Dreaming of Narwhals

Today is National Flash Fiction Day. I will be hosting a flash slam in Oxford to celebrate. I have also been judging flash fiction – for a super League of Extraordinary Authors competition – you can see my shortlist here and comment on your favourites.
And to celebrate in style, I’ve written my first flash of the year:
You are dreaming of narwhals again.
Last time it happened you woke at 2.56 am and scribbled “John of Patmos, your eschatology lacks narwhals” on a post-it and when you found it in the morning you were so pleased by the line, even though you didn’t have a clue what it meant, that you wrote a poem around it for a slam that night and everyone laughed at you but not in that “you’ve just said something really superficial but I’m going to wet myself because you said cock. Or Rebekah Brooks. Or Rebekah Brooks’ cock” way that people do at slams.
A part of you is trying to remind the you that’s immersed in the dream that the narwhals have not been channelled from the spirit world just to become part of your new masterpiece but of course the dreaming you tells that you to shut the fuck up and it does so so loudly you wake, confused, and scrawl on the bedside table in capitals with a coffee spoon
THE NARWHALS ARE NOT A METAPHOR
You fall back to sleep and find yourself in a dark room. A chandelier comes on and winks gaudily at you and you realise you are at the edge of the swimming pool from THAT scene in the Joan Collins film The Bitch. The pool is filled with the writhing bodies of copulating narwhals crying out as they orgasm
“If we’re a metaphor then so are you. You are a metaphor for the climate change that’s destroying our way of life. Just look at us. Look at the fin de siècle decadence you’ve brought upon us. Look at our horns! We’re Cetacean Dirk Digglers and the 80s are coming!!”
At an existential level you cannot accept the horror of these once innocent creatures descending into orgiastic drug abuse, shoulder pads and Reaganomics and all in a Paul Thomas Anderson film that’s not Magnolia so you place your hands on your ears. You are still screaming
THE NARWHALS ARE NOT A METAPHOR
When you wake, miles from anywhere, and you run home screaming, stopping only to steal a bible from a Christian bookshop because the talk of the fin de siècle has made you want to read the Book of Revelation.
That evening, calmer, you mutter through a performance of Rhinoceros “Fuck you, Ionesco, if my narwhals had been metaphors mine would have been a far better play than yours because mine would have had paddling pools.”
On the way home, two politicians you recognise from the news drag you into an alley. As their boots lay into you, you wait for them to turn into horned creatures of some kind, but they don’t. As you are taking your last breath the pain stops and you see the most wonderful sight. Dipping your toe in the water, you look back one last time, laugh in the politicians’ faces and cry
“John of Patmos, your eschatology lacks narwhals”

Some of These Things Are Beautiful

I am delighted to say that my first solo show, Some of These Things are Beautiful, will be at Cheltenham Poetry Festival on April 24th 2013.

“go out and live. And live. And go on living, because you never know when it’ll stop.” (Katelan Foisy, Blood and Pudding)

Some of These Things Are Beautiful is a lyrical, heartbreaking, but ultimately joyous picaresque across the neon-soaked night cities of the world in search and celebration of lost friends. With influences from Patti Smith and Gregory Corso to Amy Winehouse and The Kills, Some of These Things Are Beautiful is a memoir and a tribute to lives lived short, fast, and full. For people who have forgotten how to live for the moment and how to connect with each other, and a poetic tradition full of family and love that has forgotten how to write about friendship, this show carries a simple warning: cherish the friends you have while you have them. Because one day they will be gone, and all you will be able to do is try and fail to write poetry about how you wish you’d loved them more.

Dan Holloway is an award-winning novelist, poet, and journalist, and is the MC of touring spoken word show The New Libertines. His works deal with disconnectedness and the seeming impossibility of relationships in the modern world. In 2010 he won Literary Death Match with his story The Last Fluffer in La La Land, an account of the last human relationship.

The Next Big Thing: Kill Land

The idea of this is that a writer puts up a post on his or her own blog answering ten questions about his/her work in progress, and then “tags” three – or five, depending on which version you see – other writers to do the same. Then, the writer posts a link to his/her “tagger” and to the people he/she is “tagging” so that readers who are interested can visit those pages and perhaps discover some new authors whose work they’d like to read. I was tagged by Jill Marsh, author of Raw material
 http://jjmarsh.wordpress.com/
I have loved Jill’s work pretty much since I joined the online writing community, and it’s been wonderful following her progress recently with Triskele, seeing everything come to fruition for her. She is a writer who conveys an incredible, intense sense of place, making the land into a central character in her books.

The writers I have tagged in my turn appear at the bottom of this post.

What is the working title for your book? 
Kill Land 

Where did the idea come from for this book? 
This book has been sitting there for longer than I can remember, waiting to be written. It combines the two things that are at the centre of all my books – how we define ourselves amid the fragmentation of our modern, virtual world; and the fallout from the collapse of the former Soviet Bloc. In this case I have taken three lives, one that is lived almost totally online, one that is the empty relic of a childhood torn apart in the dying Yugoslavia, and one that is lived completely off the grid. The lives of the three women intersect at one point – the body of a murdered charity worker who spent years in Kosovo.

What genre does your book fall under? 
I don’t really know. Literary fiction I guess, with magic realist elements, maybe – Keph, a street poet, believes that she can sense when someone is about to die (and she then latches onto them to get to their innermost secrets, out of which she fashions poems so that she can keep their memories alive), and Bex, a disaffected rich teenager who spends most of her time in chatrooms, believes she can summon the souls of the dead by playing the violin. Those things aren’t treated as paranormal, they’re just – if they’re real – part of our world. Sort of the way the porous boundaries of our world work in Murakami.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 
Dani, the Kosovan refugee and now a detective working the murder investigation, would be played by Olga Fedori, who played Frieda Petrenko in Holby. The other two characters – I’d have to choose people from the poetry scene – I’d love Kate Tempest to play Keph. I don’t know about Bex, but someone in the alt lit scene would be great.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? 
Three women’s lives come together when a charity worker is found dead in Oxford and slowly unravel as we are led into the darkest recesses of Europe’s recent history and the human heart.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 
Strictly self-published!

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 
I’ve been trying to write it for about three years and now I’m ready. I aim to finish during Nano.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Ooh, very hard to say. Np by Banna Yoshimoto for the mix of the banal and everyday, the slightly surreal and the stomach-turning; Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher for the intensity of the interplay and the use of sex as a painkilling distraction. Of course Dubravka Ugresic’s Ministry of Pain, the book about the break up of Yugoslavia and its consequences. Stylistically, like a lot of my writing it’s both lyrical and minimalist in a mix of Murakami and Tao Lin way, and structurally it’s got a lot in common with some of the Kundera books I admire most like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Immortality. It might be easier to do an “if you like this you’ll like” playlist, which is what I usually do to get something of the mood and feeling of my books across – for all I love the conceptual and experimental, my work is deeply emotional, and the emotion the reader feels is the thing that matters most:
Video Games
 
Come to Daddy
 
Roads
 
There There
 
Bruises

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 
I think much of it comes down to being a student from 1989 onwards, first with the fall of the Berlin Wall and then following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the imploding of Yugoslavia and the horrors of Kosovo. All that and a burgeoning fascination with Young British Art.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 
Well, people who have read my work before will be pleased (or sickened) to learn that the usual motifs are there – there’s an exhibition at an art gallery where the laws of physics are suspended (I don’t think I’m capable of writing a book without a supernatural art gallery any more. I don’t think I’d ever want to read a book without one, and when I do read books without one, that’s always the thing I think would make it better); there is also no discernible plot, no attempt to resolve the undiscernible plot, lots of loud music and few if any physical descriptions of the characters. Other points on the Dan’s writing checklist – no male characters of any note or roundedness other than dead one, lots of music, set in Oxford, very few scenes set during the hours of daylight, the occasional highly graphic piece of sickening ultraviolence in amongst general gentleness, lots of action takes place online.

 *** The following three writers are all exceptionally talented, which is why I am tagging them for The Next Big Thing.

Dianne Greenlay

Born and raised on the Canadian prairies, Dianne Greenlay saves lives by day (she is a physiotherapist in a remote sole charge clinic as well as a retired EMT and frequently hears from her patients, "You gotta help me with this pain - it's just killin' me!" - so she does, and they seem to live through it), and she tells lies by night (as any entertaining fiction writer would do). She is also an amateur playwright and Creative Director of a long-running community theatre group.
Her debut novel, Quintspinner - A Pirate's Quest is the first book in an intended trilogy, and the pirate topic came about as the result of a Google search gone wrong. Quintspinner has gone on to win multiple awards in Best YA, Best Commercial, and Best Historical categories.
Dianne is fluent in at least her mother tongue and she thanks her fierce english teachers for that. More of her thoughts on life can be found at www.diannegreenlay.com .

John A A Logan

John A. A. Logan is the author of The Survival of Thomas Ford (winner of a Special Award in the eFestival of Words Best of the Independent eBooks Awards 2012), and Storm Damage. 
His fiction has been published by Picador, Vintage, Edinburgh Review, Chapman, Northwords, Nomad, Secrets of a View, and Scratchings; with reviews of his work in Scottish Studies Review, Scotland On Sunday, The Spectator, and The Hindustan Times.
His work has been published internationally in anthologies edited by A L Kennedy, John Fowles, Ali Smith, Toby Litt; and he has been invited to read his work at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

John blogs on the 11th of each month for Authors Electric, and is also a member of the League of Extraordinary Authors, and the Alliance of Independent Authors (where The Survival of Thomas Ford is currently “Book of the Month” for November)

www.johnaalogan.com

Cameron Lawon

Cameron is originally a Scot but now naturalised French. Writes in several genres under different pen-names and has two new full-length novels coming out at the end of the year. Passions include motorbikes and dogs.

http://www.cameron-lawton.com/ 

download steve roggenbuck for free

 

click on the image above or on this sentence to download the free pdf.  Click on this sentence to download for free in all other ebook formats.

"steve roggenbuck" printed in every font on my computer's version of Microsoft Word (except for Helvetica [except on the cover])

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this is geoffrey hill’s poetry spread-eagled across the red tops for unspeakable crimes against, you know, that kid that went missing that no one can remember the name of but we all vaguely remember the photo and some placards about how awful it was misspelt and providing fidget distractions for hands that would rather burn libraries

this is geoffrey hill’s poetry after it was strangled and anally and vaginally raped by someone in that bolaño novel

this is geoffrey hill’s poetry after i got sick of it and wandered off to listen to justin bieber fellating lolcatz instead

this is geoffrey hill’s poetry when it wasn’t crucified in piss christ

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this is geoffrey hill’s poetry after you spent every existential crisis pulling it apart and your poetry was still more shit

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this is geoffrey hill’s poetry so now do you understand why there’s knife crime and sex trafficking and overdoses in stairwells when kids get in from school and find their dealer pimping out their baby sister while she’s still in the pram and the green belt sometimes looks ever so slightly yellow

this is geoffrey hill’s poetry graffiti it on ministerial car doors and scribble it under the wigs of gameshow hosts and tattoo it on the inside of the cheek of every celebrity chef with their own kebab skewer

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this is geoffrey hill’s poetry it’s been locked away so long its eyes have evolved themselves out of existence but that’s ok because every other sense has evolved to compensate and that’s why it’s so fucking perceptive

this is geoffrey hill’s poetry cold and alone somewhere at the edge of a ghost-town watching the lights go out one by one

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all of these taxonomies are political

 

Click the image above or click here to download your free copy of all these taxonomies are political, or visit the book's smashwords page for a free copy in all ebook formats. 

This book is an examination of the depth to which the associations we make are hard-wired into us, and the lengths to which we are pushed if we want to free ourselves of these associations. It puts the question whether we can tunnel so deep inside the constructs that constitute our world, surround ourselves and familiarise ourselves with them so much that they become first banal, then meaningless, then empty, and finally receptacles for our own making of the world anew.

That is to say, it puts the question of the possibility of hope.

 I have chosen the limerick format because to many early twenty first century readers in the Anglophone world it is both the most familiar form and that whose association, of jaunty rhythm and glib content, is the one we recognise the most easily. It is, therefore, our perfect Virgil to lead us through the Underworld of ever deepening assumptions of necessary connection that are increasingly hidden from us, where our consciousness of their necessity is increasingly fixed and increasingly false. Associations that include but are not restricted to (and come without orer in any sense):
Rhythm/mood Words/meaning
People/bodies
Genitalia/gender
Ordering/ordering – that is, Positioning/hierarchy
A list/the completeness of that list in the mind of its compiler
What is written/its susceptibility to a Freudian reading

This is a free version of the book, because I believe that, as art designed to widen the boundaries of culture, no one should be barred from reading it. If you can afford, and if you consider such art and literature important, any donation you are able to make wil give me the time to keep writing. You can donate by Paypal to sonsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com Thank you.

These limericks are designed to be read aloud or sounded out in the reader’s head

Squee! Why I'm excited that My Piece About Alt Lit is in the Guardian

Yesterday the Guardian published a piece of mine about where in the literary world writers are getting to grips with the internet and its impact on our lives their books blog (even better, they had asked me to write it). 

Here it is 

The really exciting news is that the piece is a chance to talk in a mainstream cultural arena about the literary underground, specifically about the world of alt lit. I got to talk about the theoretical importance of experimental self-published literature that reuses, remixes, and reedits the internet so as to interrogate and reflect it and its impact on our lives, psyches, and souls. Which is what I've been dreaming of for ages - not just self-published literature being taken seriously as a subject but self-published material that's utterly uncommercial (almost all of it's free), obscure, and almost totally unedited - in other words material that doesn't recognise the norms of "professional standards" but deliberately distances itself from it and bases its value on entirely separate cultural criteria.

And even better still has been the reaction - both the positive (random strangers tweeting each other the article and saying they loved it and it was an article that needed to be written) and the negative (a healthy dose on Facebook of people outraged and saying "that's not art" and "how dare they" - in other words, the same kind of outrage as people have for conceptual art).

Fingers crossed it's the start of some real progress in getting the media to take cutting edge self-published literature seriously as an art form. And do check out the links in the piece to some truly remarkable pieces of writing