Consider What Becomes of the Ashes by pixelnyx

As previously mentioned on this blog, pixelnyx is an extraordinary talent.

Any writer who's interested in self-publishing online should take a look at pixelnyx's website to see how it's done.

While you're there, make sure to read / purchase / download the short novel, 'Consider What Becomes of the Ashes'.

Set in the invented world of LaGatta, the book tells the story of soldier-turned-sex-worker Noah, and Penrith, his unlikely lover.

I can honestly say I've never read anything like this before.

The closest comparison I can make is Jeanette Winterson, because pixelnyx shares Winterson's gift for dark, intense and poetic prose. The author mentions being greatly influenced by Will Self - although pixelnyx's style is much more minimalist than Self's.

Like the above writers, pixelnyx's work operates outside the parameters of any genre. 'Consider What Becomes of the Ashes could be called fantasy or 'queer lit', or steampunk (the author's preferred term), but any label is bound to be misleading.

I don't know whether pixelnyx is a man or a woman, but that doesn't matter - in fact, I think it's good that we don't know anything about the author. I have much respect for people who write under anonymous aliases. The work isn't about the author. The work is about the work.

Anyway, pixelnyx deserves to be massive, and I hope that he or she achieves global fame sometime soon.


All the info at http://pixelnyx.com/

Tom Lehrer - We Will All Go Together When We Go

Les Murray

Here's a link through to the website of one of the world's greatest living poets, Les Murray.

http://www.lesmurray.org/

The site features quite a few of his poems, but it's fair to say this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Here's a powerful example from his 2006 collection, The Biplane Houses:


On the North Coast Line

The train coming on up the Coast
fitting like a snake into water
is fleeing the sacrificial crust
of suburbs built into fire forest.
Today, smoke towers above there.

We've winged along sills of the sea
we've traversed the Welsh and Geordie
placenames where pickaxe coughing
won coal from miners' crystal lungs.
No one aboard looks wealthy:

wives, non-drivers, Aborigines,
sun-crackled workers. The style
of country trains isn't lifestyle.
River levees round old chain-gang towns
fall away behind our run of windows.

By cuttings like hangars filled with rock
to Stroud Road, and Stratford on the Avon,
both named by Robert Dawson, who ordered
convicts hung for drowning Native children
but the Governor stopped him. God

help especially the underdogs of underdogs
and the country now is spread hide
harnessed with sparse human things
and miles ahead, dawning into mind
under its approaching cobalt-inked

Chinese scroll of drapefold mountains
waits Dawson's homesick Gloucester
where Catholics weren't allowed to live.
There people crowd out onto the platform
to blow smoke like a regiment, before windows

carry them on, as ivory phantoms
who might not quip, or sue,
between the haunches of the hills
where the pioneer Isabella Mary Kelly
(She poisons flour! Sleeps with bushrangers

She flogs her convicts herself!)
refusing any man's protection
rode with pocket pistols. Which
on this coast, made her the Kelly
whom slander forced to bear the whole guilt,

when it was real, of European settlement.
Now her name gets misremembered:
Kelly's crossing, Kate Kelly's Crossing
and few battlers on this train
think they live in a European settlement

and on a platform down the first
subtropic river, patched velvet girls
get met by their mothers' lovers,
lawn bowlers step down clutching their nuclei
and a walking frame is hoisted yea! like swords.

Annie Villeneuve - Un Homme

Submissions now closed

OK, we're full up for the rest of this year, so Philistine Press submissions are now closed until 2013.

We have some phenomenal stuff on the way...

Letter to the Mother by by Mazen Kerbaj

As you'll know if you're a regular visitor, I use this blog to talk about good things I found on the net.

I'm aware that I probably sound over-enthusiastic and probably overuse the word 'great'.

But, believe me, the story I'm linking through to below is a truly exceptional accomplishment and needs to be read by absolutely everyone. You won't be disappointed.

Letter to the Mother by Mazen Kerbaj

Published on Words Without Borders

Translated by Mazen Kerbaj and Ahmad Gharbieh

Kerbaj's work is new to me, but no doubt I'll be talking about him more in the future.

His website is http://www.kerbaj.com/

“Here” by Philip Larkin

A great film, adding extra power to the Larkin poem...

Interview - Frederick A. Lierman

Frederick A. Lierman interviewed by Frank Burton

Frederick's short story collection, Buryin' Gran, is available to read online or download for free here.





When did you start writing short stories?

I wrote my first story in junior high, in ninth grade, I think. It was dreadful. The only good thing I can say about it is I actually finished it. After that, I started a number of stories and never finished them. Somewhere along the line, they bogged down and left me scratching my head wondering why, what had seemed like a good idea, had foundered. And somewhere along the way it occurred to me that, if I was trying to say something and I couldn't find an interesting way to say it, it probably didn't need to be said. That was lesson number one. After that, I could start things and finish them, even if most of them weren't particularly good.

The first time I had any success was when I entered a short-short, it had to be under 2000 words, into the Writer's Digest short-short contest. The story was called "Roots," about an old widower who lived alone in a small farmhouse in the North Carolina foothills. The story takes place on what was supposed to be his last day there; he was leaving to go live in Asheville (hill country town in North Carolina) with his surviving son, and he decides not to go. It won a prize in that contest. The first three prizes were money, and the winner also got published. I got a book.

I had thought it was a good story and the recognition, small though it was, was gratifying. I think it could have spurred me to write more, but time was at a premium then. I was a new father, and I was working second and third jobs so I could pay for the college courses I was taking then. Most often, I turned to poetry, and I didn't have time for much of that. If I was writing a paper and found myself looking out the window composing a poem and not writing the paper, then I would give in and write what was really on my mind. Poetry worked, though, because I got a thought and started writing, and I usually finished it in the first sitting.


Would you say there are underlying themes which tie all the stories in Buryin' Gran together?

These stories were all written at different times, and I can't say what it was that triggered most of them. The deer for the "The Hunters" and "History," and there is a lot of time fishing from a canoe that entered into the character of "History." "Is It a Hallmark?" was another class assignment to write something trite. I think I accomplished that, but I had fun doing it. Of course, "Conversation on a Foggy Morning" and "Tuesday Morning" go together, and there is a third piece in the back of my head that has Dean returning home a widower. It wasn't written at the time because, to tell the truth, I found it hard to write. Maybe it will get written, and maybe it won't.

"Buryin' Gran" was originally conceived as a performance poem, but before I put pen to paper it grew beyond that. So, no underlying theme ties them all together.


Your stories have a strong emotional impact without being sentimental or melodramatic. Is this a difficult feat to accomplish?

The second lesson I learned was in a creative writing class, when the professor, Dean Baker, said, "Show, don't tell. 'The king died and then the queen died' is narrative. 'The king died and the queen died of grief'' is a story." Show, don't tell is a great lesson, one that not all writers ever accomplish. I have a story you might see some day in which the protagonist has left his old dog with a neighbor while he was away for the weekend. When he returns to pick up the dog he has a conversation in the house.

"Captain behave for you?" he said, scratching the dog behind the ears.

"'Course. Mostly ate a bit, drank a bit, slept a lot. Doesn't seem to be as interested in sniffin' and whizzin as he usta," said Matthew.

"Shit," he said.

"Something the matter?" said Anne from the kitchen doorway.

"Dogs don't live forever," he said.

I can see the exchange in my mind, and I can feel the emotions of both men, Matthew not wanting to state the obvious, and the protagonist not wanting to recognize it. To me that is enough. I work at keeping to images, to showing, not telling, and I think that's why you don't feel hit over the head with it. There is a movie, "Glory," about our civil war. In a scene near the end of the movie the character Matthew Broderick plays is mounted on a horse watching a most glorious sunrise. I don't know how the scene was done, but the cut they used does not show faces and does not have words, but I knew that he knew that he was seeing his last sunrise. I try to work like that.


Who are your influences?

Every good writer I have ever read. A sign of good writing is when you don't notice the writing. Another sign is when the characters become people, and you realize about fifty pages from the end that pretty soon, you will be setting these people aside, and they won't be part of your life anymore. "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe," by Fannie Flag was like that.


Are any of the stories autobiographical?

None. I see from my characters' eyes, sometimes first person, and sometimes third person. I try to make what they say and do true to the character I'm creating. Sometimes it starts with a brief encounter or experience but none of the stories were part of my life except through the process of conceiving and telling. I think the first stories I sent you were obviously entirely different from the stories in this collection so you can see that my mind runs in many different directions.


Have you considered writing a novel?

I've started several, and I have one going on in my head right now. That brings me to the third lesson I learned, which was also from Dean Baker. "Write about what you know," he said. That has merit, because, if you write about what you know, you don't make obvious mistakes. I hate to be reading something and run across elements that just don't fit reality. One book I read was set in the early 1920s, and everyone had a phone, a dial phone. Most people didn't have phones then, and the ones that did were jiggle the hook and then say, "Hello, Central?" My family didn't have our own phone until 1954. Another book had a character getting on a Boeing 707 in 1944 and flying to Venezuela, I think. The 707 didn't go into service until late in 1958, and even then, it was not a common carrier.

So I write about what I know, which means if I ever complete a novel, it will be pretty pedestrian, because my life is pedestrian, like most of our lives. There is a lot to be said about a pedestrian novel, though. John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1962 or 1963 for "The Winter of Our Discontent," which, like his other works, was pedestrian. The thing is, pedestrian though it may be, there is in that work and all his works, an underlying tension that drives, not the everyday events, but the story and its resolution.

If I do my research and finish the novel, you'll see it.


How do you feel about online publishing?

Blessing and a curse. Blessing because there are more good stories and poetry written than were ever published before, so online publishing has provided many writers a voice. Since it doesn't cost anything, or much, there is a lot of crap, too.

Curse, because I like to stand in real bookstores and have real books in my hands. I suspect online publishing will put an eventual end to both.

hlo.hu

A great discovery here - an English-language site dedicated to Hungarian literature:

http://www.hlo.hu/

Alongside the numerous articles on Hungarian writers, there's poetry and short stories. Lots of 'em.

By way of an example, this is a poem by Péter Kántor, translated by Michael Blumenthal:


What Does God Need to Know?

God needs to know I’m counting on him,
that I need him,
that I trust him,

that he can count on me,
that he needs me,
that he can trust me,

that, however things may turn out,
he can’t behave like a bank manager
or a Prime Minister or a beauty queen,

that, however things may turn out,
I can’t behave like a bank manager
or a Prime Minister or a beauty queen,

that I don’t expect him to vacuum everywhere,
to shake the carpets, to go for a swim,
and to give up smoking,

that he shouldn’t expect me to vacuum everywhere,
to shake the carpets, to go for a swim,
and to give up smoking,

that he should take into consideration
that not only good things may have good consequences,
he shouldn’t want to be perfect
and shouldn’t want the world to be perfect either,

that I should take into consideration
that not only good things may have good consequences,
that I don’t want to be perfect
and don’t want the world to be perfect either,

that nonetheless there are limits,
that he shouldn’t think I forget to hold
the irredeemable things against him,

that nonetheless there are limits,
that I don’t think he forgets to hold
the irredeemable things against me,

that in the end, even if no one owes anyone anything,
he surely owes me
himself

that in the end, even if no one owes anyone anything,
I surely owe him
Myself.

"O Tell Me the Truth About Love" by W.H. Auden

Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto

Here's a very short excerpt from Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto - you'll find the full text here.

Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness from certain associations. The pieces of paper that Picasso and Braque insert into their work have the same value as the introduction of a platitude into a literary analysis of the most rigorous sort. It is even permissible to entitle POEM what we get from the most random assemblage possible (observe, if you will, the syntax) of headlines and scraps of headlines cut out of the newspapers:

POEM

A burst of laughter

of sapphire in the island of Ceylon

The most beautiful straws

HAVE A FADED COLOR

UNDER THE LOCKS

on an isolated farm

FROM DAY TO DAY

the pleasant

grows worse

coffee

preaches for its saint

THE DAILY ARTISAN OF YOUR BEAUTY

MADAM,

a pair

of silk stockings

is not

A leap into space

A STAG

Love above all

Everything could be worked out so well

PARIS IS A BIG VILLAGE

Watch out for

the fire that covers

THE PRAYER

of fair weather

Know that

The ultraviolet rays

have finished their task

short and sweet

THE FIRST WHITE PAPER

OF CHANCE

Red will be

The wandering singer

WHERE IS HE?

in memory

in his house

AT THE SUITORS’ BALL

I do

as I dance

What people did, what they’re going to do