Scribd, again

Selections from all three of my 2012 books are now up at Scribd. If you desire to commune (and sometimes frolic) with me, you can read a novel (/A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage), a collection of poems(The Foliate Head), or an epic adventure in verse (Thaliad.) It's a bit boggling, my 2012, between bringing out those books and serving on the judging panel for the NBA-YPL.

Wee vacation to The Purple Island

Last night I went to choir practice and discovered that I can sing again, albeit with occasional coughing bouts. But I felt laid low and slumped into bed afterward. Then I wrote two posts this morning and deleted them both out of boredom with myself and the subjects, one about the teetering status of the in-residence 4-year college education and what that might mean for writers in academia, and the other was--well, who cares what that one was about! Afterward, for some mad reason I remembered and felt impelled to reread a few parts of The Purple Island by Phineas Fletcher, a 1633 long poem about the human body. I first read it an astonishing number of years ago: better not to consider! Fletcher was an influence for Milton.

Here is a rather absurd sample:

    The Urine-lake drinking his colour’d brook,
By little swells, and fills his stretching sides:
But when the stream the brink ‘gins over-look, 
A sturdy groom empties the swelling tides;
    Sphincter some call; who if he loosed be,
    Or stiffe with cold, out flows the senselesse sea, 
And rushing unawares covers the drowned lea.

Here's a better fragment (Canto 7, stanzas 10-11), and one that lets one see why Milton liked and was influenced by him:

When that great Lord his standing Court would build, 
The outward walls with gemmes and glorious lights, 
But inward rooms with nobler Courtiers fill’d; 
Pure, living flames, swift, mighty, blessed sprites: 
      But some his royall service (fools!) disdain; 
      So down were flung: (oft blisse is double pain) 
In heav’n they scorn’d to serve, so now in hell they reigne. 

There turn’d to serpents, slown with pride and hate, 
Their Prince a Dragon fell, who burst with spight 
To see this Kings and Queens yet happy state, 
Tempts them to lust and pride, prevails by slight: 
      To make them wise, and gods he undertakes. 
      Thus while the snake they heare, they turn to snakes; 
To make them gods he boasts, but beasts, and devils makes. 

I'm not sure about the "slown." Transcription error in the online copy? "Sown?" "Slow?" "Slown" is not in the O. E. D.

Childe Phoenix

This month a story originally published in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet will be reprinted in Lightspeed. "Prolegomenon to the Adventures of Childe Phoenix" is one of my stranger stories, involving a death, chasmic separation, and a young boy's departure into the great outer world. In its surreal elements I see obsessions that I have also dealt with in poetry. In addition, there is an interview with me. The full issue is available February 1st as an ebook from Lightspeed Magazine: Science Fiction and Fantasy; otherwise, I'll be up some time in February. Here's the table of contents.

At Scribd and in the Red Room...

THE RED ROOM

"The Red Room" makes me think of Jane Eyre, flung inside to contemplate her wicked behavior... But nothing bad happens to me there; in fact tomcatintheredroom (Tom of Cardiff, we might also call him, it seems) has written a long, marvelous review of Thaliad that reminded me of things about the adventure that I had forgotten and also suggested ideas that I had thought about only in the strange, immersed-yet-outpouring way one thinks when making a poem.

Please go read the whole sparkly thing! I'm tempted to review the review because it was full of illuminating passages about sources, novel vs. epic, Gabriel and the fall from innocence, the tension between future setting and traditional form, the reason why it can get away with a name like Thaliad (despite nervily invoking classical epic adventures), the Hicks-Jenkins art, the poetic form, readability, inventiveness and exuberance, and more. I'm grateful to him for striking out in so many different directions, and for understanding so well what I sought to do so.

If you have a comment, please leave it there. Comments off.

SCRIBD

Lots of Thaliad images, excerpts, and comments are now up at Scribd. (The first chapter of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is still there as well.) Please take a look and enjoy! Find more about the book (as well as how to get a copy) on my Thaliad page or at Elizabeth Adams' Phoenicia Publishing.