You out there somewhere, Anaiis?

[poliphilo]

This is for besideserato .

I've tracked you across the web for the last hour or so. Pushing through the vines. Once I stumbled into a dark place I'd visited before- but then the web is like that- to call it a labyrinth is understating things (I mean, I've been to Knossos and it's all contained within a site of two or three acres) I'm an old guy- picture me in shorts and solar topee with a butterfly net- not understanding or connecting with half of what he sees. But kinda exhilarated, kinda made to feel that this world is bigger and blacker and more fun than he was brought up to think it was.

Your generation has left my generation behind. And a good thing too. You know more and you dare more. I'd like to read your stuff (the novel I mean) and I'd be pleased if you'd read mine. Let's set up a meeting somewhere- under a virtual streetlight on some virtual, rain-swept street- so we can exchange packages.

 

Comments

[catvalente.livejournal.com]

I'll tell her you're looking--I'll probably talk to her in the next day or so.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thank you for relaying the message. Contact has now been made

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

The gracious yuki_onna finally found me, over a journal, coffee and one too many cigarettes at some odd hour of the night, scribbling like a maniac.

I am pleased to find you enjoyed your travels through that maze, and my webs of words in forgotten corners of cyberspace.

I would love it if you read my novel and let me read yours. We should rendezvous, my address is anaiis @ gmail . com

Perchance we can start there?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Excellent. I've just sent you one of my novels as an email attachment. Hope it gets through OK. I'm looking forward to getting yours.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

I have Odes, the novel in question, in my other computer, which is in transit between Honolulu and Saipan right now. But I will be sending you the new novel I am working on, though it is not finished as of yet.

In the meantime, I should like to know what you thought of that hour perusing the dark corners of the net looking for my tangles? Did you read any of my work online?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I read things here and I read things in Diaryland (and saw pictures)and I found the zine (and didn't quite understand what was happening there) and all in all I found lots that I liked.

Dark, lush, tropical. A sense that things are happening not quite in the real world but in a place where the walls are made of flesh. And things burgeon and drip. Magic realism. Tennessee Williams land.

Some great stories. The guy in the bar who thinks that his grandfather may have led the coup that overthrew your grandfather's government- that's a HELL of a good story. And this latest story about the plate throwing- that's a good story too.

One of my quarrels with so much contemporary writing (If you read the online reviews I write you'd find that I'm quite a bore about it) is that people write without having lived. I'm so sick of poems about oh dear my dad is dead but aren't things lovely in my suburban garden. I just wish that people would go out and have experiences before they put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. And you have lived. And lived fabulously. What I ask of a piece of writing is that it take me somewhere I haven't been before. And that's what you do.

I think, as Yuki Onna says somewhere, that you are still inventing yourself. The pictures aren't always in focus. I don't know how one sharpens things up except by looking at the best models and writing, writing, writing. You are very glamorous, but some of that glamour is a generic glamour. It is borrowed from the writers you admire (and from the movies and whatever). You speak and sometimes there's a blurring at the edges as though several people were speaking the words in chorus.

But I love your work. It fascinates me. I've been scouring lj for people who can really write (there aren't many)- and I'm thrilled to have found you.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

There is something about my work in Erato that is seeking definition. The strange thing with my Diaryland diary is that it was always a diary and then one day, it ceased to feel like one. I began to feel as though someone on my side of the screen was looking over my shoulder and understanding my clever little code, keeping me from playing secret exhibitionist.

So I escaped. Twelve diaries later--some of which still live, somewhere in the great expanse of this online world--I crawled back and attempted to make Erato work for me again. But there was too much mask, not enough face, too many veils to my bride, when all I wanted to do was kiss her, kiss her abandoned and screaming me awake. But I couldn't find her mouth. Just lace.

I started my LJ while recuperating from all the white skidmarks down the freeway my life had become, not too long after the plate throwing incident, in fact. It was to be a diary of reflection, no more hiding, no more story-telling. Well, of course story-telling. But no more masks, poetic running away.

There were things that needed facing.
There were truths that needed unmaskings.

I agree with you that to write one must live. That is a challenge I am facing now, the need to balance the living and the writing. Too much of one and not enough of the other never works, we need the right combination.

I am pleased to have met you. We will enjoy our discussions.