& books & exhibitions & films &

Hello friend,

More mystically inclined people than me – people who hold deep readings of ancient texts in their heads – tell us the vast mauve everything is locked in a cycle of spiritual growth and collapse … and that the universe is currently in one of the multiple-thousand-year-long ages where it’s all tumult and dire, but which is just prior to a refreshing consciousness expansion. Decay and rebirth you know. The old story.

That’s great and reassuring if you’re able to hold a millennia-wide perspective, but I got annoyed recently about the bookshop Waterstones advertising my self-published books on its website whilst not actually allowing me sell the books through them because I am, shamefully, vanity-pressed. They were gobbling up my search results.

I’d hazard such meaningless and petty concerns don’t indicate I’m spiritual sophisticated enough to hold on to the consoling idea that a much better epoch is just around the corner.

Anyway, I vanquished Waterstones you won’t care to know. I realised that if I went into Nielsen Book Data (the place you register your ISBNs and book details) and set the Recommended Retail Price for each book to £1,000,000 then it would screw up Waterstones’ system. Indeed it did. A peeved and snotty phone call from Nielsen swiftly followed and now the poet Thomas Sharp is not welcome in yet another corner of the literary-critical complex.

Whether its universal cycles of trauma and consciousness evolution … or an arcane and tightening web of reductive capitalism … we’re trapped.

What to do?

The answer is the same for both systems of course – set our value higher than is allowed. Higher than is imaginable.

Here’s some art and projects and a new free book and a short poem about love.

My recent book, Language Consciousness Magick Romance, is now in its fourth pressing. And for the first time in six years a book of mine is actually stocked in a physical place. Devon’s Field System. This art gallery is a joyful place. I first met Mark – who founded the space with his partner Milly – after my TypoCircle talk in 2023. They were just about to launch. Since then they’ve hosted some amazing artists and live events. Follow them on Instagram to see what they do.

I’ve long thought that a more natural home for my writing would be independent art galleries – bookshops are generally impossible to get into if you’re self-published, whereas galleries seem to have a more open attitude.

In the first week of April – which will also be my sixth anniversary of trying to be a writer – I’ll be holding an installation in Field System around the book. There will be readings, collaborations and select visual work to explore. I’ll explain more in a later post but if you’re in the area then drop me a note. I promise it will be language consciousness magick romancey.

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A new book now. And a free one. Will you take a copy? Say you will?

There are just 75 books in the first pressing of Black ribbon being made. The book comes in three black-foiled, coloured-cloth covers – Kingfisher, Amethyst and Forest. It has a black ribbon marker too.

I’ll post anywhere, email me with your postal address and your choice of colour. Read on to see what it’s all about.

Black ribbon is a collection of poems in the Symbolist manner. For a while now I’ve been *obsessed* with Symbolist art. You’ll see a bunch of pieces on my Instagram.

Symbolism as a ‘movement’ is actually fairly hard to define, you could place its first wave as being around from the 1880s to just before WW1. It generally flourished in European areas where there was mass displacement of people from countryside to squalid urban living as part of industrialisation AND where Catholicism was the dominant religion.

It’s an art movement of uncanny sterility, decay, androgyny, Orpheus, tombs, incense, weariness and an overwhelmingly melancholic disassociation from *something*. It’s all very ambiguous.

It’s an art movement of the unnatural. It looks for succour to what might be behind rich yet uncertain symbols, rather than to the Romantic’s sublime nature.

Decadence is never just indulgent, decadence is a rejection of the current culture’s ‘progress’. As we collectively become more and more tangled in the cold systems of a ravenous digital epoch, I suspect that revelling in peacocks, sex magick and the unbearably ineffable might be an act of setting our value higher than simply being a data point in the billionaires’ cruel vision.

Black ribbon is a small doorway. Email me for your copy. Totally free.

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In 2020, during the first MAGA period of power, I created a piece called Game Six in collaboration with Studio Sutherl& and Mario Epsley. It was launched at a live happening in Park Village studios in 2021. We then put the film on YouTube.

It’s not about left wing or right wing politics. It’s about the tactic of flooding the zone – first pioneered by Vladislav Surkov.

If you’re at all transfixed about what might be happening in the world right now, then you may enjoy / hate this piece. I’d suggest go full screen and big volume. It’s eleven minutes long and is about a 1972 chess game, post-truth narratives and the Bhagavad Gita. It was strangely prescient about Ukraine. You’ll hear Lee Harvey Oswald and Derrida in the background.

It’s poetry as a simulacra of the current attack on consensus reality. There’s a grace at the end. New epochs come from the collapsing of the old.

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My friend and frequent collaborator Jim Sutherland recently marked ten years of his design studio by inviting a host of celebrated designers to create ampersands to feature in a book.

Isn’t the ampersand a beautiful thing? It denotes both the connection between people and ideas … but also, in its almost infinity symbol, the continuation of everything, no matter what happens.

We must go on.

My contribution to Jim’s book was a poem about Jim’s habit of photographing discarded things that nearly look like &’s and subsequently putting them on his Instagram.

I said at the top of this letter that the poem was about love. Jim’s partner is an illustrator and watching them support each other through everything fills my heart.

& more than this, love is the higher value, the sun behind the symbol of the sun, that pulls us forward.