Sunday, October 24, 2010

Call for Submissions: Emanations


Emanations

The editors of Emanations seek fiction, poetry, essays, manifestos and reviews. The emphasis is on alternative narrative structures, new epistemologies, peculiar settings, esoteric themes, sharp breaks from reality, ecstatic revelations, and vivid and abundant hallucinations.

The editors are interested in recognizable genres—science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, local color, romance, realism, surrealism, postmodernism--but the idea is to make something new, and along these lines the illusion of something new can be just as important. If a story or poem makes someone say, "Yes, but what is it?" then it's right for Emanations. Essays should be exuberant, daring, and free of pedantry. Length is a consideration in making publication decisions, but in keeping with the spirit of the project contributors should consider length to be “open.”

Our editorial vision is evolving. Contributors should see themselves as actively shaping the "vision" of Emanations.

Send files with brief cover note to Carter Kaplan:

IAsubmissions@hotmail.com


Board of Editorial Advisors

Ruud Antonius

Horace Jeffery Hodges

Dario Rivarossa

Norman Spinrad, blog

Vitasta Raina

Michael Beard

Elkie Riches

Mike Chivers

Carter Kaplan

Kai Robb, 2

Tessa Dick

Michael Moorcock

Joel K. Soiseth

Mack Hassler

Darren R. Partridge


Emanations is a not-for-profit literary project and contributors cannot be compensated at this time. All proceeds from the sale of Emanations will support the efforts of International Authors to publish new voices from around the world.

Published By International Authors


Please post questions, suggestions and ideas. The project is a collaborative effort, and as we share ideas the "vision" transforms, evolves, and grows. When we write stories and poems we hope to bring to bear the entire battery of modern and postmodern literary devices. More simply: we like good, strong writing. Our essays are incisive, precise, keen, challenging, and driven by the writer's desire to advance an intelligent audience's understanding of important subjects.

Intelligent people find themselves set between two fine-tuned extremes: the narcissistic communities made possible by the internet, and the micro-managed "fields" that are driven by an academic culture that forces people into narrowing corridors of specialization. Emanations is an artistic "way out" for intelligent people to create an exuberant, challenging and meaningful culture. We are pursuing a freedom of sorts, bringing liberty to intelligence. Whether this intelligence is human or perhaps something larger remains to be seen, but by looking into our emanations we might find an answer.



Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Additional Gloss on Book X and Milton's Project

Apropos to my claims concerning Book X, suffice it to say PL is really good existentialist science fiction, and Milton knows this. The Biblical and the hermetic material in the poem are the carriage but not the tenor. This presupposes that a truly accurate reading--anyway an "Independent" late-Calvinist reading--of the Bible will yield the worldview Milton seeks to exercise and represent. Thus modernism is in essence a Christian philosophical project, sort of an analytic anthropology of shamanism, poetry, religious myth--altogether forming a somewhat acerbic-though-accurate survey of the human condition. As to the Independent English Calvinist foundation: little wonder then at the wrath of the tin pot gods of "postmodernism" and other forms of German mental disease. If we look backwards at Milton trough the lenses of Wittgenstein, Hawthorne, Jefferson and Locke, it seems clear enough. Anyway, that's a potted but essential statement of my critical position.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Book X and the Nature of Paradise Lost

A recent reading of the tenth book of Paradise Lost has embellished my understanding of the nature of the poem.

Book X as an expression of a distinct mytho-analytic problem: Milton is dilating on lines 842-844:
O Conscience, into what Abyss of fears
And horrors hast thou driv'n
me; out of which
I find no way, from deep to deeper plung'd
!
His analysis of this theme is necessarily forced through the context of the plot and the terms of the characters and language he has to work with, but the entire book seems to be a response to 842-844.

A "reader" can pursue other avenues, but to do so is to mistake the particular character of the poem, and to go astray--and so generate various
het readings, if I may deploy a little Hebrew here.

That is, PL is not an exercise in Biblical exegesis or a celebration of the coarse associations produced by commonplace poetical mechanics, but is rather a sophisticated modern poem bringing to bear the remarkably protean tool of "mythical-epic" language to express a manifold of analytic procedures. It represents modern analyses of modern problems. The Biblical stuff, the story, the characters, the music, the emotional content--all are points of departure, and to some extent the vehicles, but not the destination.

Another way to figure this: The appropriate cover for PL should not
be a sharply-drawn realistic illustration by Dore or Durer, but more properly a well-theorized abstraction by Kandinsky or Tanguy printed on thin translucent paper, and which turns over to reveal a closely-controlled dreamscape by Dali--and vice-versa, if you will.