Withdrawn from Sale

Heads up! My pocket-sized mini-collections of short fiction, Tiny Fictions, are only going to be available in the overall collection form soon.

Still available

This means  I will be withdrawing from sale Tiny Fictions #1, #2, #3, and #4, at the end of May, both in physical and eReader formats.

Withdrawn from sale at the end of May 2012

Withdrawn at the end of May 2012

Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: publishing, books, publishing, short fiction, withdrawal

Our Benighted Experiment In Universal Sufferage

Today is the day that Londoners vote on who we want to be Mayor; in previous Mayoral elections I’ve had a horse in the race, but this time Ken Livingston has been unable to keep his more odious opinions to himself and Boris Johnson continues to be a self-serving lizard creature, and I’m left with the option of either voting for that nice independent lady, or defacing my ballot paper (Paddick lost my vote when he wormily failed to give an opinion on whether or not Johnson did the right thing in withdrawing the “ex-gay” bus ads; Brian, you of all people I would expect to put your back behind the gay community).

Leaving aside my personal politics, however, this election has brought up an interesting question for me. How do you choose between two deeply unpleasant people? Assuming – falsely in this case – that one must vote for one or the other of a pair of people standing for an electoral position, let’s try this with a slightly analogous (although grossly exaggerated) pairing:

1. Actions: over all citizens of their constituency, this candidate exercises what brings good, regardless of their wealth, race, or crime rates. They work to defend even the communities towards whom they have personal feelings of antipathy, and do not aim to privilege their own wealth. Words: Unfortunately, they have some kind of prejudice against the group of people you personally come from; this does not come through in his actions, as discussed, but in his public addresses he is snide or rude repeatedly about your specific group in ways which you definitely find offensive.
2. Actions: this candidate seeks glory and wealth and preserves the money they give to their network of confiderates by depriving poverty-stricken areas. Their actions impact heavily on vulnerable people and, mysteriously, people who have voted against them in the past. Words: They are charming, affable, and evince whichever attitude sounds best. It is impossible to tell what they actually think, but they certainly always praise your personal group and are unlikely to ever show up on TV badmouthing you.

So who do you vote for? Of these caricatures – assuming nothing further about their policies, about their parties, about other matters: do you vote for the candidate whose actions benefit people but whose words insult and injure you, or do you vote for a candidate whose actions are to the detriment of many (including you) but whose words flatter and praise you?

Happily in reality this ridiculous choice does not exist in real life, and I am content to cast my lot in one of the other options that exist: after all, one can always spoil one’s ballot.

Filed under: content: essay, content: real life, boris johnson, caricature, impossible choices, ken livingston, local politics, london, london mayor, london mayoral election, politics

Early 20th Century Literary Queer Love-In

T. E. Lawrence, on the other hand, laughed at [E M Forster's "The Life To Come"] – a reaction that puzzles [Oliver Stallybrass] as much as it puzzled Forster – and was perhaps lucky*, three years later, to be shown ‘Dr Woolacott’. This, by way of contrast, he considered ‘the most powerful thing I ever read … more charged with the real high explosive than anything I’ve ever met yet’; [...] I have already quoted T. E. Lawrence’s remarkable encomium of ‘Dr Woolacott’; and, although the story’s fascination for T. E. tells us more, perhaps, about his powerfully developed death-with than about its own intrinsic quality [...]

—  Oliver Stallybrass, introduction to The Life to Come and Other Stories by E. M. Forster.

File under “intersections between my favourite historigays”, next to “that time an exasperated Sassoon called T.E. a “tank-vestigating eremite”.

I want to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket, and then I have wanted to write respectable novels…

— E. M. Forster, Personal memorandum, 1935 (as quoted in the introduction to The Life to Come and Other Stories, pub. Penguin).

One thing I am noticing in my laid-back holidaying in the queer society of the early 20th Century is that, while shut up together as universally ‘perverse’, homosexuality and sadomasochistic leanings were allowed a greater degree of crossover between them; in that it was equally condemnable to want to be buggered as beaten by a chap, so that once one was already a transgressor as a homosexual, there was little shame or condemnation left for the other vice.

It seems that as we edge closer to the acceptance of homosexuality as “normal” (scare quotes because really the concept of normal is stupid), the more shedding of this association in popular consciousness occurs. The end goal, indeed, seems to be to shove “undesirable” sexuality out of queerness in order to give queerness a boost toward the “desirable”. I don’t think that process is complete yet; certainly “perversity” seems to have a slightly better reception in queer circles than in straight ones – indeed during my brief and irritating time going to scene parties in Brighton confirmed the idea that it was seen as far cooler to be blasé about people’s sexual practices (known or rumoured) than it was to be scandalised by them, which was more often the case with the self-professed “liberal” London Goth Scene (or at least, the heterosexual parts thereof).

But I do find it interesting that Forster bundles up his desire to be “loved by” and “even hurt by” his fictitious young man of the working classes into one package. Whether one argues it as the physical interpretation of both “loved” and “hurt” (sex, and masochism) or the emotional (romantic attachment, and heartbreak), it seems he associates the two things closely with each other and looks to embrace them both. In the sexual sense this is a difficult conclusion for people to reach unaided now; in the romantic sense it borders on the chivalric and certainly demonstrates an understanding of how love affairs are prone to work (as one would expect from a good novelist: spend long enough looking at human nature for the purposes of reproducing it and one is bound to acquire a certain amount of insight into the natural course of love).

In the prelude to reading the slightly-larger-than-sane pile of biographies of Forster I seem to have accidentally acquired (and later, no doubt, returning to the increasing mound of Lawrence biographies, all of which are endearingly ancient bindings and smell irresistibly of second-hand-book-shop, a heady perfume of dust, vanilla, leather, decaying canvas, and ink), I can make all kinds of assumptions about how Forster felt about his romantic & sexual identity, and no doubt in the aftermath of the same I shall continue to wonder, since none of us can actually know.

But on the basis that he wrapped up pain and love into one inextricable package, I am fond of who I think he might be.

Filed under: books, content: review, books, e.m. forster, history, literature, modernists, queer history, queer literature, reviews, t e lawrence, t. e. lawrencee, the life to come, the life to come and other stories

What Has It Got In Its Notebookeses?

As you will no doubt have gathered from my unceasing whining about it, I moved house recently. Having fused somewhat with the previous accommodation as a result of inhabiting it in typically carefree (and slovenly) style for seven solid years, I have been finding all sorts of gems amid the detritus that act as unintentional time capsules.

Obviously we also have the internet for that, but there is something rather fascinating about what I felt it necessary to note down and what I thought I was still going to understand later.

Following excerpts come from a green spiral-bound notebook purchased in Paris around Christmas 2005, and filled up in spurts as I found and lost it again.

Ceci c’est mon sang, ceci c’est mon corps.

Some men seek what other men have never had to find; some men search while others exist in a state of blissful now.

you’re naked said digory rather unnecessarily yes replied the boy and you’re wearing awful clothes

Ou est les enfants? NYOM NYOM I ATES THE BABIES! Tu manger les enfants? Mal Grandmere!

He lacks ennui
His penis functions

J’ne parle pas Angelaise mais je suis madamoiselle pleasante!

BELT OF RAW MEAT

Santa’s stomach strains with the naughty children that he has devoured [this was written across the belly of the single most sinister and carnivorous-looking Santa Claus I have ever seen]

Andy Warhol is perturbed and enraged by reality television

“I’m eating Jaffa cakes in an ossuary. Is that normal?”

David (Jacques-Louis) 1748-1825
Leonidan aux Thermopyles

Look at some ‘cartoons’ of Orpheous & Eurydice: Orpheous kind of minging.

– “If I throw up now, I can eat some more!”

I am up to the bit just before the poet gives them his poem — Before sunrise.

7. sewing is tessellation – pattern-solving

NB: If you want to write like Pat Barker – shorter sentences. Less florid language. Less poeticism.

–> Essence of meaning — the poetic equation/proof — elegance in brevity.

Matteo di Giovanni (died 1495)
Saint Sebastian 1480-5

Masculinity & Brotherhood in WW1 & WWII
Cross-dressing/transgenderism in ancient cultures

Always looking for the sociology or meta meaning/reason BEHIND things. Worried that life is one big ALLEGORY

“The fencer’s weapon is picked up & put down again. The boxer’s is part of him.” .2.9 [I think this is from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, judging by the context it's in]

Only at the personal level can something be “against your beliefs”.

Anatomical unravelling in progress (y)

Purity is not something to be brought about by bleach.

“One would like evil people to be lazy and stupid ones to keep their mouths shut.”

“Petty souls are more susceptible to ambition than great ones, just as straw or thatched cottages burn more easily than palaces.”

[several drunken pages of scribbling as I tried to work out a better plot than the Da Vinci Code in a pub, shortly after seeing the film]

Vassilly, huh? Holst feels usurped by Blake. Blake asks S. for any further contacts and S says no very firmly, so Blake, out of nowhere, smacks S into a wall quite casually. Even Holst is appalled.

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

When spoken of the disassociative personality diminishes his or her sense of aloofness and disconnect but momentarily [in a speech bubble, spoken by a reclining stick figure]

The Republic of Ireland was invented by Oliver Cromwell and the Jews after they realised that it was going to be many hundreds of years before ‘wipe the potato-chewing drunken bastards off the globe’ could truly be put into effect. [definitely recall writing this in the pub to annoy someone specific]

more black eyelet tape.

LARGE CODPIECE! Gumbo: Rabbit? Liver?

Letter from Julie to Peter Cross

[random Greek which I have no memory of and no idea what it says]

MIMI WONG

[Drawing of an owl wearing a hoodie]

R.M.S. = 0.707 x peak

Waves add and either cancel (out of phase) or amplify (in phase) a standing wave is when reflections from parallel surfaces [sentence not finished]

1) Use a room with no parallel walls

But no, I will laugh. It is fine insulation, even the bitter kind. Keep forcing laughter until it becomes real.

“Every labyrinth twist another dead end.”

Filed under: content: snippets, notebook, quotes, the things i find in my house, what

April Links Post

Things my friends have done:

• The lovely Holly Y has also participated in National Poetry Month, with a good deal more flair and humour than I.

Things I have done:

Things strangers have done:

• Written a rather funny article about how to write the Great American Novel. I’d write the Great British Novel but a) I’m not very good and b) it’s already been written.
• Reproduced Rudyard Kipling’s advice on living in London, all of which is entirely pertinent in every possible way, especially the bit about not rolling in the grass in the parks.
• In 1935, Sigmund Freud managed to display a more enlightened attitude toward homosexuality than an depressingly large number of modern politicians, as evidenced in this letter.
• Captured beautiful photos of London’s landmarks and landscapes … in reflections in street puddles.
• Natasha Hodgson has reviewed Battleship, thus removing any need to see it, and also making me do a small laughter-wee.
• Speculated on Why Americans Hate the Media.

Filed under: content: links, advice, america, American history, art, battleship, films, freud, holly yagoda, homosexuality, how to, letters, london, media, media studies, movies, natasha hodgson, photography, poetry, psychoanalysis, puddles, reviews, rudyard kipling, the awl, writing

National Poetry Month: Day 30

I carry my wounds like an aphid carries her children

Perhaps all these days
laid end to end
form a map of the heart
that lived them;
perhaps all these mornings
overlaid upon each other
form a topography
of the landscape inside
the mind that woke in them.
certain, however, that
in the drooping of the day
there is no poem,
only a falling curtain.

– Delilah Des Anges

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There has been this month very little emphasis on meter, and that is because despite a number of poetry courses I have never really been able to get to grips with it much outside of a partially-intuitive de-DUM-de-DUM when attempting iambic prose or the like. Trochees, spondees and so on are far, far beyond my remit.

The closest I have been able to get to understanding how the devil one is supposed to make sense of meter, and indeed a book I would recommend in general for furthering your understanding of poetry and your own skills of prosody, was How Poetry Works by Phil Roberts. In recommending one book on poetry analysis and writing which works very well for me I should I suspect also recommend a book which does not work for me at all but which is very popular and has a chatty, down-to-earth approach to helping you write your own poems, Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled.

For a continuation of this month’s activities by greater minds than mine (not hard to find), in the short analysis of poems or poetic genres accompanying anthologies of poems, one cannot go far wrong with Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley and published by Bloodaxe Books, or Axed Between The Ears edited by David Kitchen and published by Heinemann. 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, edited & commentated by Ruth Padel is, as one might expect, also a good way to continue learning about poetry and poetry analysis.

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Have you enjoyed the poetry this month? The mini-essays? Are you merely grateful that it’s all over? Whichever, why not take a little pocket change – or a lot! – and donate to MSF.

Filed under: content: poetry, freeform, april, book recommendations, books, charity, creative, creative writing, doctors without borders, medecins sans frontiere, msf, national poetry month, poems, poetry, prosody, writing

National Poetry Month: Day 29

Sunday afternoon lament

Tip
tap
tip
on the pane
drip
drop
drip
goes the rain
nag
nag
nag
in your brain
drag
drug
drag
the mounting pain
swill
swirl
swill
down the drain
sob
cough
sob
all over again
as
drip
drop
drip
goes the unrelenting
unrepenting
blood
stain.

– Delilah Des Anges

In poetry pacing is regulated by two separate factors: the position of words on the page, and the meter of the lines. These two can interact with each other in order to further manipulate the reader’s perception of the speed of the poem.

Metrically, switching between types of meter can have a profound effect on the experience of the poem’s pace; the reader can be brought to a near-standstill, or feel acceleration in the pace of the lines towards the poem’s crescendo. This can be heightened still further by the change from long to short words, or vice versa, and long to short lines, or vice versa.

In terms of placement, line-breaks and isolating individual lines has a psychological effect on the reader’s pace; a visual species, we learn to associate the spacing out in the plane of the page with the spacing out of events in time, as typographical cheats such as increasing the kerning will demonstrate:

s l o w l y

s   l    o    w   l    y

s     l      o     w     l    y

visual trickery like this may seem “cheap” in comparison to metrical manipulation but this is only because it is a little easier to achieve!

A third means of pacing control is lexical. This should be inherent to all poems, and occurs when the poet’s word choice is determined in part by how difficult or lengthy the word is to read, as well as the semantics and semiotics of it (or indeed the euphony of it).

Al three taken in careful combination can throw the reader through the poem at precious the pace the poet wishes without any silly extraneous annotation, or any guidance from outside sources. A sign of a well-put-together poem is the ability of anyone utterly ignorant of the material to read it as it is meant to be read, in a manner identical to any other completely ignorant or utterly informed reader.

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Throughout this month I will be nagging readers to donate to MSF

Filed under: content: essay, content: poetry, freeform, Uncategorized, analysis, april, charity, creative, creative writing, doctors without borders, medecins sans frontiere, msf, national poetry month, pacing, poems, poetry, prosody, writing

National Poetry Month: Day 28

insomniac’s prayer

something stirring in the shadows beneath the bed
with a bagful of pins in your swallowing throat
a loaded gun pressed like a palm to your head
each breath is an enemy soldier’s joke
as the sun flees and leaves you for dead.

night comes down with a killing blow
unstoppering thought with cruelty
until the mind’s killing fields glow
with blood and endless impiety
as the sun flees and dark grows.

when the last light’s gone
and your mind is wide,
evil suspicions won
rampaging inside:
thus fled the sun.

– Delilah Des Anges

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Other poems to read today:

Sleep in the Mojave Desert, Sylvia Plath

The Man With Night Sweats, Thom Gunn

Slumber-Song, Siegfried Sassoon

To His Mistress Going To Bed, John Donne

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Throughout this month I will be nagging readers to donate to MSF

Filed under: ballad, content: links, content: poetry, april, charity, creative, creative writing, doctors without borders, john donne, medecins sans frontiere, msf, national poetry month, poems, poetry, siegfried sassoon, sylvia plath, thom gunn, writing

National Poetry Month: Day 27

Line Jumper

Drayton Park is a dreary place
but not the one to quit the race;
the trains have stopped (never on time)
for a fatality upon this line,
and gloom settles upon every tired face
as one more soul enters death’s embrace
by jumping the line at Drayton Park
and taking the express train into the dark.

– Delilah Des Anges

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Throughout this month I will be nagging readers to donate to MSF

Filed under: content: poetry, couplets, april, charity, creative, creative writing, doctors without borders, drayton park, london, london overground, medecins sans frontiere, msf, national poetry month, poems, poetry, trains, writing

National Poetry Month: Day 26

He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead

WERE you but lying cold and dead,
And lights were paling out of the West,
You would come hither, and bend your head,
And I would lay my head on your breast;
And you would murmur tender words,
Forgiving me, because you were dead:
Nor would you rise and hasten away,
Though you have the will of the wild birds,
But know your hair was bound and wound
About the stars and moon and sun:
O would, beloved, that you lay
Under the dock-leaves in the ground,
While lights were paling one by one.

– W. B. Yeats

vs

She wishes her lover were living

Were you but risen warm and living,
and new light birthing red in the east,
You would come to me, and be forgiving,
And I would stir that inner beast;
And you would growl with violent features,
Forgiveness rescinded for those living:
Thus you would keep us both a-bed,
though you are the fiercest of God’s creatures,
So know your hands were gripped and slipped
from round the earth and air and sea:
O would, fair foe, that you’d read
Of the tortures through my body’d ripped
while new light birthed above me.

– Delilah Des Anges

One of the more effective ways to dissect a poem is to pastiche it or parody it. It helps a remarkable amount with any kind of writing, in fact: in an attempt to produce a credible replica in terms of style or pacing or in the case of a poem, rhyme, rhythm, and theme – or to invert it – it is necessary to study it. It is a little like tracing over a picture and changing some of the features.

In He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead, there is a more complex pattern than appears at first glance, and in attempting to adhere to it line by line it becomes clear. The first four lines are standard quatrain: abab, but the next four break into daed, and the remaining five are fgefg. This overall pattern, ababdaedfgefg, is not so simple – and there is further complication! The first f line has an internal rhyme - bound and wound – and the closing g line also encapsulates a variation on the first of the two b lines: And lights were paling out of the West, becomes, While lights were paling one by one. 

With this complexity it is impressive to be able to create a sense, an argument, while stepping still to the tune of the rhyme scheme. Trying to recreate it makes it a little easier to appreciate how difficult it must have been to write, even if you, like me, aren’t the biggest fan of Yeats.

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Throughout this month I will be nagging readers to donate to MSF

Filed under: ballad, content: essay, content: poetry, analysis, april, charity, creative, creative writing, doctors without borders, medecins sans frontiere, msf, national poetry month, parody, pastiche, poems, poetry, prosody, w. b. yeats, william butler yeats, writing, yeats