Author of the new collection of love stories: The Sense of Blood Ink as well as The Jaded Trilogy; The Jaded Kiwi, The Jaded Spy and the Jaded Widow, and The Way of the Bodyguard and Reluctant Q with George Spill.
Wednesday
Excerpt from The Jaded Spy in which Rawiri is released from Parry
Excerpt from The Jaded Spy now available on Amazon and cool bookstores.
If Rawiri turned around he could catch glimpses of the sunken fortress of concrete and barbed wire they called Parry amid fields of green grass and mature trees.
Rawiri, Wiremu Wilson’s brother is released from Paremoremo Maximum Security Prison. (as pictured in a recent photo.)
Rawiri later says to Wiremu:
“Parry was designed to break the spirit of the Maori. It failed.”
from The Jaded Spy
Monday
Thoughts on Veterans Day in the US and Remembrance Day in the UK
My grandfather and father survived two of the most brutal battles respectively, from WWI and WWII. Today I am honoring them. My grandfather Harry Spill was in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He is pictured on the right of his son George Henry Spill on George's wedding day Dec 26, 1938. Olive and her parents are on her left. It was a white Boxing Day.
George is with his son Peter shortly before being deployed to the East in 1940. He would not see his family for nearly 5 years. At the age of 30 he thought he would not be called up, but he was and he managed to see his son Peter before he was shipped out East.
Over 50 years later he executes his best Benny Hill imitation salute at the Auckland War Memorial. George Spill published his war memoirs that included the Battle of Imphal (1944) one of the most ferocious battles of WWII. You can read his story Reluctant Q here.
Reluctant Q by George Spill how he survived some of the most brutal battles of WWII in Burma.
A unique story of a conscript who became the Brigade's Quartermaster.
Tuesday
The Jaded Spy release date November 12
Who kidnapped Captain Cook's priceless portrait?Who got released from New Zealand's maximum security prison?What was the infamous Soviet spy doing in Auckland? Part two of the Jaded Trilogy continues.
Sunday
Saturday
Monday
Rangitoto, mon amour - the extinct volcano in Auckland harbor that many artists have drawn and painted, though none have had the wonderful Joy Spill pose next to the majestic island. Rangitoto and the harbor exert a strong spiritual significance in the new novel in the Jaded Trilogy: The Jaded Spy with soon to be announced release dates.
Wednesday
Saturday
Excerpt from The Jaded Spy.
When Alexander was a pimple-faced teenage virgin, he had read Ian Fleming. He had dreamt of being a spy. He did not have enough time to think about what Catelin had said. He had thought he was going to be fired, then the comment about his break-up and all his girlfriends put him at a disadvantage. What girlfriends? Then he was offered a job as a spy. Alexander did not have the foresight to consider why he was being chosen for this assignment. He should have asked “Why me?” But he only thought about the interview much later, and by then it was too late.
Nick Spill. The Jaded Spy release date to be announced soon.
Monday
Andrea Camilleri 1922 - 2019
Andrea Camilleri died last month after creating one of the most popular and memorable Detective characters, Salvo Montalbano, in modern fiction. He started writing the series in his late 60's and still has two more to be released after his death at 93.I can't wait to read the last two - as a substitute I just reread one of his later and one of his best stories, A Beam of Light. Now I have to eat some of his favorite Sicilian dishes! If you read his books you'll know what I'm talking about.
Tuesday
My meditation on returning to New Zealand and presenting a talk at the Auckland Art Gallery.
REFLECTIONS ON THE TRANZALPINE
Kiwis, art, death, coffee, burning books and sex.
Nick Spill writes about his return to New Zealand to give a talk at the Auckland Art Gallery. On the TranzAlpine train, he reflects on the Cambridge Five, Nicolas Poussin, Peter Wells, James Bond, Yukio Mishima, Geoff Dyer, Martin Edmund, Patti Smith and Dashiell Hammett, not to mention the murder of Simon Buis, Chekhov’s and his own gun. He reveals for the first time what happened to the Mildura catalog where his photos were featured and how they were burned, and he tells stories about many famous Kiwi artists, including Rita Angus, Andrew Drummond, Claire Fergusson, Ralph Hotere, Colin McCahon, Raymond McIntyre, and Cliff Whiting. He includes photographs from his original art work of the 1970s and his journey through New Zealand in 2019. As a famous young lady once said before she saw a white rabbit; what is the use of a book without pictures?
Join Nick Spill on a trip down the rabbit hole, downunder.
Tuesday
Godard's CONTEMPT with Brigitte Bardot
Watching Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 New Wave movie CONTEMPT last night on TMC reminded me how my parents used to take me to every French film at the LIDO in Auckland in the '60's. My mother loved Truffaut, my father was baffled by some of the films but always managed to say at the most inappropriate time: "Well at least I got to see a bit of tit." He would have loved Brigitte Bardot in CONTEMPT. Godard seems obsessed with her naked bottom. We see her spread out on her stomach on the red sofa, the white shag pile carpet, naked in Capri. Her buttocks must have appeared like landscape art shot in glorious Cinemascope. I wonder if modern day actresses would pose like this now?
CONTEMPT was not my favorite Godard film, I appreciated BREATHLESS and the original ONE PLUS ONE, now repackaged in its 4K - 50th Anniversary Edition as SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL. Witnessing in real time the chaos in creating this track in a studio, how the Stones worked, far surpassed any Marxist posturing that was inserted into the film and that was designed to give the rock documentary a veneer of French intellectual pomposity.
I resolve to revisit Alberto Moravia's novels, including CONTEMPT, TWO WOMEN, THE CONFORMIST and many others that were turned into films and that I read as library books when I was a young teenager eager to learn what adults got up to in their free time.
Sunday
The blind Chinese fiddle player in downtown Auckland
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