What are you writing?

[Ness Rowlah]

or there is always http://www.lulu.com/uk/ for getting it all out in hardcopy with a proper ISBN number and all.

Just did a quick calculation. 500 pages in hardback (I guess this will be quite an epic?) and a run of 50 copies will set you back around £/€750 ($1350)

[Agent Nucleus]

a thesis on radical modernism

[Mr. Tea]

Put it in a box like BS Johnson.

*rubs eyes*

Is that a Pratchett reference? On Dissensus?

[jenks]

No - British experimental writer. Famously once published a novel loose leaf and in a box

http://www.bsjohnson.info/

[poetix]

Not that BS Johnson. Although that BS Johnson may in fact be a reference to the BS Johnson.

[luka]

yeah zhao i guess the interenet is a way out of that and i started doing somehting but i lost heart cos no one was into it. i will go back to that cos it does have plenty of potential. the big problem is that reading on a computer screen is impossible. ideally i think i'd like to give some bits and pieces to a computer wizard and say, this is what i want, make it happen. i don't want to do the johnson gimmick again obviously. but i am quite keen to avoid blocks of text. i would like the foreground the word. to encourage a forensic focus on the word. like how you can do that with a sound in music. surround it by space. no it doesnt kust become a peice in a tune or whatever, it is a piece of music in its own right, i'd like to do that with words. and then demonsteate how much headier it gets when you get combinations of TWO words! excitement! add an adverb to a noun! wow! so it will probably come down to the arrangement of words on the page like mallarmes thing. the difficulty is to find a way of doing it which doesn't appear arbitary. if you are using more paper i think you should probably be able to justify it convincingly.

[luka]

incidently you know who the best writer of prose on this forum is? craner, easily. if you can put pressure on him to write instead of absorbing himself in the grotesque soap-opera of americna politics you'd be doing the world a favour. this is the first thing i found of his as an exmaple. hopefuly he'll be embaressed if i put this here.
he has a talent i think and he should be encouraged.

Valentine's Day Message

I gotta fetish for fuckin' you with your skirt on

I liked due to those who complain about the "coarsening of culture" which can be, nevertheless, allied to a certain languorous contempt for everything except the deep glut of consumption. Plus, I'm fully with that particular fetish.

But I was always subtle about this: there was posture or the way her legs looked in nylon, skirt and heels, when crossed. The eyes, their colour, what they convey - humour, mischief, mystique, occasional genius, joy, loss, or sorrow. Even spite - now that was something - just NOT blank, bored, or self-serving. Charisma contained like a secret revealed in body language and movement - for example, the way she walked down the street, flicked hair out of her eyes, or smoked a cigarette. The feel of clear skin or a cold body warming up.

I was overtly romantic at some point, and still there seemed to be a problem. Well, yes, apparently there was a problem. I just wasn't told. You think that could mitigate it?

Her desire was mobile, moved continually, or died. To be left standing still, or to be caught, or trapped, was to be left in silence with her own thoughts. To be left with nothing. In the end, it came down to this:

vanity. In retaliation I learned to love it and so revenge its covert form; I admired its extremes. The best dressed and the mirror-struck. I began to afford them the simple respect they deserved. They would be judged on personal taste, self-obsession, or detachment. I knew where to stand and there would always be reflected glory.

There was also The Image all over the rest.

How words betray us, for in saying your image I did not want to make you believe I saw you. No. If only I had! I sometimes tried desperately to see you, by shutting my eyes or just the opposite, by opening them very wide upon the darkness of the room.

There was also "my eye for the ladies," twitching like a maniac, with insane industry, converting someone on the street into something as flat and fleeting as a bus stop Versace poster. (George Melly said that losing his sex drive was like being untethered from a wild beast!)

Not just images and bodies but every material: metal, glass, plastic, fibre. So tactile! The connection between Guy Bourdin's early slides of LA doorways and curbs and his later fashion photographs make exact and perfect sense now. He made connections that would come to define the link between lust and consumerism. He realised this subtle intimacy between things, how it would, in the future, finally determine reaction and response, undercurrent and contours.

This is more to do with blank and obtuse visual dynamics, the awkward and cruel pose of bodies, the sheen of skin glossed into a plastic (fetishist) desire, the sharp colours and angles of concrete curves and corners, corrugated iron doors, road signs, and the discreet order of rock formations (Bourdin's early photos of cliffs and granite structures, and his Kodak slides of LA buildings and road patterns set up the visual lexicon of his fashion photographs - a tactile and textural language is worked out before and directly informs these pictures). Bourdin creates an impersonal visual world (coldness and cruelty) that remains glacial and grotesque in its distance and distortion, and is therefore necessarily and inescapably seductive. A cold eroticism that freezes LA sun. (atff)

It's the distance that compels a desire to touch, or be absorbed. Which makes lust a little sick, or sickly - a total glut, and only those with a taste for the suffocation of hardcore pornography can bypass it completely.

But it is human to search, from lure to lure, for a life that is at last autonomous and authentic.

Otherwise you are caught; and not caught because disgust is inescapable, yes, and also, with luck, there can be personal and physical rapport. Contact of bodes is an escape from image and cloth; the obscure magnetism of smell, touch, humour, empathy, desire. The unraveling. Something mortal and mortifying. Love is a tangle of physical reactions and mental telepathies and a spark of laughter. That's why it fades, or comes undone. Then it leaves the obtuse impression that wrenches.

Dear Darling. Damn your enormous eyes.

This is the short story of our loss, what a fucking waste, or waste of time. It still makes me angry. Incensed, I should say! Speechless! I still blame you, totally. You probably blame me, finally.

The one I loved, no I wouldn't go so far as to discuss her again.

No.

Soft answers.

The good things of life - caviar, plovers' eggs, champagne - it seemed to me it was all as if he had never heard of them, but had discovered them all by himself.

[scottdisco]

i like the albino deer in the goblin boozer (and rather fancy the idea of a scoop in same).

it reminds me of Quillian water.

this was a drink found in the city of Quill in the realm of Brice in the Fighting Fantasy gaming series (the fantasy world of Titan).

it was said to look like water, taste like water, smell of nothing, and three small measures would kill a man.

BTW Luka i hope these coffee outlets in the plague cities don't include yours?

he won't thank me for saying it (i mean, he does work near Soho) but something Oliver once wrote about Zurich was first-rate (FOR THE DELUGE; CITTA blog, September '06), among other bits.

[luka]

i find his current sordid obsessions very saddening. he has lost his soul i think.

[vimothy]

incidently you know who the best writer of prose on this forum is? craner

I agree, though confess that I couldn't read that particular piece any further than "I got a fetish for fucking you with your skirt on".

[craner]

though confess that I couldn't read that particular piece any further than "I got a fetish for fucking you with your skirt on".

Yes, well, ah, that was a snippet of a Ja Rule lyric from the great Ashanti song 'Mesmerized'. The next bit goes: "On a back street in the back seat of a Yukon."

I am actually quite embarrased by that piece, as Luka well knows, though I'm fond of it for other reasons (mostly nostalgic).

[luka]

hhhahahhahha write something new then for fucks sake.... this is your last oppourtunity. once you start teaching those kids are going to suck out all your energy.
you'll just come home, pour a large scotch and collapse in front of the television.
fall asleep on the sofa, hand still clutching glass at 9.45pm. you knoew its true...

[Mr. Tea]

I agree, though confess that I couldn't read that particular piece any further than "I got a fetish for fucking you with your skirt on".

I couldn't help but see that as a set-up for the classic punchline, "Trouble is, the damn thing's much too small for me".


josef k. (what is it with people on here and capital letters?) writes very well, so I was chuffed when he said he liked my line about Capital-ism as a 'disincarnate spiritual vampire'. As far as humour goes I wish Jaie Miller would post more, he was hilarious.

[craner]

you'll just come home, pour a large scotch and collapse in front of the television.
fall asleep on the sofa, hand still clutching glass at 9.45pm. you knoew its true...

What are you on about? Jenks writes poems and runs a family in his spare time and he's a head of department!

I'll probably have more energy than I do now. The kids will galvanize me.

Anyway, you've thoroughly disgraced me on this forum. I'll never live this down.

[scottdisco]

was Ja Rule addressing that line to a willing Ashanti?

if so, and let's be frank here, he's punching above his weight, i fancy