The Britney Suite (2003)

Preface

After collaborating on the book A Town Like Parataxis and the video The Perfect Storm, Gabriel White and I were discussing a third idea - a film to be based on my sequence of poems The Britney Suite - when he left Auckland for Melbourne at the end of 2000.

We couldn't get funding to produce our screenplay, so both of us moved on to different projects instead. In the course of our work, though, we produced a version of the sequence illustrated with black-and-white blow-ups of Gabriel's fascinating Tongdo Fantasia photographs from South Korea (some of which appeared in Landfall 214 (2007): 32-40).

Very much in the style of Parataxis, this mock-up for an unpublished book still seems to me an interesting work in itself. In any case, I've decided to post it here online so you can decide for yourselves. You'll have to click on both the images and the text pages to see them properly, of course.

NB: The texts of the Paul Celan translations incorporated in the original work are available here.

An electronic text of The Britney Suite can be linked to from here.

A discussion of the work as a whole and what I was trying to achieve with it can be found in my paper "Meeting Paul Celan," delivered at the Poetics of Exile conference at Auckland University in July 2003.

Contents:

• COVER
  
  
• TITLE-PAGE
  
  
• COPYRIGHT
  
  
• DEDICATION
  
  
• CONTENTS
  
  
• QUOTATION (Britney Spears)
  
  
• [Paul Celan:] SCHNEEPART, gebäumt, bis zuletzt / SNOWPART
  
  
• QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
  
  
• QUOTATION (Cut Above)
  
  
• [Wendy Nu:] keith partridge y yo
  
  
• QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
  
  
• [Paul Celan:] ERZFLITTER, tief im / ORESPARK
  
  
• QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
  
  
• Who is Wendy Nu?
  
  
• QUOTATION (ISBN)
  
  
• Nouvelle vague
  
  
• QUOTATION (Britney Spears)
  
  
• [Paul Celan:] KALK-KROKUS, im / CHALK-CROCUS
  
  
• QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
  
  
• Letter to the author
  
  
• [Wendy Nu:] mr darling writes to penthouse forum [Wendy Nu]
  
  
• QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
  
  
• [Paul Celan:] DAS GEDUNKELTE Splitterecho / DARK
  
  
• QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
  
  
• QUOTATION (John Felstiner)
  
  
• QUOTATION (Nine Days)
  
  
• It’s always too late ...
  
  
• QUOTATION (Britney Spears)
  
  
• [Paul Celan:] BEIDHÄNDIGE Frühe / BOTH-HANDED
  
  
• QUOTATION (Paul Celan)
  

© Text: Jack Ross (2001) / Images: Gabriel White (2003)