The Happy Farang

I self-published The Happy Farang in 2000, at a time when I was just finding my feet, both literally and figuratively, as a poet.

I composed all but one of the twenty-three poems in the book in longhand while backpacking around Thailand and Laos in 1999. Most are, perhaps unsurprisingly, written from the point of view of a Western tourist or, in Thai, ‘farang’.

I honestly didn’t think of them as poems I would like to publish in a literary journal, mostly because of their personal nature. But some would nevertheless find homes in various publication venues over time.

On my return to Australia in late 1999, keen to have a lasting memento of my travels, I typed the poems into a word processing file on my home PC and then laid them out in a 26-page chapbook. I printed one black-and-white copy on a cheap laser-jet printer before finalising the order of poems and the cover.

In the summer of 2000 I took this chapbook with me to Newcastle. I stayed with a friend who had a flat near the city beach, and access to a colour photocopier at his work. Late one night we printed 200 copies of each spread, then took the pages home and stapled them all together.

And thus, out of nowhere, The Happy Farang was born.

Format

The original print version of The Happy Farang was an A5-sized object with a mottled grey cover page, white pages for the content and blue-ink text throughout. The choice of the blue ink had been serendipitous but in hindsight the blue tones suit the ‘travelogue’ nature of the poems.

Also in hindsight, the book contains all of the hallmarks or characteristics of a classic chapbook. Although I’m not sure what readers made of the naïve bold Verdana font on the book’s cover, or the placement of the title above the author’s name, separated clumsily by the word “by”. Further, the back cover features a glossary by mistake – it was supposed to appear on the inside back cover.

The inside front cover includes acknowledgments and a dedication. While copyright is asserted, the publisher is named as Pumpkin Press, and an address in Northcote is given. This is a fictitious name, although the address at the time was real.

While the book object thus bears some hallmarks of a self-published work, it also performs aspects of private or ‘clandestine’ publishing.

Launch

I did not hold an official launch for the book but an invitation to perform at the 2000 Next Wave Festival in Melbourne offered me an opportunity to make public the ‘character’ of the book’s title. I thus ‘launched’ the book as part of a six poet show curated by performance poets Phil Norton and Angela Costi.

Each poet was allotted a ten-minute slot and for my appearance I chose to perform the happy tourist, complete with backpack, map, camera and – last but not least – my chapbook, from which I read out the title poem. In this sense the ‘publication’ of the book amounted to a performance of its contents and an ‘acting-out’ of its central preoccupations.

There was no real sense in which the book object itself was being launched – in fact I had foolishly neglected to bring along any copies for sale or distribution at the gig. My partner was forced to go back to a local bookshop, Polyester Books on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, and take back all of the books I had left there on consignment the previous day.

In the end, I probably sold five or ten copies of the book that night, and afterwards considered it a great success.

Circulation

While The Happy Farang echoes the format of chapbooks and zines in its eschewal of an ISBN — not to mention its reference to a fictitious publishing ‘house’ and its omission of a recommended retail price (RRP) – the book was in fact distributed, though in erratic ways.

To begin with, copies were sold at the ‘launch’, or else given away to friends, fellow poets and other people I met in the course of my everyday life. I also went to the effort of leaving some copies on consignment in several Melbourne bookshops including Polyester Books in Fitzroy and Readings in Carlton.

This distribution is ‘marked’ on one of the few remaining copies in my possession by the presence of a $3.30 price tag, courtesy of Readings. In fact, The Happy Farang remained listed in the Readings online catalogue for some time, despite no longer available through them.

I have now managed to rid myself of all but 3 of the original 200 copies. In this sense The Happy Farang has an easily-defined public.

Reception

It’s difficult to speak seriously of any critical reception for The Happy Farang, as there was no conscious effort to send the book to reviewers or to elicit any testimonials or praise from established poets for the purposes of a blurb. On the contrary, the whole point of producing the book in chapbook form was to avoid or ignore the usual trappings of a poetry collection.

However, again in hindsight, the book represents a serious first attempt to crystallise my desire to produce a meaningful book object. Therefore in terms of literary prestige, even from a purely personal point of view, The Happy Farang can be considered as an obscure example of self-publishing containing elements of private or coterie publishing.

Its significance lies in its performance of a set of rituals known collectively as ‘chapbook’ or ‘poetry publishing’. However, this mode of performance cannot be described as deliberate or very well thought-out.

Republication

Some of the poems in The Happy Farang went on to have a life outside of the book itself.

‘A Photographer’s Wet Dream’ was broadcast on Aural Text (Radio 3RRR, Melbourne), I think as part of a 2001 interview with alicia sometimes and Steve Grimwade. ‘Mr Tui’, ‘Takraw Monkey’ and ‘The Chao Le’ appeared in the US-based webzine slope in 2001.

‘The Postman of Kowloon’ and ‘Non-Touristic Trek’ were included in a feature posted to the (now-defunct) Poetry Espresso mailing list maintained by Cassie Lewis. ‘Thomas Pynchon & The Art Of Anonymity Maintenance’ appeared in Meanjin in 2004.

Finally, ‘The Happy Farang’, ‘Non-Touristic Trek’, ‘Tintin & the Plain of Jars’ and ‘The Chao Le’ were included in my debut poetry collection, We Will Disappear (papertiger media, 2007).

Archival

Two final anecdotes about the book’s survival demonstrate the idiosyncrasies of the self-publishing world.

About a year after the ‘release’ of the book, I received an email from an American tourist who had found a copy of The Happy Farang in Polyester Books.

He was writing to me to let me know that he was the editor of an Asian culture magazine called Bug and that he had mentioned my chapbook in an editorial, describing it as a better depiction of tourism in Thailand than Alex Garland’s novel, The Beach. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any trace of the magazine or its kind editor.

On another occasion, while travelling in the United States in 2002, I left a copy with Michael Basinski, a librarian working at the State University of New York’s Buffalo campus. He took me on a tour of their collection of 20th-century poetry in English, a treasure trove of self-published and privately published works.

I’m not sure whether he ever catalogued the copy I gave him alongside all of those rare books and ephemera – but then again maybe he did.

Reissue

In 2012, as part of a weird burst of activity, I decided to reissue The Happy Farang. I cleaned up and reformatted the text and added some scans of original (mostly unpublished) handwritten drafts.

I also produced a new cover, featuring a photograph of a figure painted on a temple that I took, from memory, in Chiang Mai. Just to, you know, seal the cultural appropriation deal.

The drafts included in the digital version are for the poems ‘happy farang/amazing farang’, ‘monk-lovers’, ‘folk song don’t stop’, ‘sea gypsies’ (incomplete), ‘the reggae house’, ‘hi-fi walkam CL 931’ and ‘under the pavement laos’.

These drafts hopefully give an idea of the creative process involved when writing while travelling, a topic on which I hope one day to write something more meaningful.

As The Happy Farang reissue was also a white-label production, there is only one print copy of that version in existence. The handwritten drafts in this book differ from the PDF version. They include ‘folk song don’t stop’, ‘sea gypsies’, ‘the reggae house’ and ‘hi-fi walkam CL 931’ as well as three additional poems: ‘leaves give way to needles’, ‘takraw monkey’ and ‘how’s the serenity’.

I can’t actually remember why I changed the selection for the digital version. It could be that the white-label version was really just a test printing. This could explain why I was experimenting with the insertion of scanned images.

But as far as I can tell, all of the original handwritten drafts are now lost. If and when I do find them again, I might post them online.

In any case, The Happy Farang will always be my favourite book, and I hope that the revised edition manages to preserve some of the flavour of the original.

---

This is an edited and expanded version of a text originally published as part of my PhD thesis, “Bonfire of the Vanity Presses: Self-Publishing in the Field of Australian Poetry” (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, 2010).