Page 3. Not as pretty as page 2, but hopefully the next one will make up for it somewhat.

page 1
page 2

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been dipping into Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, ed. Penelope Rosemont. Today I came to two short texts, described as automatic writing, by Denise Levy - I Went Into a Green Song and Ivory Blue and Shady Satin. I found them intriguing, particularly the latter, which I liked better, I think, because of the characterisation in it: “Shady Satin loves vinegar while Ivory Blue loves mass”.

I got a sudden urge to do a bit of automatic writing of my own - though whenever I do it, it’s only semi-automatic, because I always let myself think about it a little. Anyway, mine is not as good as Denise Levy’s but it was fun.

IT TOOK ALL THE FOSSILS

It took all the fossils a week to dismantle a nightingale’s house. The invitation was to a lull in the sound of an unbreakable heart at the speed of childhood. The willows by the lake where we had tied ribbons around swans’ necks mourned for the solemn, handsome young hussar of the Blue China Cavalry, who got lost on his way to Moscow and came by way of seizure and goat paths to the farm where everything was made of silver needles and there were no haystacks. It came to an end in the rain. On the morning when he was to fight a duel his mother made him stay indoors and count the holes in a lace tablecloth. In the evening everyone went outside and made love. I watched them through the window in the attic, where I had gone looking for the Christmas decorations that we were to hide around the garden for the Prime Minister to find when he came on his inspection visit, but there was only an old woman and a giraffe, who begged me not to reveal their location. As I was feeling tired, I went to the milking sheds of severely tattooed players and paraded the lycanthropes of an objecting glove in the brass gardens of our old house on Winterfare Street. The interior of the car smelled like cement and your face was lime green as you suggested we should go to the ocean and exorcise the demons out of a pod of blue whales.

It occurred to me today that this business of novel #2 constitutes my first experience of not being able to deliver. I’ve always been the reliable type. At school, and then at work. Never missed a deadline, could always figure out how to do the job I was given. I was accustomed to being able to satisfy people. The idea of not satisfying people was embarrassing. Without realising it, I’d absorbed the notion - or maybe just come up with it on my own - that I was basically here on earth to do as I was asked or told (ok, except for cleaning my room), with “I can’t” or even “I can’t do it right now” being unacceptable words. I’ve tried to shake that mindset, but no can do. And now this - four and a half years after finishing The Etched City, and I still haven’t written another novel. I’ve written many words. I write pretty nearly every day, and my hard drive is cluttered with the results. My friends to whom I’ve moaned about it know why. One not insignificant reason is that I can’t let go of a certain long-black-haired reprobate. I’d write about Gwynn forever if I could. Writing without him in the picture is always a lot harder, and less fun, than writing with him there, or at least around in the background. But while I’ve tried to pen a sequel to TEC, and am still trying, it isn’t working yet, and I’m not going to rush it or try to publish something that I don’t think is at least as good as the first book.
There’s also the fact that if I just indulge myself with writing only about my demon lover, I’m not going to grow much as a writer. With that in mind, I’ve been earnestly working on three other books; but I’ve been wandering in the wilderness with all of them, then getting anxious about not having pushed another book out yet - I keep seeing visions of agents’ and publishers’ frowning faces - and stuffing up, and writing reams of unpublishable stuff as a result.

The temptation is to throw my hands up and say forget it, I’m not gonna do it. But I won’t do that, because I really do want to find out what I can write if I keep applying myself to it, and I feel pretty attached to a couple of the works in progress. And I hate giving up - and, hey, it isn’t as if I’d know what to do with my life if I wasn’t trying to do this.
Happily, I’ve discovered Gwynn & Co aren’t at all fussy about how I represent them in biro on crappy paper. In fact, they seem to enjoy running around as daft chibis. My silly doujinshi is actually giving me a chance to play with those characters again and have fun, without any concerns as to whether the product is publishable or not - so, yeah, it has therapeutic value. And when I’m not drawing fetuses and tikis, I’m still trying to make that second novel happen. I’ve taken the least ambitious of the works in progress and am trying to be very disciplined about how I write it, which means not letting my mind run off on wild inappropriate tangents. I’ve looked at a lot of what I’d written and realised I let the main character - an old lady - be far too crazy. My characters all exist in several different streams of being at once, and this old lady does have a completely batty aspect, as well as a powerful, witchy one, but this story doesn’t call for more than a hinting glimpse of either. That’s part of the problem I have with writing Gwynn, too, actually. I love spending time with him, but he phases between different aspects of himself so much that nothing settles down to a coherent narrative. Maybe I could make it work, but if so I haven’t figured out how yet. Anyway, I can’t hold Gwynn down, but I have more control over most of my other characters, and my old lady is willing to negotiate concerning her wilder eccentricities. Which might mean that I have to write a doujinshi for her later on, too, to let her express whatever I end up repressing.

Page 2:

With acknowledgements to these sources:

http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory=vol16_2/&filename=Bok.htm
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacandevelop.html
Good old Wikipedia
If anyone would like to contribute a better definition of phallogocentrism to this page, I’d gratefully appreciate it.

Btw, sorry Scott, no lesbians till p.4

page 1

So I was practising my Tai Chi fan routine in the living room and Stu says, “Is that the Asian equivalent of the Ministry of Silly Walks?”

Here’s page 1 of my very first ever comic, the first of a planned series which will seek to redress the apparent heteronormativity of The Etched City. Drawn on poor quality paper with a cheap biro and marker. Coloured and fiddled with in Photoshop. I’ll try to post a page a week.

Thanks to Jenna for suggesting the theme of Beth picking up girls and drawing pictures of them, and to Laurie for making me think daily ever more about the gay, and to Ross E. Lockhart for his review which reminded me of my concerns about the lack of gay sex and gayness in general in the book.

Warnings for bad/inconsistent drawing, silliness, and of course smut. Oh, and it’s a big picture, sorry - it was too hard to read when it was smaller.

Ross E. Lockhart, who was kind enough to read The Etched City and say some nice things about it (here), mentions something that no one else so far has, to my knowledge, namely that “for a novel that name-drops Aubrey Beardsley and J.K. Huysmans in its jacket copy, (it) depicts a surprisingly heteronormative world”. Well, I didn’t write the jacket copy. But yeah, no one in the book is gay, and that always sort of worried me. However, it was a deliberate decision that I arrived at by stages. Herewith an explanation: Firstly, pretty much everyone in the book is some kind of moral degenerate, tortured soul, freak or loser. I worried that if I made the main characters gay or bi, I’d have been somehow implying that fucked-up people are likely to be queer, or that queer people are likely to be fucked up. Then I worried that if I made one of the more morally stable characters - say, Raule - queer, I’d have been implying that queer=virtuous, straight=bad. Maybe these were foolish thoughts, but I didn’t have anyone to advise me better at the time.

There was also the simple fact that as I daydreamed the book, the relationships that happened to evolve in my mind were heterosexual. If I’d changed them, it would have been for the sake of deliberately adding gayness to the novel. Perhaps I should have, but I’m always reluctant to tinker with what my characters want to do.

I did, however, notice what I thought was a subtle undercurrent of gay, or experimented-with-gay-when-young, between Gwynn and Marriott, and tried to give it a bit of emphasis. I’ve always been fascinated by the homosexual subtexts of homosocial posses like criminal gangs, armies, etc., and I thought such a subtext did figure in Gwynn’s and Marriott’s relationship, but maybe I underplayed it. Sigh. Yes, it would have been possible to make Gwynn bisexual, and I suppose it would have gone with his Liberace clothing, but the fact is, while he wouldn’t object to the occasional boy, he prefers women. He just isn’t attracted to other mature adult males. They have hairy arses, he says; they don’t have those lovely labia; sucking cock is hard (no pun intended) work, and if you think he is ever going to be uke to another man, well… etc., etc. It would have had to have been a boy, a catamite - and I did think about giving him one, purely for the sake of avoiding heteronormativity - but he was so wrapped up in Beth that any other relationship would have seemed like an awkward aside. Likewise, Beth could have had a lesbian lover, but she’d also have ended up sidelined for the sake of the central heterosexual relationship, which would have made me feel squirmy. There could have been brief encounters, but that would have painted the queer in a superficial light. Maybe that would have been better than nothing. I don’t know.

Minor characters? Again, I could have made Colonel Bright or some of the gangsters openly gay, and perhaps I should have. Yet I was afraid of making the Colonel, who is already a caricature, a caricature of an old queen as well; and the gangster society seemed so retro-macho that I couldn’t see open homosexuality being tolerated. (Funnily enough, though, racism doesn’t seem to exist to any great extent in Ashamoil, or at least in Elm’s gang - the characters appeared in different colours, from different cultures. I didn’t have to think about it - that’s just how the society presented itself.)

I have to say, I never thought Gwynn, Raule or Beth were especially heteronormative folk. Gwynn’s physically androgynous - I made the point of describing his clothing as “ladylike” and his hair as “as long as a woman’s” to emphasise the point - and rather passive (I think) in his relationship with Beth. Beth and Raule are both unmarried, childless women, an artist and a doctor, both of them having at the forefront of their minds concerns other than love and romance. It’s Gwynn, Marriott and the Rev, the males, who seem to be from Venus (ok, Gwynn is from Mars and Venus). In Beth’s case, I wanted to take the cliche of the femme fatale, the dark muse and source of anxiety for so many male artists, and let her be the artist, the one with the power to imagine and create. Even Tareda, the nightclub singer, writes her own songs - she isn’t just some male lyricist’s mouthpiece. It may only be a minor thing, but Gwynn and Beth’s magickal sex scene was a 69 - an equal exchange, and an act of pure pleasure that can’t result in procreation. Well, it mattered to me… I guess, as a basically heterosexual person, I find a lot to explore within my own territory. I’m interested in imagining unusual lives for women who aren’t lesbians, and in imagining a different kind of straight male - note that Gwynn, whatever his defects, is capable of relating to a woman (Raule) as a friend and an equal, and of understanding Tareda, seeing her as a person with her own needs and priorities, rather than the luminous object that she is for Marriott. I think platonic friendship between men and women gets awfully short shrift in this world, not to mention the friendship that’s necessary to sustain a long term relationship - so that was on my mind while I was writing, and I remember feeling that adding gay couplings would muddy the waters. I suppose I could have gone much further with the sex magic and feminist angles in the book, rather than just adding them as seasoning, but I didn’t want to write a polemic or a pseudo-Tantric manual.

So, yeah… I could have put in some queerness, but I’d have had to force it in - without much in the way of lube, really.

Tangentially, from the same review, concerning Ashamoil:

“Unlike Lake, Miéville, and VanderMeer, however, whose City Imperishable, New Crobuzon, and Ambergris actively become characters within their novels’ narratives (in the mode of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium), Bishop’s lush and teeming Ashamoil, while evocative and picturesque, never quite rises to the occasion, remaining a setting that is well-imagined, yet never quite real. […]with a touch of tacked-on exotic orientalism included to make the city seem decadent.” The unreality of Ashamoil is a criticism I’ve received many times, and I’ve never answered it, because I’m usually rather meek about criticism. But I’m premenstrual and feisty today (hormones bring out my inner Mongol Horde), so, as Frank N. Furter said, “Wait! I can explain!” Ashamoil was never meant to be more than a stage set, lol. It’s scenery, a backdrop. It isn’t meant to be a character. And actually, it is meant to seem not quite real; it ought to have something of the cardboard replica about it. Ashamoil is somewhat derived from my home city of Melbourne, Australia, which, if you know the place, isn’t a “character” in the way that, say, London is. It contains places of character, but it consists mostly of different shades of suburbia, bare of history’s traces (no one paid attention, it wasn’t recorded), shallow; you’d never think so much brick could feel so flimsy.

All Australian cities I’ve been to have this quality of illusion and unreality, especially when you’re aware of what lies inland - thousands of kilometres of death. A low range of red hills that were once mountains as high as the Himalayas. Dry riverbeds. Exposed bedrock. I’ve been across it east to west, and from Melbourne to the centre. After those road trips, it was hard to see the continent’s cities as anything more than temporary stage sets, attractive dormitories for people to dream the dream of life. And, you know, Ashamoil isn’t even meant to be especially decadent. Certainly, there are influences from Decadent literature, but I also wanted the place to feel somewhat ordinary and suburban.

It’s funny - people have wildly varying opinions of Ashamoil, from finding it almost hallucinatorily real (which always surprises me) to finding it cardboardy and being disappointed. I can’t remember if anyone has said it was cardboardy and they liked it that way.

Well, I think I’ve rattled on quite enough. I feel a mite bad for using a positive review as a springboard for all this non-meekness, and I heartily thank Ross Lockhart for recommending the book. Feel free to comment and tell me I’m overreacting, ungrateful, or should at least wait, next time, till the Mongol Horde passes on by for another month.

The sky is dark. It’s 6 am in Bangkok. The full moon is a dark gold coin, so big and close it looks like you could pluck it out from behind the branches of the trees in Lumpini Park. Lumpini is the biggest park in Bangkok. Notwithstanding that, the young driver of the taxi I flagged down on Sukhumvit didn’t know where it was, which is a bit like a New York cab driver not knowing the location of Central Park. Anyway, we got here and now I’m walking up the main road through the park, past the large lake and little pavilions. At this hour Lumpini is full of people practicing Tai Chi and wushu - in groups large and small, or solo - mostly Chinese Thais, some native Thais, and a (very) few westerners. I join my group, which meets on the road next to a grove of date palms with ornamental boulders on the underlying grass. Greetings are exchanged, the music starts, and Mei Lee, one of the assistant teachers, leads the warmup. The sound of knees cracking ripples gently through the air. Crows cry out. The sky is turning from black to the indigo, which, when serving as a backdrop to palm trees, as it is here, reminds me of old Bible storybook pictures.

After warm-up I go off to practice the Yang style 24 form with Pao, a civil engineer, who’s a fellow beginner. Pao speaks good English and translates what the teacher says when needed. An unusually fresh, even approaching chilly, breeze is blowing across the park - it comes from China, says Pao, where it’s now winter.

I’ve been getting up in the dark to come here every morning for a week. I did some Tai Chi and related things back in Melbourne, but I slacked off and didn’t practice when I came to Bangkok and consequently forgot a lot of what I knew. After more than a year, I realised that Tai Chi was A Good Thing and I ought to start it up again. I wandered around Lumpini on a Saturday and chose this group on the basis of three things - the teacher, Ajarn (means ‘teacher’) Prasit, who was wearing gorgeous pale mint green silk pyjamas (wish I could teach in my pyjamas) and doing beautiful Tai Chi, the presence of farang in the group, and the sight of twenty or so middle-aged to elderly Chinese women doing kickass Shaolin sword routines.

So far it’s been great. The teachers are patient, everyone’s friendly, the atmosphere is informal and the exercise is enjoyable and fascinating. When I decided to give writing a go as an occupation, I didn’t realise how much I was going to dislike sitting still at a desk with mind disconnected from body. Tai Chi gives me a couple of hours a day when I’m not thinking about anything except what my physical self is doing, here and now, which I find beneficial. It’s also rather more strenuous than it looks, and feels like pretty good exercise.

Dawn comes quickly and the park’s wildlife starts to stir - white cranes commute between the bank of the moat and their nests in the trees, and one of the big water monitors that inhabit the moat comes up on the bank, waddling on powerful legs, tongue flicking in and out of the snout of its small wedge-shaped head. A note from Wikipedia: “In Thailand, the word water monitor or actually local word ‘เหี้ย’ is used as an insulting word for bad and evil things including a bad person. Its name is also considered a word bringing a bad luck, so some people prefer to call them ‘ตัวเงินตัวทอง’ which means ’silver and gold’ in Thai to avoid the jinx.: So there you are.

As I wander off (it’s come when you like, leave when you like), I go past one of the younger instructors teaching jumping wushu kicks to a girl, who is wearing ankle weights (so that she doesn’t accidentally launch herself into orbit?) I can’t resist having a go. It’s great fun, though I feel my nearly 35-year old knees protest loudly as I land on the road. If I ever try to learn this I think I’ll be doing it on grass, of which there is thankfully plenty. The other day I tried doing cartwheels, and was pleased to discover that I still can - the day I can’t turn cartwheels anymore, I’m gonna feel old.

So at the moment I’m ironing out details of the Yang 24 form. After I get it right, I can go on to the 42 form. After that I get to play with fans and swords - which is really why I’m doing this. As long as I can keep getting up at 5 am…