D.M. Mitchell of Incunabula Media has very kindly re-published my short-story collection Gweel and Other Alterities. The book always had a good title; now it has an even better cover. But do the stories inside live up to the promise of the title and cover? I hope so and I think so. Why do I think so? Because my dreams are more intelligent and imaginative than I am. After all, they’re woven by my subconscious, which is wiser and wilder and weirder than my waking self.
Some of my stories are also more intelligent and imaginative than I am. They’re the ones woven by my subconscious in a dream-like way. Gweel has some of those dream-stories. I don’t think that many people will understand everything that’s going on “Tutu-3”, for example, but I hope that it still strikes them as a powerful story. I don’t understand everything that’s going on in some of the stories. And nobody at all will understand what lies at the center of nearly every story: language.
We all understand a language or languages. But we don’t understand language. Gweel is obsessed with language and words. But it’s also suspicious of them. That’s part of what’s going on in the title story, for example. And coming to the collection anew, I liked this invented poem that provides the epigraph for “H.M.P. Yivgavurnë”:
For water is the primal drug,
The strongest ’neath the sky.
Then second comes the wasp of speech
That stings both tongue and eye.A.E. Housman, “Final Fragments” (1941)
What is the verse saying? It’s saying that water created life, then language took one branch of life onto a new plane (and new plain). So did mathematics, which is another obsession in some of the stories. One of the stories, “Ms. Found in a Steel Bottle”, is very traditional and dates back over thirty years. The newest stories – the most dream-like ones – are stranger and, I hope, stronger. I think there’s something for everyone here, but the book as a whole isn’t for anyone. Including me.
• Incunabula Media — wildness and weirdness in words and more
• Gweel & Other Alterities – Incunabula’s new edition of Gweel
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Papyrocentric Performativity 
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