Clever Beast

Announcing my new book, Melancholics Anonymous

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I wrote a book, it’s worldly famous. It’s called Melancholics Anonymous. Below you will see my son reading it (Hayden calls it a “taut, tour de force ” – at least I think that is what he said)

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Those of you following me will have seen much of the rough drafts that are herein polished and properly realized.  There are pictures, poems, rants, prose all about and for melancholics.  Not the romanticized genius nor ostracized lunatic of popular lore but a type far more common yet underrepresented.  The character that, as if stirred from some biological revolt, flees the maddening crowds, compelled by what Max Pensky calls a “resigned interiority, brooding over the very conditions of the impossibility of action themselves.” I wrote this as a call out to the Bukowskis, the Pessoas, the underground men, and too, the Plaths, the Sextons, the adaptless women, in hopes to draw them out and, in the confines of a book, briefly forge a loneliness together.

Now most importantly: how to buy a copy or six…
It is published through Blurb so click the link: http://www.blurb.ca/b/3981803-melancholics-anonymous 

You can purchase e-book versions for $4.99 and softcovers for a little more, and while the option for hardcover is listed, I don’t think it is necessary. I mean they look swell and all but, let’s be honest, this is no Tolstoy epic. Melancholics Anonymous is a kind of lean pamphlet manifesto (albeit a plump pamphlet at 92 pages!). Best to own it light and keep it handy in your back pocket for constant access. Finally, audio-books wherein I narrate the great adventure are extra and far too costly for the likes of you.

All proceeds go to the philanthropist fund, Leave No Blu-Ray Behind.

If you reblog and tag as melancholic or melancholy I would appreciate it.

Onto the new year and the new language.

Thanks to everyone for all the support, you have no idea what it means.  It is a cruel world out there.

P.S. I’d rather be read than make money, if you are on the fence, curious but not sure you want to pay, just private message me, I am more than happy to send a free one to you (what can I say I am a lousy capitalist). Follow the link you can preview some of the book if you need more coaxing.

Melancholics Anonymous

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come ye Pessoas

ye Bukowskis

ye underground men

come ye Plaths

ye Sextons

ye adaptless women

come let us be lonely together

carrying forth the light of yon dog-eared past

or nearby lit fluorescent in a shop 

with hope to gleam back through somebody

whilst sat asylum’d by separate fires

sexless, entire, the universe reset

so that we may briefly enter it

“But my self-imposed exile from life’s actions and objectives and my attempt to break off all contact with things led precisely to what I tried to escape. I didn’t want to feel life or to touch anything real, for the experience of my temperament in contact with the world had taught me that the sensation of life was always painful to me. But in isolating myself to avoid that contact, I exacerbated my already overwrought sensibility. If it were possible to cut off completely all contact with things, then my sensibility would pose no problem. But this total isolation cannot be achieved. However little I do, I still breathe; however little I act, I still move. And so, having exacerbated my sensibility through isolation, I found that the tiniest things, which even for me had been perfectly innocuous, began to wrack me like catastrophes. I chose the wrong method of escape. I fled via an uncomfortable and roundabout route to end up at the same place I’d started from, with the fatigue of my journey added to the horror of living there.”

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The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa (chapter 462)

Following

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If you blog about two or more of the following please like this post and I will check you out… In need of new sites to follow:

Anne Sexton
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fernando Pessoa
Jack Kerouac
Jessica Chastain
Kiera Knightley
Kate Winslet
Michelle Williams
Terrence Malick
Feist
Charlotte Gainsbourg
Bob Dylan
Leonard Cohen
Greta Gerwig
Walt Whitman
Melanie Laurent
Lea Seydoux

“

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgments based on feeling instead of reason, most of those young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it. that’s why I didn’t give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.

And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what’s left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny? Not knowing nor able to know what religious life is, since faith isn’t acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we’re left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul.

”

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Fernando Pessoa, opening paragraphs of THE BOOK OF DISQUIET