To celebrate World Book Night, the Dervish Days poetry collection will be available as a free download for 24 hours.

The collection features over 35 poems set in Paris, London, America and Tibet and is ideal for poetry lovers of all ages.

Dervish Days (FREE EPUB edition) (28)

My muse is never elusive, but she definitely has her moods!

There’s really no point trying to undertake a project if she’s not onboard. For example right now I have several music projects in the pipeline. But they won’t happen just yet because the muse has decided, for the time being, that photography is where she’s at. A few weeks ago she was telling me how I really needed to work on my writing, kept showing me empty seats in cafes and causing the cats to pull notebooks out my library so I could re-work some old lines. But now, she’s off on a imaginary photo shoot, Leica in one hand, Bronica in her assistant’s (yep, muses really do have have assistant muses!) yelling for me to follow her down the Champs de Lysses or 5th Avenue and get practising my rule of thirds!

Her ever-changing focus of interest shifts can be frustrating but I’ve learnt to live with her ways – and its a small price to pay for the bottomless well of creativity in which she resides. Or maybe (as Cynical Sean would say) its just an inability to remain fixed on one road, thinking that even if you change direction, the miles will mount up and over time you’ll get to the destination and find that you have passed through so many great places and so many great experiences along the way. And so photography turns back into the light of my attention, snap-shotting itself out of the shadows.

I tend to think of photography just the same way I do all art. When you look at a good photo you’re seeing the same forces at play as in good art. Just because machinery has captured that in an instant doesn’t detract from it. To me it’s all about the composition, the contrasts and the subject matter. Over time its documentary nature becomes very apparent and you see how quickly fashion and all the things we surround ourselves with change. It has managed to escape the criticisms of the art world and has infiltrated our existences.

Seeing Annie Liebovitz at work in the Visionaries: Inside the Creative Mind series set off all my neurones associated with photography and the creative process. It’s amazing how much you can learn and discover in a few moments watching a master at work. She is shown working on her 2012 book Pilgrimage, which fell like a stone in the pool of my own memories and inspirations. She says how the process became about “finding out what’s still inside me and you realise how deep the well is, and how lucky I am“. Although I’ve probably paraphrased her exact words I understand the intent well. Time alone with a camera, visiting places that move you enables you to slow the blur of the everyday. It peels back the years of paint that cover the lid of the well of your inspirations and gives you the opportunity to rip it open once more. It caused me to think about the photography that originally inspired me. There was a separate art library in the University where I studied photography. I won’t say ‘learnt photography’ as I had been doing that every year since my Grandfather had bought me a Kodak Instamatic as a small child. Researching the model name just made me realise why my current iPhone photography app of choice, Hipstamatic, had such a familiar ring to it’s name!

The art library was filled with monograph art books and was a treasure-trove of inspiration. Two books come to mind immediately. One was full of black and white photographs of Tibet, the other had some of the early work of Richard Long. The fleeting nature of his work, of paths photographed that might not exist once the photograph was taken, and the natural environments were very powerful. Another seminal influence were the photographs of Fay Godwin in Remains of Elmet by Ted Hughes (1979). The dark contrasts and almost metallic nature of her photographs were perfect compliments to Hughes’ poetry. Actually, I want to say Ted’s poetry because although I never met him, once I discovered his work I understood why many people thought my own was similar. The power of Ted’s poetry has long remained close to me. His stark paring of language does what the best poetry should do, it shouts at you in an unfamiliar way, makes you open your eyes and see the world around in a different light. Fay’s photographs helped illuminate that world and that light.

The list of influential photographers goes on, some originally discovered in that library, such as Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) and Hockney with his LA swimming pool and polaroid montages. Other photographers sneaked up via their work on album covers, for example Anton Corbijn‘s infra-red work on U2′s Unforgettable Fire and Rob Sheridan’s Nine Inch Nails Ghosts photography immediately spring to mind. There are some images which become really famous without you knowing who the photographer is. A classic example is Alberto Korda‘s photo of Che Guevera at a memorial in 1960. Visiting Cuba was such an eye-opener in terms of learning about the photograph as opposed to the ubiquitous t-shirt image –  as was discovering the depth of Che’s revolutionary heart. Another example is Malcolm Wilde Browne’s 1963 photograph of the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức. Again this was made more poignant having walked the streets of Saigon myself. It also reverberates with the current wave of self-immolation taking place by Buddhist monks in Tibet in 2012. Steve McCurry‘s 1984 photo of an Afghan girl (Sharbat Gula) for National Geographic is another example. It’s interesting that these last two images were taken by journalist/photographers.

Leibovitz however, was at the edge of my radar. I knew she was a famous photographer but had never really took an interest in her work. What is great about a series like Visionaries is that it gives you an insight into the creative processes. We all wonder how similar we are to others, or how different. Seeing how someone, who has excelled in their field of creativity, is inspired, works and the kind of environment they do that in, is something which has always interested me. In the pre-net age when you scribbled lines of poetry or song or made photographs or art it was hard to find similar people with which to share experiences and create community. So, more often than not, you carried on, alone in your pursuit of the muse’s dictum. Getting to see the workings of famous creative people was probably the only opportunity to feel like a  bone-fide member of the creative club (from a distance). Of course, it’s not necessarily any different in the post-net age. There is an inherent solitary nature to creativity. It’s why so many artists and writers have to have agents or publicists to interact commercially and socially with the world. So. To me the thing of interest is the creator’s environment and the way they approach their work.

[Before I continue, a little aside about the medium I am writing this in. Let me just say I have already backtracked as far as my thoughts about hyperlinks go in these posts. I was an early adopter and champion of HTML because it offered a way of making connections and pathways through information, something I felt was akin to the way the brain creates neural pathways and connections. I had waited a long time for its coming in 1995. I knew of the similiar work of Ted Nelson and Project Xanadhu. I had read the novels of William Gibson. I had seen the early echoes of the world wide web in Hypercard. All these were forerunners to the methodology of HTML, technological memes, in much the same way that Mondo2000 and Wired were forerunners of today's convergence of the net and everyday culture.]

So Annie caused me to reflect on my own reactions to photography. How I yearned to make seamless montages like Hockney and panoramic views. How with the advent of Photoshop and digital photography all these wishes have become ridiculously easy to fulfil. Lomography have made a great 360 degree panoramic camera and Hipstamatic continues to put all my other analog and digital gear in the shade. Whenever you watch a professional photographer like Liebovitz at work, you immediately notice the huge camera, the massive flash but are all those things really necessary to create a great photograph?

You decide.

‘We are all connected’ is a phrase that one of my ski instructors cherished enough to add to her business card. OK, she was Canadian!

If you stay in the US long enough or catch enough of their TV you’ll soon realise that the US seem to view Canada as a strange land where something of the old British eccentric gene caught hold and spread there. I have to confess there are many Canadians who have impacted my life to date. Todd McFarlane’s work on Spider-Man and creation of Spawn were landmark events in ‘graphic novel’ land and I had the pleasure of meeting his father once in Mammoth, California. William Shatner is a biggie. If not for Star Trek I would never have learnt the basics of reading and writing – but that’s another story! I hadn’t realised James Doohan can be added to the list until I started writing this! Where would the Enterprise have been without its chief engineer?

Whilst on the subject of Canadians though, I should add Leonard Cohen, whose sparingly poetic music touched me in my formative years and who I later discovered tangented my own interests in Buddhism. You may have noticed ‘tangented’ is not a real word, at least not as defined by my spell-checker. But you know what? To hell with spell-checkers! Writers and especially poets should enjoy a get-out-of-jail free card when it comes to this linguistic fascism. Language is forever changing and we should be the authors of that change. That’s my excuse and other than for the requirements of clear sense, something I will stick to.

By now you’re probably wondering about the title of this entry. I’ve recently been researching Haitian Vodou. I was about to tell you how this was initially triggered, but does that really add value, or is it just a meandering digression? Advice for writers always talks about paring language down to an almost corporate level of succinctness. I’m tempted to go down that road, but I also think that is really best left to the corporate world, or for poetry where every word should hammer an impression of the spirit of the observation into the mind of the reader. Are blogs or diaries more free-form? Are there really any rules? Let’s assume not. For the purposes of demonstrating lines of thought and interpretations of circumstance, here we go. I’ll get back to the point I promise.

Let’s start running backwards. Aleister Crowley wrote a little book about it called ThIShARB. My natural instinct is to auto-link that for you. But I’m not going to. I once believed that the infinite availability of information that the net offered was a fantastic resource. I’m fast changing my mind to think it’s a fantastic time-suck. So go ahead, check out that book (or Liber as he liked to call them) if you’re so inclined, but you’ll have to make an effort. My old school motto was ‘Nothing Without Effort’ and all these years later I kinda like it. You have to persevere (or in the world of Crowley – be Perdurabo, he who endures) to give any real meaning to anything. Working backwards brings us to news of an exhibition at the Nottingham Contemporary in 2012 which will be co-curated by Leah Gordon, and features her photography of Vodou artists from Port-au-Prince. These are the very same artists that I had recently been researching and thinking I might have to visit Haiti one day to see. It struck me as an odd coincidence. But as I have said, researching such subjects, you very quickly find coincidence, synchronicity and serendipity are your companions. Of course Rational Sean suggests that you’re just more inclined to notice something if you’re already interested in it, that you just filter-out perception of the things you’re not interested in. Quantum Sean on the other hand just laughs and holds up the card of a ski-instructor.

You decide who is right!

]]> http://www.seanwoodward.com/loa/canadians-and-the-power-of-vodou/feed/ 1 http://www.seanwoodward.com/loa/blackmouth-beach-a-short-story/ http://www.seanwoodward.com/loa/blackmouth-beach-a-short-story/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 23:46:09 +0000 admin http://www.seanwoodward.com/loa/?p=1290

Blackmouth Beach is a new short story inspired by HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and revolves around a couple who have moved to the Jurassic Coast town of Blackmouth to escape the bland urbanisation of Sydney and London. As they settle into their new lives it seems the town has secrets they could only guess at.

Extract:

“Drongos!” muttered Bambrah, slamming the brown bag down on the kitchen table.
“What’s the matter love?” I asked, opening the fridge and rearranging the vegetable shelf as she started to pass the contents of the bag. She paused, hands on hips.
“I was coming back past the bakery and some idiot in a blacked out ute bombed down the road towards the beach. They could’ve killed someone the speed they were doing”.
“Well, you know what Fossil Beach is like, the tourists can’t wait to get down there with a hammer. They all think they’ll find the next T-Rex!”
She smiled a little then and passed me the milk.“It was Ozraptors back home. I’ve seen that Range Rover before though. Last week parked down Sea Lane. Bunch of preppy kids with clipboards, seemed to be asking people lots of questions.”
“Preppy?”

Word Count: 3152
Publication Status : It is currently submitted for consideration.
© Sean Woodward, All Rights Reserved.

Birds, black chisel nicks
In the white
Cathedral mask of the sky

Snow falls quicker
Born of the uncandled quarter
The land of failed prayers.

The font of this time is empty
Only ice and the blown out light
Of unfinished windows.

Across the river, towards
Le Place des Invalides
Statues have the green stain

Strain to see through
The wedding-storm confetti flakes.

We are green no more, this land and I,
At war with the winds
The roaring mouth of frost.

Birds scatter the sky
Riding the night’s guillotine fall,
Auguries of it all

This winter without end.

Also a great new app called Mixel which instantly brings out your inner collager! You can see an example I made below. The addiction to Hipstamatic photography continues – so many great chance photos come out of this little app.

A few essentials remain on the periphery – Google Reader to drop all useful blog URLs into so they get picked up by Flipboard; and Evernote for notes, ideas and sometimes whole chunks of words. Google Reader is one of the more dangerous tools though as it becomes very easy to get sucked into research and feeding it URLs. When it comes to such diversions and procrastinations, the usual answer is to bite off the biggest problem first, or as I learned from Brian Tracy, Eat that Frog!

Another thing I learned in the last few days is that this digital age makes it very difficult to be a reclusive genius. Only someone, as the story goes, with the fortitude to turn down royalties from Warner Brothers could be capable of that. The excellent Alan More: Storyteller by Gary Spencer Millidge is a great guide to the true breadth of his work as a writer, artist and magickian. I suspect however that he’s not really being  a recluse, just very dedicated to the main task at hand.

It reminded me of the time I met William Gibson, who turned out the fantastic novel Neuromancer, on an old typewriter without any recourse to computers! The Godfather of Cyberpunk with no twitter, no blog, no youtube channel! Post-script … shortly after writing this post,  lo and behold a new WSJ interview with Mr Gibson shows he has an iPad now! Hurrah!

And the cause of all this fervent time-suk? A curveball from AOL for the iPad called Editions. Now you might be wondering what I would be doing with that when Flipboard is installed … but this daily generated magazine goes well with coffee and toast!

More to the point, In the very second issue I received appeared this article about self-published turned Pan Macmilan author Amanda Hocking.

If you’ve ever nurtured a novel inside you then go read that link and be inspired – and try and keep away from the blogs!

Like so many I was saddened to hear of the passing of Steve Jobs. You think some things will be forever, but of course, they’re not.

It’s amazing though the effect death can have! It seems everywhere I go now, this very image (approved by Steve of course) is there. I call it ‘The Ghost of Steve Jobs’. I know the biography was rushed into print and maybe it’s just me noticing it as I have been a paid-up member of the Cult of Mac long before the iPod.

Thinking back, it was probably the Macintosh II which was the first computer  to realise my dream of multi-functional, compact, empowering technology. This was a device which would enable me to throw out the typewriter, the tippex and the correction ribbons because, as part of the great GUI,  it enabled true WYSIWYG.

With a postscript printer it was suddenly possible to print a layout comprised of graphics, columns and kerning and multiple fonts rendered exactly on paper as they were on the screen. Of course this hardware was very expensive, by the standards of the IBM XT computers available at the time. I never thought fr one moment that I would own one, let alone a number of them.

What was clear to me though, even in those days, was that Apple and the vision of Steve Jobs was something unique and something which would determine the future course of technology. Over time those beige boxes were transformed, first by the iMac and finally by the iPad. It was personally gratifying to see a company that I had appreciated for so long truly come into its own with the return of Steve to its helm.

The very notion of high street Apple stores back then would never have entered your consciousness! Ralph Lauren, sure but a computer manufacturer? It shows how far Steve has brought Apple.  I am proud to be the owner of a wide range of Apple products,  not just for their fantastic ability to consume content in a stylish way but that they have always enabled me to create publications, music and art. Apple became the intersection of technology and the arts and continues to inspire those of us standing in that same place.

Steve saw death as a great definer, an agent of change that forever forces us to realise our dreams and to free our imaginations from the shackles of everyday existence. We don’t want to think about the finality it brings, but we should. We should be grateful for every day breathing, for every possibility that brings.

I couldn’t resist finishing this post in a Steve-esque fashion. These are some of my own thoughts about the ways in which he affected my own life.

And another thing …. to think different.

Verbal Narcotics was first published in 1989 and has been totally revised for the Kindle edition. Many of the poems had been previously published in magazines such as Moonstone, First Time, The Morpo Review and New Hope International. Some had also appeared in Songs of the Skin, a series of 13 poems published by Salford Pocketbooks. A handfull of the poems were so firmly rooted in the 1980′s however that they required editing and in some cases replacing. New additions include Going to Callanish, which has been read at a number of writers events, This Solstice Anniversary and William Gibson in Birmingham.

Robert Rankin (on the right) at the largest Steampunk festival in Europe.

I managed to get to the front of the book signing queue and became the proud owner of signed poster 1/250 above.

He also personally inscribed a copy of his latest novel,  Mechanical Messiah (above). I’ve been a fan of his ‘far fetched fiction’ for some time. This escalated after hearing the audiobook edition of the Brightonmicon. His recent forays into the Steampunk genre are a mixture of outrageous running jokes with some historical anchors. The immersion helped give a tongue-in-cheek slant to some of the characters in my own Steampunk work in progress, The Crystal Parliament.