maps
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Writer and researcher |
| Location | Auckland/Ohura/'Eua, New Zealand |
| Links | Audio Clip |
| Introduction | You can call me Maps or (more prosaically) Scott Hamilton. I was awarded a PhD by the University of Auckland in 2008 after submitting a thesis on EP Thompson, the English historian and political activist. I've worked as a museum librarian, editor, and proofreader. I've published scholarly texts, literary criticism, poems, and poltical writing in a range of journals and participated vituperatively in various public controversies. In 2007 Titus Books published a collection of my poetry and prose called To the Moon, in Seven Easy Steps. A book based on my PhD called The Poverty of Theory: EP Thompson, the New Left, and Postwar British Politics will be published by Manchester University Press in April 2011. I've been enjoying researching the late great Kiwi poet Kendrick Smithyman over the past year or so, and Titus Books published a selection of Smithyman's previously-unseen poems edited, introduced, and annotated by me in mid-November 2009. I live in Auckland but spend a lot of my time (in a conceptual, as well as a literary-geographical sense) in the backblocks of the North Island and on the magnificent island of 'Eua in the Kingdom of Tonga. |
| Interests | Writing and the rest of the arts, politics and the history of the left, New Zealand local and regional history, cricket, beer, and too many other things to list here. |
| Favorite Movies | Runaway (John O'Shea), Lone Star (John Sayles), Journey Through H (Peter Greenaway), Summer of Sam (Spike Lee), Zardoz (John Borman), The Satyricon (Fellini), Comrades (Bill Douglas), Aguirre: the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog), The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy), Equus (Michael Schaffer). |
| Favorite Music | John Adams, Syd Barrett, Claude Debussy, Bill Direen, field recordings of insects, especially cicadas, Miles Davis. |
| Favorite Books | Kendrick Smithyman, Selected Poems; Judith Binney, Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Te Arikirangi Te Turuki; Geoff Park, Uruora: The Groves of Life; Heraclitus, On Nature; BS Johnson, The Unfortunates; Allen Curnow, Trees Effigies and Moving Objects; Tomas Transtromer, Selected Poems; Don De Lillo, Libra; Richard Polt, The Emergency of Being. |
Which is easier to make a model airplane out of and why: a banana peel or a wet sock?
[His mind went blank]