I’ve always been ambivalent about VICE (as you’re supposed to be, I guess) but this piece of fiction by Rebecca Evanhoe, I enjoyed without reservation. The narrator’s voice is both personable and exact, and her intricate descriptions of the awkward middle ground between a neighbor and a friend, and a friend and a lover, come through effortlessly to leave their mark.

And finally, I was obviously not paying attention when the big-wig literary hoo-ha happened over J.M. Coetzee releasing a new novel this year, his first since 2007’s Diary of a Bad Year (which features a very clever triple-voiced narrative). Anyway, it’s called The Childhood of Jesus, which seems a rather you-do-the-work-allegorical choice of title, and Coetzee, who lives in Adelaide, did a reading from it at the Wheeler Centre earlier this year, which you can watch here. (If you’re up with your Coetzee-context, skip the fellow from Text Publishing’s preamble by skipping to 2:00)

- Justin

So yeah, you love reading, it’s stimulating, all that, but your life just flies by, too much work, too much fun, oh no. Novels are insurmountable…  Give up? NAY! Welcome to your next internet fiction digest: some of the best stories the webs have to offer.

First up: the wide world of NPR. It’s world-famous for podcasts, but they also put on a Three Minute Fiction contest each month, where writers enter stories on a certain theme, like ‘revolves around a U.S. President’ or ‘ someone comes to town and someone leaves town’ — at a length that can be read in three minutes. The most recent winner was Lisa Rubenson, who wrote a story ‘in the form of a voicemail message’, called Sorry For Your Loss. It’s funny, awkward, revealing and touching, and if you’re super-important you can skip the preamble: the story itself starts at the 2:30 mark.

The winning stories from that competition are printed in The Paris Review, which, in itself, publishes loads of excellent (and big-name) pieces of fiction on its website in full. One particularly satisfying one available on there is Jonathan Lethem’s The Empty Room. It reminisces on the past in a very exact way: specific, vivid memories, sharp dialogue, and an amusing reflection on how easy it is to accumulate heaps of stuff for no other reason than having the space for it. While you’re at it, it’s worth a scroll through The Paris Review’s interviews section - so many big-bosses of literature getting in depth about their methods, way back to the 50s, including Joan Didion, J.G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

A third chunk of literature for your Friday, bringing it home to Australia, is from the (premier?) Australian literary journal Meanjin, who also have a generous selections of fictions (as well as essays, poetry and memoir) available online. It’s a nicely designed site too. Here’s just one of many, to keep on the theme of recollection: The Late Visit by Antonia Pont. Deft, tense, and very clever, it looks at how we mythologise those far away from us, and in another sense, how foreignness is, in itself, a form of attraction.

Alright! Till next time. Happy reading.

-  Justin Wolfers

To Pass Money Through the Table

Wait until you have lost almost all your money in a pokie machine.

Hold the only remaining five dollar note between you and bankruptcy tightly in your fist.

Punch your fist through the table.

Alternatively, source an invisible table and walk through it, holding a five dollar bill.

The Magic Wedding Ring

A wedding ring magically appears on the finger of whomever you fancy shagging on any given day.

Trick comes with binding wedding certificate and pre nup. Wedding ring and contract dissolves when more attractive individual steps into field of vision.

The Fish Trick

Paint a picture of a woman. Instead of a vagina, paint a fish instead. Submit painting to Archibald prize.

When painting wins first prize, listen as comedians nation-wide start making jokes about how they always thought there was something fishy about vaginas.

Try to smile at the joke, but notice how it actually makes your bones feel very tired.

The first reader, Nathan Harrison, ensnared listeners with his epic chess mystery: two children, a lost journal and the star-crossed love of a chess master and his Queen.

Astrid Lorange shared her research into the correlation between rich food and female masturbation.

Luke Carman expressed his contextually appropriate passion for Cervantes, and the mania of collecting.

Justin Wolfers read fan fiction detailing Daniel Day Lewis’ expedition with award-seeking celebrities et al., into Antarctica.

Featuring:

Daniel Day Lewis as Douglas Mawson

Gael Garcia Mertz as Xavier Mertz

and

Christian Bale as Belgrave Ninnis

Clare Testoni used an overhead projector to show us the faces of the gold rush, telling their stories through the lens of an egotistical photographer and his disenfranchised assistant.

Lastly, Pip Smith told the tale of a magician obsessed with a news story from the other side of the world.

- Ariella.

Bertie decides to digitise his perishable goods to save on grocery bills and while shopping for toner he meets Bernard, artist and analogue media enthusiast.  They return to Bernard’s 1980 William Eggleston home where Bertie falls in love with his reluctantly attractive wife, Eleanor.

Nitin wore a tailored black suit and ran from painting to photo, looking expectantly over his shoulder at his audience who followed with foldable stools and clipboards to the story’s next instalment. Co-performer Laura Turner, as Eleanor, would often drag Nitin on her back across the exhibition space to the next scene, his red-socks trailing behind.

Nitin removed scripts, money, pens and Styrofoam cups from his inexplicably flat pockets, and was kind enough to draw Sharpie moustaches on audience members who wanted them. The audience was asked to participate by writing the letters found in the story, re: sudden absences and expositional love letters.

The following are extracts from the piece written by Nitin Vengurlekar concurrently for Penguin Plays Rough: Adventures South of No North and as part of the initial stages of a new theatre project currently in development with Laura Turner, Sam Duncan, Xavier Masson-Leach, Michael Pigott and Mel Armstrong.

[There is a trombone resting against the wall in the corner of the space. The narrator informs the audience that they should imagine that there is a small brass ensemble playing in the corner.]

The Crimes of Neville Umbrellaman

I

In room number one we have a small boy hand-cranking a large pulley system, in room number two we have a wealthy aristocrat satisfied with himself, in room number three we have a fat man on a treadmill. It is hard to say which one of them is imagining the other two but it seems that the boy dreams of the aristocrat and the fat man dreams of the boy. If this is true, then it is the fat man who thinks, who creates this reality. Or maybe he is hallucinating. He is running on what he thinks is a treadmill, but is actually the rotting corpse of Reverend Evan Everett, local holy man and tongue twister. The fat man is trampling all over the Reverend, who, incidentally, at time of death was dressed in his ceremonial robes made out of alternating strips of red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather and so on. As he is running kilometres on the Reverend, the fat man thinks of the boy and of his own squandered childhood, and as he thinks of the boy the boy thinks of the aristocrat and his own hopes and dreams. And as the fat man runs, and the boy cranks the pulleys, the aristocrat, who could literally count his friends on one hand – twiddles his thumb and kills two of them that had taken up residence on the proximal phalanx of his left thumb. But just at that very moment, when the blasphemy and senseless killings subside and things begin to drag on a little, the aristocrat speaks of the fat man and upsets our whole schema. His voice cuts through the fat man’s unlikely ruminations and forces us to posit an alternate hypothesis. That the aristocrat speaks of the fat man by name and is heard by the boy in the next room suggests that perhaps it is the boy who authors the other two rooms and their human contents. On the other hand, if two of these figures indeed belong to the unconscious of the third, then it is possible that the boy represents the fat man’s troubled childhood during which he had heard many distressing things, and the aristocrat’s throaty voice corresponds to the fat man’s repressed feelings about his father, who had beaten him as a child, at the game of backgammon, and from which he had never recovered. But as the fat man dreams of his redemption, somebody switches off the lights and the convoluted narrative abruptly comes to a halt. In the background lurks a man in an overcoat and a three button suit. Neville Umbrellaman, shaman, narrator, compulsive liar, vagabond and charlatan. Perhaps it is he who is concocting this pointless paradigm. He is unusually thin and apart from his prominent nose, his scrawny musculature disappears in profile. It is as though he has been painted on a piece of paper. At that very moment, we are interrupted by another narrative that appears to spontaneously manifest in the ether before us – that of postman and erstwhile coffee table, Bertie Ingtonlandsonman.

II

This is the story of Bertie Ingtonlandsonman, who didn’t have a surname, but had the endings of several surnames.

So here it is. [The narrator takes off his overcoat]

Bertie Ingtonlandsonman, coffee table and postman

Over the years, Bertie had been various things to various people – sham marriage celebrant, shoddy fridge repairman, telephone operator, department store mannequin, queen size mattress, family piano and coffee table. In this latter capacity, Bertie had been in the service of Sir Reginald Cook, a retired school pedestrian crossing lollipop man. Sir Reginald, which was short for Cyril, would eat his dinner off Bertie’s filthy back and have him varnished fortnightly and tell people that he was an antique. However, the fact of the matter was, Bertie was only 37, though he did go pretty well with Sir Reginald’s Victorian era sideboard by the window. For a time he took up a job as a seeing-eye man for a wealthy cocker spaniel that was blind as a bat. A bat that was blind as a mongoose. Which meant it was slightly better than other bats, but not quite as good as an owl or an eagle. In the end, Bertie had settled on the idea of being a postman. As a postman, he was by his own reckoning one of the most powerful individuals in the world. He controlled when people received their mail and therefore controlled the business day, the financial year, and indeed, the very fabric of time itself. In his spare time, he imparted to pensioners, in their old age, the gift of timelessness, by selling them faulty clocks. Moreover, he had come to think of his employment in the postal service as a kind of allegorical yearning for connection with his estranged father, who had left in uniform one morning when Bertie was just a boy, saying he had been posted to Rangoon. And so Bertie had finally become a postman, eager to find out what kind of package a man built like his father would be posted in. Unfortunately for you, dear listener, his father’s name was also Bertie, which will make this story rather confusing. Fortunately, there was a difference in spelling – Bertie was spelled with an ‘ie’ at the end, while his father’s name was spelled ‘Hugh’. Bertie spelled with an ‘ie’ had grown up in a small flat in the eastern suburbs of Sydney with his parents, the family dog, the family chimpanzee, and the family elephant. Since he had moved out of the family home he had been incredibly lonely. He made himself a papier mache girlfriend using strips of newspaper. Ever the pragmatist, he had neglected to paint her, which meant that he could read the news whilst making love, though the downside was all the paper cuts he ended up with.

III

We cut to the present. Bertie – the one spelled with an ie – has moved into a Noel McKenna, 2004. But Bertie, now severely obese, struggles to fit through the doorways. He has outgrown his room, which, the more he thinks about it, seems to be just a painting of a room. Yes, he remembers it more clearly now – he had lost his real house in an oversized game of monopoly, but before it was repossessed he had it painted – that is to say, he had a likeness of it painted on a piece of paper, and he now lives in front of that painting of his house. A bicycle is sarcastically painted onto the back wall as if to remind him that there is no escape from this reality – or at least, if he did want to escape, he would have to walk on his own two feet. Every now and again he speaks of leaving and believes it too, but simply retreats to his table and chair to drink several cartons of his favourite Purity Orange Flavoured Milk, only to find he has no cartons, but only photographs of cartons. He tries to sleep but his bed is two dimensional, painted onto the wall. He tries to read, the tiny lamp illuminates only one letter at a time in his 4000 page novel. Like some sort of cruel joke. But it takes him so long to get to the punch line, that it no longer makes any sense. He carries photographs of the entire contents of his house in his pockets. He eats a photograph of a banana, taken the day before he lost his house, it’s still fresh. He wonders why he didn’t digitise his perishable goods a lot sooner. He traded in his fridge for a hard drive and a printer, thinking he would save thousands on groceries and power bills. Unfortunately due to the high cost of printer ink cartridges, it ended up costing him a lot more than buying the produce fresh. Still, he was better off than his mate Julian, who was old-fashioned and ate 35 millimetre film reels of his food, which was really expensive.

IV 

One day, whilst shopping for some new toner for his printer, Bertie spelled with an ie runs into Bernard, an artist who happens to collect selenium-toned contact prints. The two become embroiled in a heated discussion over digital and analogue media. [Eleanor enters from the crowd and begins to walk to her position at the table in front of a William Eggleston photograph of a living room] Bernard invites Bertie home to continue the argument over some tea, whereupon Bertie sets his eyes upon and is immediately smitten by Bernard’s wife [Eleanor sits at the table] Eleanor. He finds her utterly ravishing. Bernard and Bertie argue into the evening about issues of accessibility and aesthetics in relation to analogue media, but no amicable solution seems imminent and they all agree to continue in the morning. And so Bernard and Eleanor, with Bertie sandwiched between them and running his argument for the next day through his head, retire to bed and get a good night’s rest. When they wake up the next morning, Bernard is nowhere to be seen….

[The narrator (as Bertie) sits down opposite Eleanor]

Eleanor – Where’s Bernard?

Bertie – [deadpan] He’s dead. [pause] Nah, I’m just kidding haha, he went to play backgammon with a friend of mine.

Eleanor – Oh. Why didn’t you go?

Bertie – Backgammon’s a two player game.

Eleanor – Oh.

Bertie – Here, I’ve written this. Those are your lines. [He hands her a script that he pulls out from his outside coat pocket]

Eleanor – Oh ok. [They begin reading from the script]

B  –So this is nice

E – What’s nice?

B – This. It looks a lot like my house, maybe it was done by the same guy.

E – No, mine’s quite valuable, it’s a William Eggleston, 1980.

B – Oh, mine’s a Noel McKenna, 2004.

E – [disinterestedly] Fantastic.

B – Oh, you have a piano. I used to be a piano, you know. [pause] Aren’t you going to ask me if I want some tea? [pause] It would be rude of you not to.

E – [petulantly] Would you like some tea?

B – No, I’d like a venti white chocolate macchiato con schiuma di latte with skim milk to have here

E – I have no idea what you’re talking about.

B – Working class trash.

E – I think you had better leave.

B – Ok, tea, tea

E – You want tea?

B – With 27 sugars.

E – Ok. [Eleanor reads the following stage direction, and then looks at Bertie] – “pours a bag of sugar into the tea cup, then adds a drop of tea from the pot.” [Bertie pulls out two Styrofoam cups and a texta from his coat pocket, and draws some tea on the outside of the cups and hands them to Eleanor, who hands one of them back to Bertie]

B – I’m allergic to Styrofoam and ink

E – Drink it.

B – Actually, I’d prefer to watch you drink a cup of tea.

E – He’ll be back any second, you know. [Bertie takes off his shoes and places them on the table]

B – Hope he brings pizza.

E – Don’t you realise? He can’t see us like this

B – Why not?

E – He’s the jealous type

B – I’ll save a cup for him. [Bertie pulls out the texta and another Styrofoam cup from his coat]

E – No, he’ll never understand

B – I’m not afraid of him. We shall declare our love to him.

E – What are you talking about?

B – You said he can’t see us like this.

E – Yes, but love?

B – Why not? Isn’t that where this story is heading?

E – It seems a bit fast.

B – Well these days it’s got to be fast. I mean, audiences don’t have time for your long gazes and slow waltzes. I know, it saddens me too, but what can we do? What can we do but embrace passionately and make love?

E – I think you should leave.

B – I live far away…. Can you give me a lift?

[Bertie climbs onto Eleanor’s back and she gives him a piggyback. Directed by Bertie, Eleanor takes a long and physically taxing route around the supporting pillars of the museum and back to the Noel McKenna painting in front of which Bertie lives, which is in fact right next to the William Eggleston photograph of Eleanor’s living room. After setting Bertie down, she simply steps directly across to the left, back to her house]

V

 That evening, Bernard returns from his backgammon game. He looks a little different, he seems to have lost a lot of weight. Eleanor cannot seem to remember whether he has always had that moustache. She goes to kiss him but Bernard tells her to stay away, the moustache is contagious, he says. He had caught it from a man dressed in an overcoat that he had met at the local backgammon club. The overcoat, whilst quite personable and polite, was not very good at backgammon. Indeed it is a general fact that most outerwear struggles at board games. But this overcoat was not like other overcoats he had met before, there was something different about this one. Bernard didn’t seem to see the man inside the coat, who was very thin, and therefore imperceptible when standing in profile. Somehow the moustache had passed from this enigma, this holographic man, and affixed itself to Bernard’s face. Eleanor, who was conscious of the time constraints and knew that the MCA would kick us out at 7 pm sharp, decides not to ask any further questions whatsoever about the moustache or the overcoat, reasoning that they were probably superfluous to the development of this narrative. Instead, she tells Bernard of Bertie’s frequent unnerving solicitations. “He’s here all the time. And he puts his feet on the table,” she complains. “You just need to get to know him better. He’s very friendly once you get to know him like I do,” says Bernard. And at that point Bernard refers to his script, which tells him that Bertie is roughly 5 feet 11 inches and very old-fashioned – he prefers paintings to photographs and, being a postman, has a fetish for handwritten letters. What’s more, Bertie spends hours opening and editing other people’s letters before delivering them. He likes to add happy endings to all the letters of regret. And did she know that he used to be Victorian era furniture, and was once even a baby grand piano, one of them expensive ones? Eleanor agrees that Bertie is very classy and perhaps even charming, and with that they both go to bed. Though Eleanor did not dwell on moustache or the overcoat, which despite its failures at backgammon, was certainly as affable and good-natured an overcoat as you were ever likely to meet, it should nevertheless be noted that the moustache added a certain dignity and class to Bernard’s appearance that Eleanor found quite attractive. What’s more, the man in the overcoat from whence the moustache originated, though he was thin as paper, cast a rather large shadow wherever he went, which made it difficult for those in his vicinity to see clearly, to discern men from mirages, fact from fable. The next morning, Eleanor wakes up alone. There is a note and some footprints on the breakfast table….

And,  love letters from Eleanor to Bertie:

Fair to say that last week at the MCA, Melbourne writer and make-shit-happener Oliver Mol let rip on the gallery space. He threaded a wild and sprawling travel narrative through the South of No North exhibition space, taking us from deepest weirdest Texas, up through sexy Canadian ski ranches,  down for some epiphany-having in South America, and back to the Brisbane ‘burbs. There was weird sex, there was fun sex, there were several Southern Cross tattoos, there were laughter fits and several weirded out gallery patrons. And in between Oliver’s stories of displaced people and intentions, impromptu micro fiction was written and read right there on the spot.

Last Thursday, at 6pm, a small group of us huddled around Spiderman, who stood frozen before a face leaping out of a wall of the MCA.

Zoe Coombs Marr was nearby with microphone in hand, ready to make sense of it all, and the MCA staff stood behind, armed with paper, pencils, and clipboards.

Zoe moved on to other artworks, each one helping her tell the story of Jan Brady – struggling comedian, wearer of Spiderman costumes, reluctant member of a large mixed family – and her relationship with patient, long-suffering Aaron.

We moved through the MCA’s permanent collection, occasionally stopping to write puns for Jan to work into her routine, before arriving before a team of dunces (Brown Council), where Zoe tested out our material.

Turns out the puns must have been hilarious, because the dunces laughed, and laughed, and couldn’t stop laughing. This may have been because they were on a pre-recorded video loop, but I prefer to believe it was because the puns were so brilliant.

First up, here are some dog puns:

And now for some choice meat puns:

You try to pull it apart, say something different, re-size and squash it into a new and meaningful nugget. But it’s made of its own parts, and differs from itself – and summarising it feels reductive as ever.

Ornaments From Two Countries gathers a wide variety of GLBTIQ stories, poems, and essays. It’s a collection edited by Peter Polites, gathered from a series of workshops focusing on stories from Western Sydney and regional NSW. Emerging from them is a reflection on the feeling of difference, and on the power our formative moments have on how our lives play out. Often the stories involve confronting discrimination and abuse, and explore the ways in which people deal with or move past the seemingly unconquerable feeling of alienation.

Here are some of the jump-out moments for me:

1.

‘The unexpected awakening forced a change in perspective. From here on I was free to embrace being an outsider. A further insight followed. The fantastical beings that appeared in horror movies were beautiful in their ugliness, dark angels of a murky netherworld that represented a state of hyper-real humanity.’  –Dmetri Katmi, ‘The tranny horror from outer space’

After a long period of alienation and confusion, Katmi makes a realisation  watching James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein. Self-identification was continually difficult for him, but he began to relate his discontent about not feeling or looking human to a sense of self beyond that, not characterised by its otherness.

2.

‘Most of the class was pretty upset that as punishment… we wouldn’t be going on year six camp. I wonder now if that was cancelled because Mr Bell didn’t want to sleep with me close by, and that that had been agreed on with Mr Cahill, the school principal, who I also desperately wished to seduce, though I didn’t love him.’ –Bruce Cherry, ‘Seduction by an eleven-year-old’

This story lends a fondness to what would have been, at the time, an excruciating story of unrequited passion. At one stage Bruce writes his teacher a friendly Christmas card with serious undertones:

‘Alright, so I didn’t come out and tell him I was so madly in love with him that I fantasised constantly about hiding in the boot of his car and stowing away to his house to seduce him. But as far as my repressed eleven-year-old self could make out, I’d said everything I could without incriminating myself.’

The innocence of the gesture, hiding the pure urgency of the intent.

3.

‘My dad is brilliant. He’s racist, sexist, homophobic and my absolute favourite person on the planet. My sister is three years older than me. She broke down all of the barriers that weren’t obliterated by my dad’s leaving.

My sister had a Lebanese boyfriend called Khodar when she was seventeen. He was beautiful and dumb as a post. Needless to say, she was pleased with herself. Their time together was cut tragically short by my father’s drunken and misinformed enquiries about fatwas and September 11, as well as his insistence on calling him Khodar the Barbarian and Lawrence.

I told my father I was gay when I was sixteen. He rolled me a cigarette, gave me a can of VB, called me Jodie Foster for half an hour before gleefully coming to the conclusion that I wouldn’t become pregnant any time soon. His neighbours are lesbians and frequently have loud, obnoxious sex in the afternoons. Whenever he yells, Shut up you fucking dykes, it’s always followed by a subdued, not that there’s anything wrong with that, at least when I’m around.’ -Peta Murphy, ‘Dad’

Peta Murphy’s meditation on how-to-deal-with-ingrained-opinions has a resilience to it that’s hard to fuck with. She doesn’t condone her dad’s behaviour – she merely looks past it, or just loves him anyway. It’s an impressive strategy showing sureness of self, and rings wonderfully of Wilde’s “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”

The pieces in Ornaments are not always polished, or pretty, or easy. But they have a grit and defiance to them that’s compelling, and thrive on their diversity.

***

- Justin Wolfers

Extracts from Ornaments from two Countries: GLBTIQ stories of difference from Western Sydney & regional New South Wales, ed. & pub. Peter Polites.

What’s in store for 2013…

This March PPR is partnering up with the Museum of Contemporary Art to turn photographs and paintings into weekly adventures told in the MCA’s permanent and South of No North exhibitions. Each week, audiences will be taken on a narrative journey through the gallery by a different writer, and have the opportunity to contribute to the telling of each story by completing various tasks along the way. Each session is free, and runs from 6pm – 7pm every Thursday in March.

Writers include:

Thursday March 7: Zoe Coombs Marr (MCA permanent collection)

Thursday March 14: Oliver Mol

Thursday March 21: Nitin Vengurlekar

Thursday March 28: Rachel Roberts

On April 2, the State Library will be opening its vaults for writers, including poet Astrid Loragne, performance-maker Nathan Harrison and fiction writer Clare Testoni, to re-imagine the history of Sydney’s collectables.

Then on May 10 PPR, in collaboration with the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, will present Penguin Plays Rough Generates Energy Inside a Windmill. Electric stories told – you guessed it – inside a windmill. For this high-tech event, Laura Jean McKay and Tom Doig will be beaming themselves in from Melbourne.

And later in the year, PPR will break all the rules within the safe confines of the Justice and Police Museum in honour of the re-launch of the City of Shadows Exhibition.

Since this hallowed day, many other people have attempted to show their affection through the written word, which, although ultimately less delicious than chocolate, has proven to be an adequate substitute for those low on pennies.

For today’s post, Ariella has put together a collection of excerpts from some famous writers’ personal love letters, in case you need some inspiration for your own…

Johnny Cash to wife June Carter

You’ve got a way with words and a way with me as well. The fire and excitement may be gone now that we don’t go out there and sing them anymore, but the ring of fire still burns around you and I, keeping our love hotter than a pepper sprout.

Franz Kafka to lover, Felice Bauer

I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?

Edith Wharton to America journalist, Morton Fullerton   

There would have been the making of an accomplished flirt in me, because my lucidity shows me each move of the game – but that, in the same instant, a reaction of contempt makes me sweep all the counters off the board and cry out: – “Take them all – I don’t want to win – I want to lose everything to you!”

James Joyce to wife and muse, Nora Barnacle

You are mine, darling, mine! I love you. All I have written above is only a moment or two of brutal madness. The last drop of seed has hardly been squirted up your cunt before it is over and my true love for you, the love of my verses, the love of my eyes for your strange luring eyes, comes blowing over my soul like a wind of spices. My prick is still hot and stiff and quivering from the last brutal drive it has given you when a faint hymn is heard rising in tender pitiful worship of you from the dim cloisters of my heart.

Dylan Thomas to his future wife, Caitlin Macnamara

I love you for millions and millions of things, clocks and vampires and dirty nails and squiggly paintings and lovely hair and being dizzy and falling dreams. I want you to be with me; you can have all the spaces between the houses, and I can have a room with no windows; we’ll make a halfway house; you can teach me to walk in the air and I’ll teach you to make nice noises on the piano without any music; we’ll have a bed in a bar, as we said we would, and we shan’t have any money at all and we’ll live on other people’s which they won’t like a bit. The room’s full of they now, but I don’t care, I don’t care for anybody. I want to be with you because I love you. I don’t know what I love you means, except that I do.

Charles Bukowski to Linda King

I liked your hand-walking act; that got me hotter than hell…. everything you do gets me hotter than hell…. throwing clay against the ceiling… you bitch, you red hot shrew, you lovely lovely woman…. you have put new poems and new hope and new joy and new tricks into an old dog, I love you, your pussy hairs I felt with my fingers, the inside of your pussy, wet, hot, I felt with my fingers; you, up against the refrigerator, you have such a wonderful refrigerator, your hair dangling down, wild, you there, the wild bird of you the wild thing of you, hot, lewd, miraculous…. twisting after your head, trying to grab your tongue with my mouth, with my tongue…. we were in Burbank and I was in love, ultramarine love, my good god damned goddess, my goad, my bitch, my my my my beating breathing hair-lined cunt of Paradise, I love you… and your refrigerator, and as we grabbed and wrestled, that sculpted head watching us with his little lyrical cynical love-smile, burning…
I want you,
I want you,
I want YOU
YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU!