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The Neverquarians




Konstantinople



What We Believe Now That We No Longer Believe What We Formerly Believed

Most noble boozers and you my esteemed and very poxy friends...

There are four strategies for keeping one's spirits up in the face of one's mortality: ignore it, face it stoically, retreat into mysticism, or try to create something that will outlast you and carry a name, a body of work, and an inaccurate impression of your personality to people not yet born. The problems with the strategies may be summed up respectively as follows: you can't; you'll go mad; the Pope/Billy Graham/Benny Hinn/L. Ron Hubbard will get your money and waste your time; your creative efforts will result in something like the books represented on the left.

The first one - THE NEVERQUARIANS - is my second novel. Profoundly moving in its rectangularity, its pages rustle when flipped. The story begins with a flyleaf, and then the reader quickly encounters a page in which the title is printed in large letters. A dedication follows, and then the obligatory epigram, this one from that flibbertigibbet Bertrand Russell. Then there are two hundred or so pages of chaff to wade through before the reader encounters the stark breathtaking paleness of the inside back cover. Upon completion of this masterpiece, the reader will experience a further frisson of pleasure at hearing the woody 'thud' the book makes when hurled against the far wall. Lucky owners of winter chalets will hear the cracky 'whoosh' and see the orange flare as they hurl the book into their fireplace.

The second book -- KONSTANTINOPLE -- is one that I wrote on a Maytag-sized Taiwanese-army-issue manual typewriter in the winter of 1996-7. The rain thrummed ceaselessly on the dreary concrete, the roaches cavorted across my ceiling. I wrote every night from 6:30 to four in the morning, before collapsing on my tatami mat (which, read into this what you will, is an anagram of 'matt amati.') It is a fine, thick novel, a literary raspberry. It does not just commit every fault young writers are told to avoid, it glories in them like a sociopath with a chainsaw at a slumber party.

That third one, with the awkward title, is what passes for a book of 'poetry' in the mattamati universe. Anyone who's glanced at my livejournal in the last year or so might say 'wait a damn second, this stuff is recycled! These aren't poems!' How true! but calling them 'random blog entries' would make the casual browser think that they were about vice presidents or movie reviews or my trip to the dentist. So hey presto, they're poems! These days, what can't pass for poetry? Call them 'flash fiction' if you prefer, or micro fiction or what-have-you.

And 'living for beauty' in one lovely place always pining for another; with the perfect woman imagining one more perfect; with a bad book unfinished beginning a second, while the almond tree is in blossom, the grasshopper fat and the winter night disquieted by the plock and gurgle of the sea, -- that too, would seem extinct forever.

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