It must surely be more stimulating to the reader’s senses if, instead of writing “He made a hurried meal off the Plat du Jour—excellent cottage pie and vegetables, followed by home-made trifle” (I think this is a fair English menu without burlesque), you write “Being instinctively mistrustful of all Plats du Jour, he ordered four fried eggs cooked on both sides, hot buttered toast and a large cup of black coffee.” No difference in price here, but the following points should be noted: firstly, we all prefer breakfast foods to the sort of food one usually gets at luncheon and dinner; secondly, this is an independent character who knows what he wants and gets it; thirdly, four fried eggs has the sound of a real man’s meal and, in our imagination, a large cup of black coffee sits well on our taste buds after the rich, buttery sound of the fried eggs and the hot buttered toast.
Posted 1578 days ago.
So about two weeks ago I was about to start in on the last scene, and here I am, two weeks later, just about to finish it. —This is not so much a bad thing; in those two weeks I essentially rewrote the entire first draft, soup to nuts, and it’s tighter, each scene with its purpose at least in mind if not revealed, much closer to what I usually consider to be my level and standard of first draft: tight, clean, purposeful.
But it’s not so much a good thing, either: I’m falling behind what passes for a schedule around here, a passing fancy I’d been managing to keep to for the first time in a while.
I’m still ambivalent, aren’t I. —Among the 22 novelettes that (will come to) make up Spring; Summer, this one, no. 37, lines up with the Temperance card: the angel, sat upon the bank of a river or a crick, engrossed in pouring water or liquor from the one cup to the other, waiting, perhaps, for the corpse of an enemy to float on by, I don’t know. Balance. Moderation. Patience—but also neither fish nor fowl. An April 25th type of deal, which isn’t nearly as amusing on a May 14th without much rain.
The lesson to’ve been learned from writing this thirty-seventh novelette would seem to’ve been that it’s one thing to know what needs to be said, and to whittle and shape and reframe until you figure out how it’s going to be said; it’s another entirely to have a flavor in mind, a taste in the head, a how that some as-yet unknown thing ought to be said, and to flail about in the finding of what it is that ought to be said in this way. (At least, you flail enough, there’s something there to be whittled and shaped and etc. —Appearances, and there being enough thereof.) —I believe, rather late in the day, I’ve finally settled on the order of the scenes; now, I just need to do that final editing pass, and then get the copies finaled and polished for the patreons, and then, and then—
But! I (still) don’t mean to alarm anymore than I do to exult. It’s doable, yet, or it yet looks doable from here: to have no. 37 done and dusted before Memorial Day. You’ll be kept posted. —In the meanwhile, here’s the photo that’s going on the cover. Enjoy!
Posted 1581 days ago.
(Originally posted on the Patreon.)
Ruslan Lobanov is one of the most popular artists in the post–Soviet Union space. He isn’t a classical author of art photography. It’s something more than that. Нe defines his genre as a cinematic photography. Uniqueness of Ruslan’s photos based on analog technologies that he used for their realization. Mystery and elaborate elements of female nakedness, which blend harmoniously with collectible accessories, handmade costumes and attentively selected locations, are embodiment of the Photographer’s perception of the World. Ruslan Lobanov compares photo with a puzzle. The main satisfaction for creator is a final result, which is admirable by fans.
Posted 1586 days ago.
If you could make a change to anything you’ve written over the years, what would it be?
In The Dispossessed, I would mention the communal pickle barrels at street corners in the big towns, restocked by whoever in the community has made or kept more pickles than they need. I knew about the free pickles all along, but never could fit them into the book.
Posted 1596 days ago.
Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring.
We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don’t live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.
Posted 1625 days ago.
I knew that I wanted it to be a little wrong. I’d like to make this, like, a little bit funny. Take this a little too far. So I did the tie-dye, which was pink and purple on the pants, I went a little further with the Home Depot chains. There’s gotta be something wrong about anything that you do, otherwise it’s just plain old cliché.
Posted 1633 days ago.
Here we are: the next chapbook is about to hit the shelves, just about two months since the last one was published. It would appear that such a schedule as exists is finally being kept! For now.
If you were to accept, for a moment, for the sake of play, the discredited notion that the reason why I decided upon 22 chapbooks per season (11, per volume) is because there are 22 cards in the Major Arcana of most tarot decks (and not, as is well known, because there used to be 22 episodes, on average, in the seasons of old-skool Yankee television shows), well. If you then were to set the chapbooks of this season (Spring; Summer) next to the cards of the Major Arcana, as if the one somehow had something to do with the other, well: this next chapter, no. 36, “ – so powerfully strong – ”, would be right there next to Death. —Make of that what you might.
The first draft came in at 17,044 words; the (nearly) final cut’s a trim 15,250, though just last night I cut five words, and significantly altered the trajectory and velocity of a major character’s path through what’s to come. We’ll see what else might happen before it’s published.
Patreons have of course already seen the cover, and will shortly be getting their ebooks and ’zines; everyone else will get a chance to see the cover when it’s posted for sale, but: if you follow the Pixelfed, you might’ve seen the underlying image. —I was walking home after one of Tonkon Torp’s annual parties—the one, in fact, where I’d spontaneously shot the cover of Good Queen Dick from a corner of their lobby—and as I made my way on foot down a freshly washed Hawthorne, I happened to see where the rain that had occasioned that bow still beaded the tables that had been set on a sidewalk outside a club, and so. —An image of a another world.
No. 36. Three chapters in, just over a quarter of the way through this volume. The free installments will appear on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, beginning April 12th; in the meanwhile, there’s no. 37 to begin, and finish. That one would be laid against Temperance; perhaps it’s best we keep our enthusiasm in check. After all: if we can’t be mirrors—or is it rabbits?—we’ll be friends.
Posted 1645 days ago.
(Originally posted on the Patreon.)
It is partly this tact which makes Marvell’s puns charming and not detached from his poetry; partly something more impalpable, that he manages to feel Elizabethan about them, to imply that it was quite easy to produce puns and one need not worry about one’s dignity in the matter. It became harder as the language was tidied up, and one’s dignity was more seriously engaged. For the Elizabethans were quite prepared, for instance, to make a pun by a mispronunciation, would treat puns as mere casual bricks, requiring no great refinement, of which any number could easily be collected for a flirtation or indignant harangue. By the time English had become anxious to be “correct” the great thing about a pun was that it was not a Bad Pun, that it satisfied the Unities and what-not; it could stand alone and would expect admiration, and was a much more elegant affair.
Posted 1648 days ago.
A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.
Posted 1656 days ago.
It would be interesting to take one of the vast famous passages of the work and show how these devices are fitted together into larger units of rhythm, but having said that every use of the stanza includes all these uses in the reader’s apprehension of it I may have said enough to show the sort of methods Spenser had under his control; why it was not necessary for him to concentrate on the lightning flashes of ambiguity.
The size, the possible variety, and the fixity of this unit give something of the blankness that comes from fixing your eyes on a bright spot; you have to yield yourself to it very completely to take in the variety of its movement, and, at the same time, there is no need to concentrate the elements of the situation into a judgment as if for action. As a result of this, when there are ambiguities of idea, it is whole civilisations rather than details of the moment which are their elements; he can pour into the even dreamwork of his f--ryland Christian, classical, and chivalrous materials with an air, not of ignoring their differences, but of holding all their systems of values floating as if at a distance, so as not to interfere with one another, in the prolonged and diffused energies of his mind.
Posted 1680 days ago.
