Sunday, April 30, 2006

Free Fiction

I love money, but when you don't write commercial stuff it's usually negligible. So money is not (and was not) part of the equation. And congratulations to those few (and in the scheme of things - it is few!) commercial writers who make a living from fiction writing. I admire you tremendously.

Millions write. Millions want to be read. Literally.

Millions try to be read by almost impossibly trying to sell their writing. So if your stuff is not commercial or is an acquired taste, logically & simply, if you want your stuff to have more chance in being read during your lifetime, then you need to do what I'm doing HERE. Otherwise (if you are not among those 'few' I mentioned before) you risk failing in this logical & simple task of having your stuff deservedly read during your lifetime. Why write it if it's not going to be read? Art for Art's Sake?


Astrology and Classical Music are the same thing.
by Selbi Cudderri

I feel that 'classical' music is like fiction injected straight into the vein. My own definition of classical music is shown below (music being something about which I am more passionate than writing editing reading...), though I am musically illiterate as far as its technicalities are concerned:-

A formless area (defaulting towards an aspirationally cultural & predominantly exact art form) within the universal, uncompartmentalised, wholly accessible language of sound commonly known as music: encouraging spirituality and/or various permutations of all human emotions -- centring on and radiating from the serious deployment of an ostensibly organised pattern of acoustic sounds as produced by orchestral instruments and voices (performed normally by established or qualified interpreters/musicians, from one to very many). The question of taste and the unknowable relativities of disharmony and harmony are no part of this description, because such affective considerations differ from individual to individual. I shall tailgate any preconceptions!

Including any preconceptions about the harmonics of Astrology. The strange forces of serendipity and coincidence ever seem to be at work, especially when amid stories in the horror mode. Either that or there is some wondrous mantra (or muse?) steering our minds towards those priceless moments of creativity and gestalt. Astrology, one such mandala, is not concerned with cause and effect; it is an empirical study of human behaviour and of life-force trends as paralleled by the positions of all the planets in the Zodiac at the precise moment and place of birth. The concept of Synchronicity (i.e As Above, So Below) could not be more logical. If our Universe and all its ingredients failed to move in cogwheel patterns with perfectly overlapping ripples, that would surely be more ridiculous than if they did move in that way. So why is belief in Astrology deemed ridiculous when a disbelief in it would be more ridiculous? Those people who ridicule Astrology - who decry this interpretative study of synchronicity empirically derived from (a) scientifically calculated patterns of the universe and (b) simultaneous human actions - will never know whether it works, because the Astrological influences in their own horoscopes may well demonstrate that very ignorance which they were born to suffer: a vicious circle of disbelief.

The movement of all bodies, Heavenly or otherwise, is surely a refined, interactive process, having taken merely a single eternity of preparation to produce our infinitely complex mortal life. Only those who believe will in turn be believed, because Faith is a two-way conduit. As Above, so Below.

If we are vampires, the stars are our stake-outs. As Below, so Above.

Vampires don't exist, unless we start to believe in them. Until similes become full-blooded metaphors, we shall always live in the negative darkness of a world in proper pain. The world this side of death, where we happen to reside, for our sins, is a living nightmare, but one that is not positively horrific; it's simply a reality without imagination, an everlasting wake without dream, a narrow house of flesh. Recession hereabouts means the receding of spirit, as well as of material things: a place where nightmares are their opposite.

We need to jump-lead the rich seams of gothic synergy in the spirit and to dark-light the way. Already, there are pinpricks of positive nightmare, in our neck of the woods - and we cannot help thinking that less directness and more obliquity will allow us to see better round corners. Eye to eye doesn't show us the soul, but simply its well-head. And in Hell there wait those who were wrongly thrown out of Heaven that sorry day universes ago. Indeed, the road to Heaven is paved with bad intentions.

And what of the vampires? They no longer believe in us.

Horror should be Nightmare disguised as Dream, Blood as Ruby Sea, Hell as Shadow. Not the other ways about. We are the best such disguise. That tells more about us than a thousand close textual surveys of our works. Search out, I say.

I have recently been reading the best sensitive horror going. Undercurrents of spectres and sensuality. Read such writers if you can. But if you want horror really oblique to the point of non-existence (but nonetheless powerful), try claustrophobic novels of timeless family life written earlier this century.

So, with due decorum, I shall hasten on to a quieter London Adventure of Three Impostors. A few weeks ago, we wandered through the ancient London by-ways and visited a Museum: a place beguiled with duplicitous perspectives, bulging with bizarre statues and skeletons, topped with a lop-sided roofscape of skylights, sown with darksome knick-knacks, peopled with peering paintings &c. &c. - and we felt as if we had walked straight into a story, a story limned by dream out of hybrid hells.

We also sat chatting around fountains in peaceful sunlit squares, viewed the dome of St Paul's Cathedral from new shimmering non-Euclidean angles, saw the outside of an inscrutable apartment where a writer we admired did hone his masterpieces of myth and monsters ... and, oh yes, as one of us wrote in a subsequent letter: "the first pub we visited where our conversation was so scintillating I could see it as an episode in a book."

We mustn't forget: even if blood were dream, vampires would sniff at it.

Well, we are not dogs too old to learn new tricks. Exploring, as we do, from time to time, some of the older books in our personal collections, we recently stumbled across some really special ones. Yet, the trove is deeper, the treasure richer, as one delves into even lesser known works which touch on preoccupations of ours regarding ambivalent existences and dimmer-switch identities. The style, too, is a deliciously woven tapestry of clause and sub-clause ... and the aftertaste is sweeter than honey yet black-peppered with other concerns that will stay with us within daylight as well as night - and during those dimnesses between.

Another wonderful reading experience, during moments of the sweetest synchronous serendipity, echoed another browsing of books. By chance, one of them expands upon the tantalising themes of crossed personality and involuted individuality, together with a disturbing treatment of bodily mutilation, plus the vibrant historical immediacy of eastern European venues.

It warmed the heart. (We hadn't eaten hearts for a long time - and even if the hearts present were insufficiently warmed through by the fellow feeling (or by the heated discussion) they were probably more palatable than conger eel with or without onions!)

Vampires would eat their hearts out to have innards.

Well, we have been guilty of brandishing bare words without elaboration, assuming that everybody must know, love and cherish books; but perhaps we are wrong: we are often wrong.

We all live out ghost stories - of sorts. Many are surrealistic, without resort to over-intellectualism. They infect dreams. There are often undercurrents of eroticism and perversion. They are ungraspable, without being opaque. Macabre. Poetic. Yet full of character and dialogue. Frequently a happy mixture of traditional and experimental; a rare dream which is successful in being both accessible and inaccessible at the same time! Frightening. REALLY SCARY. All this is our opinion. And we are often wrong.

About to draw in my feelers. Armed with a stake, I penetrated a vampire the other day on my kitchen floor, without first suspending my belief. Much messier than fiction. Even messier than dreams.

I am half Welsh, my father having spent his boyhood in his birthplace of Llanelli, South Wales, before being dragooned to fight in the War of the Worlds in 1941 - eventually ending up stationed on the English east coast in Walton-on-Naze, Essex, where he met my mother...

On a visit to Llanelli recently, whilst taking my father on a nostalgic trip back to his roots, I could easily imagine the surly inhabitants possessing brothership with Deep Ones - and the deserted part of Llanelli docks being their Lurkhole. And I think immanent synchronicity and dark serendipity affect lovers of the dark side more than most. Just as an example, whilst on that short visit to Llanelli, Dad scoured the local telephone directory in what he thought was a hopeless task to track down one of his old friends with whom he had gone diving at Llanelli docks as a boy: someone he had not seen or heard of for over forty years - and, lo, that very friend was living directly opposite the guest house where Dad and I were staying, miles from the friend's previously known abode! This chap turned out to be Chief Mason in Llanelli with more resemblance to one of the Deep Ones than it was polite to notice.

Indeed, there once existed a wonderful writer for Horror/Ghost story lovers as well as for people who love huge panoramic, picaresque, idiosyncratic tours-de-force of social history ... his books being full of Victorian fogs, street-sweepers, costermongers, plug-ugly villains, fresh-faced maidens, well-meaning heroes, weird characters with even weirder names, laughter, pain, farce, surrealism (yes, a genuine surrealism that predates the twentieth century by a good number of years!) and, above all, scenes that can horrify and gently haunt you. The style of language takes us along winding paths within an overgrown maze of meaning and resonance, whereby digressions become main narrative threads - and vice versa - until we reach an understanding of something important to life, something which is not at all obvious unless we apply a retrospective ear to a whole novel's wondrous dream-like or nightmarish or side-splitting backwash of sound.

In many ways, these novels remind me of probably the most mysterious phenomenon within the universe known to man, yes, my own greatest passion: music.

With due respect - and I may be wrong here since I'm often wrong - I imagine many of you enjoy popular rock music in its various forms ... which is fine, carrying, as such music often does, mind-stretching horror images, eeriness, nightmare, alternative religiosity (even quiet contemplation): especially when you're in the right frame of mind to bring ordinary music-listening towards your spiritual antennae.

Well, so far so good. But if you want more, if you want something different, why don't you try modern orchestral 'serious' music? I know a number of people denigrate what they call avant garde music - saying it's a load of pretentious noise. Well, yes, some of it is. You're right. But there are some composers whose music I cannot live without. The secret, for me, is to listen to such pieces time and time again until they settle down, where the unpredictable sounds and apparently tuneless passages begin to match the rhythms of your self-induced waking dreams.

There was one piece of music that originally stirred me into the outlands of taste, turning me from the more 'normal' ways of my beloved parents who only ever listened to melodic music and watched television. As ever, I will not name names.

Vampires play the flute.

I must admit that an ambition of mine is to blur the distinction between so-called literature as praised by artsy-fartsies and our own beloved horror genre. There is someone who, to my mind, embodies this ideal better than anyone. His running themes are murders, historic London, inhumanity, mysteries, literary tricks ... with such dark undercurrents one can actually sense the incubi of his demons close by, penetrating even the stones of modern London as one wanders, at random, its streets.

The first novel of his I read was one where he entwines past and present, flaying bare the seed-beds of arcane evil that marinate the very stones and statues and walls. A detective story that will haunt and horrify you forever. Another discernible theme is the ambivalence of gender. Like the phenomenon of Spontaneous Combustion, androgynous ambiguity and sexual sleight of hand are, I feel, untapped sources of material for fiction of horror and of psychological terror - although some of us subtly and perhaps unknowingly demonstrated them in some stories.

In many ways, when children didn't spend all their time glued to computer screens and had a good grounding in stylistic English, they would certainly have enjoyed these explorations into occult and mystic realms of fear, since some stories, indeed, feature children as their protagonists. Child-like grown-ups, I guess, are the only possible candidates for wonderment these days, because most of our real children have been 'spoilt'. And those grown-ups among us who read and write in the horror genre I've often thought are child-like, in this positive sense. They have not been jaded by the act of growing-too-old-too-quickly, they do not zombie round with cowed bleary eyes and a spiritless soul. Even madness is better than mindlessness.

I have a great faith that Mankind's creativity (particularly the creativity of literature and music) can be our only soul-mate in this otherwise material universe. Other people are merely passing strangers who you befriend or, even, love, but, through their very mortality, they will depart your territory, inevitably leaving you quite alone one day. And I feel that literature and music, wherein you can drift, or even fly, supplies what you are missing when the world's crazy religions are shown up for what they are: just things that make people cruel to each other.

Mankind can create its own bespoke world - and horror fiction is a very efficient tool for expanding the mind beyond the matter that constricts it. I have always condemned mind drugs that are administered to the body from outside it. I have never taken such drugs (except, I admit, for my occasional weakness for drinking alcohol!) and I never shall. Drugs come from within.

There can be no goodness without its balance of bad. Perhaps Mankind is fundamentally ill-created, perhaps people have evil inbuilt at birth, and, by recognising those facts, by simply writing about the bad-the-ugly-and-the-frightening, this act of honesty alchemically refines the "soul". Perhaps a vampire is only evil because of the human vehicle it drives.

Sometimes I wonder - does horror need to be horrific?

To be truly horrific, the images and conceits that are embedded in a plot do have to stick in the mind - and only a craftsmanship with words is able to carve out the haunting quality that is necessary whether the horror be physical, psychological, fanciful or supernatural.

Some stories are essentially literature in its purest form - wonderfully rumbustious, humorous, word-magical fantasies, liberally peppered with honest-to-goodness horror - involving the fabulous traditions of surrealism, fairy stories and piquant wit. They strike me of the feeling one would have upon entering a treasure trove of a bookshop and discovering for the first time works that had been written in some ancient future, a future impossible to believe ever possessing the antecedence of a present let alone of a past. There is one book that I had dreamed of reading but never thought I'd be so lucky ever to do so in real life.

Even if you have a complete blood change, your mind will never forget...

As I sit here - within my chalet bungalow close to the North Sea where recently, due to a storm, many pleasure beach-huts were smashed to smithereens or even entirely snatched away - I wonder what defines an island. The world is an island, I suppose. I am one, too. The horror art (i.e. the words and pictures we manufacture to depict the dark side of humanity) is perhaps a personal sea against which our mental and physical coast-defences will eventually crumble. But before this happens, we should seek out the sandbags.

The only activity we are are possibly good at is this art of horror. And we want to be famous, remembered after we are dead, rumours of our existence to be blessed with at least the life-span of this island planet. But to be remembered as being sick! No, never! But that's what will happen, if we don't beware. Our families and friends will remember us as people who got carried away by our art, subsumed by our own insular minds. And if we couldn't control ourselves, what sort of people were we?

Unless, of course, we can justify the art of horror itself.

Many ordinary people love horror. Simply that. Everybody is cruel at heart. Why not give them what they want? Lay the horror on as thickly as possible. But people like a lot of things that are not good for them. This argument of personal responsibility is an unending one. If we could resolve it here, we would deserve to be famous. Or is Horror actually good for people? A purge. A catharsis. People have evil built into the fabric of their souls at birth. And what the horror art does is dilute that real horror with its imaginary equivalent. And imaginary horror, surely, is preferable to any other kind. On the other hand, perhaps we are intrinsically evil, inexcusably warping people's imaginations. Our corrupt soul needs an artistic outlet for its own self-satisfaction. But why also submit such art for others to publish? We want to provoke. We have always provoked people since being kids, haven't we? Mainly in minor ways. Ways that we thought would not harm them. But perhaps we are more harmful than we ever expected. We must never admit that, though. Even if it's true.

Sticks and stones may hurt our bones, but names will never hurt us. What harm can there be in simple words or drawings on a page? But we want our art to get under the skin. Be more than just art. Perhaps, if we are truly honest, we want to bite home. Only nasty medicine can cure, they say. But there's something we are missing. An imponderable that we cannot even set down on the page properly, let alone successfully address. Monsters can live in our nightmares and by describing them, hopefully we circumscribe them. By writing, I circumscribe myself. I fetter myself from creating the only horror that will harm you as well as me: me.

Yet, there is much humour in our art. Sick humour, perhaps. But it's meant to make people laugh. Laughter and horror are often bed-fellows. Audiences often burst out into chortling at the most frightening bits of films. Mischief and the poking of fun are part and parcel of our attitude. Seriousness could only lead to unwelcome admissions. Perhaps, we are the appointed providers of horror. Without bad, there couldn't be an equal measure of good. Good is only good when compared with bad. We are thus do-goooders. But this absurdity means we have run out of further thoughts. Leaving us with Nothing. Bliss. Nirvana. We hope that we are forgiven by our loved ones - especially when our final artist's block comes ... or after the abandon-edit button is pushed before anything is saved. Meanwhile, the sea is in an ugly mood again, tonight. Even the fish have fangs and flop ashore, bleating for breath. And horror surrounds me with wave upon wave of self-doubt. But, as some philosopher once said, doubt is strength.

By the way, there is a misprint later. For blood, please read beer.

Each time I try to enter the non-fiction mode, ideas for stories seem to take over and I feel myself slipping away into my usual sort of convoluted dream or cruel conceit. And this set me to thinking. It strikes me that fiction represents a fusion of real life and imagination, one feeding off the other. How otherwise can one appreciate the frisson of fear or the gulp of revulsion without believing it is really happening? Suspension of belief is, I think, an expression often employed. But it is more than this. Yet would I be pretentious enough to maintain that reality is fiction and vice versa? Well, maybe.

It is much more complex than simple suspension of belief (or even disbelief). Horror fiction, at its best, enters our individual territories and becomes part and parcel of a revolving realm with Death at its core: and, in this realm, all the flotsam and jetsam of life (the richest life being generated by the imagination as well as by the day-to-day interaction of our minds and bodies) spin round, some colliding only to ricochet off, others sticking together, some being swallowed whole or bit by bit. Eventually, the various items are sucked into the core where they are minced up or refined into streams of sense (or apparent sense or, even, nonsense) which are then released from that realm into other revolving realms which create new collisions, fusions and spin-offs. This is using Death as a positive tool, as it surely is. Without Death, we'd be nothing.

Furthermore, Horror fiction shares a bed with surrealism and humour as well as with the more usual ingredients of grim acts, monstrous creatures and ghostly visitations. Literature, indeed, uses all kinds of devices, tropes, figures of speech, call them what you will, to make the welding of reality and unreality as seamless as possible. But why make something seamless, when there are no seams in the first place? It only takes a few lateral thoughts or, as I have proposed here, spinning ones. Horror fiction can accomplish this feat with some degree of logic, because the realms actually created by it are indeed real - and perhaps that is because there is nothing more horrific than being real in reality as we know it. I am only in it for the blood.

I don’t know whether any of you have ever been to Docklands, a reclaimed area in the East End of London, where my Grandfather travailed on the cranes before the Second World War - but, when I arrived on the amazing Docklands Light Railway, amid the tall behemoth constructions that still pay obeisance to Thatcherite Britain, I really felt myself to be in an Alternate World. From my hotel bedroom, I could see the same railway-on-stilts arriving through the corridors of a Wellsian Metropolis on the other side of an in-city waterscape ... and, yes, despite myself, I was awestruck... exhilirated, even.

Life is a dark dockless ocean of meaning and sound, something that will haunt our dreams forever (even beyond death) as well as make us believe that our beloved horror genre will eventually encompass all art and literature. But, surely, there is more to life than mere monsters and vampires.

Saturday, April 29, 2006

Style In Fiction

On and off over the years, I have been studying a book called 'Style In Fiction' by Leech & Short (Longman 1981) which explores paragraphs by Conrad, Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Henry James etc, examining graphological, phonological, syntactic and semantic nuances and patterns, discussing how they affect the meaning etc.

Do we miss all this? Or do we instinctively absorb it, however fast we read? Does it apply to all genres of literature? And does the writer intend these effects (in a slow laborious fashioning?) or instinctively produce them (at speed?)?

I myself feel both reader and writer 'do' this thing together - instinctively and at speed.

Selbicuderri

If you read - in the normal course of events - this message (without being solicited to do so) AND you have a UK address, you will be eligible for a free copy of EITHER Nemonymous Five anthology OR Only Connect paperback book.
Please write to nemonymous@hotmail.com mentioning this message.
Please do not tell anyone else about this message. There will be other messages with other free gifts dotted about the DFL threads or websites, should you be lucky enough to find them.

Separately, if anyone anywhere would like to review The Hawler (Word Doc or PDF doc available from nemonymous@hotmail.com), they will receive (when the review appears) both a full set of Nemonymous and a copy of the aesthetic Prime trade paperback entitled Weirdmonger, until stocks last. All will be signed by DFL, if required. These are to compensate for the reviewer not receiving a hard copy of The Hawler and the review can, of course, be praising, critical or indifferent.

des
http://www.weirdmonger.com

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Chasing The Noumenon

Arguably - using a degree of pretentious objectivity with which I do not deserve to be indulged - my lifetime's 'opus' should not be seen as directly constituted of the various DFL fictions themselves.
It is, rather, I feel, those very fictions' repercussions, i.e. their tentacular body of brainstorming accoutrements - from url to url to url to url - that I have tangentially built up (with the unselfconscious collaborative help of others) since 1999 on the Net.

Publication-On-Reading

O.G. Donde-Vega wrote that, with the technology available, there was no excuse not to be professional when publishing fiction. The fiction market was incredibly crowded because of this technology and the potentiality given by simply being protagonists on the Internet. Every one who wanted to be a writer became a writer. All three million in UK alone, probably! It became simply a question of getting your stuff read. No necessary advantage in having your stuff published traditionally. It would sink without trace eventually in those crowded seas however good it was. In the main.

Self-publishing - to Donde-Vega - was anathema, always had been. But, of course, that only applied to printed works. For example, he would never have dreamt of including one of his own stories in NEMONYMOUS (a fiction magazine he earlier edited and published).

There seems now to be five ways to publish a novel:
(1) Traditional publisher with all their services of distribution, marketing, review copies sent out etc etc, (either by Print-On-Demand (POD) or traditional printing).
(2) Publisher who simply prints book and facilitates distribution (usually by POD)
(3) Publisher who asks for money from author to publish it (vanity publishing, either by POD or traditional printing).
(4) Author self-publishes in print with whatever he wants to give to it as publicity impetus etc etc.
(5) Author makes raw text of novel available on-line allowing the reader to decide to 'publish' it by simply reading it there or producing as book for personal use only and for author to sign (or not).

In hindsight (and perhaps sub-consciously), Donde-Vega chose (5) for his first tentative novel (WE ALL LIVE ON A YELLOW CARPET) at the age of 58 (after 20 odd years' activity as a story writer and editor/publisher), because that was the way he did it and it probably read like that (with references to current affairs of the day when he wrote it etc.) and it would never have been written without this method of doing it and he was deeply unsure of the novel as comments on his earlier work did not encourage him to think he should ever write a novel that was publishable traditionally, because of commercial considerations etc. although he did seem to have some facility as an acquired taste for a small coterie of readers. All speculation.

He named his method (5) above as Print-on-Reading (POR) as a method of publishing a novel (not self-publishing although it involves the author making raw text available on-line) - with the knowledge that it had become easier to print and bind things to one's own specification. This could have led to many unique editions of one work - and signed by the author if the logistics of getting the author to sign the hard copy are easy enough.

I shall quote from the introduction to 'We All Live On A Yellow Carpet' by O.G. Donde-Vega (aka Rachel Mildeyes): “In 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell', it was said that there had been some prejudice against using magic in the wars of those historical times. However, today's magic has become fiction: equally powerful, equally prejudged, equally within the hands of only a few skilled practitioners. And the biggest war is about to be fought using fiction's powers as one of the available weapons.”

Stub Of pencil: Horror literature horrifies, but does it ‘truly’ horrify? A work of fiction, if you touch its words one by one, should literally (as well as literarily) fill you with horror -- an electric shock from one word? A synaptic outburst from another? Just reading the words doesn't seem enough. Incidentally, do the viruses in avian influenza have conscious ‘intent’ to infect the human beings to further their own survival or are they hidebound by the tenets of ‘The Intentional Fallacy’? This and other catalysts are treated in Donde-Vega’s novel.

*********
Chasing The Noumenon

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Wordy Weird

I see myself as an exponent of 'wordy weird' fiction (even though I said earlier on this blog that I did not like the word 'Weird'!). By means of a vexed texture of text or a woven firewall of words, I feel that one can wring a greater degree of (often unexpected) meaning or plot-direction or characterisation-construction than in straightforward or transparent or linear prose. If anyone else wants to employ this 'wordy weird' form of story-telling, I shall probably end up following them, because I generally see myself as a first mover in literary matters, but not as a skilled practitioner.

Here is a picture of Wordy Weird:
HERE.

*********
Regarding my claim above to be a first mover, this actually comprises seven pointless claims:

(1) DFL wrote the world's most separate short fictions published in the most separate independent print publications (none of which fictions, incidentally, should be read out of context with the others but rather as an entire highly moral accretion of fiction or novel-in-continuous-progress),

(2) he produced, in 2001, 'Nemonymous': the world's very first self-contained multi-authored volume of anonymous fiction stories collected as such (the authors' by-lines being revealed in the subsequent published volume),

(3) he was the very first editor to start considering (and later only to consider) anonymous story submissions for publication until and beyond final acceptance or rejection,

(4) he is the only writer who has ever attempted to post the whole of his back catalogue of fiction to a megazanthine network of freely available websites - a sixties-type 'happening' showing the writing he has done over the years,

(5) he published, in 2002, the world's first blank short story in print (as far as it is known), and

(6) he coined these words and expressions: 'zeroism, egnisomicon, egnisism' in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1967), 'whofage' in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1973), 'agra aska' (1984), 'weirdmonger' (1988), use of 'brainwright' in modern times (1990), 'wordhunger' (1999), 'nemonymous, 'nemonymity', late-labelling, veils-&-piques' (2001), 'denemonise' (2002), 'megazanthus', 'weirdonymous' , 'chasing the noumenon' (2003), 'wordonymous', 'wordominous', 'the-ominous-imagination' (2004), 'a woven fire-wall of words', 'nemoguity', 'vexed texture of text', 'fictipathy', 'nemotion', 'the hawler', 'the angel megazanthus', 'klaxon city', 'horrorism' when used as a word for the philosophy of horror fiction (2005), 'publication-on-reading', 'antipodal angst', 'the tenacity of feathers', 'a writer's mandala', 'fiction as magic', 'wordy weird' (2006).

(7) he is the first DF Lewis to serialise his first novel (THE HAWLER) as freely available on the internet as its first and only publication without having first submitted it for publication elsewhere.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Brand new DFL fiction to read

These are stories and fables I've written very recently and can be read for free: HERE instead of links below (EDIT).

Grass Candlemass Candlemass (2)
Left Foot Left Foot (2) Snail Trail Snail Trail (2)

Monday, April 24, 2006

Only Connect (free gift)

For anyone reading this post with a UK address, you may receive an absolutely free copy of the beautiful paperback book entitled ONLY CONNECT (1998) containing mostly ghostly tales by me and my dad. Until stocks last. Details of book: HERE.

Just write to me at nemonymous@hotmail.com to arrange your delivery of this book.

Please do not advertise this offer elsewhere, as it is only intended for those who read this particular message in the normal unsolicited course of events.

des

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Tamar Yellin

Tamar Yellin's collection of stories Kafka in Brontëland has had a wonderful review in the national newspaper 'The Guardian' and the review can be read HERE.
If you enjoy this book (and you will!), please try her stunning novel The Genizah At The House Of Shepher from the same publisher ... together with three original stories that appeared in the NEMONYMOUS journal, i.e. The Unmiraculous Life of Jackie Mendoza, Genie, In The Steam Room.

Tamar Yellin is among this blog-owner's top ten favourite living fiction writers. And no greater praise can he give than that.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

A Whelk To The Paradise Garden

OBITUARY (21 April 2006)

For DF Lewis, the ability to know his limitations was a happiness greater than continuously striving with blind ambition.

He was ever expressive of thanks to the Small Press for many writerly joys over the years, allowing him a tiny glimpse at least of being a 'proper writer' in publication outlets well beyond his wildest youthful perception of any possible literary achievements that he could manage in later life.

Just before his death, sad to report, he resorted to self-publishing on the internet. This included his trilogy of novels (written in the last months of his life) and the re-showing of all 1500 of his previously printed stories at a weblink address that will now, perforce, remain hidden to most of his few readers. This act of his seemed to be another ratchet beyond (or, rather, behind) his youthful ambitions. Yet, as a result, these first (and, now, of course, last) novels of his - at the age of 58 - are being read by some and, in a few cases, printed as a book by these readers.

He annoyed more than he pleased. And his views on fiction and Nemonymity were no exception to this.

Meanwhile, his death now makes me wonder how real a fictional situation needs to feel before it ceases to be (i) a fictional experience (as one would expect a fictional experience to be) and becomes (ii) a really real experience with all the drawbacks that real experiences often entail!

It's at that very cusp between (i) and (ii) where DF Lewis was trying to establish a magic base for Fiction, I feel. This related to his latterly expressed point regarding the state of antipodal angst kicking-in the older he became. Perhaps he felt the touch of death's own cusp.

In the last months, he still tried to make his fiction as real and nasty as possible, but that sometimes entailed him making it less real or nasty to prevent it blowing the readers' minds before they enjoyed the experience. Like the dynamite in LOST.

Feemy Fitzworth


====================

Friday, April 21, 2006

Small Press

Rhys Hughes gave a very interesting slant on a lifetime of being 'published' in the Small Press today here:
http://tinyurl.com/zzyja

I wish him luck now that he is spreading his wings, with the help of an agent. He is a wonderful writer.

For me, the ability to know one's limitations can be a happiness greater than continuously striving with blind ambition. But if those limitations are not yet clear, one must indeed persevere until either success comes (in one's own terms) or any personal limitations do eventually become established.

I am thankful to the Small Press for many writerly joys over the years, allowing me a glimpse at least of being that 'proper writer' in outlets beyond my childhood's wildest perception of any possible achievements that I could manage!

I now self-publish on the internet. This includes my trilogy of novels (just written) and re-printing all 1500 of my previously printed stories (please enquire for weblink to access these). This act of mine seems to be another ratchet beyond (or, rather, behind) the Rhys template in his post. My first novel (at the age of 58) is at least being read and, in some cases, printed as a book by its readers.
des

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Horror Fiction

Today, someone wrote this on another site:

I've noticed there are lots of these writers who start writing horror fiction at some rebellious/difficult stage of their lives and when they find balance (redemption?) they suddenly give up writing horror.

I have noticed this myself (particularly when people get married or settle down with kids etc.). I've even noticed this in myself from time to time, but, at the age of 58, I still fight against it! :-)

I don't think I actually write Horror Fiction, but rather Swiftian fables in the mould of 'Modest Proposal', but my output seems to appeal (where it appeals at all!) to those interested in Horror or Surreal or Absurd or Nemonymal fiction (I don't like the term 'Weird' even though I invented a character called 'Weirdmonger' in 1988!).

Just to finish, in the early nineteen nineties, this (now, to me, quaint) article written by DF Lewis appeared in a popular American Horror magazine:

***********
AS I SIT here --within my chalet bungalow close to the North Sea where recently, due to a storm, many pleasure beach-huts were smashed to smithereens or even entirely snatched away --I wonder what defines an island. The world is an island, I suppose. I am one, too.

The horror art (i.e. the words and pictures we manufacture to depict the dark side of humanity) is perhaps a personal sea against which our mental and physical coast-defences will eventually crumble. But before this happens, we should seek out the sandbags....

The only thing we are possibly good at is this art of horror. And we want to be famous, remembered after we are dead, rumours of our existence to be blessed with at least the lifespan of this island planet. But to be remembered as being sick! No, never! But that's what will happen, if we don't beware. Our families and friends will remember us as people who got carried away by our art, subsumed by our own insular minds. And if we couldn't control ourselves, what sort of people were we?

Unless, of course, we can justify the art of horror itself.

Many ordinary people love horror. Simply that. Everybody is cruel at heart. Why not give them what they want? Lay the horror on as thickly as possible. But people like a lot of things that are not good for them. This argument of personal responsibility is an unending one. If we could resolve it here, we would deserve to be famous.

Or is Horror actually good for people? A purge. A catharsis. People have evil built into the fabric of their souls at birth. And what the horror art does is dilute the real horror with its imaginary equivalent. And imaginary horror, surely, is preferable to any other kind.

On the other hand, perhaps we are intrinsically evil, inexcusably warping people's imaginations. Our corrupt soul needs an artistic outlet for its own self-satisfaction. But why also submit such art for others to publish? We want to provoke. We have always provoked people since being kids, haven't we? Mainly in minor ways. Ways that we thought would not harm them. But perhaps we are more harmful than we ever expected. We must never admit that, though. Even if it's true.

Sticks and stones may hurt our bones, but names will never hurt us. What harm can there be in simple words or drawings on a page? But we want our art to get under the skin. Be more than just art. Perhaps, if we are truly honest, we want to bite home. Only nasty medicine can cure, they say.

There's something we are missing. An imponderable that we cannot even set down on the page properly, let alone successfully address. Monsters can live in our nightmares and by describing them, hopefully we circumscribe them. By writing, I circumscribe myself. I fetter myself from creating the only horror that will harm you as well as me: me.

Yet, there is much humour in our art. Sick humour, perhaps. But it's meant to make people laugh. Laughter and horror are often bedfellows. Audiences burst out into chortling at the most frightening bits of films. Mischief and the poking of fun are part and parcel of our attitude. Seriousness could only lead to unwelcome admissions.

Perhaps we are the appointed providers of horror. Without bad, there couldn't be an equal measure of good. Good is only good when compared with bad. We are thus do-gooders. But this absurdity means we have run out of further thoughts. Leaving us with Nothing. Bliss. Nirvana.

We hope that we are forgiven by our loved ones--especially when our final artist's block comes...or after the abandon-edit button is pushed before anything is saved.

The sea is in an ugly mood again, tonight. Even the fish have fangs and flop ashore, bleating for breath. And horror surrounds me with wave upon wave of self-doubt. But, as some philosopher once said, doubt is strength.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Weirdmonger Wheel

I've recently re-sighted the 'Weirdmonger Wheel' so as to check who exactly is riding on it.
Please contact nemonymous@hotmail.com should you wish to receive the new address.
des

Stefan Grabinski

A kind friend recently sent me a copy of 'The Dark Domain' containing a selection of stories by Stefan Grabinski written 1918-1922, as translated by Miroslaw Lipinski. I'd never read this author before and I am enjoying the experience. The following passage struck me from the story entitled 'The Area':

"‘Yes, yes,’ the heads of the literati sadly nodded, ‘he wrote too much too soon…’ […] Wrzesmian wasn't too popular. The works of this strange man, saturated with rampant fantasy and imbued with strong individualism, gave a most unfavourable impression by inverting accepted aesthetic-literary theories and by mocking established pseudo-truths. His output was eventually acknowledged as the product of a sick imagination, the bizarre work of an eccentric, maybe even a madman. Wrzesmian was an inconvenience for a variety of reasons and he disturbed unnecessarily, stirring peaceful waters. Thus his premature eclipse was received with a secret sigh of relief."

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Non-Fiction

































Fiction

Fiction describes but does not shape. However, inasmuch as fiction describes itself, it does in fact also shape a competing world where positive revolutions (and resolutions) can be managed within the overall context of any single fictioner's spinning of that world.

The real world is either simply that (i.e. real) or indeed a fictioner's world in competition with all others. Within this context itself and inasmuch as the 'real' world is capable of being real, so may any fictioner's world be arguably real, neutralising evils by contextualising them.


Fiction as Magic

Separate to above, how far is it possible to see fiction as fiction that is magic rather than fiction about magic or fiction like magic? The last two are common in literature. But the first one is a giant leap. In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (and, ironically, I can't currently find the relevant passage again!), fiction is used as magic itself - or thought about in that way. This is the first time (in print) that I've seen this concept starkly broached in this way. (I had coincidentally written (The Tenacity Of Feathers) about this myself before I read JS & Mr N).

This is as if fiction - when written 'properly' - can be in itself a book of spells that can change the world, ie. not just a fiction about characters using spells to change the world or not just a fiction about fiction as a book of spells. And I wonder if JS & Mr. N is the nearest any book (currently in print) has reached out towards making this giant leap. In fact, it has, arguably, indeed made this giant leap, feasibly allowing others to make the same leap if they are imaginatively muscular enough.

I've greatly enjoyed JS & Mr N and in many ways it is a flawed masterpiece - and I would not class it as one of my favourite books. Too much like 'Harry Potter'? However, what I'm saying - whether one enjoys it or not - I consider it to be the first printed book to be an example of (i) below as well as of the more common (ii).

(i) A fiction that is magic (a big claim and deserving of scrutiny by others).

(ii) A fiction about magic as well as about fiction working as magic.

I don't think I'm able to judge (i) properly because I have found myself preoccupied with such concerns when writing my own first novels (before reading JS & Mr N).

I see all other artistic activities as secondary to magic: ie. art as 'happening' or 'happening' as art. Art is not magic, although it tries to import magic as a symptom or ingredient, but an attempt essentially corrupted by a self-awareness that this is what is going on. Only magic is magic, I feel. And I had sense that JS & Mr N was nearing an unself-conscious (literal) equivalence to true magic as far as possible without risking counter-claims of literary (as well as literal) madness in thus claiming this to be the case. It's just coincidence that the book is also about magic (though it helps). This is something I've been trying to do without consciously trying to do it (whilst remaining hopefully unpretentious or unself-aware - and this is all very much in hindsight!): with my fiction and with 'Nemonymous' since 2001: and what Elizabeth Bowen did with her fiction ie. almost accidentally approaching the true state of magic without the intervention of pretension or of self-awareness or of gauche ulterior motives for art-for-arts-sake ("buried art") or even of a desire for success in doing it (so might as well throw it all away on a dele(c)table blog).

Furthermore, even if unintentional and a flawed masterpiece in itself (imho), JS & Mr N should be admired at least for evoking such thoughts (adjacent or noumenal as they may be in turn or simultaneously).


The Ominous Imagination

My greatest love in fiction is the 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' core that I find in most sorts of literature, old and new, literary and otherwise.

For me, this core should be and is being expanded by the current vogue in fiction genre-crossing and genre-betweening (Interstitiality), i.e. acting like a magnet, and making other fiction traditions conducive to the 'Horror' spirit or, as I would like it to be called, The Ominous Imagination. Indeed, I believe, most good fiction is (and has always been) imbued with and steeped in this type of imaginative spirit, in any event.

This is really what, when articulated, I have been trying to do in ‘Nemonymous’, especially if you ignore its radical aspects of Anonymity etc. for a moment. All issues contain stories each of which are representative of a different fiction genre/tradition as well as stories that, actually within themselves, contain various genres/traditions -- but all, inevitably, with the Ominous Imagination.

Those who publish genre-specific outlets in the Horror fiction field, for example, perhaps allow the hard-fought beach-heads of 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' to crumble and separate out, thus allowing these particles of fiction already gathered for the 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' core to escape from that core because such genre-narrowing outlets tend to crystallise that core AS a core rather than as a magnet.

des

Monday, April 17, 2006

Dr Who

The new series of DR WHO (in UK this weekend) seemed to start in a very wildly unfocussed way where it wasn't worthwhile even to tussle through one's own eye muscles to watch it - and it seems to me that the only episodes worth watching are those not written by Russell T Davies. (Based on my subjective experience of the last series and a gut-feeling about the new series.)

Also, Cordwainer Smith together with 'Cities In Flight' (New New York?) by James Blish come to mind as derivables for this first episode of the new series!

des

Sunday, April 16, 2006

The Nemo

Further to the bits about the nemo in my post earlier today I've just read this appropriate section from an article in today's Independent newspaper (written by Richard Schoch):

Many people are trapped in a spiral of consumption that compels them to buy ever more luxurious items to maintain a consistent amount of pleasure. At some point, and it arrives sooner and sooner, pleasure turns first to boredom, then to dissatisfaction, and, finally, to anxiety. We torture ourselves by asking why our hard-earned possessions fail to make us happy. Our clothes are never stylish enough, our cars never fast enough, our homes never palatial enough.
One secret of happiness is to moderate our pleasures, so that we find ourselves in the hugely more satisfying state of tranquillity, where simple things yield as much enjoyment as luxuries. Once we grow accustomed to simple things we have a better time in life, because we appreciate luxuries all the more, if they come along.


And I make an oblique (possibly, opaque) alignment of the above words with this quotation below which I think I may already have made famous by quoting it in "Nemonymous" and elsewhere over the years!

The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.
-- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')

Carrying His Own Skin

The crowd was silent
Reading the poems of Baudelaire.
Suddenly, completely unpremeditated,
They lurch forward, in unison,
And sing the National Anthem.



"The problem of hollowness, then, of a-Voidance, is really one of secondary satisfactions, the attempt to find substitutes for a primary satisfaction of wholeness that somehow got lost leaving a large gap in its place. The British novelist John Fowles calls this emptiness the 'nemo' which he describes as an anti-ego, a state of being nobody. "Nobody wants to be a nobody," writes Fowles. "All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mark the emptiness we feel at the core.""
from COMING TO OUR SENSES by Morris Berman

"... there is a way of going about enterprise, particularly as it applies to creativity, in which the activity is preceded by wholeness, rather than being a frantic attempt to achieve it. This frantic approach to life is not inevitable; we really don't have to spend our lives chasing ecstasy in an effort to shut down the nemo [nemo: a feeling of hollowness, an anti-ego, a state of being nobody].”
from Coming To Our Senses : Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West -
Morris Berman (Unwin Hyman, 1990, page 316)


"Next to her hung a further small picture, showing a saint carrying his own skin.”
-- Robert Aickman (The Cicerones)

"Her pillow sounded hollow with notes and knockings, notes and knockings you hear in condemned rooms.”
--Elizabeth Bowen (No. 16)

""WHAT do you call him? Nemo?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn.
"Nemo, sir. Here it is. Forty-two folio. Given out on the Wednesday night at eight o`clock, brought in on the Thursday morning at half after nine.""
-- Charles Dickens (Bleak House)

Des says:
In my fifties looking back at the fifties...
Excitedly waiting for the Beano comic to drop on my doormat every Thursday, the smell of its pages, the stationery smell of newsagents in those days, the smell of books in general, uniform fifties library books (which drabness seemed to accentuate the delights emerging from the print within), my Mum making me wear waterproof leggings when it rained, being able to scribble stories in pencil, using plasticene, throwing bean-bags about in PE, sitting on bristly PE mats, fuzzy grey pictures on the TV screen which, on some evenings, were indecipherable... and arcade amusements on Walton-on-Naze Pier: hand-cranked cranes that could never quite grapple with the pack of cigs wrapped round with a brown ten bob note, pinballs without flippers, ghost house tableau where a coin would produce a skeleton out of the cupboard, silver balls spinning round vertically into the lose and win holes, the win giving you another turn, the lose losing you your coin. More lose holes than win. A lesson for life?

Saturday, April 15, 2006

Life On Mars

Yesterday I had my Life On Mars moment!
I took my elderly parents to see the tiny old terraced cottage where we lived in the Nineteen Fifties. They had not visited the area for many years. I was 4 to 5 years old at the time I lived there. As we sat parked outside in the car - a little boy of about that age appeared at the door and waved! We waved back - and drove off. Or perhaps, rather, it was his Life On Mars moment.
des

Friday, April 14, 2006

ireducibles

This Weirdmonger Nemonymous blog has very recently been renamed Irreducibles. I told management that I wanted it renamed Ireducibles but they said nobody would get the joke!
des

For Easter

An excerpt from my TENACITY OF FEATHERS trilogy of novels. This part to be re-contextualised whenever you can in the Nemonymous Night half of the The Hawler:


********
A bus doesn’t touch the Earth with its metal body but has a layer of toughened rubber-around-air between it and the road it treads. As it floats round the city as only dreams can allow such a large mechanical thing to float, two passengers on the top-deck chat of something people on buses would leave well alone. Death. Just past the stop for the covered market.

“We’re trapped on this bus.”

“You can get off at the next stop. It’s not like a plane.”

“Yup yup. But a human body, like my own body, is something you can’t get off. I'm trapped inside it and there is nothing I can do to escape it. To escape it is certain death. I wonder how we ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it’s all going to end with a blank while incapable of waking up from the nightmare. I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them, terrifying situations I thought I could never escape – until, with great relief, I wake up and leave it all behind in a quickly forgotten dream. Life’s problems, by comparison, are as nothing compared to those one sometimes meet in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It’s relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable. Who the devil landed me in this body? They have a lot to answer for. And I can’t really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness within my body finally vanishes. A paradox – that I hate being trapped in my body but I’d give anything to stay trapped there forever, because I can’t face the outright blankness…”

“Yes, a paradox,” answered the other man-on-the-bus in just one more of those typical conversations that wheel through the city like stories with no baggage to weigh them down.

I watched the bus turn the corner, its top blown off like a sardine can containing explosive sardines.
**********

Guy de Maupassant - who possibly wrote the greatest vampire story ever i.e. entitled The Horla said:
"The least thing contains something unknown. Let us find it."


H.P. Lovecraft:
"This was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice."
from "The Horror at Red Hook"

**********
I hope everyone has a good holiday.
des

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Yellow Patch On The Wall

Someone in the comments here yesterday asked about Elliott Carter. Yes, I have some string quartets composed by him on CD and I listened to much of the recent concerts in London featuring his work. He was present at these concerts – as testified by the TV cameras – despite having been born in 1908!! Still going strong.

Following discussion about self-promotion on the internet, I also raised the subject of any communication on the Internet being counter-productive. Perhaps many friendships have been lost because of electronic misunderstandings etc. Then there are other general factors of misinformation received, misinformation given, time wasted, too much put into writing which would have been better said...?

What would have happened if this thing hadn't been invented? Actually, I've made a lot of friends on the internet - some I subsequently met. In fact one or two close friends have happily come my way purely because of the Internet. Equally, I've lost a few - because of the nature of the Net itself. I'm sure we all gain time and waste time on the Net, but who judges which is which?

And I understand written communication can stifle (because of its re-checkable nature) whilst verbal (by mouth) communication can liberate. I’m not talking about artistic communication here. If that lady civil servant had said 'A good day to bury bad news' to her colleagues instead of emailing it, she'd still be in her job. Equally foolish, however, saying it or emailing it, but that's life.

I understand many businesses are tied up in red tape because all their staff write emails to each other rather than pragmatically sorting things out by word-of-mouth.

Also, the internet de-iconises, over-familiarises, desensitises, overcrowds, I feel. Allows for uncensored things without any policing. Confuses with its over-dosing of information and communication. Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers become email addresses or websites tarnishing their iconicity...

Seeing relatively famous authors flouncing about on the internet also serves the same negative purpose. (append smiley)

Friendship or even love can never really join people through the bone of their skulls let alone through the distance of hyperspace. However, I cherish the friends I have made on the Internet as well as those I am lucky to know face-to-face. I hope to make many more friends by means of this blog. Devil’s Advocate argument thus ends!

To finish today, here are links to two passages from Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time about Bergotte’s death and Vermeer’s yellow patch on the wall. These are examples, I feel, of life-changing literature, beautiful and touching. You will not be the same after reading them. You can find them here:
http://www.tinyurl.com/4df96
ie. the two long posts that I made on March 2nd 2003.
des

PS: Remember: Don't eat yellow snow!

==============

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

The Falls

I have been reading The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates, a writer I've long admired. This is a family dynasty page-turner, where the main character is not a family member but Niagara Falls. But can a waterfall be an animate creature?

I re-read recently Robert Aickman's story Wood (not be confused with another story by him entitled In The Wood). This is a masterpiece and perhaps my favourite ever story.

Rhys wrote the following on the aforementioned TTA thread yesterday:
A certain amount of self promotion is probably necessary and maybe even desirable. The question is how does one go about doing it without looking arrogant or (conversely) a bit sad?
Very wise and, together with Mark's wise statement (quoted yesterday on this blog), makes me think that - with the internet now in use for such self-promotion - there will be more and more need for an outlet (or at least a philosophy) such as represented by Nemonymous.

I also sincerely predict that both Mark and Rhys will become very big fiction writers for the 21st century.

My group of three novels about Bird Flu The Tenacity Of Feathers (incorporating self-contained novels 'The Hawler', 'Klaxon City' and 'The Angel Megazanthus') continues to receive a high number of "hits" on the internet where I have placed their raw text. Although I would like these novels to be traditionally published, I do not expect this ever to happen (for various reasons), but in the meantime some individual readers are publishing the works themselves as bespoke books. Very gratifying and thanks to them.

I continue to listen to all forms of music. My latest interest is in the Naxos-sponsored string quartets specially written for Naxos by Peter Maxwell Davies.
des

PS: Great to win Paul Barnett's Dan Brown competition on the TTA Boards yesterday!

===========

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Irreducibles

Today, I've added two stories to the Weirdmonger Wheel, one old ("The Irreducibles Of Nygremaunce" (Black Moon 1997)) and one new ("The Beer Is Free"). I haven't counted them yet, but there are hundreds and hundreds of my past published stories available for free reading. I've still got a long way to go to re-publish all of them! Please contact me for free web-link to the Wheel, if you're interested.

Last night, Mark Samuels (of 'White Hands' fame) wrote the following on the TTA thread that I mentioned yesterday:
The problem I have is with those pretty dreadful authors (imho) who are nevertheless excellent at self-promotion, and tend to concentrate on that aspect above all else. It seems to me that a lot of genuine talent can be left behind in the commercial rush. Mixing up the two attributes (ie talent and self-promotion) can lead to a sorry state of affairs. I've heard a number of publishers and editors remark that often the pushiest authors are the least talented.

Although I can empathise with what I think he means, the only real answer to this is the 'Nemonymous' approach. Any comments.

I've been reading 'The Brooklyn Follies' by Paul Auster recently. I liked this bit yesterday:
"That's what happens to you when you land in hospital. They take off your clothes, put you in one of those humiliating gowns, and suddenly you stop being yourself. You become the person who inhabits your body, and what you are now is the sum total of that body's failures."

and a bit about Biography Insurance!

Stop Press
Rhys Hughes (of 'Infamy' fame) has just written this to the aforementioned thread:
Des, if you perceived my comments as an 'attack' then you really need to get out more and see what misery and pain exists in the real world.
Well, it was an 'attack' within the context of the thread, unimportant though that thread is in the scheme of things. In fact I do get out, and I never think of Rhys at all when I'm gadding about! ;-)
des

Monday, April 10, 2006

Only Myself To Blame

I only have myself to blame but I feel that, today, exactly seven years since I started constant public interaction on the internet that this has now become counterproductive to my ideas, to my fiction works and to my 'Nemonymous' products. In future, any ideas, information, input etc. from me will appear on this blog. Comments welcome. Any significant DFL news will appear regularly on the main website HERE. -- Meanwhile, gratifyingly, I received in the last few days gorgeous publication-on-reading book editions of 'The Hawler', 'Klaxon City' and 'Agra Aska' for my signature and return to the reader who arranged their production for himself.

Anonymity etc.



The Two Ways of Anonymity



(one) The most common way - to say something you don't want to be known as saying, i.e. for *devious* purposes (which could be spite, nepotism, insult, cruelty, dubious joke etc etc.) -- or publishing pornography, or issuing a Valentine's card, or hiding one's identity to avoid reputation depletion etc.



(two) The Nemonymous way,

(i) whereby the fiction author wants some objective view of his work to be made without his name getting in the way -- and I, as an editor, equally don't want it to get in the way when I consider his submission for publication and

(ii) as an experiment in fiction anthology presentation as a new gestalt reading experience (i.e. stories written independently and remaining separate yet somehow more 'together') and

(iii) leading to a brainstorming approach to reviews and critical appreciation and

(iv) bringing fiction nearer to the artist-naming (late-labelling) approach of other arts such as fine arts, architecture, music etc. (instead of having the name on the spine, on the title page and, often, on the top of each alternate page throughout the book) and

(v) trying to bring fiction more easily to an interstitial or between/cross-genre optimum, thus bringing more readers for each of the separate genres themselves.



Regarding (iv), it may sound dubious – but I believe writers actually *lose out* by direct by-lining, i.e. without the advantage of the variously gradated ‘late-labellings’ that other artists enjoy.


I think it true to say that (one) above brings anonymity into disrepute, a cross which Nemonymous has to bear.



AUTHOR AS ARBITER

1) Fiction/Poem = Original Text placed in the audience arena. Nothing can change that. It is everlasting and immutable. (If it is changed, ie revised or translated, this becomes a new work, a new immutable entity).
(2) What can be taken from or given to the Text = reader's 'opinion' or 'reaction' or 'knowledge' -- countless opinions and reactions and degrees of knowledge: all different and mostly unknowable but all added to the aura of the work whether they are physically annotated on the printed page in pencil or kept inside the head.
(3) Creator (or First Mover) of Text = Just another reader with fallible rights to describe/interpret/evaluate Text, i.e. after it has been placed in the audience arena as a discrete 'sculpture' or entity of creativity.


Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Dies Irae

Iritis (or Dies Irae):

Iritis irks my eye rotten. And if it isn’t treated with steroid drops, the sight is likely to be burned right down to the optic fuse.

The recurrence of iritis in my left eye must be the Curse of Cthulhu. After several cruel attacks of iritis, I can now easily recognise a fresh onset of its characteristic light-tender ache and thus deal with the problem in its early stages. Yet, upon initially inspecting the red-blurred seepage into the eye's white by means of a mirror, I sense the touch of something that itself should be untouched – almost as if the eye itself is the culprit rather than the iritis.

After the first attack in 1973, there elapsed ten years before there was a further attack (in 1983) by or upon my left lit sight-bulb.

That is the only way to describe my eyeball when it’s in the iritic mode.

Then another ten years before it attacked again in 1993.

But it’s speeding up. Five years, then two. Now, it’s sometimes merely a matter of months between attacks. Soon, I guess, it will be days. My eye’s sly susceptibility to searing could one day teeter upon the brink of strobing.

Iritis is a relatively rare disorder. No known cause. Not contagious or infectious, but growing organically from within the eye like a second disfigured eye, one that is raw with what I imagine to be the waywardly plaiting tendrils of a blindness primed to pounce.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of something far more insidious, as I’ve already hinted. Not the Curse of Cthulhu, but the eye actually is Cthulhu. Or, a little less grandiosely, a mere demon from a less believable mythos. Or one of God’s angels from the least believable mythos of all. More likely a demon keeping a beady eye on me – grooming me for the dark visions of Hell – ensuring I can’t escape. Eyes follow you everywhere, don’t they?

Eventually, I will gouge it from the socket with a screwdriver: feel it bubble and squirm in God’s ire, an agonising fire that has its seat somewhere in my soul.

Meantime, Cthulhu sits calmly in its unholy spy-hole disguised as my right eye . . .


First published in 'Mausoleum' 1996

---------------------------