The Klecksograph - first issue

The first issue of The Klecksograph was published in January. It contains original poetry and an article on Pareidolia, as well as translations of Kafka, Baudelaire and others. It also has the story Mercury, by D. H. Lawrence. The magazine is free to download from the website.

Starting a new magazine has some similarities to creative writing: you need to draw people's attentions to your product. Yet it has the added advantage of being able to encourage other writers, and perhaps even influencing the literary climate, in a small way.

Starting up a new magazine

Like everyone else I have my own specific taste in art. I particularly like that which has a high degree of fantastic elements, that is, divorced from a high degree of realism. I feel that most literary magazines these days tend to favor realistic and especially slice-of-life narratives, both in prose and poetry.
That's why I decided to set up my own magazine, THE KLECKSOGRAPH. With enough appropriate submissions, I plan to publish the first issue in January 2020. It'll be both free to subscribe and to submit to. Please check out the website for more information.

The Old Merry-Go-Round

With its gilded decorations and panels with bucolic landscapes it stood out among the other merry-go-rounds with their cars, airplanes and bright yellow lights. At its heart, walled with mirrors in rococo frames, was the central pillar, large enough to make me think inside must've been a spinning palace. The fierce wooden horses were white, with carmine nostrils and mouths, pulling dainty carriages with cushions for the girls to sit in.

Away we went to the shiny music from the barrel organ, the horses bobbing ever faster. We children were now separated from the revolving adult world beyond the brass poles.

But curiosity made me look down the hole in the wooden floor beneath me. I saw a remorseless crankshaft, tarnished with age, thrust my horse up, then pull it down. Beneath this baroque jungle lay a machine that would crush me if I fell into its gears.

Every time since, when I saw the merry-go-round, I'd see the metal bars that fanned out underneath the floor, like a giant rasp to shred whoever fell through the wooden floor. Every time I got off the merry-go-round, I felt I'd survived a brush with danger.

This beautiful work of art, this bringer of pleasure, hid a mangling machine under its skin. And no parent could save me from it.

POEM: AFTER A CLOUDBURST

Pause and gaze in awe,

At wonders you alone can see,

The wet sunlit city stones

Shimmer like drawn swords.

Their surfaces cast

An inhuman glow,

The fire of self-creation

Published Weyfarers 71, Guilford Poets Press

When I wrote this, I was particularly interested in alliterative verse, a form of poetry peculiar to Germanic languages, among them Old English. In it, the number of stresses per line is important, regardless of the number of syllables, also the initial sounds of the stressed syllables are often similar, so “awe,” “wonders,” and “wet,” further on they move to the rear “drawn,” “glow.” I still used internal rhyme as well: “sunlit,” “city,” “shimmer,” “inhuman.”

The seed of the poem lay in the image of wet stone after rain, from that emerged the rest of the poem, meant to express the idea of the whole of the self-created Universe manifesting itself in me seeing the light reflecting off the wet stones. However, this idea also contains many paradoxes, among them the glow of self-creation shimmering like a sword, a symbol of destruction. The poem itself exhorts the reader to see something no one else can see, thereby setting up a contradiction. The purpose of this was to remove the distinction between the one uttering the poem and the one reading it, and so to express the idea of monism, that we’re all part of one existence.

Expressing poetry through imagery, as opposed to sound, is also called phanopoeia, and is especially used in the poetry of China and Japan.

The Writing Arrow: Noodler’s Konrad

I was intrigued by Noodler’s ink bottles and their peculiar labels. The inks themselves garnered many accolades, and their pens are equally promising.
At the office, one of my tasks is taking notes at meetings, some of which can last for most of the working day. For that you need a full pen and an empty bladder, as the arguments aren’t going to stop to allow you to fill one or empty the other. So I need a pen that’s easy on the hand and has a high ink capacity. So I when I saw the Konrad demonstrator on the Pure Pens site, I gave it a try.
Noodler’s presents itself as a practical, no-frills company, and that shows in their pens. The nib and feed are friction fit, meaning both can be adjusted to get the right flow. I like to write wet, as it’s the best guarantee against skipping. The nib is steel, but with enough flex to use it for calligraphy.
Made of vegetal resin, the barrel has a slightly rough feel. One vintage feature is the blind cap that covers the turning knob for the piston.

The instruction pamphlet goes into detail on how to maintain and disassemble the pen, but as I’m not especially handy, I’ll leave off doing the latter. I filled it with Visconti Blue ink, which is a strong color. At first I thought it might stain the barrel, but during refilling I saw this wasn’t the case.
The pamphlet also mentions the design is based on a German model of the fifties, so I knew the name referred to Konrad Adenauer, the West-German chancellor at the time, who oversaw the economic resurgence of his country and made it a member of NATO and the European Economic Community (later the European Union).

Edgar and William Burroughs: Escape and Supermen

Edgar Rice Burroughs sits cozily next to William Burroughs on the shelves of second hand bookshops. This got me thinking of common ground between the two. Both are about wish-fulfillment, about supermen. Both have similar settings: the Far West, Africa, and the Tropics. After all, what is Edgar’s Mars but just another Far West? Both have lots of violence which isn’t meant to repel the reader. In both we find the American constants of guns and action. Here’s an article by George Laughead who hung around William Burroughs in 1997; there was a lot of gunplay involved. 

Both were ultimately successful in what they created. Edgar’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars stories were escapist fantasies that kept many sane on long train journeys or days of loneliness. They took all these modern boys and men into another world full of novelty and adventure.

Yet the works of William Burroughs are also about escape, but one away from conformity. But the author escapes, taking us along into a strange world whose dangers are yet familiar: diseases, random violence, and repressive authorities.  The fragmentary narrative gives the sense of dreams, splinters picked from a damaged mind. While Edgar’s stories slide effortlessly through our consciousness, William’s are like streams clogged with flotsam and bodies, the aftermath of floods. His supermen are in direct opposition to the straight world. They often are spies, gangsters, and even pirates, many of them have a certain aspect of addiction about them.

D.H. Lawrence wrote that all of Edgar Allan Poe’s characters are vampires. The vampire combines the elements of addiction, sexual rebellion, and superhuman capacities. The same could be said of the characters in the novels of William Burroughs.

Writing Prompt: Beast into Man

 There's this writing prompt that reads: "What animal am I?" Reading a scene in a novel where a writer leafs through an encyclopedia, I thought of an improvement on this. Take the characteristics and behavior of a certain animal and superimpose them on a person. One advantage is writers then don't have to write about themselves all the time.
Take the bat for example. A direct transposition results in the character we all know from comics and films. But what if you applied the characteristics more subtly? What if you had a whole family that only came out at night? None of them could see very well. They might live in a remote area where nights were quieter than the daytime, where perhaps people didn't venture out after dark. They would have the run of the town and be feared. But then one member of the family would rebel. This is where the story begins. You're free to use this idea, by the way.