Biblio-Something

My body is still on sleep rebellion.

So.

Your humouring me only requires you to either read or not read the list of things I mean to read/finish reading in the next year or so. (It's 5am. I'm out of things to do. I'm making a list.) Feel free to judge my reading tastes.



Tokyo Fiancee - Amelie Nothomb
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying - Sogyal Rinpoche
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
The Invisibles - Grant Morrison
The Man who Tasted Shapes - Richard Cytowic
Smoke and Mirrors - Neil Gaiman
Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman
Meridian - Alice Walker
Red Dust - Ma Jian
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Stranger Things Happen - Kelly Link
Lizard - Banana Yoshimoto
N.P - Banana Yoshimoto
Newlywed - Banana Yoshimoto
I Haven't Dreamed of Flying for a While - Taichi Yamada
Coin Locker Babies - Ryu Murakami
Piercing - Ryu Murakami
Out - Natsuo Kirino
Pagan Paths - Pete Jennings
The Beauty Myth - Naomi Wolf
The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly
9 Stories - J.D Salinger
Claudine at School - Colette
Claudine in Paris - Colette
The Garlic Ballads - Mo Yan
Little Birds - Anais Nin
Sin City: Hell and Back - Frank Miller

Two Things.

1: Library Porn.

2: My 'Present for the Wolf' fairytale is in the Christmas edition of the very lovely Danse Macabre. I think I still have another couple of pieces forthcoming over there in another edition...

Multiply Affected

I am Effect #5 in WiredWriter's Verdrahtet's 'Multiple Effects.'


And there's a small person hanging off an eyeball to complement my seduction-by-intestines in the Clockwise Cat.

(Complement? Compliment?)

Sweetmeat

He folds her eyelids shut like window-blinds, strokes her marzipan cheek.
Once more, he promises her that this icing will make spun-sugar of her existence. Make her every memory light as a shaken snow-globe's flurry. Make her ready.

He lifts his brush and paints her lips, her eyes, her cheekbones, with demerara. Careful brush-strokes until she fades out beneath the sugar-sheen.

Smoothes the rectangular label onto her soft white forehead.


Ready.

And I want to know which words they are.

I'm making all sorts of changes, and just hoping routine will act as momentum.

I want to feel like I'm treating myself properly, boosting my health and energy in every way I can, helping to shed some tired old stuff. It's just past new moon. It feels like the right time.

I'm meditating each day. It feels good. It feels, each time, like I'm reminding myself what it's like to be inside my body. I have a tendency, if I'm not careful, to soak up other people's energies like a hoover, to suck up busy places, and odd atmospheres, until I'm exhausted, overloaded. I figure the more firmly I am within my own skin, the more protected from that I'll be.

I've started acupuncture again. It feels lovely. I'm cutting down refined sugars. I'm veering back towards veganism. Not in a rigid way (I'm keeping honey in. I'm still wearing leather shoes.) But I've got no real reason for eating flesh-based foods, meat-eater's guilt, and a well-developed wish to make life for my body as easy and gentle as possible. I don't want anything too unflexible. If I crave seafood occasionally and eat it, I figure that's cool. I just partly want to minimise harm I'm doing in the world right now, balance out how take take take I feel.

It's a good start, so far. I'm very good at beginnings. They're always false starts until it turns out I'm ready, and then finally I gain momentum.

For all of this, I feel like I need a new vice.
Something gritty.

Blame this on the boogie.

Earlier, the friendly man at the cornershop asked me:

'How's mum?'

'Mum's well...'

'What's mum's name?'

'Mum's name is Sandra.'

'Ah, that's nice and easy.'

I'm fairly certain the bloke at the cornershop has never met 'mum.' 'Mum' lives in a different city. I'm thinking he maybe thinks I'm an overdeveloped fourteen year old?

And on the subject of odd things it's probably better not to attempt to explain, I wrote this silly absurd little story about Michael Jackson roleplay. I hadn't realised it had been accepted, but I'm pleased to see it appearing here in the Less Than Three Absurdist anthology, alongside work by Michael J Solender, Michael Purfield, Justynn Tyme, Brian Cutean, Doug Mathewson, and Paul D Brazil.

It's put together by Lynn Alexander, the very talented editor of Full of Crow, and Jeff Calico, writer of oddly poignant minimalistic absurdities. Info about Jeff's upcoming zine Negative Suck can be found here.

...And now I want to cartwheel

A couple of my poems: 'Variations on I love you' and 'Thud' are bleeding all over the new issue of Gutter Eloquence. Really cool to have some work up there again.

'...Amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.'

- Barbara Kingsolver, 'Animal Dreams'

Three dolls with 'issues'

I have: some very sparkly legwarmers, some rather fabulous tights, a distinctly tedious cold, and a much lower danger of electrocution than I have been at all week.
And newly reddened hair. (This has either little or nothing to do with the electrocution thing.)

I found a disc edition of the ever-wonderful Sein und Werden in my letterbox earlier. It features art, spoken pieces, poetry, and prose. All of an existentialist, surrealist, or expressionist nature.
This edition includes three very fucked up doll pieces of mine. They seem to be in good company.

'Disenthralled' Launched

Walter Conley has launched a new zine: Disenthralled.

Catch the first issue here, including a few sentences from me. Thanks for asking me to be a part of this, Walter.


And catch some awesome poems of Walter's here.