In an artificially engineered loop of parallel time called the Alternative States of the American Fifties, Victor Winton, a talented but unfulfilled cartoonist, struggles with the contradictory forces held in precarious stasis by the loop. While trying to create the perfect pin-up girl for his new comic-strip series, he becomes intrigued with an 'ordinary girl' by the name of Jenny Mills. As he struggles to harness the fascinations at work in his life, they expand beyond the range of his control and threaten a fulfilment for which he might not be ready. Blue on Blue - a cosy novel in which anything might happen.
?Poetry is one of the oldest, most widespread and yet most secret means of renewal known to human culture. It is the most essential way of prizing single words and the immemorial heritage that is language. With poetry, science and magic are mixed; we put runes under a microscope. A poem is a fish that has swallowed a ring of many meanings, leaping from the belly of a lake to flash for an instant in the sun. ?In recent years, I have found myself drawn to the Japanese tanka form, and have developed my own version of it, in English, through practice rather than theory. I say ?my own version? not as a boast, but as a disclaimer; as a disclaimer and not as an apology. I would say I ?attempted? to develop my own version, except that, in being something worked out in the doing, it has been entirely natural to me. The new form combines a discovery of small mental and emotional specimens, like shells on the mind?s shoreline, with a stylistic means of presenting such natural and serendipitous finds as aphorism, memento, meditation and so on. ?In 2015, I decided that for the month of September, I would write, upon wa
Back in print after a long hiatus, Quentin S. Crisp?s third collection of fiction, Rule Dementia!, sees the author start to experiment with the form and content of the macabre tale. ?The Haunted Bicycle? is his first attempt to use Japanese I-novel techniques with supernatural subject matter and tales such as ?The Waiting? and ?Unimaginable Joys? are a fusion of cosmic vision and the fey, shoe-gazing miserablism of Generation X. Throughout, the collection forms a symbolic, whimsical bestiary of the modern soul as brimming with unexpected, irreducible and oddly specific imagery as a Hieronymus Bosch painting. ? Informed by a surreal, apocalyptic paranoia, yet rooted in child-like imagination and sheltered in the lee of unschooled mysticism, these early tales together make up a playful scrapbook of despair and hope at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.
In an artificially engineered loop of parallel time called the Alternative States of the American Fifties, Victor Winton, a talented but unfulfilled cartoonist, struggles with the contradictory forces held in precarious stasis by the loop. While trying to create the perfect pin-up girl for his new comic-strip series, he becomes intrigued with an 'ordinary girl' by the name of Jenny Mills. As he struggles to harness the fascinations at work in his life, they expand beyond the range of his control and threaten a fulfilment for which he might not be ready. Blue on Blue - a cosy novel in which anything might happen.
?Poetry is one of the oldest, most widespread and yet most secret means of renewal known to human culture. It is the most essential way of prizing single words and the immemorial heritage that is language. With poetry, science and magic are mixed; we put runes under a microscope. A poem is a fish that has swallowed a ring of many meanings, leaping from the belly of a lake to flash for an instant in the sun. ?In recent years, I have found myself drawn to the Japanese tanka form, and have developed my own version of it, in English, through practice rather than theory. I say ?my own version? not as a boast, but as a disclaimer; as a disclaimer and not as an apology. I would say I ?attempted? to develop my own version, except that, in being something worked out in the doing, it has been entirely natural to me. The new form combines a discovery of small mental and emotional specimens, like shells on the mind?s shoreline, with a stylistic means of presenting such natural and serendipitous finds as aphorism, memento, meditation and so on. ?In 2015, I decided that for the month of September, I would write, upon wa
Back in print after a long hiatus, Quentin S. Crisp?s third collection of fiction, Rule Dementia!, sees the author start to experiment with the form and content of the macabre tale. ?The Haunted Bicycle? is his first attempt to use Japanese I-novel techniques with supernatural subject matter and tales such as ?The Waiting? and ?Unimaginable Joys? are a fusion of cosmic vision and the fey, shoe-gazing miserablism of Generation X. Throughout, the collection forms a symbolic, whimsical bestiary of the modern soul as brimming with unexpected, irreducible and oddly specific imagery as a Hieronymus Bosch painting. ? Informed by a surreal, apocalyptic paranoia, yet rooted in child-like imagination and sheltered in the lee of unschooled mysticism, these early tales together make up a playful scrapbook of despair and hope at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.