"I love how objects
and characters change their appearance entirely from frame to frame... but
Van Loon's turned this seeming handicap into a virtue..." Stephen Drennan, ByPass Small Press
'Zine more reviews
'The
running dogs of capitalism – the bourgeoisie
– will be
crushed by the power of the people; collectivisation holds the key to
true worker power in the context of–' It was at this point
that
the door to the staff area and workroom at the rear of the library
burst open, crashing against the nearby wall. Several hooded and caped
figures ran into the quick reference area causing the internet terminal
screens to fade to a cold, opalescent blue as they passed. A lady in a
flowered hat whom Angela recognised as Mrs Wilberforce, secretary of
the local Women's Institute, fainted away as she sat at one of the
computers. Angela thought that she saw a mist of frost stealing over
her inert form.
All this happened in a flash and Dickon, having been interrupted in
mid-sentence, suddenly plunged after the figures and the three black
horses which had cantered after them, overturning a couple of
occasional tables and a small sofa. A toddler in the children's library
left the pile of books he was sitting on to read, squealed and bolted
for his father who was reading a newspaper at one of the tables. The
man's head was determinedly buried in his paper and he refused to be
distracted from the football scores. By the time the intruders had
reached the automatic doors to the street, Dickon was gaining on them
and Angela, despite her state of shock, was drawn after him. A leaflet
spinner went flying scattering multicoloured paper in every direction
during the parabola of its trajectory. The outside ramp for wheelchair
access to the library proved the downfall of the last of the hooded
figures who tumbled onto the pavement and was trampled by the, by now,
galloping horses. Dickon checked his progress for a second to note that
the garb was muddy and completely empty save for a little vapour
escaping from the sleeves.
'I thought I'd seen the last of these fiends,' breathed Dickon, loud
enough for Angela to hear as she ran up to him. They looked up to see
three of the black figures riding off on two of the horses, two
together on the first. The third horse was lurching and snorting, its
eyes wild, with its bridle tangled in the ornamental Magnolia at the
corner of the building. It was the work of moments to free the tack and
Dickon, soothing the beast with a muttered incantation, suddenly
mounted the saddle with practised grace and snapped 'Come on' to Angela
below. As he pulled her into the saddle behind him, Angela thought to
herself 'Thank goodness I put on an A-line skirt this morning.'
So....
if you want the whole story, buy a copy of 'The Bart Dickon Omnibus'
by
clicking here.
And as a bonus tantaliser, below is a passage from the forthcoming
full-length Bart Dickon novel: "Bart
Dickon's Descent Into Hell" (just waiting for that juicy
author's advance from one of the Publishing Houses Of Repute - or even
one of the publishing houses of ill-repute...)
Bart Dickon, The Ideologically-Sound
Etc., sat in a room with neither door nor window, employed in a
favourite passtime. He leaned back in the comfortably upright armchair,
supported in his lumbar region, head on the high back, arms resting
evenly on the buttoned red leather with legs crossed, relaxed. He then
took careful aim at a spot hign on the rear wall near the corner,
crossed the big toe of his langorously dangling foot, then swivelled
his lower terminal extremity upwards at the ankle. Like a fisherman
making a cast, like a bowler delivering a deft googly, like an
expressionist painter creating a telling stroke of the brush, he
brought his foot down and flicked his big toe over its neighbour at the
nadir of the swing. From the tip of his elegantly brogued shoe his toe
extended forwards in slow motion, still clad in its silk sock and
leather. The bulge of his toe resembled the shperical form of a
billiard ball moving smoothly over the baize, steadily growing from the
stem behind it. This extrusion of Bart’s terminal limb softened
the bone, elasicized the skin and surrounding coverings. Bart’s
gaze remained transfixed on the chosen spot on the wall and as the toe
met the angle, it bounced in a precise angle into the corner, bounced
again on the celing then against the wall and continued acoss the room.
Bart followed his distended toe’s progress as it passed
diagonally above his head and out of sight. He calculated the soundless
percussion of toe and wall behind him until the trajectory came once
again into his purview.
Like a piece of chewing gum stretched
by a small child from mouth to extending fingers, the bulbous part of
his big toe maintained its progress undiminished, drawing in its wake
the slim tube of the remainder of his lower digit. Unlike the
aforementioned unpleasant and insanitary comestible, however, the toe
did not get ever thinner, did not sag and break in a sticky, stringy
mess. This was but the beginning of the sport. Controlling the speed
with the angle of his foot, Bart relaxed his muscles a little a raised
it slightly. The toe started to speed up and make more dramatic angles
on the walls. The skill was to avoid hitting one’s toe, or rather
the trail of one’s toe, from a previous bounce. Soon a positive
cat’s cradle of toey substances festooned the upper room until
the big toe struck the bottom of the picture rail and sped downwards to
floor level, from whence it bounced towards the ceiling.
‘Hah!’ muttered Dickon as he adjusted the speed and
mentally bisected the angle his toe made with the floor.
‘Tricky...’ as yet the extended toe had not come too near
to his own static figure, but his head now darted to the left to dodge
a possible impact from behind; the toe whistled past his right ear. At
one point the toe bounced in steep angles between floor and ceiling
creating a cylindrical filligree all around his chair and Dickon knew
that it was time to stop. Raising the tip of his foot in a definite
manner, the snookering bulge stopped in mid-air and rapidly retreated
back into itself. Retracing its pathway like a film run in reverse, the
whole creation took several minutes to rewind until his shoed foot
regained its customary shape and substance with a satisfying
‘flup’.
"Else heard include fat include. Final may,
must,
hunt front body
floor. Use like represent clear dark numeral surprise. Out learn might
root noun. Day these die war toward same. Over hot under just. Go
forest hot. How lost dog, there. Wave voice continent time lead give.
Use must early notice thank ground. Interest fun, fast."
The above passage is a plot device from
"The
Thunderer" short story
in 'The
Bart Dickon Omnibus'.
Doubling as anonymous note and incantation in the story, the text is
taken directly from a spam email received by the author. Anyone
unfortunate enough to be bombarded by avalanches of junk email may know
the nature of some of these tedious mailings. In recent months some
seem to have taken on an eccentricly philosophical bent with little
truisms and badly typed aphorisms before hitting you with the hard sell
about nubile females, erectile dysfunction and counterfeit Rolexes
(eh?). The above snippet of concrete poetry was copied and pasted
exactly as it arrived. Not that I read all the thousands of spams, of
course.
ANECDOTES OF THE VIRGIN
SELF-PUBLISHER, No.2
The picture of the dissected eyeball above
reminds
me that the
printed version which accompanies 'The Thunderer' in the Omnibus book
is a bit more blurred. The reason? Technology, of course. Putting the
constituent parts of the book together on my eMac machine, I prepared
those text-based pages (around six) in AppleWorks6 - the word
processing / draw / paint / spreadsheet program which comes with the
Mac. Assuring myself that my printer, Five Castles Press in Ipswich,
used Macs in their studio (they were handling the imposition of the
pages for reproduction), I felt that all data would be transferable. As
I toiled through the one hundred or so scanned TIFFs, retouching and
checking the quality of every pixel and level of contrast, these text
pages were the least of my worries. Little did I realise that the
studio had installed 'G5' machines - mine's a G4 - and those
witty chaps at Apple have made the AppleWorks software
non-retrospective, even though they're both running the OSX operating
system. This meant that all my careful spacing and formatting went
haywire. Sending via email attachment and by disc didn't solve it, nor
did the time-consuming job of exporting it to Word for Mac and
rebuilding all the subtleties (like getting the story to fit within the
allocated page-count!). Neither Simon at Five Castles Press nor I were
happy with the quality of the images. Now, I don't use fancy PageMaker
of Quark programs, but I was most disappointed with Apple for their
lack of care of Mac users - something for which they have hitherto been
famous. What did we do? Back to basics: print off the best quality
obtainable from my laser printer, deliver to Simon by hand and he
scanned the pages at high resolution and placed them as pictures! We
got a decent result, but this eye continues to stare out at me as a
stark reminder of the limitations of this brave new world. I remember
when you could do a paste-up, shoot it on a process camera with no
edges or cut-marks showing and print it.
Update (Nov. 2006): Nick
Snode emailed: "The AppleWorks and G4 or G5
shouldn't really have been a problem.
OSX has always had, built into it, the capability of creating PDF
files. Admittedly there isn't much control over the specifications
for final
output but the end result should be more than adequate for litho
printing. Certainly better than scanning laser copy print-outs. As PDFs
embed all the images and fonts, page reflow would not have happened.
Nearly all printers can take PDF files and impose them correctly for
their presses. Why Five Castles Press didn't suggest this, I don't
know. Like you I sometimes yearn for the days of repro cameras but
paste-ups on a drawing board... never!"
I came across the answer while browsing 'The Missing
Manual: Mac OSX Panther ed.' by David Pogue (bless him). You bring up
the document, select Print to bring up Print Dialog Box, click Save As
PDF... button and presto! As Nick says this would have saved me a lot
of trouble if the printer had mentioned it.
ANECDOTES OF THE VIRGIN
SELF-PUBLISHER, No.3
Ah, the progress Mankind has made in the last twenty
years. Time was, you could stroll down your local High Street and
browse through the shelves of your local bookshop. This was clearly an
outdated method of disseminating an archaic format to the patently
baffled; after all, who needs bays of books of all sorts, shapes and
sizes selected on the whim of a bookshop owner and conforming to
desires and whims of local book-buyers. Having published, 'The
Omnibus', I needed, obviously, to try to get it in front of the
discerning public of yore. However, I found to my dismay that a chain
called Waterstone's (not even runby this cove Waterstone apparently and
owned by a record chain!) has a stranglehold on virtually every
bookshop in the country. Once one has a seller's account with
Waterstone's, one is the proud owner of the right to approach the
Manager or graphic novel buyer in every shop they own in the country.
They look at your sample copy, decide to buy it (obviously) and place
an order for one copy on their computer. This is then routed via
Nielsen BookData (who sell you the batch of ISBNs - you can't buy just
one [they used to be free] - for a very reasonable £70 odd) to
Gardners Books, who then mail you an order. Or rather they should, but
several orders placed in this way never show up. Then you sort out an
invoice, carefully wrap and post the copies to Gardners, who open the
package, sniff the contents, return three because they got a little
damaged in the mail and send the rest to the Waterstone's branch which
placed the order. This is clearly a very green way of working, no waste
or unnecessary overheads and very efficient. Lord.
