Ask the Author: John Thomas Allen
Answered Questions (12)
John Thomas Allen
Diana,
"Cemetery Tour" is on Goodreads. There are three reviews of it, one from an SFPA member, which I am going to post here.
"Cemetery Tour" is on Goodreads. There are three reviews of it, one from an SFPA member, which I am going to post here.
John Thomas Allen
If you meant "personal", I think everyone, but most especially writers and just perceptive people can feel the "ideational atmosphere" of their times. American (and other schools) of surrealism want to take things as far as they can go, but now there's this fatalism that goes along with. The sacred--any kind of sacred-- is something you have to drag out of the river. Pretty much every institution has been soiled.
Antinatalism is staring the grinning skull in the face, and even reveling in it. Combine these two, and those are the poems in "Rolling".
Antinatalism is staring the grinning skull in the face, and even reveling in it. Combine these two, and those are the poems in "Rolling".
John Thomas Allen
I think it comes down to an impasse with the way things are. If I can construct a few musically and meaningfully charged patches of words (sometimes referred to as stanzas), it will stand above the machinations that have made the Western world an authoritarian, force worshipping nightmare. That is enough to make me want to live most days.
John Thomas Allen
Villiers De L'Isle Adams was certainly otherwise a decadent, but he had wonder and excitement in things; Edison, for instance. I see now "decadence" as being an affair of constant and pure despair and that's just boring. If you want to write like Leopardi, for instance, a writer very close to my enthusiasm, you need his hope and imaginary "felicities". Even David Park Barnitz had some hope. Now we sort of drown ourselves in identity politics and keep away from fundamental questions, so we keep ourselves at length from decadence. There is a new book by Will Self called "Liver and Other Stories", but I've never read and it so can't comment on it being "decadent" or not.
John Thomas Allen
The crux point of static pinches in fluxes of the purple moons and silver orbs are solar arrythmias; and the eye which dissolves, a grape held in cubes of indefinite, lotto numbered cuneiform bits coming in like teeth....
John Thomas Allen
I would ask *you* why shade during a fatigued afternoon is unrated as yet, unclassified by drooling memes; how the volcanic ash diamond of Contra Nintendo Bytes fire aspartame suns through the cracked, gigabyte smile of Zuckerberg, Jobs?
John Thomas Allen
Only when you do it
John Thomas Allen
Learn the craft, then undo it. Most of all: think of what's between your teeth. The most interesting places are the borders, in every field.
John Thomas Allen
A Pataphysical Exercise Book.
John Thomas Allen
I'm not sure. I've never, to use a double negative, not been a writer. My answer would be if you've never been able to feel your eyelashes spinning and your eyeballs replaced with some exotic form of chlorine gelato and enjoy that, I would feel sorry for you because that's really something.
John Thomas Allen
I wasn't aware my introduction was online, so I can't speak to that. When I use the term "Logos of Surrealism" in the book I make a reference to the overarching occult ambience that Surrealism contains. It is difficult to describe without getting wishy washy, but it certainly is present: all surrealists--Charles Henri Ford, Andrew Joron, and here I would encourage any enthusiast of Surrealism to take a look at the scholarly work of Ferdinand Alquie in his "Philosophy of Surrealism" or Celia Rabinovitch's unfairly lauded study "Surrealism and the Sacred"--an Imaginal House that has a similar consistency when one gets down to it. A truth of imaginative freedom--something like Prometheus' truth.
John Thomas Allen
I don't experience writer's block much unless I'm cramping my brain to write too often or to write perfectly, in which case things get stagnant.
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