'TIS PITY SHE'S A S'MORE

literature. some cupcakes.

[tispityshesasmore]

At long last, my copy of the steampunk anthology my short story was published in has arrived! What a feeling it is to see in print something you scribbled in your university days when free time was still a thing. I have also been bowled over by the other stories in this collection; it is an honour to share space with them. A million thanks to @jhameia, @blackwolfchng and @rosariumpublishing for making this happen, to @lindbloem her beautiful illustrations, and to my parents for being my unending inspiration. Fingers crossed that the rest of the books will make it across the seas to this part of the world soon!

[tispityshesasmore]

Visit Original Link

Rock N’ Roll Suicide David Bowie Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth You pull on your finger Then another finger, then your cigarette The wall-to-wall is calling, it lingers, then you forget Oh, you’re a rock n’ roll suicide You’re too old to lose it, too young to choose it And the clock waits so patiently on your song You walk past a cafe But you don’t eat when you’ve lived too long Oh no no no, you’re a rock ‘n’ roll suicide Shift brakes are snarling as you stumble across the road But the day breaks instead so you hurry home Don’t let the sun blast your shadow Don’t let the milk float ride your mind They’re so natural Religiously unkind Oh no, love, you’re not alone You’re watching yourself but you’re too unfair You got your head all tangled up But if I could only make you care Oh no, love, you’re not alone No matter what or who you’ve been No matter when or where you’ve seen All the knives seem to lacerate your brain I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain You’re not alone Just turn on with me and you’re not alone Let’s turn on with me and you’re not alone Let’s turn on and be not alone Give me your hands 'cause you’re wonderful Give me your hands 'cause you’re wonderful Oh give me your hands. David Bowie (b. 1947) has described 'Rock n’ Roll Suicide’ as being in the tradition of the 'French chanson’, drawing on Baudelaire, Machado and Jacques Brel.  It was released in 1974 as the closing track of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.

[tispityshesasmore]

I was 20. I was heartbroken. This man told me I was not alone. He told me to give him my hands because I was wonderful. Give me your hands, he said.  Goodbye, David Bowie. If only we could steal time, just for one day.

[stephanisoejono]

Aaaages ago, @jhameia contacted me to do illustrations for @rosariumpublishing story anthology for The Sea is Ours

I LOVE the story assigned to me, Working Women is about the things I love, women from different backgrounds kicking ass, a well developed world and a gorgeous backstory. I’m really sad that I wasn’t able to illustrate EVERYTHING–heck, if I have the money I’d like to shoot this into a movie because it is THAT GOOD. (that’s ANOTHER can of worms hahaha)  I might revisit this world when I’m done with Bidadari just because. Olivia Ho, your stuff is awesome, don’t stop :D

Fantasy casting this short story, I’d like Dian Sastro to play Khairunissa, Karen Mok as Ning and maybe a beefed up Phillipa Soo as Ah Hong.

[tispityshesasmore]

Honoured to have the wonderful @lindbloem illustrating my short story Working Woman, which is being published in Southeast Asian steampunk anthology The Sea Is Ours by @rosariumpublishing. Am still in awe at her art and at how something I wrote could have inspired that.

[tispityshesasmore]

My best friend and I loved Working Woman and were wondering when we could maybe see further adventures?

Hello! I am so very glad you did.  I am also sorry I don’t really have the hang of Tumblr message alerts so I only just discovered this.  I have not got started yet on any Further Adventures but will keep you posted if I do!  You could also suggest the sorts of Further Adventures you might like to see.

[rosariumpublishing]

Publisher’s Weekly starred review of “The SEA is Ours”!

Check out this fantastic review of “The SEA is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia” on Publisher’s Weekly’s website!

Excerpt: “Characters appropriate clockwork technology, live in high-rise apartment blocks, and fight guerilla wars, but these familiar elements don’t hinder the stories from frequently surprising the reader….. Even the slighter stories have the craft, perspective, and components that merit savoring, and the finest would be worth considering for any year’s best anthology.”

[beyondvictoriana]

CLICK HERE to support The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia

Southeast Asian Steampunk! | Crowdfunding is a democratic way to support the fundraising needs of your community. Make a contribution today!

The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia is an anthology of short stories and art. It is exactly what it says on the tin–it has:

SOUTHEAST ASIA!

Southeast Asia is the lesser-known Asia, the Asia confused with other Asias. Some know us by our typhoons and tsunamis, as the land where refugees and cheap labor come from, or as the sad, downtrodden, Third World region where Westerners go for their exotica and sex tourism.

Southeast Asia is a rapidly modernizing region, home to unique flora, fauna, cultures with long histories of towering civilizations, and peoples picking ourselves up in the wake of imperialism. Southeast Asia is a place of far flung dreams, rising metropolises, high-end technology, and myriad languages. Each Southeast Asian country has its unique history and treasures.

STEAMPUNK!

Commonly assumed to be “Victorian Science Fiction,” our fancy steampunk recipe combines alternate history, technofantasy, and retrofuturism.

THE BOOK

Twelve stories that reimagine Southeast Asia through a steampunk lens—or perhaps, stories that reimagine steampunk’d fantastic technology and potential histories through a Southeast Asian lens. You decide! These are tales of Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam by writers all over the world.

Here you will find dreams of revolution, acts of resistance, and lives, loss, and loves played out in high and low places. Aswang! Boat People! Clockwork revenge! Dragons! Spider fighting! Volcanoes! And the requisite explosions galore!

THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

“On The Consequence of Sound” - Timothy Dimacali “Chasing Volcanoes” - Marilag Angway “Ordained” - L. L. Hill “The Last Aswang” - Alessa Hinlo “Life Under Glass” - Nghi Vo “Between Severed Souls” - Paolo Chikiamco “The Unmaking of the Cuadro Amoroso” - Kate Osias “Working Woman” - Olivia Ho “Spider Here” - Robert Liow “The Chamber of Souls” - zm quỳnh “Petrified” - Ivanna Mendels “The Insects and Women Sing Together” - Pear Nuallak

These are the voices of the unheard, singing the songs of the unsung. Only a few have ever been published in the West—indeed, some have never been published before! Each story will be accompanied by an illustration by an equally talented artist.

The SEA Is Ours will be released November 1, 2015 from Rosarium Publishing, distributed by IPG.

Donate here & please signal-boost!

[beyondvictoriana]

ICYMI

[tispityshesasmore]

DO IT TUMBLR

[apoemaday]

How It Is

by Maxine Kumin 

Shall I say how it is in your clothes? A month after your death I wear your blue jacket. The dog at the center of my life recognizes you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic. In the left pocket, a hole. In the right, a parking ticket delivered up last August on Bay State Road. In my heart, a scatter like milkweed, a flinging from the pods of the soul. My skin presses your old outline. It is hot and dry inside. I think of the last day of your life, old friend, how I would unwind it, paste it together in a different collage, back from the death car idling in the garage, back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced, reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish into a ceremony of sandwich, running the home movie backward to a space we could be easy in, a kitchen place with vodka and ice, our words like living meat. Dear friend, you have excited crowds with your example. They swell like wine bags, straining at your seams. I will be years gathering up our words, fishing out letters, snapshots, stains, leaning my ribs against this durable cloth to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

[clementinevonradics]

I. When I was trying to quit smoking and we drank white wine from Mason jars, you called my freckles cocoa powder and I called your green eyes celery. II. I am learning how to be a grown-up who pays bills, cooks her own meals, and doesn’t cry at words like I think I just want to be friends. III. The truth is this: Love is an organic thing. It rots and softens.

-All That’s Left To Tell, Clementine von Radics

(via

talesofunsuccess

)

[tispityshesasmore]

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

Robert Ardrey, African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man (1961)

[tispityshesasmore]

A long time ago, there was a girl named Jenny Haniver who lived at the edge of the sea. She lived with her mother, who was old and blind, and with nobody else. Jenny could sail, and she could fish, and her eyes were the same colour as the sea. At some point, a man fell in love with Jenny. They would have married and lived to be happy and old. They would have had children and grandchildren and, on their last day, sailed out of life together. But before that could happen, the man was swept out by a wave. He would have drowned, but Jenny was an excellent swimmer and she saved him. Afterwards, she died. Jenny's mother wrapped her daughter's body in silvery fish. She sewed them together with hair that she tore from her own head. She popped their eyes with a silver pin and whispered secret words into their fishy ears. Jenny Haniver swam away without saying goodbye. The man watched until she disappeared, and he watched for many days after that, but she was something else, something new, and she never came back.

Megan Kurashige, from 'The Manticore, The Mermaid, and Me'

[tispityshesasmore]

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.

Frank O’Hara, ‘In Memory of My Feelings’

[otomoved]

a sentence will always look like poetry

if you hit enter a lot

[tispityshesasmore]

Paul Eluard, ‘Je t’aime’

Je t’aime pour toutes les femmes Que je n’ai pas connues Je t’aime pour tout le temps Où je n’ai pas vécu Pour l’odeur du grand large Et l’odeur du pain chaud Pour la neige qui fond Pour les premières fleurs Pour les animaux purs Que l’homme n’effraie pas Je t’aime pour aimer Je t’aime pour toutes les femmes Que je n’aime pas

Qui me reflète sinon toi-même Je me vois si peu Sans toi je ne vois rien Qu’une étendue déserte Entre autrefois et aujourd’hui Il y a eu toutes ces morts Que j’ai franchies Sur de la paille Je n’ai pas pu percer Le mur de mon miroir Il m’a fallu apprendre Mot par mot la vie Comme on oublie

Je t’aime pour ta sagesse Qui n’est pas la mienne Pour la santé je t’aime Contre tout ce qui n’est qu’illusion Pour ce cœur immortel Que je ne détiens pas Que tu crois être le doute Et tu n’es que raison Tu es le grand soleil Qui me monte à la tête Quand je suis sûr de moi Quand je suis sûr de moi

Tu es le grand soleil Qui me monte à la tête Quand je suis sûr de moi Quand je suis sûr de moi

[tispityshesasmore]

James Schuyler, ‘May 24th or so’

Among white lilac tresses, green-gold spaces of sunlit groves The shade side of a clothes pole, dark innards of a light-violet shell. Everything trembles everything shakes in the great sifter: bud scales, pollen, all the Maytime trash whose sprinklers are clocks that tell the time of the dandelion take-over generation, never quite coming to pass.

A man passes in calendula-colored socks. A robin passes                          zip                                thud punctuating the typescript of today with a comma on the too-close cut grass. Then erases it for a full stop in a lilac. In Y’s and V’s and W’s an elm ascends smoothly as an Otis elevator. Other trademarks blur in the gone-over forsythia hedge. A table and a chair, carved chunkily in the lawn, are the colours of an oystershell as though beneath the sod were chalk not sand. Why it seems awfully far from the green hell of August and the winter rictus, dashed off, like the easiest thing

[tispityshesasmore]

The same Umm Kalthūm refrain heard in Fez, late afternoon, jasmine and café terrace tucked up against the city walls, smoking kif and sipping tea in the company of refined, articulate elders, full immersion now to shape heart into arabesques, maze of the idle self, assuming all its spiralling potential.

Abdelwahab Meddeb, Talismano (1976). Trans. Jane Kuntz.

[tispityshesasmore]

Mona Arshi, ‘Ghazal’

Not even our eyes are our own… – Federico Garcia Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba

I want to tune in to the surface, beside the mayfly, listen to how she holds her decorum on the skin of the pond.

I want to sequester words, hold them in stress positions, foreignate them, string them up to ripen on vines,

and I want to commune with rain and for the rain to be merciful, a million tiny pressures on my flesh.

I refuse to return as either rose or tulip but wish to be planted under the desiring night sky.

I want to be concentrated to a line under the pleat of your palm and for it to radiate opalesque under shadow.

I want God’s fingers to break and for you to watch as I fold over my sleeve, reveal the detail of my paling wrist.

[tispityshesasmore]

Sheree Mack, ‘Maman de l’Eau’

Before you notice the dead fish and rotting things; the drowned pet amongst the rusting cans, you will see her –                               a woman, and what a woman.

She will be amongst the shallow waters, washing her clothes, naked from the waist up with only her long hair as a means of covering.

Her long flowing skirts will skim the water’s edge. She will be singing a song in the sunlight, a song you recognise but cannot name.

You will be drawn towards her, as she lingers in this golden moment, washing and rubbing clothes, making suds on the surface of the water, all the time

                              singing her song, lost in her own world.

You imagine touching her, her long slender neck. Running your fingers down her spine squeezing her broad behind.

You imagine this, all the time you are moving closer, and all the time her song is running around your mind.

She bends to rinse and pull the clothes heavy with water. Snap and crack, rubbing and rinsing, pulling and wringing                               her hands a frenzy of activity.

Lost in her own world and her song, you will think that this is the moment, the right time to make your move, to claim this beautiful woman of the water:

she who is so beautiful that your tongue tingles in anticipation of making contact with her smooth coppery skin.

Within a crack and a splash,                               she will catch you around your throat.

Her green slitted eyes with hold you as her tongue hisses, burying deep into your ear, burrowing and tunnelling.

Now you will notice the dead fish,               the rotting things                              around the dead pet,                        amongst the rusting cans, as you lie amongst them                                                             taking your last breath.