The three current novels by David C. McLean

Though I generally write poetry, I have also written three novels. The first of these is Henrietta Remembers, and it is here at Lulu. & here follows the Amazon link.  This book was substantially revised in 2021 & has a nice cover. It's a sort of Nausea for nihilists. The Lulu link is better to use as far as I am concerned, though Amazon now have the updated version with a somewhat smaller font.

A novel without plot about a murder rising from the emptiness that is words. David McLean's first novel demonstrates that the form is neither dead nor the exclusive province of literary establishment windbags. "A very nasty book. The repetition, rather than diminishing the effect, served rather to hammer home the innate nastiness and bleakness until it rang like a heavenly bell."
David Mitchell - author

The second is flesh & resurrection, and it is here at Lulu. It is also here at Amazon. This is also substantially revised in 2021. It is about a man who seems to be dead & to have no memory of his life, & Henrietta is involved too. Otherwise they drink, argue, & wander off somewhere at the end.

The blurb says: 

Even more fucked up than McLean's first novel (Henrietta Remembers), which makes it well better, it abandons all pretense of plot & degenerates nicely into an inchoate prose poem.

 

 

The third was written more recently, divinity extractor fan my anti-novel on Lulu. Here it is on sale at Amazon. This is for Emma more explicitly, but they all are.

Blurb follows

This is a novel that became an anti-novel. It quotes extensively from Lyotard, Artaud, Nietzsche, & Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy". It explores the posthuman, antinatalism, overpopulation, & ecology. It is primarily an attempt by the author to identify the theoretical underpinnings, as it were, of his love for his muse, Emma, in the form of a bizarre prose poem that grew into a bizarre novel. Sacher-Masoch & St. Augustine of Hippo are sampled in & cited, with footnotes & everything. Deleuze & Guattari with their becoming-animal are featured as well, at some length.

 

How MMA Writes, a section from certain observations by Aad de Gids

A post by Aad de Gids, HOW MMA WRITES. LEE KWO, AAD GID, DAVID MCLEAN, of which I share here the section about me, having been obliged to correct Facebook's challenging formatting. I would only observe that I have adopted a new and more positive point of view recently.

Here is CODE #4 TEXTS, a collaboration by Aad & Michael Mc Aloran

Acryl Lacquer Lost in the Forest by Aad de Gids is here at Bone Orchard Poetry.

 

poetry of disdelusion DAVID C. MCLEAN

all vignettes of classicism,and then a new one. the derivational poetry of what it all not is, leaves us piquant poems unveiling dead centers. often a bit fucked up as plazas. David Mclean's poetry spurs toward such comments. his poems are concentrated lemmata in which a certain, or two, "truisms" "get's it", can get it. and it gets it. all confessionalism, thought of an afterlife, heaven or hell, the thought or idea of a god, even of spirituality, of solidity, are all heavily under fire or yet, refinedly attacked with arsenic and mould. hell rather is the here and now. only however when the heavily ecclesiastically burdened notion is bereft of all that: what belief and faith and confession have made of the world. the poetry of david is certainly post-Inquisitional,if this means all the fucking christian notions and lexicological or exegetical acribic bullshit is cut out of it. perhaps there is even a new inquisitional impulse here. it is the never ceasing curiosity about which moronic actions the society has entangled itself into now,again. if belieflessness acquires contours of zealousness it is also thrown into the dustbin of no return.

perhaps this could be an idiosyncratic feature of the poetry of david mclean. at first sight, also after having read more poems of david,one could be tempted to place the topology of his poetry within the ideological-postideological-nonideological cloud of nihilism, ascetism, logicism, antitheology, agnosticism, fatalism, hermetism, antipoetry, postpostmodernism, postironicism, neoclassicism, flarf, antiflarf, anhedonism, deathpoetry, poetry of the endworld, antihumanist poetry, posthumane poetry, poetry of the dead socius, poetry of the psychotic socius. i think it is all of this and more,yet to name but one of the above monikers as the exhaustive declarative clausule would be excreted by the poetry itself, and, asap. and this abjective reflex seems an idiosyncratic impulse in the poetry of david. an abhorrence of the mundanest things of the world where they show their mediatic poise: as "élan vital", as a vitalistic yet presumptuous assertion of what is often or and generally thought to be the regulative of the conventional and correctional societal mechanisms as eversomuch "motors" keeping our fucking economy together thereby ruining our fucking ecology as these in accumulative measurements is antropofected detrimental to all other livelihoods on the planet. this, would never be entamised as such in davids poetry yet can be easily derived as one of the major factors driving his poetry. then now we shall leave it at this abhorrence.

the poetry itself is written in an impeccable style of often mere global assertions, or, lighter, hunches, with which the poems softly begin,and weaving further on these introductive sketches, we are launched along almost atmospheric trajectories, whereby the following assertions each time annihilate the latest one, so that we perhaps hover within a certain nihilist realm, yet if this was said to be the solid regulative of these poems, david would minutiously make clear that perhaps in our perception may lie a nihilism dormant, but that he preferably shuns any "isms", and leave us with these consecutive derivative denunciations of overly happy-merry-systemy-styley-schooly pinpoints yet that his, this poetry rather resorts under, well, under nothing really, this not a devaluation of any sorts and if it is paradoxical that such poetry with that haughty of onset in any which way shall keep puking on whatever system or unsystem, then that is o.k.

the dead travel insanity

safely, this distorted world
is twisted faces
and no sense of location;

it is flux and nipples,
death and the living waiting
we are: memory and empty
falling too far,

it is remarkable that we could take almost any quote out of david mcleans poetry and we then have a prism, representative, immediately,of the lucidity and at once (david put the plugs in your ears) a kind of mysticism, of, "what there is", and it is kind of an endgame, hilarious more than tragic even if it is tragic, this, all so masterly written is nothing more than a wonder. yet nothing divine!

 

 

 

One chapbook, two novels, loose ends

Here I complete, somewhat brusquely, my selection of work available. starting with a chapbook from Michael Mc Aloran's Bone Orchard. It's called the children without guns, and it's here at Lulu. It is now at long last also at Amazon.

 

This chapbook is actually not bad, but now for the fiction, the two novels that were both originally published by Oneiros Books.

One is Henrietta Remembers, and it is here at Lulu. And here follows the Amazon link. Och här finns den på Bokus. EDIT: This is substantially revised in 2021 & has a nice cover.

A novel without plot about a murder rising from the emptiness that is words. David McLean's first novel demonstrates that the form is neither dead nor the exclusive province of literary establishment windbags. "A very nasty book. The repetition, rather than diminishing the effect, served rather to hammer home the innate nastiness and bleakness until it rang like a heavenly bell.
David Mitchell - author

 The other is flesh & resurrection, and it is here at Lulu. It is also here at Amazon, och, här ligger den hos Bokus i Sverige. EDIT: This is substantially revised in 2021 & has a nice cover.

The blurb says: 

Even more fucked up than McLean's first novel (Henrietta Remembers), which makes it well better, it abandons all pretense of plot & degenerates nicely into an inchoate prose poem.

Here's a free sample from the children without guns.

health warning

we regret to inform you
you are watching this life
with contaminated eyes.

and it is not even your life,
except a minuscule fraction
of you we might hope to find

a dead cold dream inside

no drugs for the dead

we pour no snowy libations
over the noses of corpses
and put no faith in names
that have slept insensate a night

till memory is impotent dust,
like words were once, like love;
their powder hearth and home
and nowhere,

implicature and absences to share.
we put these dead in zombie god's
forgotten pocket, with pornography
and other historical documents,

the sexual palimpsest that religion
is. we waste no luscious drugs
on the dead: they have gone now,
and once they were full of shit;

mourning amounts to nothing more than this

 

Things The Dead Say

They say all sorts of stuff, obviously, but  a few of their standard cliches are here. The book is here at Lulu, and also here at Amazon.

Som jag har tidigare hotat, här ska jag säga hur man ska köpa dem i Sverige, men Bokus påstår att denna är slutsåld och Adlibris hittar den inte. Ska åtgärda detta så fort jag orkar. Man kan beställa till Sverige genom Amazon i alla fall, eller allra helst Lulu ju.  RED: Här finns den på Adlibris nu.

The blurb says 

Love hate murder sex - the boiling down of western culture to its primitive urges, horror movies as the sublimation of our self-loathing, married to a critique of the 'society of the spectacle'. Powerful stuff. 

There are two sections about horror franchises, a section of "diverse poems" and a section of Bodhidharma poems. 

Here's a couple of pieces from the latter category. 

many dharmas

there are many dharmas
and none of them matter,
none but cleaning and slow reason
where there are eons between us
immeasurable,

night is a timely toilet
nothing sticks
 

they looked for god

they looked for god once
because they assumed a meaning
behind life, did not know
what the relevant questions were
for slightly defective epistemic
engines. they wanted a heaven
and resurrection and death,

or maybe just Nirvana,
but they did not know
when to let blood-stained
Buddha go, did not know
there is no eternity,
and the enlightened wise
live their pointless lives the same

after satori, down to the tiniest details,
they are just as thirsty for non-entity
as any sexy suicide, they did not notice
that nothing at all constitutes heaven
or Nirvana, smelling like razor blades
and bitter almonds or a bullet
in the stomach,

all that should count for humans
is fucking and love and knowing
what's happening - being smart
and happily finite rutting animals,
devils, or an enlightened person,
a saint - it's exactly the same thing,
living innocent and cruel

and selfish like children -
but they looked for god,
these healthy men
because inside them
they were pitiful, inside them
they were cripples, a world
that did not listen 

without seeing the silk

and we are cutting holes in space
following orders blind,
with the inebriated mindfulness of snails or priests
or any other policemen

swallowing the moral not: here are whole eternities
i have forgotten, stretched over a cold afternoon in ’77,
but fuck them as well - they have done being heaven;
without having seen our own silk

we are dead men, dead as them

too much human

Here is one recent book by me. too much human, my antinatalist manifesto, it's here at Amazon, from Black Editions Press.

Or here it is at Adlibris, if you happen to be in Sweden. OBS att de inte garanterar leverans före julafton, men de säger inte att det inte kommer innan jul, så man vet ju aldrig, och det blir fan perfekt julklapp för mormor och morfar. 

& then here it is at Lulu, too, & I would naturally prefer it if it were purchased here, to maximize the filthy lucre coming my way.

Blurb follows.

A beautiful hand grenade of a book that would probably serve as effective population control for the hysterically reactive and weak of heart. Throw it into a crowd of SJWs and watch them die.

A.D. Hitchin, author of CONSENSUAL

& these two,

under the god

under every god they have assembled an ideology incessant & weighting impatient history with moral shackles the dread impediment

progress is the evolution of sanity from a vulgar sea of belief, image macros & the fossils left by the urge back to the ocean, the expectant sexuality of tolerant death

under their gods is innocent dust for pigs to root in their rutting insolence like a bishop in an orphanage painfully erect, under their gods they invented lies & death


perfectly ordinary orgasm

electric is in the walls a perfectly ordinary orgasm & the stolid corpse has never yet sniggered, though he is sorely tempted as night falls like a dead man laughing

& night was tied together from broken days & the skin that insisted that you live in it as if it were a unity & a confirmation of something that you strongly disapproved of in secret, since everybody runs around with confused & stupid opinions & is not man or woman enough to concede that he or she is an incorrigible cunt not worth the paper they are printed on & wasting air like being a fucking moron was going out of style

it was a corpse's conventional orgasm & made of tiny holes in time

Old Stuff

In other irrelevant news, I am very happy to be living where I am at the moment, having all mod cons etc, thanks to my daughter, Jonna, & here I am back home in the country where immigrants perfected pizza in the 1980s, where there's no reason not to drink the tap water, where I have a very smug Morrissey mug for my tea, & where I don't need to worry about wearing one of those goddam chin diapers all the time.

Here is some old work linked from old issues of Gloom Cupboard. I always mean what I say, especially when I don't. Interviews always made me exert myself to be as much of an arrogant cunt as possible, & I'm pretty good at that. 

I am actually writing new work, but it will only come in book form. 

There are ghosts inside me & they all used to be angry, but they are happily murderous now. Whatever one can say about home, the laundry facilities here are fucking awesome.

Very grateful to my daughter & whole family. "Keep your eyeballs white & keep your needle clean," a great man once said, & I would also like to express my huge gratitude to Emma for teaching me how to feel, how to mourn quickly & start to grow my heart back, because no other motherfucker ever got to do that, no other motherfucker ever go to tell me how to think about my life & how to feel about it.