#vagabond city literary

[megacrashcourse]

Press Roundup for Periodic Boyfriends

Analog Science Fiction & Fact: "The land of the dead, like the realm of the microscopic, may be invisible to the naked eye, but it’s still there." (interview)

Chelsea Community News: "The poems run the gamut from sneakily humorous to outright hilarity to loss and longing, and sometimes encompass all of the above in a single entry."

CultureSonar: "...a masterpiece of love, lust, loss, and acceptance."

Full House Literary: "This collection of poetry should be on your must read list."

GCN: "...strangely beautiful in its resolve."

Highland Park Poetry: "Pisarra is skilled at emulating the classic moves of the Shakespearean sonnet, deploying enjambment to dazzle his audience..."

John V’s Eclectic Avenue: "...eloquent and masterfully constructed sonnets."

Loch Raven Review: "Much like punk culture, the most provocative, daring, and honest art often comes from the LGBT+ community. Periodic Boyfriends is no exception to this rule."

The London Grip: "Rabelaisian, witty, wistful and intelligent, Drew Pisarra’s poems are a delight to read."

Misfit Magazine: "Pisarra has written a one-of a kind collection of gay 'love poems' that even a straight person can love."

Modern Literature: "...there is no time better than now for reading this voluptuous collection of sensual poetry."

Modern Literature (part 2): "Why do you always write about sex?" (interview)

Ocean State Review:  "If you want to celebrate pride by reading something by a queer author that will make you laugh, gasp, and give you what the kids call 'the feels', and make you go, 'Huh? Huh!', then I highly recommend it."

Other Terrain: "The humanness of this collection is striking, that cannot be understated."

Out in Print: "These poems exist beyond their origins, all 118 of them." Ovunque Siamo: "Pisarra shows not only a keen understanding of chemistry theory and poetic craft, but of psychology and human relationships. These poems are, by turns, incisive, beautiful, salacious, wistful, and flat-out entertaining." (not online)

Penumbra Journal of Literature and Art: "The work is sexual and heady, but brings much more than that to the table the deeper one reads."

Sacred Chickens: "​It’s a rare writer who can combine laughter and tragedy, light and darkness, not only in the same poem, but in the same sentence. Drew Pisarra is that writer."

Vagabond City: "Pisarra’s poetry playfully explores a wide swath of experiences and feelings, making the collection’s specific vision all the more impressive and admirable."

The Washington Blade: "...like hanging out on a summer’s night with the acclaimed queer poet Frank O’Hara and Dorothy Parker."

Your Impossible Voice: "Everything changed for me once I’d experienced Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers." (interview)

[finishinglinepress]

NEW FROM FLP: Now We Drink Alone In The Dark by Matthew DeGroat

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/now-we-drink-alone-in-the-dark-by-matthew-degroat/

Set against the backdrop of humanity’s dwindling days, Now We Drink Alone In The Dark is a meditation on the existence of the plagued and the hopeful; on human resilience in the face of dizzying madness. DeGroat’s #poetry reads as part travelogue and part journal; park black comedy and part avant-garde ramblings, touching on themes of #love, #loss, #depression, american #politics, #life across the pond, pandemic one-night stands, and laughing while crying. A collection to be revisited time and time again, this is the first book of many from DeGroat that will continue soothe the reader’s soul, as we collectively approach the precipice of time.

Matthew DeGroat is a writer and musician, currently based in New York City. His poetry is emotionally bittersweet, poignant and honest and when not writing or performing with his band, LUV DOT GOV, DeGroat can be found vagabonding around Europe, or seeking out his next favorite scotch whisky in a dark and quiet Manhattan pub.

PRAISE FOR Now We Drink Alone In The Dark by Matthew DeGroat

“Romance just out of reach, the sobering distance between loneliness and solitude, these poems, filled with women, war, desire, abortion, booze and despair chronicle DeGroat’s fascinating existence. Nothing’s off limits. Part poetry, part travelogue, this collection will dance right into your heart. I could not stop reading.”

–Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of BRAZEN (NYQ Books 2023)

“With raw honesty and humble introspection, DeGroat crafts each poem to tell a story that is precise, yet esoteric. His ability to evoke an emotional response in the reader is unparalleled. He eloquently tackles taboo subjects and examines controversial topics with an air of grace. DeGroat exudes a coolness that is contagious, mixed with playful self-deprecation that makes you root for him and leaves you wanting more.”

–Kelly Thomas, Literary Agent at Serendipity Literary Agency & Developmental Editor at Editorial Freelance Association

Please share/repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #read #poems #literature #poetry

[bewitchingbooktours]

Bewitching Blitz- Exiles by LJ Ambrosio #Fiction #ComingofAgeFiction

Exiles

Reflections of Michael Trilogy

Book Three

LJ Ambrosio

Genre: Fiction/Coming-of-age

Publisher: Film Valor

Date of Publication: May 2024

Number of pages: 150

Word Count: 40,241

Cover Artist: Seamus C 

Book Description: 

In this final chapter, Ron's story concludes from Reflections on the Boulevard (2023). 

Michael's wish was for Ron to exile himself in the heart of Paris with its beautiful culture and citizens as they protest and fight for the soul of the city. 

Ron's journey is met with life-affirming friendships and lessons along the way. 

The final book in the Reflections of Michael Trilogy, which started with A Reservoir Man (2022).

Amazon      BN       Smashwords

CHAPTER ONE

A cool autumn breeze, in the twilight, wrapped around our exile who sat on a bench in front of a bookstore that resembled a place we might find in a Tolkien novel. On this street, rue de la Buccheri, was the bookstore Shakespeare and Company. The store itself was famous for housing the books of many great literary artists on their shelves. They also supported any young or old artistic vagabonds by allowing them to sleep in the aisles of the bookstore on makeshift beds when finding themselves homeless.

Ron, who managed the store, sat on this bench every evening thinking of Michael. Ron thought of things he remembered and how much he learnt from Michael. He felt the emptiness in his soul, yearning to have that connection just one more time. He had lived in Paris for six years now, a brief time for an exile, yet he was free from a society drowning in untruths; his refuge was the bookstore.

Just like every night, as Ron prepared to close the store, he occasionally checked the front of the store, looking for his friend. Then, he noticed another young man still looking at books on the outside shelves.

Ron moved outside to get a closer look at the late customer under the guise of moving the outdoor book bins back inside. He suddenly noticed that the young man was putting a book down his pants.

Ron raised his voice and shouted for the thief to put the book back on the shelf. The young man, caught in the act, ran away.

The young man sprinted and tripped while running past the café. In this stumble, he decided to turn the corner and make his way rapidly toward la Seine.

Ron, weak in the legs from forgetting the spirit of his youth, had been managing bookstores more than living life. His legs pumped forward. but with the awkwardness of an old man who had forgotten how to walk. In a few seconds he was up to speed and ran faster to catch the thief.

Near the corner, Ron had missed his opportunity to slow and check for other people walking, so he slammed into a group of women. He especially blasted into an old lady whose groceries flew into the sky, and a yogurt splattered against a wall and the faces of the other women. She turned to condemn her assailant, but he was already on the next block in pursuit of the thief.

He spotted the thief at the Notre Dame Hotel, out of breath, leaning against a pillar. Surprised at the thief’s choice to stop here, he slowed down and let his feet pound the street into a halt.

Ron grabbed at him but still missed his shoulder.

“Give me the book back!” he said, very loudly.

The thief just shrugged his shoulder, a mocking smile. His smile made the act of chasing him through the streets feel silly, as if this were a game that had been played and he took it too seriously.

The thief looked at Ron and asked, sarcastically, “What language are you speaking?”

“What do mean? I am speaking French!”

Our thief laughed, turned to a random man who walked down the street, and said, "This young man thinks he is speaking French Go ahead say something to this stranger; he will tell you are speaking some other language other than French!”

“I will call the police,” Ron said firmly.

About the Author:

Louis J. Ambrosio ran one of the most nurturing bi-coastal talent agencies in Los Angeles and New York. He started his career as a theatrical producer, running two major regional theaters for eight seasons. Ambrosio taught at 7 Universities. Ambrosio also distinguished himself as an award-winning film producer and novelist over the course of his impressive career.

Website: https://www.ljambrosio.com/ 

Blog: https://ljambrosio.blogspot.com/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/authorlambrosio

TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@ljambrosioauthor

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ljambrosioauthor/ 

Author Bookstore: https://payhip.com/LJAMBROSIO

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22516285.L_J_Ambrosio

a Rafflecopter giveaway

[happygirl2oo2]

Publication submissions that are open for unagented authors - an ongoing list

Hera Books

Bookouture (a division of Hachette UK)

NineStar Press

ECW Press

Tule Publishing

Hazy Dell Press

Harlequin publication house a/o Afterglow Books

Carina Press (an Harlequin imprint)

Entangled Publishing (and their imprints)

Alcove Press

Sourcebooks Casablanca

Sourcebooks Horror

City Owl Press

Austin Macauley Publishers

Kensington

Lyrical Press (a Kensington imprint)

Dreamspinner Press

Quill & Flame Publishers

Baen Books

Harper North (a HarperCollins imprint)

HQ CIL (a HarperCollins imprint)

One More Chapter (a HarperCollins imprint)

Mills & Boon (a HarperCollins imprint)

Page Street

Bold Strokes Books

Smartypants Romance

Brother Mockingbird

Holiday House

Evernight Publishing

Oliver Heber Books

Allen & Unwin

Small Town Girl Publishing

Turner Publishing

Chronicle Books

Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing

Tiny Ghost Press

Dragonblade

Wise Wolf Books

Ylva Publishing

Boldwood Books

Black Rose Writing

5 Prince Publishing

Shadow Mountain **only during the listed dates on the linked page

Vagabond Press **only during the listed dates on the linked page

Covenant Communications

Aethon Books

Hot Tree Publishing

Torchflame Books

Deep Desires Press

Whimsical Publishing

Fairlight Books

Lake Country Press

Red Adept Publishing

Quills & Quartos

Red Empress Publishing

----

[if you're looking for a literary agent, which will give you the ability to submit to more publications, Literary Marketplace is a great place to use in your search as it contains a list containing many of them]

[identitiesyourself]

THE BOHO LIFE

Being part of the boho community is basically practicing an unconventional lifestyle (that one departs from social norms and conventions), often in the company of like-minded people and with few permanent ties. Includes musical, artistic, literary, or spiritual interests.

These days we went on an adventure with the bohemian community and we traveled from Los Angeles California to the Arizona desert. It was definitely something unforgettable. Throughout the trip, we were able to get to know, experience, and enjoy firsthand the life of a bohemian community far from prejudices and the internet where only you, nature, and coexistence with your companions matter, days of relaxation and creativity, laughter, dance, and music.

We interviewed a few of the boys in the early days to get to know their way of life better, and this is what they told us: 

“Being a bohemian person is not just a kind of style, it's a way to live It's about enjoying your existence and any little thing that happens in your life, not worrying about all material stuff, we give more importance to the art and culture and just need living the life.”

“We usually live in small communities, leading sample lives in caravans, visiting new places and meeting new horizons and people, others of us live in small neighborhoods of the cities filling the streets with our art and our music, actually some nights we have and “special nights” where we share songs, poems, anecdotes, and stories, is just an incredible night to be with friends and family and sing and dance.”

These are just a few of the testimonies that we were able to collect. Adopting this lifestyle saved many, and rescued them from getting lost in everything material, everything toxic that exists today, many believe that living a lifestyle bohemian means being vagabond, lazy, and detached, but we were able to discover that living a bohemian life means much more than that, it means freedom, self-confidence, expression, joy, color, it is living now and enjoying tomorrow.

That's easy.

~Posted by Flores Gala

[helpinghandsrpc]

literary sexts vol. 2 poetry meme

PART TWO

Inspired by the Vol 1 meme by lizzyisameme, I have decided to make an unofficial sequel with various quotes from Literary Sexts Vol 2, found here on Amazon, as edited by Amanda Oaks & Caitlyn Siehl. As always, if you like what you read, please consider supporting the authors and buying the book yourself!

Not all poems from the book will be found here, as this is only from the middle of the book, and I’m still leaving a good chunk out. 

I want you, smelling like the earth, fresh out from the rain, running back to me clothes heavy and soaked with sky.

I watch your eyelids flutter with our fluidity, intertwining into a perfect rhythm that I could never hope to recreate in even my greatest love poem. 

Kiss me so loud the clothes are quiet when we peel off each other’s shells. Love me with such volume the neighbors mistake our bodies for gunshots and we’ll never run out of ammunition. 

The are are no fig leaves, no apples. Just an overripe peach waiting, your wide mouth with tongue catching rivers of golden summer light.

Desire is fundamental, the lexicon of planets and moons, a sentence’s structure, the lunar longing to pull you into me with the unequivocal dark power, like the black noun longs to pull the red verb inside it.

You are a mountain beside me. I am the slowest river. We are aglow.

Your name like a caramel thing, burnt-sweet and sticky. In my mouth, dissolving, sugar cube, cherry red, lips locked.

I’m licking the salt of your body from my fingertips, never thought I’d find such a burning sea.

I have been collecting your voice for ages - taking syllables here and there, burying them in memory like seeds. I forget where I leave them, only remembering when I hear you again, and then it is springtime, the first bloom, your hands soft on my skin.

Let us ask forgiveness for our sins after we’ve finished - or shall we just shout God’s name in something like praise?

These mountains of yours have taken more lives than Everest. Inching closer to the top and I can hardly breathe. I bet you the world that I will barely make it out of here alive.

Your body, a bolted cage; mine, a feral beast. I know the ecstasy of a free life but I want forever to be trapped inside you.

Cities were sacked, entire civilizations raised and leveled, stars imploded and sucked up the crust of the universe when they heard those sultry words leave your lips.

My back arched over the surface of the kitchen table, bent up, concave with one fixed kiss below. You leave whole notes around my wrists. I etch staves down your back, and the fermatas holding each beat in its curve.

You smell distantly of a slice of honeydew melon, and I want to be the one who grabs you underneath the chalky lights of this bar, show you the curves of you -- how I can eat you, until you are nothing but a rind. 

Tonight my ridges are violent and gritty. If you’re not willing to get a dirty love underneath your fingernails, pivot your heel back downtown. I am not catharsis; I am a pair of crimson lips, ready to bleed between yours.

My liberty is godless but tonight, your lips are holy. I am the restless disciple of your hands; I will be what they tell me to be. You are unhooking my faithless declaration with honeysuckle fingers, you’re becoming my religion.

Where you walk, shadows draw back and nothing escapes your light. Where you walk, gravity moves away from you and you divide the sea of people. 

All this time I spent boarding my windows against you and still stole in through the cracks, sifted over the furniture, and settled into the carpet, persistent as sand in a beach house.

I am the vagabond moon swallowed by your wandering star, the crescent sliver of light kissed into oblivion by your absolute eclipse.

Kissing you didn’t require practice. It was slipping back into my skin. It was our bodies adrift in dark water.

You sigh; dancing in the ash of separation. I shudder; the tragedy of years wasted. We collide; for the first time I make love with both eyes open.

I see something new each time I taste you. How do you so widen the hearth of my desire? I cannot hold my hunger for you. 

We make love like near-death. You’re a hellhound man with heaven-streaked hands. I run towards the light.

My tongue will speak you into riverbed. Flood your throat until the drought of your heart becomes thirsty again.

Let me dribble peach juice down your chest. Let me trace a sugar road into your mouth, lick my fingers clean from your sin and drink your body whole. 

I never pretended to be anything less than what you see: a woman completely in love with you, the most dangerous kind of wolf. It was only when you buried your hands in my fur that I bit down. 

Tired of names, let this only be colors: the red of your nail lacquer, matching the stem of your wine glass. Now, I brush my teeth while you sleep, your long hair everywhere. Later, I will braid it into my own, dream of you. 

[theoutcastrogue]

Men without masters: Marginal society during the pre-industrial era

[by Bronisław Geremek]

Rogue literature

On the threshold of the modern era appeared an abundant literature devoted to a description of the world of delinquency. More particularly, these were treatises on the mysteries of the forbidden quarters of the cities of the time and on the behavior and way of life of social groups living by swindling or fraud.’ This being drawn to the exotic and the unusual in society, which was not unrelated to an awakening of ethnological curiosity, was also seen in the flowering of a type of literature which could be called “picaresque”; It had already appeared in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, but it came into full bloom only in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Spanish picaresque novel, because of its literary brilliance and its wide acceptance by the reading public, left in the shade a multitude of similar works coming from other European countries, from the English "rogue pamphlets" to the "rogue" literature of Germany and Holland to the tales of Polish and Czech vagabonds. These literary works are closely related to treatises which claimed to be based on eye-witness accounts or which claimed to report authentic events. In reality, they were all taken from fiction and demand comparison with documentary evidence. But the abundance of this type of literature and the success it enjoyed also indicate an early awareness by modern society of the growing importance of social groups living in contradiction to the norms, manners and customs in force at the time. [...]

At the end of the 19th century the curiosity which the lower levels of society aroused was already directed less toward miserable working conditions and poverty than it was toward the disparate fauna of urban marginal society, the thieves and ruffians. This curiosity was accompanied by a sympathetic and indulgent attitude, free from the fear and aversion which the duo poverty/crime had excited during the first centuries of the modern era. In the 20th century the image of the outlaw took on a new menacing aspect. Outlaws became a potential instrument of political struggle, a reserve force for totalitarianism. The Beggars’ Opera, by John Gay ( 1728 ), returned to the London stage in the 1920’s and was warmly received. In 1928 Bertolt Brecht rewrote Gay’s play, bringing it up to date, and his Dreigroschenoper, (Three Penny Opera) was triumphantly successful in all the theaters of Germany, on the very eve of Hitler’s takeover of power. Brecht’s intention was to put the bourgeoisie on trial by showing that a bandit may quite well be of bourgeois origin, just as a bourgeois may become a bandit. His MacHeath was conceived as a bourgeois called upon to threaten the sympathy the bourgeoisie felt towards criminals.’ The atmosphere of great crisis caused a change in the appeal previously exerted by marginal groups: the public seemed to see in the life of the outlaws a defiance of social order and the norms of collective life and, in the thieves, the bearers of a catastrophic future.

Rogue terminology

The definition of marginal society and its extent poses many difficulties. The sources do not furnish elements which permit precise lines to be drawn. Custom and law make primary use of the idea of delinquency and the delinquent, but they consider condemnable and punishable all ways of life which do not conform to the propriety of social conditions or origin; for example, they condemn the fact that a “plebeian” might shirk labor. At times, all the members of this milieu are designated as “people of ill repute.” The repressive apparatus used this concept to determine the manner in which an accused person should be treated, how he should be “interrogated,” and so on. The author of a French account of the moral doctrine in vigor in the late Middle Ages treated delinquents and protesters as “vrays folz frenetiques”; he puts thieves, looters and criminals of all types into this category, but he also includes gamblers and pimps. They are distinguished not only by their way of life, which could be called asocial, but also by their particular ethic, which causes them to refuse to recognize the right of ownership and to subordinate moral imperatives “à la voulenté de leur sensualité.” In the terminology of the time, however, we especially find designations such as “vagrant,” “no fixed domicile,” as well as a whole range of pejoratives emphasizing an asocial way of life. In Polish juridical acts, alongside the term vagrant (rustici vagi, hici vagi, vagabundae, vagantes) we meet more and more often the Polish expression luźni, referring to unemployed peasants and to journeymen. We also find the German term lose Leute or Losleute, from which the Polish equivalent luźni probably derives; and in French, the expression “gens sans aveu,” which has the same significance. In the Slavic countries, we come across the word hultaje, in Russian gulašč ije ludi, with a broader meaning: it designates free peasants, short-term salaried workers and all types of “idlers.”

If, at the judiciary and administrative levels we again find as characteristics of these groups the break with social bonds, itinerancy and idleness, the image given by the literature emphasizes above all the danger which their existence presents to  public order, and it points out primarily fraud and criminal actions in characterizing their way of life.

— Bronisław Geremek, “Men Without Masters: Marginal Society During the Pre-Industrial Era” in Diogenes 25(98), p.p.28–54. (January 1977); abridged, emphasis and titles mine

[mtnboho]

Mountain Bohemian Lifestyle Brand | Website Blog Product Pages

Mountain Bohemian Lifestyle Brand Supporting, Free-Spirited Conscious Culture, Boho Fashion, Metaphysical Gifts & Decor.

“Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people and with few permanent ties. It involves musical, artistic, literary, or spiritual pursuits. In this context, bohemians may be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds.

This use of the word in the English language was imported from French in the mid 19th century and was used to describe the non-traditional lifestyles of artists, writers, journalists, musicians, and actors in major European cities.[1]

Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or anti-establishment political or social viewpoints, which often were expressed through free love, frugality, and—in some cases—simple living, vandwelling or voluntary poverty. A more economically privileged, wealthy, or even aristocratic bohemian circle is sometimes referred to as haute bohème[2] (literally "high Bohemia").[3]”

WikipediA

[bryanastar]

All of My Writing

Howdy Tumblr! And Instagram (if you came here from the link in my bio). For the sake of your convenience, here is a master list of all of my currently published writing . Click the name of the short story if you want to know more about it before digging in (it’ll link to a tumblr post I made introducing the story which also contains a link to the story itself). Or, if you’d rather get to reading immediately, click the name of the publication right below it to dig right in.

Note: The list doesn’t include any forthcoming pieces (because then the only link I could share is on the introductory post to the story, which I don’t share until the piece itself comes out)

Short Fiction (Online Publication) -

A Bar for Old Ghosts, Among Others

— Outlanderzine

The Lotus Motel

— The Graveyard Zine

Judith was Never Adopted

— Rhodora Magazine

The Marionette’s Tale

— An Insipid Board of Ideas

A Conversation With Aunt Willow

— An Insipid Board of Ideas

In Ten Minutes, I’ll Be Dead

— An Insipid Board of Ideas

Sunshine Over Moonshine

— Le Château Magazine

After Christmas

— An Insipid Board of Ideas

Winter’s Peak

— An Insipid Board of Ideas

Whisper-Speaking

— An Insipid Board of Ideas

Life After Death

— Le Château Magazine

Longing Primavera

— Block Party Magazine

55 Bucks

— An Insipid Board of Ideas

Sunset Flower

— The Literary Canteen

Chipped Blue Paint

— Novus Literary Arts Journal

Don’t Choose Your Own Adventure

— io Literary Journal (Refractions)

Robots Writing Prose on Love

— The Talon Review

Opposite the City Across the Ocean

— White Wall Review

Summer Spirits

— Birdie Zine

Aurora Memorialis

— Fulminare Review

Salt Lore

— Occulum Journal

Crane Cage

— Same Faces Collective

The Good It

— Caustic Frolic Magazine

Before ‘84

— Art for Life Magazine

Frankenstein, Revisited

— As Alive Journal

The Preacher’s Skull

— Twin Bird Review

A Public Space

— Vagabond City Lit

Short Fiction (Print Publication) -

Imaginary Ghost

— Pile Press

A Payphone, Just Outside Helena

— Payphone Calls from the Road

Creative Nonfiction -

My Family Once Told Me

— Ninetenths Quarterly

Poetry -

When My Mother was an Elephant

— Irshaad Poetry

Essays/Articles -

It’s Easier to Sympathize with Real People

— Youth Be Heard

Growing Up Too Fast: How Teens and Teenagehood is Adultified and Sexualized by Popular Media

— Cordelia Magazine

Opinion - Russian War Crimes Only Strengthen Ukrainian Resolve

— Blue Blood International

Interviews -

Writing the Immersive, Haunting, and Raw with Pushcart Prize Nominee Bryana Lorenzo

— Outlanderzine

Other -

Out Where the Bluebirds Flew

— Novelly

[emilysvietnameselitblog]

Ten Interesting Vietnamese Novels

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong

Paradise of the Blind is an exquisite portrait of three Vietnamese women struggling to survive in a society where subservience to men is expected and Communist corruption crushes every dream. Through the eyes of Hang, a young woman in her twenties who has grown up amidst the slums and intermittent beauty of Hanoi, we come to know the tragedy of her family as land reform rips apart their village. When her uncle Chinh‘s political loyalties replace family devotion, Hang is torn between her mother‘s appalling self–sacrifice and the bitterness of her aunt who can avenge but not forgive. Only by freeing herself from the past will Hang be able to find dignity and a future. - Goodreads

Ticket to Childhood by Nguyen Nhat Anh

The story of a man looking back on his life, Give Me a Ticket to Childhood captures the texture of childhood in all of its richness. As we learn of the small miracles and tragedies that made up the narrator’s life—the misadventures and the misdeeds—we meet his long-lost friends, none of whom can forget how rich their lives once were. And even if Nguyen Nhat Anh can’t take us back to our own childhoods, he captures those innocent times with a great deftness. -Goodreads

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today. - Goodreads

Dumb Luck by Vu Trong Phung

Banned in Vietnam until 1986, Dumb Luck is a bitter satire of the rage for modernization in Vietnam during the late colonial era. First published in Hanoi during 1936, it follows the absurd and unexpected rise within colonial society of a street-smart vagabond named Red-haired Xuan. As it charts Xuan's fantastic social ascent, the novel provides a panoramic view of late colonial urban social order, from the filthy sidewalks of Hanoi's old commercial quarter to the gaudy mansions of the emergent Francophile northern upper classes. The transformation of traditional Vietnamese class and gender relations triggered by the growth of colonial capitalism represents a major theme of the novel. Dumb Luck is the first translation of a major work by Vu Trong Phung, arguably the greatest Vietnamese writer of the twentieth century. The novel's clever plot, richly drawn characters and humorous tone and its preoccupation with sex, fashion and capitalism will appeal to a wide audience. It will appeal to students and scholars of Vietnam, comparative literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, and Southeast Asian civilization. - Goodreads

I Love Yous Are for White People by Lac Su

As a young child, Lac Su made a harrowing escape from the Communists in Vietnam. With a price on his father's head, Lac, with his family, was forced to immigrate in 1979 to seedy West Los Angeles where squalid living conditions and a cultural fabric that refused to thread them in effectively squashed their American Dream. Lac's search for love and acceptance amid poverty—not to mention the psychological turmoil created by a harsh and unrelenting father—turned his young life into a comedy of errors and led him to a dangerous gang experience that threatened to tear his life apart. - Goodreads

The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bao Ninh

Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. Originally published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its non-heroic, non-ideological tone, The Sorrow of War has won worldwide acclaim and become an international bestseller - Goodreads

Catfish and Mandala: A Two Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam by Andrew X. Pham

Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey—a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam—made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland. Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as "boat people." Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness." In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United States he's considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity. - Goodreads

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

This illustrated memoir is about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui’s story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. - Goodreads

Ru by Kim Thuy

A runaway bestseller in Quebec, with foreign rights sold to 15 countries around the world, Kim Thúy's Governor General's Literary Award-winning Ru is a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland. Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters become rough again: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy's autism. Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy. -Goodreads

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. -Goodreads

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: This body was never made by Tara Propper

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/this-body-was-never-made-by-tara-propper/

This body was never made is a meditation on #grief and its attendant fears surrounding the #body – the body’s frailty, lineage, and legacy. Its #poems paint portraits of #maternal #loss, of a fractured #family, of nature’s eloquence, and of transcendental beauty. While This body was never made does not solve the problem of death, it embraces the “night sounds” that accompany an awareness of the body’s temporality, resolving in the chapbook’s final lines, “There is nothing in this room but shapes of us—amorphous/organs ascending and descending underneath the bed sheets.” In this collection, still-life speaks, seascapes listen, and math provides counsel, reminding us that #life exists before and beyond the body.

Tara Propper has earned her MFA in poetry and PhD in English. Her poetry has appeared in the Southampton Review, Janus Unbound, Literature Today, Ekstasis Magazine, Shuili Magazine, Taj Mahal International Literary Journal, Moveable Type, Vagabond City Press, and P – Queue. Her scholarly work has been published in Composition Forum, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, and Resources for American Literary Study. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Literature and Languages at the University of Texas at Tyler.

PRAISE FOR This body was never made by Tara Propper

Cerebral, lyrical, witty, loving and grief-worn, Tara Propper’s life-infusing poems in the collection, This body was never made, reveal an immense talent, a rare gift to the world of poetry. In a sky of many, Propper is singular. The poem “Seascape at 4:42 PM” concludes: “One chiseled cloud makes a metonymy/ of itself. Cotton mammals lurk above/ both pure and untrue. /4:43 PM drops/its un-blessings. It’s the ugliest of day–/and most aware.” Propper’s poems are sinuous tracings that unnerve the tick of the clock; a lot happens between 4:42 PM and 4:43 PM, a lot that is “most aware.”

–Star Black, author of three books of sonnets: Waterworn, Balefire, and Ghostwood; a collection of double-sestinas, Double Time; and a book of collaged free verse, October for Idas

Tara Propper’s This body was never made tests the precision and range of mathematical concepts in particular and, more broadly, any intellectual construct we use to understand the stunning input of our senses. Can a fractal describe a pregnant female body? A miscarriage? Rage? Death? This body was never made also tests the language with which we express these concepts, using rhymes, chimes, puns and syntactical play to push words to their limits: “Outnumbered, she let the numb root.” The raw power of these poems comes from the pressure they are under to bridge the rational and the anything but.

–Julie Sheehan, author of Orient Point and Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise and Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University, NY

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems

[prolapsarian]

Notes to Sean Bonney (1969-2019)

The great ruse of our political epoch: Cameron, Osborne and Clegg, and their crows in press, scorched a set of oppositions in the minds of the people. The whole of society encapsulated in an image of “workers versus shirkers”, “strivers versus skivers.” The great tragedy of our political epoch: the Labour movement, the left, and the social democrats took the bait of these laminated ghouls. They responded simply by saying that there were no skivers: instead there was a worthy working class, labouring away ever harder, and getting ever poorer. They said the whole thing was a myth, that the shirkers were a phantom, a chimera, a scapegoat, an image invented by evil overlords to turn the working class against itself, leaving it prone to the ideologies of reaction. The labour movement talked instead only about the working poor, or the unemployed who wanted always to get back to a good job, on a good wage, forever and ever.

Few resisted the ruse, but Sean Bonney was one of them. Perhaps it was because Sean himself was a skiver, a drunk, a scoundrel, a villain, an addict, a down-and-out, a fuck up. More likely it was because of his deep political intuition and understanding. For him, the politics of class warfare was never about worthiness; it was never about what the working class deserve at the end of a hard day’s work, but instead its crucible was the hatred of the social conditions that pummelled people, silenced them, boxed them in, boxed them up, oppressed them, made them suffer. This politics was uncompromising because it understood that any compromise was a failure: there is no weekend that redeems the week, no pension that makes good on the life wrecked by the conformity and unfreedom of work.

I like to think of Sean as the thing that terrified those Tories most, as one of those beautiful creatures who so absolutely threatened them that they had to transfigure him into a phantom. His poetry too was one with this politics in this. Every line is written in solidarity with the shirking class, a class whose underground history crawls and stretches backwards, a perpetual dance, an unending squall, as anonymous as it is enormous. If Sean was a skiver he was also always hard at work, undertaking an immense labour of compression, in order to make that history heard. And this furious labour was quick and angular, because it always came with some sense that history was, already, ending. As a singular voice that resisted the ruse, his writing is one of the most important political efforts of our time.

o scroungers, o gasoline there’s a home for you here there’s a room for your things me, I like pills / o hell.

*** Since hearing of Sean’s death I have been thinking a lot about what I learnt from him. Learning is maybe a strange way to look at it. Because Sean’s poetry was not really so complicated. He stated unambiguous truths that we all knew and understood. Just like Brecht’s dictum in praise of communism: “It’s reasonable, and everyone understands it, it’s easy […] it is the simplicity, that’s hard to achieve.” This was the plane on which we met. All of us, Sean’s friends, comrades, loves, beloveds, others we did not know who all were invited, all in this common place where we know how simple these truths are, even if none of us were able to express them with such concision as Sean – even if we were all somehow less rehearsed, less prepared, less audacious. And suddenly I know it was a common place he made, wretched and hilarious.

*** So communism is simple. But running beneath all of Sean’s work was an unassuming argument, from which I have learned so much. Although argument was not his mode – his poems were always doing something, accusing but never prosecuting – an argument is there, even if it was exposed as a thesis in its own right. It is something so simple, easy, and so obvious that it barely seems worth saying. Sean’s poems made an argument for the enduring power of French symbolism – for a power that surged through history in the spirit of that movement. No surprise for a poet who rewrote Baudelaire and Rimbaud. But constantly a surprise to a world that thought that mode already dead, a world no longer animated by the literary symbol, nor transfixed by the resurrection any such symbols could herald. His writing followed the traces of this hyperhistory that wrapped around the world and back, from the high culture of decolonial revolutionism back in to cosmopolitan centre where bourgeois savages feast greedily on expropriated wares; into the dark sociality of the prison, and out again into every antisocial moment that we call “society”; sometimes making the earth small within a frozen cosmos ringing out noise as signal to nobody and everyone; sometimes bringing the whole cosmos in crystalline shape (sometimes perfect, sometimes fractured) as the sharpest interruption within the world - every poem charting a history stretched taut between uprisings and revolts. He knew the rites of symbols, the continuing practices with which their political power could be leveraged.

Sean was one of the few untimely symbolists of our time. His poems are full of these things: bombs, mouths, wires, bones, birds, walls, suns, etc - never quite concepts, never quite images, never quite objects, but pieces of the world to be taken up and arranged, half exploded, into accusations; treasured as partial and made for us to take as our own, a heritage of our own destruction, at once ready at hand, and scattered to the peripheries on a map of the universe, persistently spiralling, in points, back to the centre, some no place.

But if Sean was a symbolist, if he was attentive to its fugitive history, a slick and secret tradition of the oppressed, then this was also a symbolism without any luxuriant illusion. It is a symbolism in which all knowingness has been supplanted with fury and its movements. Sean’s poems are spleen without ideal. They have nothing of the pointed, almost screaming, eternal sarcasm of Baudelaire when he ever again finds the body of his beautiful muse as white and lifeless cold marble, utterly indifferent to the desirous gaze. There is no such muse, no callous petrified grimace, half terrified half laughing, ancient enough to unseat Hellenism itself - although there is beauty still but it exists otherwise, amid a crowd, darkened and lively. When I think of Sean’s monumental work I imagine an enormous bas-relief of black polished marble jutting out from some monstrously disproportioned body, angled between buildings. This great slab flashing black in the white noise of the city. This great slab as populous as the world. Flashing black and seen with the upturned gaze. There is no oppression without this terrified vision that sees in ever new sharpness the oppressor.

When you go to sleep, my gloomy beauty, below a black marble monument, when from alcove and manor you are reduced to damp vault and hollow grave; when the stone—pressing on your timorous chest and sides already lulled by a charmed indifference—halts your heart from beating, from willing, your feet from their bold adventuring, when the tomb, confidant to my infinite dream (since the tomb understands the poet always), through those long nights in which slumber is banished, will say to you: "What does it profit you, imperfect courtisan, not to have known what the dead weep for?" —And the worm will gnaw at your hide like remorse.

*** I haven’t explained what I learnt. I ask the question, What does it mean to find the late nineteenth century stillborn into the twenty-first? Why should these febrile years, from 1848 to the Commune have been so important? What was Sean leveraging when he recast our world with this moment of literary and political history? And what was he leveraging it against? I have a sense that what was important to Sean was a sense of mixedness. There were those who would read these years, after the defeat of revolution, as a dreadful winter of the world. There were those who saw only society in decline. “Jeremiads are the fashion”, Blanqui would say while counselling civil war. And then there were those for whom arcades first provided an extravagant ecstacy of distraction and glitz. These were the years of monstrocity, from Maldoror to Das Kapital. These years of the great machines that chewed up humans and spat out their remains across the city, of great humans who chewed up machines and made language anew. These years in which the fury of defeat burnt hot. These years of illumination. These years where gruesome metallic grinding and factory fire met the dandy. Few eras have been so mixed, so utterly undecided. No era so perfect to carve out the truly Dickensian physiognomy of Iain Duncan Smith. This was neither the stage of tragedy nor comedy, but of frivolous wickedness and hilarious turpitude. The world made into a barb, and no-one quite knowing who is caught on it. The great progress. The great stupidity. Street life. The symbol belonging to this undecided realm.

Marx was famously dismissive of that “social scum” the Lumpenproletariat, who he described at the beginning of this period as “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.” Marx saw in these figures, in their Bonapartist, reactionary form, a bourgeois consciousness ripped from its class interest and thus nourished by purest political ideology. But if he could excoriate the drunkenness of beggars, Marx failed to appreciate its complement: the intoxication of sobriety of the working classes, the stupefaction in methodism, their imagined glory in progress. Wine, as the beggars already knew, was the only salve to the social anaesthetic of worthiness and the idiotic faith in work.

If Sean were here I’d want to talk to him about this learning in relation to a fragment by Benjamin, which he wrote as he thought about the world of Baudelaire; this world of mixedness of the city constructed and exploded, and the people within it subject to the same motion:

During the Baroque, a formerly incidental component of allegory, the emblem, undergoes extravagant development. If, for the materialist historian, the medieval origin of allegory still needs elucidation, Marx himself furnishes a clue for understanding its Baroque form. He writes in Das Kapital (Hamburg, 1922), vol. 1, p. 344: "The collective machine ... becomes more and more perfect, the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous one — that is, the less the raw material is interrupted in its passage from its first phase to its last; in other words, the more its passage from one phase to another is effected not only by the hand of man but by the machinery itself. In manufacture, the isolation of each detail process is a condition imposed by the nature of division of labor, but in the fully developed factory the continuity of those processes is, on the contrary, imperative." Here may be found the key to the Baroque procedure whereby meanings are conferred on the set of fragments, on the pieces into which not so much the whole as the process of its production has disintegrated. Baroque emblems may be conceived as half finished products which, from the phases of a production process, have been converted into monuments to the process of destruction. During the Thirty Years' War, which, now at one point and now at another, immobilized production, the "interruption" that, according to Marx, characterizes each particular stage of this labor process could be protracted almost indefinitely. But the real triumph of the Baroque emblematic, the chief exhibit of which becomes the death's head, is the integration of man himself into the operation. The death's head of Baroque allegory is a half-finished product of the history of salvation, that process interrupted — so far as this is given him to realize — by Satan.

I won’t pretend to know all of what Benjamin means here but I have some idea. And those last sentences terrify me. Modernity begins with a war that is a strike, one that repeats through history. And the shape of this strike, this war, this repetition, is the shape of detritus of production interrupted. We shift perspective and the machine is revealed as other than it was once imagined: it is not some factory churning out commodities, but a world theatre of soteriology. An exchange takes place: the half-finished product for the half-destroyed body. Although what is created (albeit as a “monument to the process of destruction”) is some monstrous combination of the two. One and the same seen with two different perspectives, and the two perspectives separated by the distance between the promise that production will be interrupted, in rhythmic repetition, and the force of the machine that completes the product, kills the body into it, sealing death perfectly within the commodity, as its catastrophe. This distance, a tropic on the edge of the end of the world, is Hell.

This is a lot. But maybe it gets close to what I learnt. That all those bombs, mouths, wires, bones, birds, walls, suns, etc were for Sean the emblemata of our political times. These are the monsters, half-finished, half-human, half-machine, the bird interrupting itself with a scream a silent as the cosmos once seemed. I don’t know if they are to be taken up as weapons in the battle for salvation, or as mere co-ordinates on the map of hell. But they are certainly potent, and set here in commitment to redemption, for the work of raising the dead. Sean’s writing was always ready for this task, in constant preparation, and in constant interruption. Its angles quickly pacing between the two.

This has become theologically ornate. But perhaps something of the point is clear: that in the symbolic realm of Sean’s language are staked the great theological and materialist battles of our age. He had to deep dig into our time for that, furrow and dig so deep that he found the nineteenth century still there, crawling everywhere, right up to us. And all of this was set, furiously, against a more everyday view that production has all but disappeared from sight: society fully administered slips across screens with nothing but a sense of speed and gloss. His poetry decries, digs into, a laminated world with which we are supposed to play but in which we are never supposed to participate, never mind to get drunk, see the truth, raise the dead, even now as they slip away ever further through the mediatized glare.

*** Are we not surrounded by those who cast spells? Sorcery is the fashion, if only for the blighted, the meek, the poor, the oppressed. And it would be easy to mistake what Sean was writing for just another piece of subaltern superstition; promising mighty power for as long as it remains utterly powerless and otherworldly. But this is not right. Seans symbols are not just any old sign, or signal, or sigil. They are not arcana, but materials taken to hand out of the dereliction of the present. They are certainly magic, just as Sean was certainly a seer. But this is a materialist magic, a fury, a joy. They are not drawn from some other mystical world, but from this one. And his magic was to suspend them between this world and the next, between law made in the mouths of a class who hated him, and justice. He saw more deeply than most of us dare, and invited us along. Invited everyone along, including the dead who will rise, even if we have to dig and dig and drag them out of the ground and through the streets, to show the world what streets are really for. Here in this common place, between buildings, together. This is the place of magic, for riots, for burning cars; here a wall, there a blazing comet. Let his poetry dance on, and we will dance on too.

[eng-hypnosismic]

JPN/ROM/ENG Lyrics to “Yokohama Walker”

Lyrics：peko　Song/Arrangement：ist (Yeah yeah yeah hey listen

We’re Mad Trigger Crew represent Yokohama

You’re gonna be a little easier don’t give a damn about me

Show some respect)

Ay yo ストレイトアウタヨコハマ

誰がこの街の王様？

分かってない輩 ただい容赦なく

今日も叩きのめして go around

ミスターハーコー a.k.a ハマの狂犬

口を開けば撒き散らす暴言

俺様が Notorious

どきな雑魚 俺様がお通りだ

肩で風切り歩くこの街

舐めてるやつらに向ける矛先

挨拶代わりそこらでドンパチ

Do or Die ぶっこんだもん勝ち

トラブルばかりの毎日

返り血で汚れた帰り道

本音を言えばシカトしたい

それでもこの視界にみなとみらい

Ay yo sutoreito auta yokohama

Dare ga kono machi no ousama?

Wakattenai yakara tadai youshanaku

Kyou mo tataki no meshite go around

Misutaa haakou a.k.a hama no kyouken

Kuchi wo hirakeba makichirasu bougen

Oresama ga Notorious

Dokina zako oresama ga otoori da

Kata de kazekiri aruku kono machi

Nameteru yatsura ni mukeru hokosaki

Aisatsu kawari sokora de donpachi

Do or Die bukkonda mon kachi

Toraburu bakari no mainichi

Kaeri chi de yogoreta kaerimichi

Honne wo ieba shikato shitai

Sore demo kono shikai ni Minato Mirai

Ay yo straight outta Yokohama

Who’s the king of this town?

No mercy even to the clueless folks

Today too we’ll wipe everyone go around

Mr. Hardcore a.k.a Hama’s mad dog

If I open my mouth, violent words spew

I am Notorious

Get out of the way small fry, this is my path

The wind cuts at my shoulder as I walk this town

I target anyone that messes with me

Everywhere we greet each other with gunfire Do or Die I’ll kill and win

Just trouble everyday

The path home dirtied by blood

To be honest I couldn’t care less

Nevertheless, Minato Mirai is in sight

何事もない一日なんてこの場所じゃありえないぜ

街の中でも外でもトラブル続きのeveryday

嫌気がさすこともある

それでもこの街で

Mad Trigger Crew in the building

今日もまたただヨコハマ walking

Nani koto mo nai ichinichi nante kono basho ja arienaize

Machi no naka demo soto demo toraburu tsudzuki no everyday

Iyake ga sasu koto mo aru

Sore demo kono machi de

Mad Trigger Crew in the building

Kyou mo mata tada yokohama walking

This isn’t a place where nothing happens all day

In or outside the city, trouble continues everyday

Sickening things happen here

Still in this town

Mad Trigger Crew in the building

Today is just another Yokohama walking

今日も街をパトロール

軽く流すいつものコース

ヤクザ、チンピラ、ゴロツキばかり

どうしようもないな　この吹き溜まり

睨んでくるのは構わんが

覚悟はあるんだろうな********

デカイ面してるやつは今すぐに

ワッパかけてしょっぴいて暇つぶし

私が独占するマーケット

パッと出くわす新たなターゲット

Kyou mo machi wo patorouru

Karaku nagasu itsumo no kousu

Yakuza, chinpira, gorotsuki bakari

Doushi you mo nai na kono fukidamari

Nirande kuru no wa kamawan ga

Kakugo wa arundarou na motherfucker

Dekai tsurashiteru yatsu wa ima sugu ni

Wappa kake deshoppite himatsubushi

Watakushi ga dokusen suru maaketto

Patto dekuwasu aratana taagetto

Today again I patrol the town

A light cruise on the usual course

Yakuza, punks, and thugs galore

It can’t be helped, this hangout for vagabonds

I don’t mind being glared at

Cause I’m prepared, you motherfucker

The guy acting all big and tough, right this instant

I’ll handcuff and arrest him to kill some time

I monopolize the market

Suddenly encounter a new target

逃げ出したらすぐさまカーチェイス

鳴り止まないサイレン

気の抜けない 24/7

手を汚し悪事にのめり込んでる

この町で生きるには hell or heaven

豚箱に詰め込んで選ばせる

Nigedashitara sugu sama kaacheisu

Nari yamanai sairen

Ki no nukenai 24/7

Te wo yogoshi akuji ni nomerikon deru

Kono machi de ikiru ni wa hell or heaven

Butabako ni tsumekonde eraba seru

If you run, promptly a car chase

The unending ringing of sirens

On edge 24/7

I dirty my hands and get swallowed by crime

To live in this town is hell or heaven

Stuffing you in the slammer is a choice

何事もない一日なんてこの場所じゃありえないぜ

街の中でも外でもトラブル続きのeveryday

嫌気がさすこともある

それでもこの街で

Mad Trigger Crew in the building

今日もまたただヨコハマ walking

Nani koto mo nai ichinichi nante kono basho ja arienaize

Machi no naka demo soto demo toraburu tsudzuki no everyday

Iyake ga sasu koto mo aru

Sore demo kono machi de

Mad Trigger Crew in the building

Kyou mo mata tada yokohama walking

This isn’t a place where nothing happens all day

In or outside the city, trouble continues everyday

Sickening things happen here

Still in this town

Mad Trigger Crew in the building

Today is just another Yokohama walking

隠れたベースキャンプそこがアジト

ここに潜伏し眺める街を

艶やかな街並みとは異なる

油断できぬはげ山の一夜

サバイバルライフにない休息

体鍛え磨く耐久力

身にまとうミリタリージャケット

左右常に聞き耳立てる

いつ何時も隙は見せられない

小官が相手じゃ敵は逃げられない

目には目ゲリラ相手に手に汗

撃破して��のエリアへ (go)

狙いは外さねえ

キッチリ仕留める獲物 100％

食材ハントし on the まな板

百戦錬磨小官はサバイバー

Kakureta beesukyanpu soko ga ajito

Koko ni senpukushi nagameru machi wo

Adeyakana machinami to wa kotonaru

Yudan dekinu hageyama no ichiya

Sabaibaru raifu ni nai kyuusoku

Karada kitae migaku taikyuu ryoku

Mi ni matou miritariijaketto

Migi hidari tsune ni kikimimi tateru

Itsu nandoki mo suki wa miserarenai

Shoukan ga aite ja teki wa nigerarenai

Me ni wa me gerira aite ni te ni ase

Gekihashite tsugi no eria e (go)

Nerai wa hazusanee

Kicchiri shitomeru emono 100%

Shokuzai hanto shi on the manaita

Hyakusen renma shoukan wa sabaibaa

Hidden base camp that’s the hideout

Here is a city hidden in view

Different from the glamorous cityscape

You can’t lower your guard for a night on bald mountain (1)

No rest in survival life

Drilling my body to improve stamina

Wearing a military jacket

Always listening alert from the left and right

Never showing an opening no matter the time

I am your opponent, enemies can’t escape

An eye for an eye, a sudden enemy with sweat on my hands

Destroy them, advance to the next area (go)

Don’t lose sight of the target

Accurately shooting down prey 100%

Hunted ingredients on the chopping board

I, a veteran, am a survivor

何事もない一日なんてこの場所じゃありえないぜ

街の中でも外でもトラブル続きのeveryday

嫌気がさすこともある

それでもこの街で

Mad Trigger Crew in the building

今日もまたただヨコハマ walking

Nani koto mo nai ichinichi nante kono basho ja arienaize

Machi no naka demo soto demo toraburu tsudzuki no everyday

Iyake ga sasu koto mo aru

Sore demo kono machi de

Mad Trigger Crew in the building

Kyou mo mata tada yokohama walking

This isn’t a place where nothing happens all day

In or outside the city, trouble continues everyday

Sickening things happen here

Still in this town

Mad Trigger Crew in the building

Today is just another Yokohama walking

飛び交う罵声

忍び寄る影

ひと時たりともできないな休憩

ジガラミ捨て

生き残る術

everyday　ただ磨き続ける

Tobikau basei

Shinobiyoru kage

Hitotokitari to mo dekinai na kyuukei

Jigarami sute

Ikinokoru sube

everyday tada migaki tsudzukeru

Taunts fly about

Shadows creep out

A rest that can only be short-lived

Ties abandoned

Means of surviving

everyday we just keep on improving

飛び交う罵声

忍び寄る影

ひと時たりともできないな休憩

ジガラミ捨て

街を見守る

また今日もハマの夜風に吹かれて��

Tobikau basei

Shinobiyoru kage

Hitotokitari to mo dekinai na kyuukei

Jigarami sute

Machi wo mimamoru

Mata kyou mo hama no yokaze ni fukarete…

Taunts fly about

Shadows creep out

A rest that can only be short-lived

Ties abandoned

Watching over the city

Hama’s night breeze blows today as well…

T/N

This could be a reference to the well known series of orchestral compositions based on Russian literary works and legends by Modest Mussorgsky. Probably the most well known version of this piece was used in the final segment of the Disney movie “Fantasia”.

A clip of said scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLCuL-K39eQ

[thunderboltfire]

Xaere - reference sheet

Woohoo! Xaere’s reference sheet is finished! (She’s one of my D&D characters, a centaur bard from homebrew setting)

The final file (which can be found on my DA) is very big, so Tumblr wouldn’t probably let me post it here - so I made a separate picture of each part. The general description and short backstory under the cut! (warning: a ton of text)

(It made a good outfit design training, because I usually dress all my OCs in relatively washed colors and Xaere’s clothes should be colorful by definition)

Xaere - read as [ksaɪrɛ] species: centaur (female) Class: Bard Alignment: undefined Age: 25 Height: 220cm (155cm in withers) land of origin: Liwarn weapon of choice: Bow and Arrow

Strenghts: fast, strong, quick-witted, persuasive, easily adapting, outgoing, curious, musically and literary talented, generally friendly, generous to friends.

Weaknesses: Fate (constantly happening concidenses, cases of terribly bad or good luck), acrophobia, too big to move freely indoors, short spans of attention twoards things that don't catch her interest, often dishonest, it takes a lot of time to earn her loyalty, can be tenacious and unforgiving.

Short story:  Xaere was born in one of southern centaur tribes. She was always fond of stories, and soon turned out to be musically talnted. Unfortunately, the fate wouldn't leave the young centaur alone, and unbelievable situations of bad and good luck, as well as weird coincidences followed her on all occasions. She was so-called Double Coin, or Fatum's Bait - what meant that she wasn't going to have peaceful life. Life in her clan taught her, among other things how to track and use bow and arrow - which remained her favourite weapon. Xaere's tribe had connections with merchants from Evatraia - western lands of Kavra. When Xaere grew up, her parents, knowing about her adventurous personality sent her to study the ways of poetry and music among Kavra, other nation of their homeland. The centauress, after long journey joined the College in , Liwarn's capital city. She spent few years studying to become a bard, learning songs and stories, playing in taverns and working as a messenger. To this day, while knowing courtly etiquette she remained more of a playful vagabond than corteous noble's favourite. 

Clothes: Xaere's style comes from living between two cultures. Being a centaur, Xaere wears a blanket on her equine half, but its style isn't always strictly centaurine. Having spent a lot of time in harbor city, she drew from materials and patterns popular there, often mixing it with centaurine embroidery or pieces of jewellery. (she also doesn't divide her clothes strictly into sets, so illustrations above are orientational) Her signature piece of clothing is short, padded jacket, a piece assiociated with city's troublemaking yougsters, embroidered in centaurine style, with ornamental phoenix on the back. She usually wears rather vibrant colored clothes, as fabric and leather dyes are one of her homeland's resources and colorful clothes are popular.

[theoutcastrogue]

You know, the more I think about it, the more I think I underestimated the influence of the Court of Miracles. This calls for an addendum.

“La cour des Miracles” by Gustave Doré, illustration for Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris

The Court of Miracles

In 1939, four years before “Thieves’ House” was published, a very important film came out: The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It included a colourful depiction of the Court of Miracles “where the scoundrels of Paris collect in a lair”, to quote another version.

The Court of Miracles really existed in Paris, and it wasn’t just one, there was a whole mess of them in the general vicinity – except that, again, all this was happening in the 17th century and Victor Hugo took some liberties and projected it back to the 14th. And what he described was a heavily mythologised version of the real thing.

The real thing was, more or less, a collection of slums. It’s where the excess of people went in a city whose population had just exploded. Paris had become a sprawling metropolis again, coming back from the disasters of plague and war, and attracting people from all over. So where will all the rejected and marginalised go? It’s quite simple: if there’s no housing they’ll make a shanty-town and shack up there, and if there’s no jobs they’ll resort to begging and petty crime. What else are they supposed to do? Meekly starve? Fuck you, they won’t.

Out of that reality, we got a mythologised literary version of the Court of Miracles, much like the rogues of England were treated in the pamphlets. Again we read about complex hierarchies, a Prince of Thieves and a King of Beggars, elaborate initiation rites, and a secret thieves’ cant – the argot. And crucially, this underworld has a space of its own: a lair, a den, a headquarters. This feature doesn’t appear in English rogue literature, but Leiber’s Thieves’ Guild has it (it’s in the title!), and so does any D&D-related or inspired thieves’ guild, so I think it’s not a stretch to attribute it directly to the Court of Miracles.

The 1939 film, inheriting Victor Hugo’s anachronisms and liberties, portrays the Court of Miracles as a single, fixed, and secret place in the middle of medieval Paris (which had abruptly become the largest city in western Europe in the 1300s, but then the Black Death hit). The portrayal is stunning and memorable. The scene where the hapless Gringoire is asked to demonstrate his thieving skills by balancing on one leg on a stool and pickpocketing a mannequin full of little bells is iconic. This is the stuff that inspires whole genres, and I believe it did exactly that. The roguish side of Sword & Sorcery and Dungeons & Dragons owes a lot to English rogues and vagabonds, but we shouldn’t overlook their enormous debt to The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939, dir. William Dieterle)

There’s a lot of material out there, and I barely scraped the surface. Our earth is big and rogues are the salt of the earth, and wherever there’s property there’s also thieves, and whenever a city raises domes and spires to the heavens, that city’s outcasts will converge to its underbelly and mingle and, well, associate. It’s only natural. If you decide to include a Thieves’ Guild in your D&D setting, your character backstory, or your worldbuilding, you can draw inspiration from anywhere, as long as you know where to look and are willing to do a bit of digging.

Besides the Mafia, what exactly is a "thieves' guild"? Is it something D&D invented?

Fritz Leiber invented it, D&D pilfered it.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser #1: “Ill met in Lankhmar”, art by Mike Mignola

Thieves' House

There's a Thieves' Guild in the city of Lankhmar, where Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (the OG fantasy rogue) operate, and it's first mentioned in the short story Thieves' House (1943). Ankh-Morpork and its own Thieves' Guild (which hilariously operates like a proper historical guild, recognised and regulated by the state) is inspired by Lankhmar, too.

"The house had a bad reputation. People said it was the den in which the thieves of Lankhmar gathered to plot and palaver and settle their private bickerings, the headquarters from which Krovas, the reputed Master Thief, issued his orders—in short, the home of the formidable Thieves' Guild of Lankhmar."

The Guild is powerful, merchants pay tribute to it, and Krovas the guildmaster just hates it when independent thieves attempt to make a buck, too. In the story, said independent thieves are our (anti-)heroes, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. And that notion of a trade monopoly obviously comes from historical guilds, whose entire point was that no one was allowed to practice a trade unless they were members of the relevant guild.

Rogue Literature

So where did Fritz Leiber get the idea of a Thieves' Guild? I can't know for sure, but his parents were Shakespearean actors and he was into Elizabethan theatre, and do you know the book The Rogues and Vagabonds of Shakespeare's Youth? If Leiber did, he knew rogue literature, and that explains both Thieves' Guilds (not the term, just the content, the term is all his) and Thieves' Cant.

English rogue literature is an early modern (rather than anything medieval) and largely urban genre, which appears around 1600 with pamphlets describing the wicked ways and language of beggars, thieves, and conmen, all out to get the upstanding, respectable, and all too gullible good people of (usually) London. Around 1700, the first cant dictionaries appear, and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) is probably the first novel of the genre. Meanwhile, there are a lot of plays that are at least inspired or informed by it, from Shakespeare himself to John Gay's The Beggars' Opera.

1600s

Now, if we take the early Elizabethan pamphlets at face value (and we should NOT, since all our sources were outsiders who aimed to shock – and titillate! – their law-abiding audience), thieves and beggars were organised in associations or fraternities with strict hierarchies. There were ranks and offices, and elaborate initiation rites and oaths to the devil, and codes of conduct and chains of command, and even kings of thieves with prima nocta privileges. And lots and lots of greed.

Most of that is bullshit, it's made up or wildly exaggerated. Some of it makes a lot of sense, though, if you take out the fanciful stuff. A certain level of organisation is necessary for urban crime to work. After all, thieves need fences and beggars need real estate (I mean, they need to call dibs on their spots and somehow ensure that other beggars will respect that). And we should keep in mind that rogues (people without masters) and vagabonds (people without homes) were a world apart from respectable society: not only did they not enjoy whatever protections the state extended to its subjects, but they were considered criminal elements merely for existing without masters and without homes. So their only recourse was each other. A fraternity where all the thieves of London somehow worked together is mere fancy, but there was certainly a lot of mutual aid (if you were lucky) and internal exploitation (if you weren't).

1700s

As we move on to the 1700s, London's criminal underworld booms as much as the city itself, and the pamphlets (and now the newspapers!) have plenty of material to talk about. And for a hot second, there arguably is a thieves' guild, run by a sinister guildmaster, a criminal mastermind who controls the thieves of London with one hand – and with the other, serves law-abiding people and retrieves their stolen property for but a small fee. His name is Jonathan Wild, and like Lankhmar's Krovas, he hates it when independent thieves try to make a living in his city. And also he's an utter bastard.

The infamous Thief-Taker General and his elaborate organisation may have been an inspiration for Fritz Leiber's Thieves' Guild, or perhaps it was second-hand from Professor Moriarty, who was also partly inspired by Jonathan Wild.

Elsewhere

Meanwhile, in 17th century Istanbul, the Thieves' Guild ("the corporation of thieves and footpads who... pay tribute to the two chief officers of the police") and the Beggars' Guild (which had a "sheikh", i.e. a leader, a guildmaster) once joined a very official procession of the guilds on the city streets. Or at least, that's what The Book of Travels says. But all the research I've read about Ottoman guilds considers this passage fanciful. There may have been thieves and beggars in the procession, but they didn't have a legally recognised guild – an esnaf.

Spanish picaresque novels had been around since the mid-16th century, and Cervantes describes something like a thieves' guild in Seville. A French jargon of thieves, along with assorted poetry and literature, is attested from the 15th century. Rogue characters/anti-heroes appear in Arabic literature from the 9th century, and the early emergence of big cities in the Islamic world leads to various associations of thieves and beggars in places like Cairo and Baghdad. A loose co-fraternity of rogues, the Banu Sasan, pops up in every corner of the Arabic world, from al-Andalus to India.

But I don't think Leiber (or Gygax) were too familiar with any of these, except perhaps with a very distorted echo of French thieves & beggars via The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Victor Hugo took a heavily mythologised version of the Court of Miracles, a 17th century thing, and projected it back to 14th century Paris, so it's kinda based on history but also wildly inaccurate.

Conclusion

So as far as the D&D origins of Thieves' Guilds and Cant are concerned, I believe we should stick to Fritz Leiber, English rogue literature, and whatever kernel of historical truth is behind it. And completely ignore the Mafia and any sort of contemporary organised crime, which is another animal altogether.

[lombredundoute-blog]

Femmes en mouvement (Women in Motion) Ni passante, ni piétonne, la flâneuse a été laissée en dehors des livres d’histoire. Pourtant, la flânerie est liée à l’émancipation, et aussi à la révolte. L’espace urbain serait-il un enjeu féministe ? Recensé : Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse. Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, Londres, Chatto & Windus, 2016, 317 p. Hanter boulevards et avenues et se laisser captiver, capturer par leurs sinueux tours et détours ; s’ancrer, par le pas, dans la ville et lui appartenir ; s’inscrire, par l’écrit, dans le lieu que l’on habite en marchant : telles sont les flâneries des flâneuses dont est Lauren Elkin. Il y a quelque chose d’envoûtant et de viral dans son invite à aller par les rues et à suivre sa dérive amoureusement érudite. De New York, où elle est née, jusqu’à Paris, où elle réside, en passant par Londres, Venise et Tokyo, l’auteure vagabonde entre recherche académique, critique journalistique et écriture fictionnelle (maître de conférence à l’université de Liverpool, Lauren Elkin est critique pour le Times Literary Supplement, le New York Times Book Review et le Paris Review. Elle est aussi l’auteur du roman Une année à Venise). Papillon des villes, elle vous entraîne dans son butinage citadin, à la fois intime et littéraire…  Pour en savoir plus lire le billet publié par Adèle Cassigneul , le 24 novembre 2016 sur le site de la La vie des idees