The
Gate was finished, pretty much, on the 19 February 2008. It took several
months to write; although during that time I suffered a period of illness, and
was in a hospital for a while. 
|The
Gate was finished, pretty much, on the 19 February 2008. It took several
months to write; although during that time I suffered a period of illness, and
was in a hospital for a while.
It's a story about my experiences at the Glastonbury Festival of 2007, working on one of the entry gates, dealing with my insecurities and charting a gradual decline into exhaustion and feelings of defeat.
It's just under 20,000 words long (50 pages), so some would class it as a novella, I guess. Dedicated to Hugh Epstein, the greatest teacher of my life, and the man who not only taught me to love language, but showed me great understanding, appreciation and compassion. He turned my life around, and many others.
You can buy the paperback at http://www.lulu.com/content/2074501. It costs £3.15. You can also download the PDF version of the book for free here. Alternatively you can download the story as an HTML file, for free. It's exactly the same text, and prints out on about 32 sheets of A4 very neatly.
I designed the cover in Photoshop CS.
...
The End Of Days: The Major Arcana - Done in about three days at the end of 2006.
Unfinished Business - About my trip to Egham in September '03.
Real Holiday - Dead now.
Henry
Miller is the biggest influence on my (writing) life. I wrote my dissertation
on The Rosy Crucifixion (view
as a PDF file - 213KB) with the usual research (view
bibliography in PDF - 53KB). Unfortunately, it's a piece of shit.
The people at the Henry Miller Library were a considerable help. I hope to go there one day. There is a good blog researching his life and work. His daughter's web site is moving.
I am struck by this passage from Plexus. I find it worrying.
Hunter S. Thompson has been a big influence. I try to escape his style often (not that I can match it). My election story is a kind of homage in a way. Thompson taught me a lot about politics.
I'm also an avid reader of Philip K. Dick's work. My favourite is Valis - which had me screaming with laughter. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is a masterwork.
Better mention Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ryszard Kapuscinski and T. S. Eliot. And The Mystery Plays, Mankind and Mysteries.
The Destroyer books, Red Shift, Ringworld, The Dice Man, Catch 22, The Happy Hooker, The Vampire Tapes, Astra and Flondrix, Man, Myth and Magic, Fourth Mansions, Lord of the Rings, Divine Right's Trip and 2000AD were all early influences. So were Franz Kafka, Gerald Durrell, James Blish, William Golding, Larry Niven, Russel Hoban and Iain Banks. More recently John Dolan of The eXile.
Recently (2003
to date) I have been reading and listening to the late Terence
McKenna. Two of his talks stand out for me:
DreamAwake (MP3 - 4.9MB - incomplete)
Eros and Eschaton
(MP3 - 17.5MB)
The Tree of Knowledge is also very good; and the Earth Trust Recordings.
At the moment you can easily download dozens of MP3s and videos of his talks from various sites, including this one and this other one.
http://www.rinf.com/articles/Terence-Mckenna.htm has pretty much everything in the way of audio.
And so does http://www.thegnosticoracle.com/complete_terence_mckenna_at.htm
Google also have some good videos.
I find the time to take photographs. To me it is a kind of play and, like Miller and his painting, I don't take it seriously. You can download some of the snaps on my other site.
I may
have about a million words of writing sitting in various boxes and bags. I have
been writing in earnest since about '82. I've scanned a few pages. The files
are in .JPEG format. Most of them are over 100 kilobytes. Some are over 200
kilobytes. Quite a lot of this stuff is embarrassing.
Acid Tape - acid1, acid2, acid3, acid4, acid5, acid6, acid7, acid8, acid9, acid10, acid11 - This represents about a quarter of a tape recording made during an Acid Trip I took with two friends in '88 or '89. The tape itself records only a fraction of the trip. I have never been a big fan of LSD. This was my second and last trip. I used to listen to this tape constantly after my breakdown.
Alamo Jones - aj1, aj2, aj3, aj4 - This was a short story I wrote during the mid 80's, which I cannabilised from the 'novel' I was writing at the time. It was published in the college magazine, but was butchered by someone on an early word processor prior to publication. I don't write fiction any more.
I Don't Know - This is a short skit I wrote in roughly 40 minutes between classes at the tertiary college in Twickenam in 1986. I still like it.
Poems (very bad).
Various 'Revisions' - rev1, rev2, rev3, rev4, rev5, rev6, rev7, rev8 - from the 1980s and 1990s.
An attempt to describe someone -john1, john2 - from the 1990s.
