Is it a legitimate excuse to say you've not written anything on your blog for the past two months because a deliberate silence feels more profound than anything you might say and you're also feeling a bit exhausted by the internet's insatiable appetite for narcissistic noise?

No, I didn't think so.

Gods Again.

Different lands have different gods. The magic of one land will not work in another land, but the stories are the same: finding the underlying harmony in things, non-violence, compassion, the river and the way, dying gods, in my end is my beginning. And of all these stories, the Abrahamic religions, born of the desert's austerity, are the most foreclosed: only one god mediating the umbilical between self and world, their simplicity and inflexibility perfectly equipping them for rapid viral dissemination and rabid fundamentalist extrapolations – misread, misused, missing the point entirely. 

Or so I thought as I watched Princess Mononoke for the first time last week. 

Update.

I've just posted a short story that occurred to me one morning in the shower while enduring my usual gloomy forebodings about the end of the world and craving caffeine. I guess it represents the continuation of my obsession with pulling apart the idea of short stories needing big pay-offs that began with Red Shift.

What else? Oh yeah. I don't know if I mentioned it at the time on here, I rather suspect I didn't, but I had some more poetry put up on The Writers' Hub, including my poem 'The Lovers' which is about paintings that want to, ahem, seduce you and 'Man and Superman', which has nothing to do with Nietzsche beyond the title. (It's actually about me watching my son watch the first Superman movie for the first time.) There's also a poem about an anthropmorphic boob called 'Alice's Left Breast'. Plus ça change, etc. All three can be found here. 

Finally, I just last week finished the second and, hopefully, more or less final draft of my first novel (I'm working on another one, and another one kind of, and I have an idea for a super-cool one which I'm itching to start, but oh the time!). Now I have to work out what to do with the first one. More on this later, perhaps.

And so to bed. Or not, as it's only 11.22 in the morning. WHY AM I NOT IN BED?

Faust.

Here's the translation of the blurb for a forthcoming production of Doctor Faustus at a theatre festival in Santos. I quite like it.

If Faust still reflects our servile condition before power, it is perhaps because it represents a continuation of the way that social conditions have always been in the West. In the moment when society as we understand it was formed, various powers imposed man’s limits upon him. This conditioned existence subject to another still remains in force, whether through the religious structures of the past or the capitalist structures of the present. The metaphorical import of the play is no longer the search for modernity but the collapse of desire. There is no longer any value in desiring something, since desire is a byproduct of what is permitted by dominant systems. Just as reactions are also controlled permissions, so man's only option is to conform to unreal desire. It does not matter what it is and who it is for. Desire really does not matter. Mephistopheles is transmuted from the genius promising fulfilment to a futile force unable to survive by itself. 

Street Magic.

The first time I saw an animal sacrifice was outside the cemetery by our old apartment. I used to go and walk there a lot, ostensibly to check out the crazy funeral art, but mostly, I think, to fool myself into thinking I was in the countryside. That's where I saw it.

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