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.

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.

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.

the hand that whirls the water in the pool

Everglades Photo Journal by Margaret Evans

Photographer's statement:

The Everglades: Unique, Magical, Mystical. Photographs taken by Margaret Evans October/November 2009. It may take a lifetime to fully appreciate all that the Everglades National Park in southern Florida has to offer. The territory covers 1.4 million acres of water-covered land and is home to more than 300 species of birds in addition to numerous reptiles, invertebrates, mammals and innumerable species of trees and plants. The Park has been designated a World Heritage Site, an International Biosphere Reserve, and a Wetland of International Importance. This mosaic of mangroves, cypress swamps, hardwood hammock, and sawgrass wetlands is the only subtropical preserve in North America.

Professor Margaret Evans is a faculty member in the Communication/Journalism Department at Shippensburg University. The photographs in this exhibit were taken during a fall 2009 sabbatical leave project in the Florida Everglades.

Click here for gallery.

Milton's Project

Milton's project is to take the Independent Calvinist worldview and from it render a secular anthropological and political understanding. This worldview is "modern" in the sense that religion and the power of the church are mitigated (first) by knowledge and scientific skepticism and (second) by constitutional policy that denies magisterial power to churches. Magisterial power is reserved exclusively to the state--this is the substance of Locke's Letter on Toleration and Jefferson's Virginia Act of Religious Freedom. In this particular and others, Milton laid the groundwork for Locke and Jefferson, who carried Milton's project forward, refining the modern worldview by defining and designing institutions--education, balance of powers, property and labor rights, natural rights, the obligations of governments and the duties of citizens, a free press, the fair and equitable distribution of wealth, and so on--that would establish and maintain the processes of an open, free and liberal society.

Jefferson on the Presumption of Uninspired Men

"The impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time."

—Thomas Jefferson, The Virginia Act of Religious Freedom

Political Science: 1933 & 34

Hitler addresses the folk, 1933:

Hitler addresses the party, 1934:

It is important to note the following distinction:

1) The 1933 speech was for public consumption and rolls out the talking points and especial "codes" that lead the party to power.

2) The 1934 speech addresses NAZI Party concerns, which rather comes off as a mix of corporate religion and politics.

While the former speech is of interest to history, the latter is of interest to political science.

It's clear to see in the 1934 speech (and I have seen this described elsewhere) that Hitler set party members against each other to enhance the "strength" and "integrity" of the power structure, as well as to enhance his position at the top.

In regard to Hitler's language, figures of speech and logic in the 1934 party speech: The subtitles either represent a poor translation, or this is indeed the face of ruptured sense and meaningless language, the very mark of totalitarian madness.

Deep Space Triple-Star System Gravity Hole Drama

Click here for story.

Check 9 o'clock for Fuji!

From Mod to Chav in Three Generations: Historical Footnote on the Death of the British Working Class

The traditional British Working Class came to be regarded by their masters as "redundant" for various economic and political reasons: the former role of imperial soldier was taken over by assets of the American Global Police Force, manufacturing was transferred off-shore, and the political obstacle to efficient social and economic management represented by the working class was widely recognized as an interrelated and compound problem. For these reasons (some would also emphasize "aesthetic considerations") an effort was mounted to mitigate and, eventually, remove this sector of the British population. Globalism afforded an opportunity to achieve these ends. A sector of the British working class, the hard-working lower-middle-class clerks (especially the highly-motivated class of self-styled “progressives”) would, as usual, play its functionary role; and popular media, itself enhanced by progress made early in the process by methods of cultural exploitation pioneered by the working class themselves, provided an useable instrument of control. Through Globalism, the means of production was moved to zones of enhanced profitability, and through the apparatus of the welfare system the workers were made dependent upon the state for their support and sustenance. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry provided workers with role models that valorized self-destructive behaviors. The project was successful, and within three generations the mass of the British working classes was weakened to a point where their political clout was thoroughly mitigated. Meanwhile, traditional Liberal forces--middle class traders and professionals—finding themselves discouraged by the behavior and the appearance of the working class, were alienated from it, and the traditional political, cultural and ideological ties which had previously strengthened both classes were cut. Systems of social support were now removed, and the working class, or rather the spectral shadow of the storied British Working Class, was purged.

The Future of the Library

Interesting report here on a meeting held last week exploring the future of the library:

The Future of Libraries, Books, and Reading: A Twinsburg Library Centennial Presentation

Participants included Prof. Mack Hassler of Kent State University; Liz Murphy, proprietor of The Learned Owl Book Shop in Hudson, Ohio; and Ed Rossman, Adult Services Librarian at Shaker Heights Pubic Library. Mr. Rossman is also the author of Castles Against Ignorance: How to Make Libraries Great Educational Environments. Carrie Baker Dubiel, reference librarian at Twinsburg Library, moderated the event.

Michael Brennan

New Work

Crawl Out of Your Pupa

I don't think crying will help

There's nothing good on TV

Rock stars take up your time

Books are good can you read?

Crawl out of your pupa

But don't come crawling to me

Crawl out of your pupa

Create you own destiny

Love is something we live on

Like flowers rolling in weeds

So drop your play acting

Roaring wind shakes the trees

Crawl out of your pupa

But don't come crawling to me

Crawl out of your pupa

Create your own destiny

Spend your life in a pupa

A butterfly building its wings

Cicada sings in the oak tree

You were born to float on the breeze

Crawl out of your pupa

But don't come crawling to me

Crawl out of your pupa

Create your own destiny

XB-70 Aesthetics

I do not know nor

May I ever know

Mach 3 at 70,000 feet

But I approve it

Just the same

As falling in Love

With a good-looking

Blonde who shines

Bright as a Valkyrie

Sent by the gods

To drag the dead away.

"Do you believe in Love

At first sight?"

"Yes," Ringo sang,

"I'm certain

That it happens

All the time."

Art of the Prose Poem: From the Secular Iconography of Inevitable Progress to the Valorization of a Dreadful Absurdity

"Up, reach up! Higher! Higher! Rise and ascend!" we cried. "Roar forth against the brow of the boundless sky, O bird of silver steel and singing flame!" And, dog-gone-it, up she went!

In those days we were all rocket scientists, our ballistic fleets mere child's play, day after day seducing us, propelling us, thrusting us, exalting us toward an effortless sense of glue-together achievement transcending the mundanity of worldly morality and the neck-breaking burden of the geopolitical albatross!

Bathysphere 2010 - Courageous Men in the Deep Sea

Bathysphere 2010 - mutige Männer in der Tiefsee from Norbert Brüggen on Vimeo.

Wood Childe of the Vernal Equinox

The Author Function and the Author's Work

Various lines from wikipedia outlining Barthes' thoughts on the Death of the Author and Foucault's concept of the Author Function:

In ["The Death of the Author"], Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity — his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes — to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed:

"To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text."

In [his essay "The Author Function"], Foucault posits that the legal system was central in the rise of the author, as an author was needed (in order to be punished) for making transgressive statements. This is made evident through the rise of the printing press during the time of the Reformation, when religious texts that circulated challenged the authority of the Catholic Church.

The author function does not affect all texts in the same way. For example, the author of a science text books is not clear or definable as the author of a well known novel. It is not a spontaneous creation or entity, but a carefully constructed social position.

Critics interested in pursuing such matters will be pleased to learn that Tally-Ho, Cornelius! is a good point of departure for an inquiry into the nature of authoriety, the deconstruction of the "author function," and the nature and genealogy of transgressive statements. Indeed, these issues form deliberate themes (and meta-themes) in the novel. Jerry Cornelius, which Mr. Moorcock created as a sort of "share ware" trademark everyman (see the wiki article on JC, here) has been utilized by many authors over the years. This shared control over the character is part of his meaning, which plays upon a range of Continental ontological theories ranging from Rousseau to Foucault, meanwhile bringing to bear an incredulous (some might say "flip") British skepticism that, when it's all mixed together, produces fascinating literary/philosophical effects, as well as some unusual comedy.

What I found rather curious as I composed the novel is that the humor reminded me a lot of the aesthetic I find in Hawthorne and Milton, and I think often the reader can tell (perhaps it seems more obvious to me) that the writer--that is "I"--was evidently deeply impressed when he--"I"--read Paradise Lost and The Scarlet Letter. Significant to me as a reader is how Tally-Ho, Cornelius! brought me into a greater appreciation for Milton's and Hawthorne's humor. Moreover, I think Hawthorne and Milton are more hilarious fellows than most critics are willing to admit. Along these lines, I think this is true also of Gurdjieff--who is a capital joker, though you wouldn't necessarily get this from reading the people who write about Gurdjief, whoever they are.

Succulent Suite (The Astral Plane Song of Karak-kar-ka-krak-sha)

Through sticky strands of flying tales
My friendships seem to pass,
Where wise old owls and little girls
Are laughing at the past.

Into the sun the flowers turn
Their petals brush the sky,
Honey bees fly into them
If you follow so will I.

A spider spins a web
And seems to go away,
But she remains to hatch her egg
Just watch the shadows sway.

If some song’s seven meanings
Leave much unexplained,
Open your eyes, don’t cheat yourself
What will be will save the day.

About elliptical clouds of ellipsoids
My refractions fly so fast,
Where crooked, aglow the dying woes
Are sailors before the mast.

Through corridors of spinning stars
A looking glass leads the way,

Against the frozen dust of a silent moon
The fires of the sun display.

Large corpuscles sublime appear,
They inflate amongst the mist.
Toward the goal they seem to soar
They lead the Just to bliss.

If you say your name backward
Does it sound the same?
Aleister Crowley has a job for you
On the Astral Plane.