every day I lose face

1.19.12

2012-01-19T15:29:00.005-05:00

Announcement:

New novel:

Title: CELEBRANT

Publisher: Chômu Press

When: 2012

More details to come.

12.20.11

2011-12-20T03:46:00.003-05:00

News from under the isolator ...

I'm very honored to announce that a story of mine was selected for inclusion in The Weird, a mammoth anthology of some of the best weird fiction of all time. This will be released in May of next year.

Weird Fiction Review has named The Great Lover "Weird Book of the Year!"

D.F. Lewis' very thoughtful real-time review of The Great Lover can be found here.

My essay on supernatural literature and what's wrong with Todorov's definition of "the fantastic" is now available in the print version of The Weird Fiction Review #2, edited by S.T. Joshi and published by Centipede Press. Centipede will also be releasing a multi-volume collection of my novels, essays, and stories next year ... more on that later.

It's likely that a new novel from your reporter will be appearing from Chomu Press in 2012, and a new short story of mine has been chosen for their upcoming Dadaoism anthology.

And the Kafka blog is already up to aphorism #20.

Many happy returns of the season to everyone, and thank you for your continued attention and interest!

11.26.11

2011-11-26T18:29:00.003-05:00

New blog project: Kafka's "Zurau Aphorisms," aka "Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way" [Brod's title, or couldn't you guess?]. The 109 aphorisms will be posted one by one and in order, with commentary where possible from your reporter.

The first post and wretched exegesis can be found here.

9.10.11

2011-10-09T02:26:00.003-04:00

Johnny sez Occupy Wall Street and/or your own town. Donate.

The President has already begun his campaign for 2012, and he's dusting off his Progressive drag again. Democratic politicians are already maneuvering themselves out in front of the occupiers, trying to co-opt them much in the same way way the Tea Party was co-opted by the Republicans.

The more people there are in the streets making trouble, the harder it will be for either party to maintain the pretense that they represent anybody, so viva trouble.

10.7.11

2011-10-07T15:08:00.002-04:00

Blood and Other Cravings is available, with a new story, "Bread and Water," from your reporter.

Jihan was a softspoken Hispanic man with African features. His air of thoughtfulness, which could still be distinguished from the vacant quiet of being sick, struck me. A greying moustache blurred the gauntness of his face, half obscuring his mouth, and his sleepy eyes were always downcast and apparently unseeing. He’d been present when the other one, the one I’d been introduced to that day, died. The nurses tried to keep our morale up by gathering us together periodically, and I heard about it the last day they propped us up in front of the television in the day room. We noticed that we were only five; the nurses evidently had planned to keep this from us, telling us only that so-and-so was a bit too sick to join us. Jihan, however, had been visiting this person when he went. Jihan struggled to make himself heard over the noise from the television. “Garfield Goes Hawaiian.” With haunted eyes, he kept pressing his hands to his throat, and his lips trembled as he spoke. The remote was missing, and none of us could get up. Jihan’s voice failed, but he continued to whisper to himself until the nurses came. Not more than a few days after that he hanged himself with the shower curtain from the back bathroom."

7.7.11

2011-07-07T15:52:00.003-04:00

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities
featuring an article by your reporter
is available.

Read more about it here.

Available for pre-order (and on sale after the 7.12.11) here.

6.30.11

2011-06-30T19:45:00.004-04:00

If anyone is interested in publishing a collection of short stories by Marcel Béalu, translated by me, please let me know.

6.26.11

2011-06-26T16:13:00.002-04:00

CLOACAL GROANING

Why is Franzen Important?

Franzen is important because he allows the middle class to believe they still matter, they still exist.

We know that the Western novel (as distinct from long prose narratives in general, and so not including The Tale of Genji or The Golden Ass) develops in parallel with the Western middle class, and that this parallelism is not a coincidence. The middle class strives to vindicate itself socially alongside the aristocracy by demonstrating a moral superiority predicated on the cultivation of an elaborate personality or interior life. The novel is the model of this kind of interior life and the obsessively general, all-surveying point of view it takes on the world and its society. Any people anywhere in the world, irrespective of class, may have elaborate Freudian inner lives; my point is that the middle class have turned the elaborate inner life into a fetish which serves as one of the fundamental componants of class identity. In principle, every middle class person lives a novel. Middle class life is a novel. Not every novel is a middle class life.

Every generation of the middle class has its great national novelist to update the model and to reflect the persistence of the middle class' importance, and Franzen wins this dubious distinction for the current generation.

The middle class has less clout in American society now than ever. Given current conditions, the status of the solid bourgeois citizen of two generations ago has disappeared. The US is now a society with two classes only: the filthy rich and the rest. The middle class are already lumped in with the rest, but they resist acknowledging this. The last thing they want to do is acknowledge that they have anything in common with the "white trash" they have been trained all their lives to detest irrationally. They cling to their middle class distinction by clinging to trappings, or to cheap or often expensive imitations, of all sorts, the way the Russian duchess, disposessed by the revolution, clings to her hyphenated name, her snippets of French, her endlessly refondled memory of dancing with Prince Shklovsky at the ball, while she's waiting in line to cash her disability check. So, the middle class clings to Franzen. If they didn't have him, they'd find someone else, they'd invent him.

The middle class do not cling to fantasy, horror, and science fiction novels. These are never taken seriously. Now, however, this kind of fiction is a redoubt of literary activity in the US, far more so than is the traditional middle class novel. Why?

Horror fiction: because it registers the idea that ordinary life is a dream, and that reality is in fact much worse. The middle class occupies an oasis of comfort in the midst of the desert created by all the trouble it requires to sustain itself, and which is too discomfiting to look at. In many horror stories, the menace is overcome by a turn to spirituality or religion; this has an obvious counterpart in my analogy. However, not all horror fiction includes a comforting restoration; the basic wrongness often remains, the sense that a penance has to be paid, there is nothing that can be done to reinforce the foundations of this precarious way of life. What's more, horror fiction often masks a desire, which is not always ambivalent, to destroy this way of life. Or at least, to see it destroyed.

Fantasy fiction: because it reflects a desire for a connection between individuals in a greater scheme of things, particularly to fictionalized traditions, histories, and societies. Adopting, if only in fancy, a substitute history, which blocks out the reality. Trying to validate middle class values in the same way that aristocratic values are validated. Tolkien is replete with this: the hobbits are English 19th century middle class values incarnate. However, the appeal of fantasy is hard to understand without realizing that middle class life feels hollow, divorced in practice from the values it espouses in theory. This is especially true of its meritocratic rhetoric; in fantasy, individuals really do make a difference. In many cases, the fictional history is appealing not because it blocks the view of an uncomfortable true history, but because that true history is blocked out in any event, and this in turn creates a yearning for a history, even if it makes all history look like fiction. Fantasy also reflects a frequently fanciful nostalgia for a less alienated life, lived closer to the land and the tribe. For values that are not well realized or really meaningful in a middle class capitalist milieu, like compassion, wisdom, kindness, selflessness, courage, blessings and curses, justice.

Science fiction: because it presents alternative futures that emerge from a special kind of anticipation that is also characteristic of the middle class. Technological innovation can produce sudden wealth and renewal of the middle class; the middle class can go on forever, even on Mars. Neither aristocrats nor poor farmers are traditionally supposed to be interested in innovation (whether or not they are is not material here, only that they are not specially associated with innovation the way the middle class is). Science fiction affords the greatest possible scope to the kind of all-seeing, all-surveying, strictly neutral or "tolerant" middle class point of view. However, science fiction also reflects an intense appetite for meaning through discovery and the development of knowledge; it is now the only place where such an appetite can be found. Science fiction has a salubrious optimism that is surprisingly attractive and resistant to criticism. It values intelligence, curiosity, inventiveness, resourcefulness, intrepidity, and above all a willingness, not to discover the truth, which is an impulse shared by many other kinds of fiction and therefore not specifically a hallmark of science fiction, but rather to embrace and adapt to the truth, which is a hallmark of science fiction.

These three genres continue to develop because they have something to say. The middle class realist novel has less and less to offer, and will likely continue its devolution until it becomes an empty amulet.

5.27.11

2011-05-27T04:38:00.004-04:00

The sewermouth is opening again.

Nothing sewermouthed about this, though. Ann VanderMeer reads from The Divinity Student here.

I'm touched and very proud that Ann chose to read from The Divinity Student.

A triangular Amazonian interview between Jeff VanderMeer, Brendan Connell, and yours truly here.

There's also a new review of The Narrator here.

Thank you. Sewermouth closing for now.

4.11.11

2011-04-11T20:16:00.005-04:00

Publishers Weekly:

The latest phantasmagorical offering from Cisco (The Narrator) is a fusion of dark fantasy, literary fiction, and existential horror that revolves around the eponymous character of the sewerman, an undead tramp in search of capital-L Love who can enter into women's dreams. As he pines for a blind woman named Vera, he also helps a disgraced academic turned prophet to establish a "ptochocratic" cult that wants to create its own reality underground and battle a soul-sucking plague of white noise. The surreal narrative is something like a 400-page T.S. Eliot poem: otherworldly, lyrical, deeply philosophical, and supersaturated with extraordinary imagery and ideas (like the Prosthetic Libido, a golem-like device constructed to house a scientist's unwanted desire). Fans of stylish and thematically sophisticated weird fiction should seek out this mad testament to Cisco's visionary genius.

The Great Lover is available

HERE

Read about it here
... or here.

1.16.11

2011-03-16T10:49:00.005-04:00

His notebook had been utterly destroyed, but a single page had survived, clenched in his hand:

... in time to see him lowering from his lips a half-chewed human leg. (It was his mother's, judging from the tattooing). In the next instant, he had bolted for the treeline.

We pursued him as best we could, back through heavy timber, back to that lone sentinel-like rock I had so often glimpsed from a distance. As we approached it, I could see that every flat surface on the stone was carved with tangled occult symbols and inscriptions. IMAGOLAIRDBARRONJACKSONIMAGOBARRONOKERSTOKERSTOKERACKSON

The clearing beyond was littered with dismembered human remains in all stages of noisome decomposition. A groan rose from us all as we looked in on stark denial. Wilson recoiled from the rock and turned aside, vomiting noisily. It must have been several minutes - but, in such circumstances, what is any reckoning of time worth? - before any of us could really take notice of the Queen Anne table so neatly placed among the charnel fragments.

An immaculate dollhouse perched on top of this table. The canary-yellow walls and white trim, gay red roof and fanciful chimneys, all as clean as if it had been newly made and painted. Opening the hinged sides revealed a meticulously furnished and decorated Edwardian interior, populated by a whole menage of exquisite handmade porcelain miniatures. Their heads gleamed with unbelievably perfect coiffures of real human hair (the donors lay in pieces all about us). Several of the male figures wore waistcoats of silky human fat, and the gowns of the ladies were trimmed in a friable lace that analysis later identified as human cartilage. The faces of the dolls were painted with exacting care; the adults simpered at the rather numerous child figurines, all of whom had flat, neutral expressions, and were strangely configured, more like small adults than children.

Again that nerve-shattering whistle broke upon us and froze us where we stood। And, as before, I lifted my head to confront the cockatrice-gaze of that baleful, solitary eye, frenzied and soulless, that hell-bead of ravening malevolence, wedged in features blank with a malignancy more than daemoniacal, but still surmounting the fabulous incongruency of the gashed white stockings, the battered and mud-smeared patent leather shoes, the ragged pinafore with the dangling hem, still pink where the blackness of innocent blood had not yet stained it ...

1/10/11

2011-01-10T19:09:00.003-05:00

Read what Jeff VanderMeer has to say about The Narrator here.

And related post, featuring a raft of reviews, here.

Also be advised that a new novel from me and the bright lights of another new publisher, Chomu Press, is on the horizon: The Great Lover. Read about it here.

The Centipede Press anthology will take the form of five slip-covered items, and is due to appear in 2012, assuming there's still a world to appear in.

More work is on the way.

My thanks to Adam Niswander et al. for the warm reception I received this last weekend at MythosCon in Phoenix, and greetings to all I met and re-met.

That is all.

11.26.10

2010-11-26T14:12:00.004-05:00

It is with real sadness I note the passing of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, of Throbbing Gristle, Coil, etc., a few days ago. Sign his condolence book here.

Don van Vliet gone, too. No condolence book except the day and nothing to write with but your feet.

10.26.10

2010-10-26T18:29:00.008-04:00

"If William Burroughs was helping Cormac McCarthy rewrite Blood Meridian as dark fantasy, it might look something like this. The Narrator is wonderfully grotesque and slippery book, a meditation on the nature of violence chock-full of palpable, haunting and shocking strangeness."

- Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State

My latest novel, The Narrator, is now available here.

Read what Nick Mamatas has to say about it here.

Read what Ekaterina Sedia has to say about it here.

Read what J.M. McDermott has to say about it here.

Read what the OF blog has to say about it here.

Read what Paul Charles Smith has to say about it here.

Happy Halloween.

That is all.

10.10.10

2010-10-10T14:27:00.003-04:00

We are proud to announce The Great Lover, a new novel by Michael Cisco, has been accepted for publication by Chomu Press. Expect to see more about this on their website soon.

Yet still more material is on the way. I have a new piece in an upcoming anthology and another one is in the works right now. Information will be forthcoming.

The Hedayat essay is in print.

7.15.10

2010-07-15T17:30:00.002-04:00

Further information.

We here at Cisco Gold Star Values are proud to announce the publication of a new novel: The Narrator, to be published by Civil Coping Mechanisms. This is currently scheduled to appear in October of this year.
http://copingmechanisms.net/?page_id=148

The Centipede Press omnibus is planned for Fall 2011 at the earliest.

Also due in Fall of 2011 is a new anthology on the subject of vampirism, edited by Ellen Datlow. Blood and Other Cravings will feature a story by your reporter.

6.4.10

2010-06-04T17:23:00.002-04:00

Recent publishing activities:

"Mr. Wosslynne," Phantom.

"Machines of Concrete Light and Dark," Lovecraft Unbound.

"Violence, Child of Trust," Black Wings.

"Modern Cities Exist Only to Be Destroyed," Cinnabar's Gnosis: A Homage to Gustav Meyrink.

"Last Drink Bird Head," Last Drink Bird Head.

Coming Soon:

"The Cadaver is You," The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Homage to Mikhail Bulgakov.

"Bread and Water," in a yet to be announced anthology.

A Michael Cisco Omnibus from Centipede Press, which will include all the novels published to date and some short fiction as well, including a few new items. Also, a new essay on supernatural literature, and more.

A new novel! The Wretch of the Sun has been accepted by Ex Occidente Press for publication this year.

Nonfiction

Joshi's upcoming Encyclopedia of the Vampire will contain a piece by your reporter on Gogol's short story "Viy," and the (first) film adaptation.

I am also very proud to announce that my essay, "The Eternal Return in Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl" has been accepted for publication by Iranian Studies, and is scheduled to appear this fall (September, I think) ...

And there is more to come ... I am authorized to say that one of my already-published stories has been selected for a truly remarkable anthology from Atlantic. Formal announcement in the months ahead.

I'm attending Readercon as usual. Assassins take note.

Why I Like Damon Packard's Movies

2010-04-01T20:57:00.002-04:00

(Don't be mislead by the date. I'm not joking.)

I think they’re hilariously funny; he pays close attention to sound design; they have the kind of weird energy I associate with seeing live performances; most of them are shot in the Los Angeles I remember growing up in; they remind me of the hours I spent in front of wistful 1970’s horror movies with orange sky and hexagons in the sunbeams on my grandmother’s Zenith television. These are my personal reasons for liking them. What follows are my "professional smart person’s" reasons for liking them.

They represent the relationship between the audience, the blockbuster, and the people who make the blockbuster. These movies are designed to overpower audiences; they are stories turned into commodities, carefully designed to induce compulsive re-watching. People incorporate into themselves elements of the stories for which they have an affinity. To a considerable extent, my identity is a narrative about myself I tell to myself and others. The composition of my storyline is improvised from one day to the next and highly susceptible to all kinds of influence, including and especially the cinematic variety.

The commodified blockbuster film story is not a folktale. It has the same effect; it influences its audience in the same, often powerful, way; it becomes another component of a common frame of reference; but it is produced to make money and, once it doesn’t make money any more, it gets thrown contemptuously aside. The fans who have taken these stories into themselves are just so many suckers and those who try to live the story somehow, by dressing as the characters etc., are first class prize suckers. Commodity films prostitute epic tropes in a crude attempt to synthesize a sure-fire story-formula, hence big box office.

On the other hand, because the fans socialize around the films and use them to create their own stories, however derivative, this means the films still function like myths in some ways. That’s the discrepancy between the money value and the use value of the films. Discriminating between these two values is difficult, and can involve being humiliated.

Packard’s movies always have blockbusters in the background, and somehow they always manage to show them in both lights at once, both as commodities, which is how they are produced, and as magical stories, which is how they are received. These stories are designed to burn themselves into people’s brains using the most sophisticated special effects and the most immersive presentation and editing technologies. Whether it’s a character or the film itself that’s affected, Packard’s movies show the derangement that a steady diet of spectacle can induce by jumping back and forth between the movies and spontaneous street footage. There’s also a similar jumping between the movie as a story and the movie as a product.

Packard takes whatever he wants or needs from other movies and puts it into his films. Why go through the trouble of putting together a paltry imitation when you can simply edit the effect you want from one movie into another?

For that matter, now that commerical moviemaking is only a matter of editing together elements from tried, safe films, remade with different actors who themselves are only versions of each other, what’s the difference? What’s the difference between Packard’s technique and the technique of the major studios, apart from budgets and pretenses? Isn’t it more honest simply to collage films together?

If Packard’s movies are often incoherent, they’re usually only more incoherent in the same way that the biggest ticket contemporary Hollywood movies are incoherent. It’s the same incoherence.

http://www.youtube.com/user/pookie67

10.10.09

2009-10-10T19:30:00.002-04:00

Cisco reads! Out loud!

KGB! October 21! Along with actual draw: John Langan! 85 E. 4th! 7 o'clock!

NYRSF! October 27! Along with Elizabeth Bear, Rick Bowes, and Caitlin Kiernan! At the Soho Gallery, 138 Sullivan St in Manhattan. Doors open at 6:30.

22.5.09

2009-05-22T14:43:00.003-04:00

Three new stories on the way from your reporter this year.

"Mr. Wosslynne," in Phantom, edited by P. Tremblay and S. Wallace.

"Violence, Child of Trust," in Dark Wings, edited by S.T. Joshi. No link I can find yet.

"Machines of Concrete Light and Dark," in Lovecraft Unbound, edited by E. Datlow.

In every case, my work couldn't possibly be in better company and my vanity has become grossly inflated.

A hunt for agents is underway - all replies welcome. Starting in on novel number nine, with four unpublished ones gazing reproachfully at me from a heap in the corner, I begin to feel a curious compulsion. But can I really betray a lifetime of principled sloth and carefully cultivated obscurity?

Just coming up for air

2009-04-28T15:25:00.001-04:00

Laughing Without Smiling

2009-02-28T17:17:00.002-05:00

Apocalyptic Laughter the Laughter of a Maniac the maniacal laughter at the world’s end is fruit of vengeance, the maniac laughs because time and change have made a mockery of your petty aspirations and short sighted expectations.

"Now that it’s all over, you will plainly see what my madness," he says, "... as you called it, and for which you punished me without a shred of hesitation, or so much as a single second thought, saw all along.

"No. You punished me for seeing it, and you only told yourself that this was insanity and what you did to me you did for my benefit and that of the community, even suprising yourself, but without being drawn to investigate the reason for your surprise. How civic-minded you were, all of a sudden! You never had any such laughable thing to begin with; as always this was only another of the bare pretenses my laughter spat back at you. There was laughter, because what else was possible? Who has the strength to be light as a feather if you had never – I meant to write “nerve” – if you had never ... I did it again – if you had nerve to ... to ..."

What word? for that no word will do, whether it means look or think. It’s not that it matters so much to me, my laughter was only anticipating – no, rehearsing – for the last laugh. He who laughs last is the only one who ever laughed.

That kind of laughter in particular which bubbles up from the entrails, and then bursts through the face, seeming to come as much from the stare as from the jaw, is never encountered outside the movies. It doesn’t ring false in the mouth of a villain – the whole thing is false through and through anyway but see below – it just isn’t there at all.

A villain chortles over his victim, or in expectation of that satisfaction, which in truth goes completely against the spirit of maniacal laughter. The villain is a maniac why? Like everybody else, he wants this or that thing, he does what he can to get it; he’s just a bit unusual or flamboyant in his ways and ends. Perhaps more extravagant in his aims.

The real maniac is just there to one side of him: his pawn. The real maniac is more pure, because he loves destruction and malice for their own sake. He takes an idiotic delight in them. He’d stand and die in a burning house, transfixed by the beauty and wild power of the flames. Why transfixed? It must be because, unlike the villain who employs fire to attain this or that – and how many horror movies end with fire running wilder and wilder, and aren’t you in the audience supposed to get some vicarious sense, etc? – the maniac becomes the fire. This is his desire. He abandons everything he was.

Villains never do this. They are supposed to be more admirable for their persistence in being themselves, but they are all the more slaves insofar as they are only vessels to be filled with the audience’s frustrations. The villain resists to the end, and is justly immolated. The maniac vanishes in the explosion only to become the tower of dark light and smoke, the cracks in the earth, the force that smashes masonry and the chandelier that nearly misses the hero preserved by dumb luck.

The maniac is so wretched he’s indestructible. He will reappear in other places and times, generous to a fault he will give outright (from his point of view, but from ours, it’s only a loan) his proper laughter, which is his soul or his true name, to the villain for his use.

When have you heard someone truly laugh that way, in the street, at home, at your place of business if you can keep a straight face there at all, in school, at a funeral, inside the coffin as it descends, or through the wall from the neighboring apartment, or soft and low from the gap between houses you can feel it beat ha ha ha ha faintly in the wood. Have you ever heard it come into your ear from behind? It has a tinny, radio sound that keeps to itself. Or you might say it is like a sinuous little cone, draining into the notch.

The doctors never laugh like that, although, in the movies, only doctors laugh like that. I am a doctor myself, and I have never really laughed that way, because, as was the case with the fire, you have to disappear once and for all – once and for all into a laugh. Laughter is a state, like hunger or sleep. It’s a condition; it’s like nirvana, and so it really is too institutional a word for what I mean. It’s as if I were saying you have to disappear into the hospital or the church when what I really mean is that you LAUGH. Right there, in that unbearably long first cry, is the spot where you will disappear when the time comes. (Every word of this I have laughed.)

The Toastmaster: words by Michael Cisco, images by Stepan Chapman.

2008-10-25T18:22:00.002-04:00

I've been a toastmaster for years.

Toastmaster Two

2008-10-25T18:19:00.002-04:00

This morning, I really had a breakthrough with the toast. Simply the most perfection I've ever managed to introduce into a piece of toast. Fine grained. Light crumb. Evenly but not monotonously browned, with a subtle variability of embrownpoint traversing the surface with a series of elusive transitional shadings. I had arrived.

Toastmaster Three

2008-10-25T18:16:00.003-04:00

Crowned heads of Europe stop me in the street and say: "When are you coming to make toast for me?"

I say: "I have no time."

I open my notebook and say: "Look at my timetable. You see any time in my timetable for you? I have no time. I'm toasting everywhere. I am booked."

Now they see I carry a piece of toast with jam and bite marks on it and everything in my hand, and they say: "Please, may I taste it? Let me only have a taste."

I say: "No."

I say: "NO."

Toastmaster Four

2008-10-25T18:13:00.003-04:00

They say: "Please, a bite from that back corner there."

I say: "That corner is the best part! I've been looking forward all day to eating that part! The whole point of the process of toasting is to cultivate that very corner, to make it the succulent end point of your journey through the toast, to give it final delectableness!"

They say: ""Well, I don't care if you bite it or no, let me have a taste from the end you're eating then."

Toastmaster Five

2008-10-25T18:12:00.003-04:00

I say: "NO - this toast is not for you. Everyone gets their own toast. Different toast. I made THIS toast for ME."

Toastmaster Six

2008-10-25T18:10:00.003-04:00

If you want to become a toastmaster, you must understand that there is no technique. This is the first illusion you must disabuse yourself of, if you are to go on. You cannot make advances if you are weighted down with this Eurocentric concept of "technique."

Toastmaster Seven

2008-10-25T18:09:00.002-04:00

It is in the spirit that the answer must lie. You must make toast as a whole human being, and not as a human being divided in intentions and of unfixed concentration.

Toastmaster Eight

2008-10-25T18:06:00.003-04:00

A true toastmaster like myself can make toast out of anything, can make toast anywhere. I have made stone toast. I have made nourishing toast of air. You may eat a slice of fire toast that will give you power to race up steep cliffs. I have spread bitter tears on the toast of teasing. I have made toast from verbs and abstract nouns. I have eaten the supernal toast of beauty and justice. This practice is the best practice. It is to this practice you must look if you are to find the toaster's way.

8.10.08

2008-10-08T16:45:00.002-04:00

masulisch 16 grotesque it "the kingdom of heaven means nothing

shrouds

-ere

the dashing rage of cottaged clouds

in bewildered atmosphere

weightless mountains loom

monument swells fall

to rise in musical fury of cyclones again

a white chaos from the moon

Like thin, false hands balled up in shrouds

That shred as they appear,

it snakes along the breakers’ backs

taking any water for its tracks

the black water crawls like lava

and plummets down the glassy slope

a locomotive on a rope of smoke

-eads

the firemen with wolfhound heads

and black and brawny hands

shovelling charge

the bellowing hearth

-ands

hurtle on like a comet without need

joyous in wild nightmare of speed

incurable dream of illness,

voluptuous and insane.

perch ministers, like spiders and owls

plunge

like a pendant over heaving breast

the reckless engine dangles

down elastic eversion of their triangles

-est

Or a man about to drown.

Braids of foam, a hollow column,

acres of green hood

they lean far from the windows

when they reach

the reeking bottom of the waves

the cars bristle in nervous rows

of long boathooks and nets on staves

they look to see what chance will bring them

in eerie moment before the rise

one crazed fisher lunges so far his friends

must batten on his coat and arm to drag him in again

mow the reeking bottom of the wave

to bid on the briny armor

baleful moonlight

whose lividity embosses

pinions of raven albatrosses

with women’s cries borne forth on the blast

the howls of furies ring out like brass

cleats

by the train’s flanks in great gouts he breathed,

in mania rolled, in spume enwreathed,

the (whale) which even archaic name outspans

projects

the cyclopean trunk of his sex

by mistake or - who will say? –

the monster couples with the train

mad amorous altercation flung in disarray of

the sharp clouts of titan heart’s pulsation

the people hilarious

the tempest

of power unencircled

The engine garlanded in sperm

laved in unliving alive witch light -aved

Moon - delirious

Sky - demented

Sea - depraved

Don't Get Primed: A Primer on Prime Books for the Novice Novelist

2008-07-22T16:48:00.005-04:00

a) I think I remember what money looks like ...

The Traitor appeared the better part of a year ago, and your reporter has not seen dime one from it. The novel wasn't even listed on my last royalty statement. Eagle-eyed vigilance in following the Amazon sales rank, especially following selection by VanderMeer for the top 10 fantasy books, and a glowing review from Nick Mamatas, gives me reason to believe at least 500 books have been sold just at that venue.

I am not alone. Every Prime author I have spoken to - and in the interests of full disclosure I must say this runs to no higher a number than four, not including myself - has complained of long, inexplicable, and unannounced delays in payment. One author is still waiting, lo these five years, for money she is owed on original cover art!

b) Oh, uh ... yeah um ... what was the question?

Prime counters allegations of misconduct with handwaving and/or dithering (hereafter "hanthering"). This can be accounted for in one of two ways. It could reflect a sinister scheme of data dispersal designed to insure a strict separation of authors and useful information, so that nothing can be known of your payment status or release date until a series of secret maneuvers is performed under shadowy circumstances. The answer goes round and round, then comes out here. Does it make sense? Were you informed? Who can say?

Or all the hanthering may simply be a sign that no one there knows what's going on. Either way, it's less than refreshing to have to deal with and plan around.

c) No means (mumble)

"I'd like five ARC's available to hand out at ReaderCon," an associate of mine asked Prime.
"Affirmative," Prime chirped (simulation).
ReaderCon comes along. No ARCs. What does the affirmation of this plan mean?

Let's release The Traitor at such and such a date, so as to give momentum a little time to build, then debut it at the Con, your reporter suggested.
"Sounds good," is the reply.
Subsequent experience indicated that these cryptic words are best translated: "Go away."

So take any positive statement from Prime as a - oh I don't know - an impressionistic extravagance. Why be so tied down to the bourgeois gridiron of times and places and checks? I mean, it's all about the art, right?

d) What was it you published again?

Prime's idea of publicity is sticking your book under a rock and informing the wind. You will have to do absolutely everything yourself. Blurbs, getting your text to reviewers, everything. Prime takes authors they believe are already being talked about precisely to as to avoid having to do publicity. I firmly believe Prime's neglect helped to scuttle my last TWO novels.

How many novels do you have to burn?

Prime is an attractive publisher for a variety of reasons, and I would advise any new writer to consider submitting material thereto, but do so forewarned and forearmed. You will not be told what is going on, your requests for information will be met with stalling, ignorance real or feigned, or - most often - silence. All the real legwork will be left to you. Payment will involve unnecessary headaches and a whole lot of waiting - if not outright defrauding (which has yet to be seen).

Good luck - and try elsewhere! Don't the same mistakes I did!

01.7.08

2008-07-01T20:05:00.001-04:00

Your reporter will be attending Readercon 19.

18.2.08

2008-02-18T17:48:00.002-05:00

Attention. A new interview with [unintelligible] has appeared here. Please make a note of it. That is all.

09.11.07

2007-11-09T18:40:00.000-05:00

Flash: The Traitor has been selected for Amazon's top ten fantasy/science fiction titles of 2007. The Black Radio expresses pleasure.

15.10.07

2007-10-15T14:18:00.000-04:00

Hello. I, the Black Radio, have been instructed to direct you to this review, by Nick Mamatas, of The Traitor.

09.10.07

2007-10-09T16:41:00.001-04:00

The Traitor is now available at Amazon!

20.09.07

2007-09-20T16:39:00.000-04:00

Hello.

The Traitor is, as of this writing, debuting at Amazon some time in early October. I will advise as more details become available. In the meantime, you might try contacting Prime if you would like to pre-order the book from them directly.

http://www [dot] primebooks [dot] net

In other news, a piece of mine will be appearing in The Best of Leviathan, currently slated to appear about a year from now. And my short essay on the new weird should be included in another upcoming anthology as well. Watch this space for further information.

This October, your reporter will be Guest of Honor (fiction) at the annual H.P. Lovecraft forum, convened just over the Hudson from Poughkeepsie, in the lee of Storm King, beneath the crumbling gables of SUNY New Paltz. The festivities begin late on afternoon (nonEuclidian time) of October nineteenth.

That is all.

7.09.07

2007-07-09T19:46:00.000-04:00

Readercon proved to be a great success, and my thanks to everyone who came to hear me read. The Traitor exists in print form, but as yet has not been released to the general public. Stay tuned for further developments.

6.11.07

2007-06-11T18:58:00.000-04:00

My latest Jungle Mind column has just appeared; a short essay about Eva the Fugitive, by Rosamel del Valle. Far out.

6.8.07

2007-06-08T18:34:00.000-04:00

Jeffrey Ford has this to say about The Traitor, due out in about a month:

"Michael Cisco's The Traitor is a sinister, hilarious, and profound story, hallucinatory in its language magic - a tale of Betrayal in all its forms; characters, scenes, ideas swirl like ghosts and devour themselves. An ingenious, crackpot nightmare in the very best sense of the phrase. Lovers of dark fantasy will find something utterly unique and compelling here."

5.17.07

2007-05-17T17:21:00.000-04:00

Hello -
We'd like to welcome you for coming along, like you did. My other, more generally political page, has been brusquely shunted aside. Here's what's underway:

There are two sound files available now on the Official Website, which has recently undergone a bit of an overhaul. Many thanks to LJ Lindhurst for her assistance.

A collection of my Lovecraftian stories, Secret Hours, many of which have never been brought to light yet, has recently appeared from Mythos Books.

My novel, The Traitor, is set to come out in time for this year's ReaderCon. I'll be there myself and can guarantee you will find a seat at my reading.

John Langan has just interviewed me for Erebos, a new online journal that should be appearing soon, edited by Matt Cardin with help from Jason von Hollander.

Novel number eight seems to have begun.