daily routine?
RO: What it used to be was getting up at four o'clock in the morning drinking a lot of coffee, reading the newspapers, making notes, and then at six o'clock writing until I had written 25 jokes. And if I did it in three or four hours I'd reward myself and take the day off.
If it took 12 hours to write 25 decent jokes I would keep at it. And that's seven days a week. I was a workaholic.
RV: What about when you were doing the Red Skelton Show, what was your routine there?
RO: Same thing. Only then I would first start off writing Red's material because it was making me the most money...and then, although when you write jokes you really have to think is this joke right for one client or another? I was simultaneously, as I mentioned before, writing for Barry Goldwater, Red Skelton, and Dick Gregory. Well obviously those jokes were not interchangeable. (laughter) So you had to put yourself in the mindset of the person you were writing for.
RV: What years were you writing for the Red Skelton show?
RO: 1964 to 1970.
RV: Ok. And you were liviing in Los Angeles, was it?
RO: Los Angeles, yeah. It was a lovely six years. I enjoyed it tremendously.
RV: And so each day you'd... How often did the show go on?
RO: Once a week. I wrote the monologue on the shows, so this was the six or seven minutes that Red opened the show with.
And it usually came to about 28 jokes but I would write between a hundred and a hundred fifty jokes each week, and pick the best and then the routine could be done.
RV: What was your deadline there?
RO: Well, you always write pretty far in advance. I think we were writing three weeks in advance. Because re-runs also were used for the show so you couldn't get immediately topical.
RV: So the same routine there, getting up at four a.m.?
RO: Absolutely. (laughs)... You couldn't be too topical but...you knew what that audience was concerned with.
RV: Ever considered writing memoirs or a life story?
RO: Well I do have a book Speaker's Handbook of Humor and it's published by Merriam-Webster. And that's probably as much memoirs as anything because I talk about a lot that's happened in my life, and pertains to how to do speeches, how to write speeches, how to use humor.
But a memoir as such, memoirs generally don't sell, and ah, unfortunately, I've never been a note-taker and I would come back from these different events, with television and with business, whatever, with wonderful anecdotes and think I will never forget that, and I have.
-copyright Simon Sandall.
-copyright Simon Sandall.
Robert Orben used to write the monologue for the Red Skelton Show, wrote gags for comedians like Dick Gregory, and flew around in Air Force One with President Gerald R. Ford when he was writing the U.S. president's speeches.
Robert Orben's mind is like a bubble gum machine that has churned out thousands of gags since his first book in 1946.
When Steve Martin wrote a column about his favorite 100 books, number five was a book by gag writer Robert Orben."Steve Martin was kind enough in a magazine called the New Yorker, oh, a couple of years ago," Mr Orben said."He had 'The 100 Best Books I've read'. And 19 were gag titles of one sort or another. But one was Patter for Standard Tricks by Robert Orben, because he started as a kid as a magician and used my books and I was always very grateful he was kind enough to put it in."
Robert Orben published his first gag book at the age of 18 in 1946, when he was working in a New York magic store. Professional magicians bought gag books to add humor to their acts.And comedians would go to magic stores to buy props for their stand-up acts, so they'd pick up gag books, too.
When Robert Orben wrote his first gag book, Encyclopedia of Patter, it proved very popular, and he started publishing more books of gags, complete with sketches, ad libs, bits of business and routines. Titles included Patter Parade, Laugh Package, Sight Bits, and Screamline Comedy. By the 1950s Orben gag books were ubiquitous in the comedy profession and were probably overused by stand-up comedians.
In addition to his gag and humor books he started publishing a regular newsletter of topical humor. Also he started writing custom-made gags for comedian Dick Gregory for six years, and wrote for the Jack Paar Show in New York (1962-63), and the Red Skelton Show in Hollywood (1964-70). Late he moved into politics, and in 1974 he became a speech consultant to Vice- President Gerald R. Ford. In August, 1974, he became a speechwriter for President Ford and in January 1976 he was appointed Special Assistant to President Ford and Director of the White House Speechwriting Department. These days he gives speeches on humor for corporate events.
READERSVOICE.COM: I've got these old books of yours. I've been collecting them.
ROBERT ORBEN: Oh, really? Hold on to them because the first 40, maybe ten years ago an antiquarian book seller got a thousand dollars for 40 of them. Now I have a feeling they would go for far more.
RV: I've got Boff Bundle. Crack Comedy.
RO: Oh, yeah, that all goes back to the 1950s, probably.
RV: Yeah that's right. Ad Libs.
RO: Uh-huh.
RV: And the Joke Tellers Handbook for 1999 Belly Laughs...This one's '76.
RO: That's right. I've been around a long time (laughs).
RV: I was wondering how old you were when you started writing comedy.
RO: Well, err, I was 18 when the first book was published. It had the grandiose title of The Encyclopedia of Patter. And that came out in 1946. And I just kept going.
Actually the books gave me sort of a calling card into every other good thing that ever happened to me so err I've been very grateful to them. In fact in the early days the books sold as well if not better in the UK and perhaps in Australia as they did in the United States.
RV: And what would be your five favorite books of all time?
RO: Well, you know, it's an interesting thing. I had a discussion with my wife after that (initial phone enquiry-ed). I was an omniverous reader in my teens and as soon as I got involved in writing I switched almost entirely to periodicals. I used to get five or six different newspapers each day and the news magazines and other magazines because I was writing topical kind humor and I had to keep up on things. There was no time...at one time... I marvel to this day at people who have time to read books. I'm all for books but at one time in 1962...Is that right..1964 maybe, I was a writer on the Red Skelton Show, a tv show, and was writing the monologue on the show. I was churning out a humor service that came out twice a month that consisted of a few hundred topical jokes; I was doing material for a black activist very popular comedian by the name of Dick Gregory sending him a page of material a day; and I was sending a page of material a day to Senator Barry Goldwater who was then running for president of the United States. So how I ever found time to even bathe and shave much less read books I don't know. But in thinking about it, my favorite books, beyond Winnie the Pooh, were fantasy books of one sort or another. Jules Verne, H.G.Wells. And I certainly read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories from front to back.
And something you may not be familiar with. As a teenager I used to love a series called Tom Swift. To give you an idea how antiquated this is it was probably written in the twenties. Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout. (laughs) But there may have been 35 or 40 of them. Books for young people and Tom Swift was a young inventor always doing creative things.
RV: It rings a bell.
RO: Oh, well, it was very popular. And in fact now I think they've resurrected it and they have more up-to-date things to invent other than an electric runabout. There was a also a series by the author William Seabrook who was involved with all manner of interesting psychical research, unusual things. And I read all of those books.
I never read classics. Jane Austen and such. I never had the time, and, until recently, the interest.
READERSVOICE.COM: Have you read many biographies of comedians?
ROBERT ORBEN: Oh yes. I have. Many of those. Groucho Marx. I wrote for Red Skelton for six years and Arthur Marx wrote a book about Red and I certainly.. (read that) and other books on comedians, yes. The Woody Allen books...I'm looking here at some of the things I've got on my shelf that I know I've read. Uh.. books about Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Lenny Bruce.
-There were many other performers Robert Orben had liked over the years:
RO: ..But of current performers I like Ellen Degeneres very much, and obviously Robin Williams. And there's so many others. There's so many wonderful performers.
But it's changed. What I don't like about modern humor: One, I don't like the off color aspect of it. It has gone too far. Too far. There's nothing I haven't heard but I don't want to hear it in a theatre or a nightclub so I don't go to comedy clubs anymore.And most of the writers my age have the same feeling.
But what changed substantially from when I was very active 30 years ago before I got involved with politics and things of that sort was the fact that in those days an act had a beginning, middle and end. There was almost a story line and now the comedians have no storyline at all. In fact some of them don't even have a beginning. They come out and say "Where are you from?" When I hear "Where are you from?" I realise they don't have an act. And they don't have a finish. They sometimes finish on a strong joke, sometimes on a weak joke and then they just walk off.
RV: It's funny you should mention that because the same thing happens in movies and novels. The whole skill of plotting seems like a craft that's being lost.
RO: That's very true. Very true...
RV: Did you ever perform magic and comedy?
RO: No, I demonstrated magic in a magic shop, a professional magic shop. Stuart Robson's (stage manager for Florenz "Flo" Ziegfeld) conjuror's shop in New York.
But I was never a very good magician and only in the last 25 years have I been doing humor and that in the form of speeches. I give workshops and speeches on how to use humor in communication. That's been a very successful thing with corporations.Teaching their executives, teaching their salesmen. And then for recognition events, just arr, rather than have somebody give a corporate speech to the best salesman or for people who've done well for the corporation, they would have me as the after dinner speaker, and ostensibly teach them how to use humor but essentially to do a half hour, three quarters of an hour of jokes.
RV: How old were you when you started working in Stuart Robson's magic shop?
RO: I was, err, well, I can tell you precisely I was 17, 18 years old. That's how I got involved in writing humor. When I went to work in Stuart's shop, I was 17 years old at that point, a very successful book in magic was something called Smart Talk For Magicians by George McAthy and I looked at that book and I thought well I can do that. When you're 17 years old you think you can do everything.
So I went to work and I put out Encyclopedia of Patter and that was essentially the start of the writing.
RV: How did you get that book published?
RO: I err...When you're 18 years old nobody's going to pay attention to an 18 year old kid. So I borrowed money from my mother and I printed it and published it myself and that was kind of interesting.(I) went out on a limb to do this, and we printed 2000 copies, and sent out a circular to the various magic shops at that time because that would have been the market.
And for about two or three weeks we'd get an order for three copies or one copy or six copies and I've got 2000 copies sitting there, and I'm thinking "This is a disaster". And then after about three weeks we started to get copies..or rather orders for three dozen, four dozen or a gross, and the 2000 went within the month and that went through something like 20 reprintings, so, uh that started me on the way.RV: Did you do any other jobs after the magic shop?
RO: No, pretty much the books carried me along and then it dawned on me maybe there was a way to go beyond this and then out of the blue I got an enquiry, essentially. Dick Gregory, who was just beginning to make a huge name for himself as the first black American comedian that paved the way for Cosby and all the rest back in 1962.
He had used the books. He had written to me, oh, maybe in 1955, and said he was a black comedian working on the South side of Chicago, and he feels if he had special material, he had been using my books, he would be able to move ahead very fast. And he had seen a very small amount of money.He had been working in odd jobs in Chicago to keep alive and I wrote back and I said, "Unless you really have a persona, a special approach, all I can do is give you more of the same material that you find in the books so save your money."
And in 1962 I got a telegram at maybe one o'clock in the morning where we were living and he said, "I've found", essentially "my voice, who I am. And Wednesday there's going to be a two page article about me in Time Magazine. And you and me are going places, Bob."
And I still remember the conversation this was like at three o'clock in the morning when I reached him at the Playboy Club, which is where he was working in Chicago, and I said "I'll tell you what, Mr Gregory, I've heard a lot of 'You and me are going places, Bob' ...I'll spring for 35 cents, I'll buy a copy of Time Magazine, and if the two page article is in there I'll call you back" (laughs).
So the two page article was there, Thursday I flew out to Chicago, Friday we flew back to New York and we signed a contract at that point and I wrote for him for a number of years and I must say he was one of the best employers I've ever had.
Robert Orben turned his hand to politics in the 1970s...
ROBERT ORBEN: I don't know whether you're aware of this from whatever you've found but after I migrated to six years on the Red Skelton Show I started to write for political people, politicians, and it eventually brought me to 1973 when I became a consultant to Vice President Gerald R. Ford.
And in 1974 I joined the White House staff and in 1976 I became director of the White House speech writing department. For Gerald R. Ford.
RV: So, what was the procedure when you were writing a speech?
RO: Well the speechwriting is a rather large part of the White House operation. There's usually about six speech writers, Nixon had 14. I don't know how many Bush has, probably seven or eight of them, I'm sort of guessing at that, but we had about six and what would happen is you'd get a schedule of the speeches that had been committed to, and I'd meet with the president, and go over each of the speeches.
He would tell me what areas he wanted to cover and since we were pretty well familiar with the administration policy then we'd sit down and write the speeches. There were six of us. And then what was unusual, and I didn't realise how unusual it was having met with other White House speechwriters, I had enormous access to the president. I would say I spent two to three hours a week in the Oval Office working with the president on speeches and then when we'd fly out to do the speeches, on Air Force One, I would work with him a little more and we'd go over the speech in a sort of rehearsal, and so for most of the domestic speeches I was with him. And that sort of access to the president hasn't been the case since Gerald R. Ford, and I personally don't feel you can do a totally adequate job for anybody whether it's a comedian, a business executive or a president without having one on one access.
RV: What was he like?
RO: He is wonderful. He is a totally down to earth individual and he is to this day. I went to the White House last year at a dinner celebrating his 90th birthday and in another couple of months on August 9th we'll be going to the capital for a dinner and reception honoring Gerald R. Ford for the, arr, it's the 30th anniversary of when he assumed office.
And there's no imperial presidency with Gerald R. Ford. He is just a down-to-earth and an extremely capable person and what's giving me great satisfaction having lived to my mature age is that all of the criticism that he got at the time for pardoning Nixon and the put-downs he got.Those same people are now writing articles and books and appearing on television saying that the Nixon pardon was right. It saved our country from a debacle of arrr...a political debacle, and that Gerald R. Ford was a very capable and good president.
RV: When you were with him did he seem kind of, um, to take the presidency in his stride, like it was just another job?
RO: Well, remember he had been in the Congress for 24 years, where he was minority leader, that's the leader of the party out of (power), the Shadow/ Opposition in England. So he was a very astute politician.
I remember him talking. We were going over a speech when I was the consultant, he was Vice- President, and I remember late at night, one night. There was all the furore about "Is Nixon going to resign? Is Nixon going to be impeached?" And ahh, Vice-President Ford was saying to me, he said, "You know I promised my wife Betty that this would be my last year in Congress, and arr, I don't wish to be president." And, ahh, but when he was asked obviously he had to take the role.
RV: Right. And um, just jumping back to the humor now, again, arr I've got maybe five more questions...
RO: Well, I'll tell you, arr, before we..speaking of humor. Ford had a very great appreciation of humor and in the very second speech he did as president...ahh, there was tremendous uncertainty in the country whether our constitution was going to work.
Here was a non-elected vice president and now a non-elected president and there were all manner of rumours about the troops being on alert and whether the system was going to work.And Ford was very much aware of that so for his second speech, it was at the Ohio State University, there were...it was to 15000 people in the Field House, huge audience, and he started out by saying "So much has happened since I accepted your kind invitation to be here today. "At that point I was America's first instant vice president and now I find myself America's first instant president. "The U.S. marine corps band is so confused they don't know whether to play Hail to the Chief or You've Come a Long Way, Baby."
It was an interesting crowd reaction. Nobody knew Gerald R. Ford. There was a split second of silence when I almost died there. And then suddenly the place was up for grabs. A roar of laughter.
RV: That was your gag?
RO: Well, it was the president... the president said it.
RV: What people or styles of humor influenced your style of humor?
RO: Oh, certainly Bob Hope and Groucho Marx.In fact there have been times in the past when people have said I've sounded a little like Groucho Marx. I don't agree with that. But that short one-liner to the point, that's strictly Bob Hope and Groucho Marx.
RV: Are you still doing that newsletter?
RO: No, I did that for about 30 years and I stopped doing that in 1989 when I turned 62. I felt it was time to spend more time doing what I want to do.When you do current material, someone once said, with the next deadline it's out of date. Well, not totally, but I did it twice a month and it was about a hundred jokes an issue and it was all very topical so I had to read and read and read. Unfortunately as we've discussed, not books, but everything else to keep up to date.
RV: What sort of things magazine wise do you read today and newspapers?
RO: Well, the same thing I did then. I got a few newspapers. I get all three news magazines, Time, Newsweek and the U.S. News. And maybe 15 or 20 other magazines that I still get... magic magazines to know what's going on. In fact I just turned down an offer to go out to a magic convention and be interviewed on stage akin to what you're doing now but I had a conflict with a speakers' conference.I still do speeches and workshops.
RV: What's your general daily routine?
RO: What it used to be was getting up at four o'clock in the morning drinking a lot of coffee, reading the newspapers, making notes, and then at six o'clock writing until I had written 25 jokes. And if I did it in three or four hours I'd reward myself and take the day off.
If it took 12 hours to write 25 decent jokes I would keep at it. And that's seven days a week. I was a workaholic.
RV: What about when you were doing the Red Skelton Show, what was your routine there?
RO: Same thing. Only then I would first start off writing Red's material because it was making me the most money...and then, although when you write jokes you really have to think is this joke right for one client or another? I was simultaneously, as I mentioned before, writing for Barry Goldwater, Red Skelton, and Dick Gregory. Well obviously those jokes were not interchangeable. (laughter) So you had to put yourself in the mindset of the person you were writing for.
RV: What years were you writing for the Red Skelton show?
RO: 1964 to 1970.
RV: Ok. And you were liviing in Los Angeles, was it?
RO: Los Angeles, yeah. It was a lovely six years. I enjoyed it tremendously.
RV: And so each day you'd... How often did the show go on?
RO: Once a week. I wrote the monologue on the shows, so this was the six or seven minutes that Red opened the show with.
And it usually came to about 28 jokes but I would write between a hundred and a hundred fifty jokes each week, and pick the best and then the routine could be done.
RV: What was your deadline there?
RO: Well, you always write pretty far in advance. I think we were writing three weeks in advance. Because re-runs also were used for the show so you couldn't get immediately topical.
RV: So the same routine there, getting up at four a.m.?
RO: Absolutely. (laughs)... You couldn't be too topical but...you knew what that audience was concerned with.
RV: Ever considered writing memoirs or a life story?
RO: Well I do have a book Speaker's Handbook of Humor and it's published by Merriam-Webster. And that's probably as much memoirs as anything because I talk about a lot that's happened in my life, and pertains to how to do speeches, how to write speeches, how to use humor.
But a memoir as such, memoirs generally don't sell, and ah, unfortunately, I've never been a note-taker and I would come back from these different events, with television and with business, whatever, with wonderful anecdotes and think I will never forget that, and I have.
-copyright Simon Sandall.
-copyright Simon Sandall.
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