AUTOEROTIC ELEGIES: A blog about the writings, predominantly poems, of David C. McLean. Also about other writers at POSTHUMAN POETRY & PROSE.
The new book by Tanya Rakh has reached Amazon. It's sale at this link for Amazon USA, & at this one for Amazon UK. See the post below for my introduction & further information.
Amazon, being corporate scumbags, don't pay very well. So, if you prefer the artist, Tanya, to make a little more for her work, please consider buying from Lulu, at this link. They at least pay acceptable royalties, though the price is forced up by Amazon.
It is enormously gratifying that a new book, tundra, by Tanya Rakh is now available from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, with a brief introduction by me. The book is fifty numbered pages, & includes Tanya's own illustrations & cover art. I might as well post my introduction below, after the cover.
The book is available direct at this link, & the proof has been approved so the book is coming to online sites like Amazon shortly. Feel free to buy direct though, because Lulu pay authors much more than Amazon & other major booksellers.
It is gratifying to publish this present volume by Tanya Rakh, a short collection of poems called tundra.
For reasons that I have elsewhere described at great length, it is not possible to capture intensity & fire in the drab garb of the natural languages, but it is undoubtedly possible to adumbrate them via negativa, or to hint at them as the unnameable that hides within the interstices of the text.
that’s the secret
you can paint
with the other
side
(“quill”)
As I have previously written of Rakh, this focus on fire & intensity, on all varieties of passion, means that she produces Dichtung, not Poesie: the work thereby belongs to & reveals earth as it pertains to beast & goddess, not the paltry human world, the scientific world that relies on commensurability to describe everything in terms of quality & quantity, a world blind to intensity.
It is also most gratifying to me to note that this book clearly touches on the eternal return, & does so in a way that is entirely compatible with my own Deleuzian understanding of Nietzsche & the selective, as it were, nature of the divine attention:
yes, it’s always the end, we finally make it and the wind picks up and the mountains peel back to beginning again. how do we stay? what imprints are left after the blood tide? after all these planets close their eyes?
nothing but this, love. a wide-eyed sea. all screaming ghosts of sun flesh swimming through the open dream. a sky arched over water. soft lights twinkling past the edge of a century.
As the above quote illustrates, it is only intensity that is ultimately real, because the energy that constantly emanates from goddess to fuel this illusion that it pleases Her to construct is ultimately fire - it is the eternal & infinite fecundity that quantum physics shows is always already there instead of the grotesque & imaginary void that torments the imagination of the weak & reactive. It is always fang & fury & pain, & this is obviously nothing other than love.
The poem “sulfur” is perhaps the closest this book comes to the Mesopotamian understanding of primal goddess:
I cry my soul
into seven ancient rivers
each opens the mouth
of a burning star—
a sulfur world
that breathes our language
If that isn’t redolent of Lamaštû, the seven witches, then I don’t know who screams in the night or why.
A quick post about three recent books now being available from Amazon & elsewhere.
The new book about Tara is now on Amazon, here at this link for Amazon UK, or at this one for US Amazon. This one is only £9.
A new, longer, & revised version of the Kali book is apparently on Amazon UK at this link & it is here at US Amazon.
The main reason the new version is longer is because I refer to & discuss studies by psychologists. I have always maintained that gurus, & spiritual people in general, are a bunch of fucking narcissists, so it occurred to me to check the research. It appears that I hit the nail on the head. If I erred it was on the side of generosity, since the research is touchingly unanimous.
The Lilītu & Lamaštû book, however, had some fucking issues with the fucking metadata, but is obviously still at Lulu. It's available at this link. It is at last available on on Amazon UK here & on Amazon USA at this link
The new Lamaštû book is being written, but I am deliberately taking my time over this one since it will be my main work about antinatalism & population control, & since Lamaštû is so significant to me.
Coming to Amazon soon enough, & now accepted for global distribution, but at present at this link, here is my book Tara is the fire. Blurb & cover, then six samples, follow. Choosing some fairly arbitrary samples, not the best ones, I must say that this seems to be to be the best I ever wrote. There's quite a lot in this book about non-discrimination, intensity, incommensurability, human narcissism, & the fundamental nature of creation & cosmos, drawing on Karen Barad, among others. A lot of this was revealed to me by Lamaštû, somewhat to my surprise. Lamaštû is the subject of my next book, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, will be pretty much another antinatalist manifesto.
EDIT. This is on Amazon UK at this link, & Amazon USA at this.
This book is about Tara, the second Mahavidya. It continues McLean's series about goddess.
Tara embodies the explosive energy of cosmos that is constantly consumed & constantly renewed.
She teaches us how dualisms are empty, how ritual is unnecessary, & how alignment with goddess offers us liberation.
Today I make available divine fury: poems for Lilītu & Lamaštû from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. I am also about to release Tara is the fire, but I shall give that a separate post. Here is the first of these books on sale direct, probably coming at Amazon soon. After the Tara book, I am writing one solely about Lamaštû - partly from gratitude to Her for favours received, partly because Her role in preventing conception makes Her very well adapted to my antinatalist predilections.
In the Lilītu & Lamaštû book, with which I am rather pleased, I do deal with my usual themes: humanist narcissism, how Dark Mother has become dea abscondita, the bogus patriarchal religions with their daddy kinks, the narcissistic fear of chaos, the "bipolar" contrast between spicy forms of goddess & the more vanilla aspects of divinity, masculinism & sexism within religion & the occult, &, of course, last but not least, the incommensurability of intensity & the shortcomings of language.
I am hugely grateful to Nausicaa Morgue for the cover images & for discussion of both these aspects of Dark Mother.
Blurb & cover follow, &, since I have neglected to post samples recently, four sample poems:
This book extends McLean's series about goddess to include Lilītu & Lamaštû, & removes Lilītu completely from the fictional image of Her as a creature of the patriarchal god. She is a black moon Kali & a central aspect of Dark Mother.
Seeing Lilītu as a demon is not seeing Her in Her full bipolar divinity as goddess, with Her benevolent & "malevolent" aspects incorporated.
If we cannot accept the spicy aspects of goddess, then we do not deserve Her incalculable bounty.
I have today released a second edition of Kali breathes this fire. Because I constantly write about the Mahavidyas & other forms of Dark Mother I have needed to add a little to the introduction. I do not deny that I caught a couple of typos too. I shall certainly produce further revisions, but this is the current one. The main difference is that I have added much more about the incommensurability of intensity & the shortcomings of language, as well as a few pages with extensive references about spiritual narcissism. There's also some discussion of my use of the term "patriarchy", elucidated by reference to Juliet Flower MacCannell, & I can totally recommend her Regime of the Brother.
My book is available here at Lulu, & soon be available on Amazon, since I have sorted out what the issue was there.
EDIT: This book is now approved for Amazon 7 will be there shortly. Currently the older version (232 pages) is on sale there, but when it's listed as slightly longer (& £12.99) it will be the new one. It looks like the book is available now at 239 pages but the price is still £13.75 & the back cover looks like the old one, though "look inside" gives the new TOC. I would assume that the new book is what you will get. The price should update soon.
The book about Lilītu & Lamaštû & the book about Tara are both being written right now & I trust that they will be pleasing to Maa.
Delighted to announce a new book of poems by Carolyn Srygley Moore at Posthuman Poetry & Prose. It is now on sale at this link & the proof has been approved so it will appear on Amazon soon. Laying Flowers on the Boundary costs $10, €10, or £8.
EDIT: After much buggering about, it is now here on bloody Amazon. Here it is at USA Amazon too.
As I say in the blurb, this is definitely some of her best work, & Carolyn & I did a good job preparing it, I think. The poems adumbrate a fundamentally aesthetic stance that is innately moral, since moral development is largely based upon aesthetic considerations, & a poem can itself perform a small scale transvaluation. Discriminations are empty & serve to strengthen the insistent falsification that is Maya, & inspiration is arbitrary, so the sense of an aleatory & random imaginary is a great strength of this book. Generally goddess does not care for American writers, because of their tendency to narcissism, but She thinks it's alright for me to publish this & Carolyn's previous here, For All of My Beautiful Ghosts.
The cover, featuring Carolyn's photography & designed by me, is below. I endorse this book.
There are a few books forthcoming fairly soon from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. These will appear as time permits.
Carolyn Srygley-Moore has a collection of poems called Laying Flowers on the Boundary that should be completed relatively soon. I am putting it together.
I myself am working on two books, with lengthy prose introductions. One of these is about Tara, the second Mahavidya, it is called Tara is the fire, & I shall obviously distance Her very much from the eponymous Buddhist divinity because nobody likes narcissism. I am also doing some minor alterations to the original book Kali breathes this fire because that has been my intention all along.
But before this book I am writing one about Lilītu ("Lilith"), ,Lamaštû & associated divinities that are all differentiated from Inanna, on account of killing babies & various other forms of spicy behaviour. (I do not take it upon myself to judge any behaviour that pleases any aspect of Dark Mother.) This book will be fairly controversial, since I wholeheartedly despise both the Kabbalistic & occult interpretations of "Lilith" as filthy patriarchal bullshit, based upon dismissing aspects of primal goddess as demonic due to occasional spiciness. The same goes for astrological interpretations, though the various "Lilith" figures there have similar functions based upon a less offensive interpretation of Her.
This book is very little censored to render it palatable; Lilītu is having none of that nonsense. I have actually tried to tone parts of it down because even I find them sarcastic, cruel, & full of raw hatred, but Lilītu thinks I would be a little bitch if I did that because my hatred is strong & beautiful. I really really want the motherfuckers that I abuse in this book to try to curse me. That would be sweet. Lilītu has not said what this book is to be called yet.Lilītu is a Mesopotamian goddess, & the religions of the book can all fuck off.
EDIT: Because of a promise to Lamaštû I shall be writing a book
directly about Her now, & this will come directly after the Tara
book is published.
Lalita drinks too much hits Amazon (soon) at this link or at this one for US Amazon.
Here it is at Lulu.
Samples posted in this post.
Cover & blurb below.
This book continues McLean's series about Kali Maa & the Mahavidyas & is about Lalita or Shodashi, the third Mahavidya.
The poems are preceded by a lengthy & controversial introduction, where McLean discusses goddess; the selective Nietzschean eternal return as a template for reincarnation; Kali & temporality; the imaginary ego; spirituality & narcissism; the narcissistic nature of the guru phenomenon; intensity & incommensurability; the patriarchy & fratriarchy; & the colonialism to which the tribal peoples in India are subjected.
The cover image is the Sri Yantra.
I'm pleased to announce the arrival of AmaLilith online shop at Big Cartel, with arts, crafts, & bone sculptures, created without harmful chemicals with traditional methods, by Nausicaa Morgue. The shop is online at this link. There is also a blog that I previously mentioned here.
Nausicaa's products are inspired by, & imbued with, the powers of Lilith, Hecate, Asmodeus, & Astaroth, the goddesses & demons with whom Nausicaa works. Lilith & Hecate are both forms of our Dark Mother goddess, & both of these are subjects of future books by me, obviously. The products, however, are of great aesthetic value even for those of a secular inclination. Some sample photos are included below.
Whatever one's faith, Nausicaa's products channel the power & beauty of nature, & these pieces, none of which is particularly expensive, are full of life & vitality, fragility & immense power. The Divine Mother has directed me to be of assistance to Nausicaa in whatever way I can, & I think that her artistic expression adumbrates the beauty of incarnate spirit as a simple expression of goddess, in more or less the same way that I aspire to do through words. The pieces are transformative in their celebration of the ecstasy of becoming, rooted safely in decay, of the profound love that preserves the inconsequential, & sees the essential in the interstitial & the liminal.
These are offerings for the crossroads where Hecate & Matangi shepherd the broken ghosts home, the impure purity of the fragmentary that is all that ever deserves to return.
As usual I post here a few poems as samples from the latest. Here it is at Lulu. Amazon link coming later.
The latest in the Mahavidya books is now available, a little more controversial than usual. The Divine Mother wants this one out now, & I am starting a new one about Tara. The order in which these books are appearing is fairly arbitrary. In this book, I discuss Deleuze, Lacan, Nietzsche, colonialism, & spiritual narcissism, & I swear as little as possible while so doing.
The book is on sale here at this link, it is coming on Amazon soon, & the cover & blurb follow.
This book continues McLean's series about Kali Maa & the Mahavidyas & is about Lalita or Shodashi, the third Mahavidya.
The poems are preceded by a lengthy & controversial introduction, where McLean discusses goddess; the selective Nietzschean eternal return as a template for reincarnation; Kali & temporality; the imaginary ego; spirituality & narcissism; the narcissistic nature of the guru phenomenon; intensity & incommensurability; the patriarchy & fratriarchy; & the colonialism to which the tribal peoples in India are subjected.
The cover image is the Sri Yantra.
If you are looking for other writers from Posthuman Poetry & Prose they are linked here in the post in the other blog devoted to the pre...
