The Wide White Page

[joeallonby]

Last night we had to kill poor Higgins. His tales of slatternly krakens
vexed us so. Alas, my last match blew out in the wind so that we had to eat
him raw. His liver was quite palatable however, tenderized as it was by his
enslavement to drink.

on 11/10/04 5:56 PM, Joel Katz at mittelwerk at hotmail.com wrote:

> conditions are intolerable.  the men are subsisting on hardtack spread with
> the remnants of jenkins' bone marrow, poor sod.  higgins is frightening the
> others with his terrible nightmares, appalling tales of a future in which
> men are held in thrall to something called 'octopus porn.'  o nature, thou
> unkempt whore!  o grand seductress!
> 
> 
> 
>> Review: The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine
>> Antarctica
>> 11 November 2004
>> Reviewed by KIM GRIGGS
>> 
>> Antarctica has long existed in the imagination. The
>> ancient Greeks decided that there had to be a
>> counterweight to the Arctic, and so its opposite was
>> named the Antarctic.
>> 
>> Nowadays, the Antarctic is not quite so imaginary:
>> Lonely Planet has produced a guidebook. But the
>> remoteness of the coldest, driest and windiest place
>> on Earth means that Antarctica has mostly been the
>> preserve of scientists, heroic explorers and the
>> occasional travel writer.
>> 
>> Bill Manhire, in editing the anthology The Wide White
>> Page, offers another Antarctica: the Antarctic that
>> writers imagine.
>> 
>> His selection eschews, in the main, non-fiction and
>> the work of writers who have been to Antarctica.
>> Rather, we are offered a journey through centuries and
>> genres, from Dante's account of Ulysses' last ocean
>> voyage, to Ursula Le Guin's story of South American
>> women who made it to the Pole first, to Monty Python's
>> skit about Scott of the Sahara.
>> 
>> We are also treated to the mysterious end of Edgar
>> Allan Poe's first book-length work of prose fiction,
>> The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The
>> next entry, An Antarctic Mystery by Jules Verne,
>> provides one possible solution to Poe's mystery.
>> Another gem is the story by German poet and short
>> story writer Georg Heym, translated especially for
>> this anthology, of a trio of South Pole explorers who,
>> unlike Ernest Shackleton, decide to carry on to the
>> Pole when they know they have no hope of making it
>> back.
>> 
>> Manhire does include some writers who know Antarctica
>> through experience, but avoids the obvious choices.
>> The diary entry of Robert Falcon Scott is one that
>> evokes small details of Antarctic life rather than the
>> drama and sadness of the Englishman's better-known
>> final entries. Modern-day visitors are also included:
>> Manhire has selected two works by local poet Chris
>> Orsman, one of New Zealand's first Artists to
>> Antarctica.
>> 
>> Manhire ends the anthology with his own Visiting Mr
>> Shackleton, a hilarious collection of comments he
>> found in the visitors' book at Shackleton's hut at
>> Cape Royds.
>> 
>> Tempting those uninitiated into the fascinations of
>> Antarctica is the stunning cover, the pale blue edge
>> of the Barne Glacier. Inside, though, the images are
>> again those of the imagination.
>> 
>> A Gawrey Extended for Flight portrays a flying woman
>> who appears in a 1751 novel by Robert Paltock.
>> Paltock's hero, sailor Peter Wilkins, meets and
>> marries his Gawrey, a woman whose wings can also be
>> handily reconfigured to enable her to float. Equably
>> fanciful is The Creation of Antarctic Light by "Ern
>> Malley", a collage that was, in fact, by Harold
>> Stewart - Malley being the creation of Stewart and
>> James McAuley, in one of Australia's most infamous
>> literary hoaxes (and the inspiration for Peter Carey's
>> novel My Life as a Fake).
>> 
>> Each entry Manhire has chosen is complemented by
>> explanatory notes that often include interesting
>> asides about Antarctica, a mark of Manhire's lifelong
>> interest in the continent. Everyone, according to
>> Thomas Pynchon, has an Antarctica; The Wide White Page
>> puts on offer an elegant choice.
>> 
>> http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3092427a4501,00.html
>> 
>> 
>> 
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>> 
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