Words of Traitors Crowdsourced Fundraiser

Art by Amy Claire

NONE OF THESE MEMORIES ARE MINE ANYMORE. The divorce was amicable. It just didn’t work out. They’re great memories, honestly. Don’t get me wrong. Sad, brutal, we’ve lived hard together, and the truth is that I’m a little jealous that you’ll make them your own. It’s selfish. These memories can guide the lost, or offer comfort. There's enough of them for seven people, compressed into snapshots, provided to you for the price of a bar of artisanal chocolate and a latte.

They’ll find a perfect home in your head—sending their roots into the verdant soil of the right mind, a mind like yours—and I’m sure before any of us know it, they will be yours entirely. To me, it will be as if they never were. We wouldn’t have a flicker of recognition if we passed one another on the street one rainy morning.

I hope you are happy together. Wishing you all the best. Goodbye.

-Jamie Curcio

We are raising the funds required to produce The Words of Traitors: 7 Lives in Transition: $8000. 
A challenging book does not just appear out thin air. Back in the 50s and 60s it took a publisher that wanted to give the establishment the finger. Now everything is different, but the need to produce and really support art lit that pushes the boundaries is as real now as it was then. So we are asking you to join our production in some sense and help us fund it into existence.



In exchange, you will get a lot of unique artifacts such as:

• Full-color prints. 
• e-Book Fundraiser edition of WoT
• Paperback Fundraiser edition of WoT
• Custom, signed, Hard-cover full color Fundraiser edition of WoT 

Some of these may feature different covers, and we will almost certainly be adding perks to thank you for your contribution.
Some tiers of funding will also give you access to the final 1st edition when it is completed production in 2013.

Words of Traitors website.

That is really quite a lot to squeeze out of $8,000, and it is only possible because we have an art team willing to accept independent guerrilla-style rates for these things. We are dedicated and want to create something amazing. If we don't make the full goal we will still try to work with what we have, and continue with the campaign to produce a series off of the Nyssa stories in this edition.

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Eyes without Look

Jerry and I are naked most of the time, and we are slowly learning how to see with our bodies. The ass, nipples and genitals are the most sensitive seeing areas, and the lookout is different according to which areas are used. Above all, the popling wants to be seen with other bodies and to see other bodies. When he looks at me with his nipples, my nipples become erect. Today I was in the workshop and the popling came in. He looked at the beams and made a little chirping giggle sound that vibrated in my throat, and then he looked at me with his neck where a red line like a rope mark appeared, and jerked his head to the left and I ejaculated. His whistles and chirps vibrate in my body like some sonar language. (William Burroughs, The Popling)

If one eye can see, so how can it be without look? Spinoza was the first eye without look, a type of blank eye. Not that his eyes were without looks, for example, without beauty, attraction, or even without any depth of field, No! The matter is that he himself was an eye without look. Even his owns eyes were eyes without look. All of his organs were eyes without look. His elbows when hitting something, or his ears when connecting to a sound, or his intestine when connected to some food, or his hair when wind blew, or his legs when stepping on the ground, or the skin of his belly when seeing an image, or his neck when it bent down, and truly speaking, his neck when he walked, his legs when accompanied by the flow of a sound, his belly when wind blew, his hair when stepping on the ground, or his elbow when smelling something, were all and all eyes without look. Spinoza was not really Spinoza. Like Beckett, he too, was a floating particle and in danger, and necessarily in connection and disjunction, in relations with other particles.

Descent to the Merkavah/ Part 2

By Brian George

“The Just Man sat upright on his solid hips. A ray of light gilded his shoulder. Sweat came over me: ‘Do you want to see the meteors glowing red? And, standing, hear humming the influence of the milky stars, and swarms of asteroids?

“In night farces your brow is spied on, O just man! You must find a roof. Say your prayer, with your mouth in your sheet, after a mild expiation; and if some lost soul knocks against your bones, say: ‘Brother, continue on your way, I am crippled!’

“...And the Just Man remained standing, in the bluish terror of lawns after the sun had died.”—From “The Just Man,” Arthur Rimbaud, tr. Wallace Fowlie

__

In Kabbalah, if we desire to cross consciously from one world to another, and, as things fall apart, to be actors and not just observers of the electromagnetic shift, the first stage of the process is referred to as “going down to the chariot” or “descent to the Merkavah.” A modern phrase similar in structure—if not in exact meaning—might be “descent to the unconscious,” as this was used by Freud and Jung.

If the goal—as in psychotherapy—is to heal, it is not to heal ourselves, but rather to repair the rip in the structure of the cosmos, which makes it difficult for us to perform our predetermined role. Some would argue that this rip is virtual, but it is nonetheless problematic. It would be best, perhaps, to view it as the time-lapse movement of a lightning bolt, which had previously shattered the upper vessels of creation, and has just struck the iron tip of a tornado, within which we have built our homes.

Divine Filth Georges Batailles

8 July 2012 at 19:00H

Address:

Estúdio 111 (ao Teatro Sá da Bandeira) 

Beco de Passos Manuel nº40 / 4050-Porto

 FEE: 2 euros

Die Elektrischen Vorspiele is pleased to invite all interested to attend the event titled “Divine Filth: In Memoriam Georges Bataille”.

This event honors the figure of Georges Bataille on the day that commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

Georges Bataille: On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death (video)

Today, we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Georges Bataille. I wrote and recorded the following lecture for presentation at Acephalia Encyclopaedica: Conversations on Georges Bataille, which was held today in Portugal. 

My reflections take Bataille's final text, the preface to The Impossible, as their point of departure. The preface was written with a sense of great urgency during January of 1962, as his correspondence with the publisher indicates. During the time between then and the appearance of The Impossible in print that spring, Bataille at last overcame his propensity to "erect artificial obstacles [and] without even knowing me yet, was trying through me to forbid himself from rejoining Laure [his lover, whose death in 1938 profoundly changed him], nevertheless lost forever." After years of delay, Bataille contacted the author of the preceding lines, Jérôme Peignot, the nephew of his long-lost love, expressing his strong desire to meet him (again; they had met while the latter was a child). Of their meeting, Jérôme Peignot wrote only the following poignant words: 

When I arrived at the Pont-Royal bar, there was a man with gray hair waiting for me. What we said to each other then is not important. What is, on the other hand, were the tears I saw rolling down his cheeks. (Jérôme Peignot, "My Diagonal Mother")

In the vocabulary of Buddhism, by publishing The Impossible and at last meeting the nephew of his lost love, Bataille was able to relinquish the last attachments that bound him to this world of the living. Approximately three months later, he died like a cat: peacefully in his sleep, while his wife and young daughter were vacationing in England. I imagine that Georges rejoined Laure in death, and that perhaps, in another life, they would find one another once again.





Other writings by Prof. Rowan on Georges Bataille:
In Memoriam Georges Bataille: (2012; a version of the text of video lecture)
Friendship d'après Georges Bataille (2011)
The Logic of the Lost Moment (2009)
Communism in an Economy of Excess: Toward a General Economics of an Enduring Communist Society (2009)
Par-délà la Poésie (2007)
On Bataille and Desire (2005)


Translations by Prof. Rowan
Schizogenesis (La Scissiparité): Part 1, Part 2
The Oresteia (L'Orestie), Manuscript Version

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Serious Wonder Interview

A rather peculiar 2 part interview I had with the popular if offbeat Serious Wonder podcast. Black holes, the myths of science, the shadow people, aliens, death, transhumanism, and the future.

Episode 37

Note: the site was experiencing server outage. It seems to be back online again.

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Of Love and Death

Let us start from a claim, an old mythical story about Love and Death from which modern mythology has nourished a lot. This is our departure point.

Such claim as what regards love the correlative to the world of metaphors is rather a ghastly mistake. If love is metaphoric, it means it is “within-language” as if language is a signifying system which produces meaning. Love is however neither something meaningful nor something meaningless. Love is the extremes of thought: intensity. It is where language produces the anathema to what it has been producing so far: non-sense, the realm of the unthinkable. Along with love, death is also a non-sense since it goes beyond any possible metaphor. Love is the affirmation of life in its extremes, thus it must also be correlative to the standpoint of death because life in its extremes slides towards death. The “entanglement of life and death” is why love is so complicated and hard because, on the one hand, love is not conceived of as living with regard to death, and on the other hand, language is inaccurately considered as a self-sufficient system. Love is thought of as a metaphor because it is placed in the world of language. This is wrong because love is the impossibility of thought and anathema to it. Love is the pure affirmation of non-sense and not a simple negation of meaning.

Philosophy Begins In Terror: Aphorisms for a Philosophy of Happiness in (our) Time

The Truth of Transience: A Philosophy of Happiness

I.

I have never believed in anything, not even and much less myself. I have always felt as though selfhood, identity, kept me, keeps us, in fetters, shackled to the lie of transcendence. I lied, just now. I believed in deliverance, escape, in the pleroma of the apocalypse of love.

II.

Reflecting upon the man I've become and the stark contrast in which I stand to my past, I can only find it insufferably presumptuous to speak of myself in the present tense. Even today I have not ceased to live ahead of myself. Whereas you, my friends, can see me as I am,  I can only see myself within images of the past, in the reflections of memory's mirror.

III.

When I write, I write as an author of quotations without context, excerpts drawn from non-existent books.

IV.

Happiness in love is elusive for the very same reason as its simplicity: one must affirm (to eternity) that nothing is necessary, and that the origin of love lies in absolute, radical contingency.

V.

The Analyst: You know, love is just a Romantic fantasy, a mask for our every retrogression into primal, neurotic behavior. These aggressive, self-destructive drives masquerade as expressions of a noble emotion, when in reality, they respond to the trauma of intimacy, the anticipatory grief of knowing that the beloved will one day disappear. On occasion we attain mastery, only by becoming agents of the feared dissolution.

The Analysand: Can't it be otherwise? Can't love inspire progress?

The Analyst: Why, then, is it you on the couch and not I? 

VI.

Why must we reproach ourselves for ephemeral happiness as it recedes into the past? Wouldn't this amount to sour grapes on the part of my present existence? 'I must have been mistaken. Had I been or had reason to be happy it would have lasted.' In so doing we forget that transience is indissociable from the very idea of happiness.

...to love to let go.

VII.

Hope is impossible. Despair is doubly impossible. To genuinely let go: impossibility raised to the power of infinity.

VIII.

At that moment when at last I felt at home in the cosmos, a multitude of previously unseen stars illuminated the sky.

IX.

Perhaps every turning point is in accompanied by a palpable uncanny aura. I can feel the coexistence of what was and what will be in the now.


How to be in the world, to unite my time into a now?


In (Our) Time:

I.                        

The non-identity of self and self is time itself – without which we could not exist. Existence is neither eternal, unchanging Being, nor bound, teleologically, to absolute annihilation, eternal non-being. It is rather their unending, non-dialectical synthesis: the stream of Becoming.

Experience does not admit of non-existence, only being-in-time: becoming. genesis and phthora, birth and death, the passage of time: none refute existence. Universal transience and impermanence refute only our fantasies of eternal self-identity – fantasies tantamount to suicidal ideation.

II.

Nostalgia is an addiction to the past, to that which is not - or is no longer. It is the apotheosis of neurosis.

III.

Ennui is a lack of faith in the reality of the future, which makes the present recur eternally without change: the prison of time.

IV.

The time of hell is not, as Walter Benjamin wrote, the time of Eternal Return; it is the timeless time of the endless end.

V.

Absolute zero: a juxtaposition that signifies the unity of being and nothingness and the final kenosis of Spirit in Time

VI.

Marx says that historical events are subject to repetition, they come first as tragedy, then as farce. What Marx left out is that, when events recur thrice, they then come in drag.

VII.

Does the rejection of anthropocentrism (and the Copernican revolution in general) necessarily entail relegating humanity to utter insignificance, that is to say: nihilism?

VIII.

Skepticism that is not skeptical of itself is called nihilism.

IX.

Unknown shores: almost in sight

The felt presence of the unforeseen

Unforeseeable yet already present

Optics of the unconscious

Blindsight.

What power has the "light of truth" over blind Tiresias?




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The Words of Traitors: 7 Lives in Transition, 30 Day Crowdsource

NONE OF THESE MEMORIES ARE MINE ANYMORE. The divorce was amicable. It just didn’t work out. They’re great memories, don’t get me wrong. Honestly. Sad, brutal, we’ve lived hardtogether, and the truth is that I’m a little jealous that you’ll make them your own. It’s selfish. These memories can guide the lost, or offer comfort. Enough of them for seven people, compressed into snapshots, provided to you for the price of a bar of artisanal chocolate.

They’ll find a perfect home in your head—sending their roots into that verdant soil of the right mind, a mind like yours—and I’m sure before any of us know it, they will be yours entirely. To me, it will be as if they never were. We wouldn’t have a flicker of recognition if we passed one another on the street one rainy morning.

I hope you are happy together. Goodbye. —Jamie Curcio.

The truth about these stories. I was fighting chronic pain, I had to move, I was behind on payments, I was getting death threats, royalties from past books weren’t cutting it, and suddenly I had an infection in the nerves inside my teeth. No one in their right mind would choose THAT as the time to start churning out short stories, one every few days. But that is exactly what I did. 20,000 words in a month. When my laptop and desktops died or became unreliable, I started writing it on my cellphone because my handwriting, though it’s alright for notes, is just too slow and clumsy to write fiction with.

I packed my life into boxes and then unpacked them again, and in the process discovered that I had one parcel along with them: this freshly printed young manuscript, written in a month, which was (I was told quite a few times) bringing people to tears. 

At the end of the day no one knows anything about what good literature is, not really. But I do know that I made girls cry, and that has to count for something. (Though I hope it makes some of you laugh, in the end, as well.)

Now it is the time for these stories to be polished, for them to be paired with the art of some very talented artists, for a cover to be created — and most importantly — it is time for you to join us in the steps that come next. 

FUNDRAISER July 19, 2012 - Aug 19, 2012. 
MANY PERKS TO BE ANNOUNCED FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION.

http://wordsoftraitors.tumblr.com
www.wordsoftraitors.com to be functional as soon as the DNS stops screwing around.

Goodnight, and good luck.

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The Forbidden Book - A Review

"...the magician of (Giordano Bruno’s) De vinculis is the prototype of the impersonal systems of mass media, indirect censorship, global manipulation, and the brain trusts that exercise their occult control over the Western masses."

- Ioan Couliano, Eros & Magic in the Renaissance

For those uninitiated into the magical roots of heroism, Disinfo Books (now a division of Red Wheel/Weiser/Conari) recent publication of The Forbidden Book provides an interesting thought experiment dealing with the political and psycho-social intricacies of the heroic ideal and traditional philosophy of magic. Originally published in a Spanish language edition by Roca Editorial in 2007 as El Libro Prohibido, Guido Mina di Sospiro and Joscelyn Godwin’s novel is an important meditation on the potential political implications of esoteric practice.

In The Forbidden Book we are introduced to the Riviera della Motta family, an aristocratic family whose line has dwindled to three heirs, an uncle, Baron Emanuele Riviera della Motta, and his two nieces, Orsina Riviera della Motta and Angela Riviera della Motta. They are the last vestiges, in the imaginal world of the novel, of a lineage of Hermetic alchemists begun by Cesare Della Riviera, whose work entitled "Il Mondo magico de gli heroi" (The Magical World of the Heroes), was popularized, in our reality, by the 20th century Italian Magus Julius Evola.

30 DAYS, so far.... Former Runnerup for Mayor Cameron Whitten on Hunger Strike*

[Edit: I am now offering a personal call to arms to anyone in the Portland area, homeless or not, to join us in our solidarity. If you yourself do not live in Portland, but know of those who do, spread this message and tell them to bring those who are down and out and disenfranchised to us. This is OUR public property. Our tax dollars support the agenda of city hall. Tell everyone you know who is homeless in the area of Portland to come to our relief camp, where we will have food, shelter, and companionship for those who truly need it. Tell your friends. Spread this around. Let us do our best to make these council men understand that thousands of people in Portland need homes, and that for every 20 empty houses there is one homeless individual. This problem could very easily be solved, and it is testament to human greed and stupidity that it has not been. TELL YOUR FRIENDS. THIS IS OUR PUBLIC PROPERTY, WE HAVE A VOICE.]

"Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light."- Dylan Thomas.

 Speaking with former candidate Cameron Whitten is a humbling experience. He is soft spoken, but lucid, and shows surprising insight for his age. Quick witted and fluent in answering all of my questions, his eyes are dark and piercing. He wears the look of a pugilist in his last few rounds with a formidable adversary. He is now on day 30 of a hunger strike to help raise support for lifting a ban on the use of tents for homeless in Portland to use in inhabiting the city.

"THIS STRIKE is to increase awareness towards the need for decent housing for the poor, the dispossessed, and the entire working class", Cameron says. He has indicated to me that his strike is not exclusively a product of the Occupy Wall Street movement: he views it as its own thing, outside of Occupy, although many activists from Occupy Wall Street inluding himself are present for the vigil.

"I'm really trying to bridge the gap here and find the common ground between the people and Occupy, on the one hand, and the governing institutions on the other. This strike is about utilizing my ability to petition our leaders directly."
 

Whitten, pictured above

Whitten is 21, certainly a young age to have already made a serious attempt at election for Mayor of Portland. He sports a black "Suicidal Tendencies" baseball cap, which makes me hope that it isn't a highly unsettling bit of foreshadowing. A high school honors graduate and registered student of Portland Community University, calm yet assertive, Cameron seems to be alert and on the top of his game. The mood is not just a bit solemn, for many of us know that Cameron has gone a month without food now and could be close to physical and emotional collapse. Even so, he is undaunted, stating simply: "I am doing this to work for a change in how our City Council handles the issues of housing for the poor, the disposessed, and the middle class, post recession."

The Mythology of Science: Telling Stories Around the Campfire of the Universe

Today's Science: Tomorrow's Mythology?

"I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD." --Joseph Campbell, from an interview with Jeremy Mishlove

When I talk to people about modern mythology, many mistakenly believe I'm talking about urban legends. And while theoretical debates about alligators in the sewers of New York may be entertaining, they are certainly not as important to me as the mythic framework of human society. In fact I feel urban legends are more akin to cultural "white noise," than any kind of true mythology.


In the past, I think mythology (and today contemporary religion) served as a medium for the transmission of culture, social mores, and world views. They were narratives that help broadly define an individual's sense of reality. They were important, because they gave purpose to people's lives.

In Memoriam Georges Bataille: Truth, Love & Death

Portrait of "Dianus" by Alberto Giacommetti

“As I sought it out I have never found it.”

Truth. Comprehending the truth of love, of death, of laughter and tears: such experiences disclose the Impossible. This truth is strictly speaking ungraspable. It exists inextricably bound by a relationship of complementarity, a discordant accord, with that other side of truth which is the business of lucid scientific rationality, i.e. the production of knowledge as an objective description of the world of things, of what is possible. Irreducible to objectivity, such experiences as love, laughter and tears are no less real and no less a part of the world in which we live and die. They escape the grasp of knowledge, properly speaking, and yet without the perspective given therein, truth would remain forever incomplete; and what's more, the unknowability of death itself guarantees the necessarily incomplete status of life, of history, of the world, and of the totality of the universe.

Georges Bataille à Oréans, 1961

“Science is silent about the moment in which reflection loses its moorings within the impossible.”

The truth of love and of death, viz. the impossible can only come into the purview of objective knowledge (whether according to the methods dictated by scientific reason or by philosophies such as phenomenology or logical positivism) by means of a reduction: any objective description and knowledge of love, of death, is possible only from without and après coup: to mistake love or death for merely biological phenomena amounts to an amputation of all that arises from (inner) experience. While a work of decidedly broader perspective and (in my view) greater intellectual rigor and honesty, P.-L. Landsberg's Essai sur l'expérience de la mort remains the fruit of a project doomed in advance, one that could only fall short or fail utterly: one simply cannot have knowledge the experience of death from the perspective of the one who dies – for death is essentially the permanent disappearance of the very subject of knowledge.

Laure and Georges: once again united by death.

“In so may ways, the ensemble of mankind has fallen into a trap. This much we can grasp.”

Our inevitable, final fall into the impossible is our common destiny: slipping beyond the bounds of meaning into absolute senselessness, every being does finally escape from the twin prison-houses of self and world; likewise from that of language. That final destiny which we share with every living being is to at last venture beyond every possibility, to transgress the most distant of limits. We are bound to joyously disappear into that unknown domain to take leave of the world, of knowledge, without so much as a shadow of self. Dissolution into boundless immanence is our final destination, for the world in which we live is that of false, reified – deified – transcendence. The lie of transcendence is supplanted by truth in the final reckoning, for “the totality of the world rests finally on my precarious self, and on death.” In truth, we are bound together by the universal and inevitable disappearance of our selves.

Would this then not be the “nothing of transcendence?" 

No, let us not be seduced by the thought of nothingness. Human existence is always in suspense of death: beneath the surface there is an inconceivable abyss into which, one day, we will fall. Does the end of all possibility and knowledge signify or reveal nothingness, non-being, as the ultimate truth of life, of being? No, for we can only speak of nothing as poets, as dupes, or as liars: for nothing exists only as the abstract negation of the something that is. There is no nothing: no experience of nothing. What's more: even in the vacuum a sort of creation ex nihilo takes place - an ephemeral creation destined to return to its origin and to repetition.

"Experience is immeasurable," and the universe is inconceivable. When we confuse our impossible destiny with absolute annihilation we succumb to the seductive, cold comfort of nihilism: we suppose that we have attained absolute knowledge, an immutable, ultimate truth, and thereby forget that human existence is of its essence an unanswerable, open question, forever incomplete(able). 

"We are never within our rights in preferring seduction: truth has rights over us. Indeed, it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must, respond to something which, not being God, is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights, only by accepting disappearance.”

The preceding reflections, composed on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death (7 July 1962), are to a great extent inspired by the final expression of the thought of Georges Bataille, the preface to The Impossible. This text was written with a sense of great urgency, as his correspondence with the publisher indicate, and the book had been in print less than three months before he died peacefully, like a cat, in his sleep, while his wife and young daughter were vacationing in England. With the exception of the last, which concludes the published preface, all quotations are drawn from the manuscript version found in Tome III of his Oeuvres Complètes (my translations).

Mythos Media Fundraisers 2012

Rather than these vague twitter posts let me be very clear what is going on.

There are several projects in production and all of them need some seed funds to really get off the ground beyond a sort of "pilot episode."

And this is of course despite conjecture such as this. The fact is, it costs money and time to produce media, and I've killed myself (and years of my life) too many times on projects that made it through round 1 of funding only to die at round 2, which often means due to contracts that no one even got to see anything for our labors. No more. Beyond the most bare bones, which usually amounts to words on a page or on a screen, transmedia and multimedia projects need to gets funded and produced, or they have to get shit-canned. I am streamlining production cost but there is only so far you can go and produce the kind of quality that I am aiming for, and in the past I've encountered problems of retaining talent when they have studios like Image and Vertigo and movie studios knocking on their doors and it comes down to "I really like this script, James, but I've go to go where the money is."

So in a sense I'm counting on all of you to vote with your dollars, cause that's what we have to vote with these days. And our past track record of production at least shows that well--considering what we've done on shoestrings, what we could do with slightly longer ones could be amazing. 

Nyssa:

A dark modern fairy tale. 

Below is a piece of artwork-in-progress from the artists I am working with on issue 1. At least some of these will appear in the ongoing series if we raise the necessary funds to produce a multi-part series that will also be collected as a graphic novel. The production will include a lot of mixed media material, availability as print and ebook, and short video trailers and web materials that add layers or other angles to the narrative. (Transmedia.)

Fundraiser: September 1 - October 10. 

I plan to run this Kickstarter in September and really hope I can get some press help and bloggers and all of you on twitter to get the word out because it does come down to a popularity contest at the end of the day. We will work our asses off to make something beautiful and unique if we can fund it. 

Estimated necessary budget: $30,000. (I have to review the spreadsheet before I say this is final.)

Giveaways: Just initial thoughts...We will be giving away various artist prints, of course e- and print versions of the illustrated story 'pilot' (issue 1) as well as the lowest donation tier which will be the unillustrated text. The pilot is why I'm waiting until September to begin the Kickstarter which will run for 40 days. Of course I have ideas for posters and some unique items, but the question does arise of production cost of giveaways vs. funds raised and production overhead itself so I have a lot of math to do...

Words of Traitors:

These Are Not My Memories. A collection of stories that get at the nebulous - fate, faith, choice, death of the self, death of another, young lust - while they are in transit from one place to another.  These are works of "honest fiction" that I've been working on by way of 'stretching' myself as a writer. Or that is how it began. As all projects do, this is taking on a life of its own, and I am now seeing the final version being ideally a hardcover with a single very nice illustration to accompany each piece. I would like to pitch first rights for each short story to publishers but want to retain creative control over the final version which means having money for an editor, for luring artists to actually hit deadline, and for a marketing campaign that actually gets the word out.

Fundraiser: July 20 - August 20. I plan to run this on Indiegogo. This is because even if we get partial funding, we can make some headway with this project. They say that August is a terrible month to fundraise. I guess I'll find out.

Estimated necessary budget: $7,000.

Giveaways: obviously, early editions of the stories will be giveaways, as 1 offs and as a collection at a higher tier and then in an early print chapbook at a higher tier. I'd also like to offer something unique, so I'm thinking about that as well. Then those at a certain tier will also receive a final, hardbound copy when production on that is complete - likely several months after the fundraiser is complete, but long before it is available on the public market. You can read first (and I mean first) drafts of pieces for this project on my tumblr under this tag: http://fallennation.tumblr.com/tagged/writing

If you'd like to get in ahead of the curve and donate to Mythos Media / Modern Mythology productions in general:

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Kali The Cremation Ground of Bakreshwar Temple

By William Clark

[For an earlier conversation see Alterati.]

A narrow, unpaved road beginning near the main temple complex guides you along a winding path flanked on opposite sides with a motley arrangement of grave markers. As you approach the cremation ground’s main entrance, a small roadside temple presents itself. The phrase “JAY MA SMASHANA KALI” (Victory to Mother Kali of the Cremation Ground) is written above its doorway in bright red Bengali script. Housed within this shrine, a murti (sacred image facilitating divine communion) of Kali depicts her standing upon her husband––Lord Siva––in characteristic pose, brandishing a sword and holding a severed head with her right hands while her left hands give the mudras (symbolic hand gestures) of abhaya (fear not) and varada (conferring boons). Although essentially depicting the dark mother goddess in her popular form, a few macabre embellishments have been added here to emphasize the particularly fierce nature of her smashana (cremation ground) aspect. Wavy red lines, flowing from the corners of her mouth around her cheeks and down her neck, have been painted to represent oozing blood. On Kali’s left and right sides, two semi-nude female shaktis (human embodiments of feminine force) gaze upward toward her as they dance, both of them smeared with gore and feasting on human flesh.

Bakreshwar’s sacred burning ground is separated from the surrounding area by a border of tombstones and a small river running along the side of it. Cremation here differs from others I have observed in that a network of connected trenches is employed to contain the improvised wooden pyres. The resultant fire, burning at ground level, is thus easily managed by the Dom who use bamboo poles to manipulate the wood and break the body down as it is slowly incinerated. Pieces of wood which have not burned away are removed, put aside, then later incorporated into fresh pyres.