Long since gone, it’s intriguing to put it up here and out into the world.
Posterity’s possible when there’s the pleasure of digital space.

Mathilde Fibiger was a 20 year old Danish governess when her novel, Clara Raphael, ignited a furor. The novel’s theme of female independence was immensely controversial and it is considered the first Danish feminist work. The book energized the women’s movement and influenced the 1857 decision of the Danish Parliament to grant women majority at the age of 25.
Although Mathilde received a small pension from the Danish Queen Mother, she struggled to support herself as a writer and translator. In 1866, Mathilde trained as a telegraphist, making her not only the first female telegraphist in Denmark but also the first female civil servant in Denmark.

***

This woman was awesome.

This post is a continuation of my research that didn’t make it into Purefinder.

A wry friend once told me, ‘If you’ve heard one performance poet, you’ve heard them fall’.
He put a slight gap between the f and all of ‘fall’.

Though there’s some truth about many performance poets sounding similar in his quip, I replied ‘But what if you’ve read them first?’

James Wheale [@JamesWheale] is the writer of Maskboy and more besides.

Not yet 25, he’s won poetry slams and written interactive games that have toured the world – I haven’t seen James perform apart from in that old Youtube video but I have read Maskboy.

Maskboy is Mr Wheale’s first collection and it’s for all those of us who’ve grown up reading comics. It’s a collection of poems that can be performed or can be mulled over or projected onto your inner cinema-screen like the best comic-book panels.

The key figures in the book are the poet, a time machine, a witch-doctor, and the titular Maskboy.
The poet is our average-man who could become a hero or a villain, we don’t know til the end – this, of course, is a formal construct of the positioning of the poems and works the notion that in writing, we make ourselves. Some poems are split in two so that their tone and their echo continues to be felt and heard under those it bookends. This construct is perhaps the best in Maskboy because it gives the poems, what any good Doctor Who fan would call, a timey-wimey feeling of not concentric-circles but an interconnected, achronal existence.

I can’t resist a formal construct so, if you can’t yet tell, I enjoyed Maskboy.

In looking at science-fiction and super-hero themes, it immediately brings notions of performativity, the masks we wear every day, and the illusions/delusions/realities we create for ourselves.

The collection is, as I said earlier, -

There are wordplays aplenty, simple things that we’ve all thought to do and never had the bravery to but superhero-makings too:

I can bring you back
in a handful of lines
exploding
in a yellow radiance
laced across your tangerine lit wrists
singing one of the crap songs we once wrote.

Antigone
back to her rightful place as a myth.
This is what a time machine does
it makes you an addict of your past

This is taken from the poem ‘Time Travellers Anonymous.’
The question of time travel runs throughout the collection and examines the idea of building a Time Machine  as an adventure, as a way to get back to old loves, as madness but it’s this realization that ‘It makes you an addict of your past’ that I enjoy most. I don’t like nostalgia and neither does this realization.

The collection is, as I said earlier, a brave one – it is free from the distant, ironic, and dry; it’s often funny because it’s so frank; it’s earnest; and it has no qualms about revealing intimate details yet never ‘over-shares’, as the internet would have it. It walks and often slides on many (time) streams but manages them in a manner that’s disarmingly elegant.

This is an honest collection and one I enjoyed reading.

The collection is, as I said earlier, one I’d recommend you read too.
Whatever your chronotope.

The Royal Family

Anonymous composite CDV of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their children, put together from the famous series of photographs taken by J. J. E. Mayall in the year before the Prince Consort’s untimely death. The various princes and princesses are here identified by their initials.

***

This is more research that went unused in Purefinder.

THE WATER THAT JOHN DRINKS

This is the water that JOHN drinks.
This is the Thames with its cento of stink, That supplies the water that JOHN drinks.
These are the fish that float in the ink- y stream of the Thames with its cento of stink, That supplies the water that JOHN drinks
This is the sewer from cesspool and sink, That feeds the fish that float in the ink- y stream of the Thames with its cento of stink, That supplies the water that JOHN drinks.
These are vested int’rests, that fill to the brink, The network of sewer from cesspool and sink, That feed the fish that float in the ink- y stream of the Thames with its cento of stink, That supplies the water that JOHN drinks.
This is the price that we pay to wink, At the vested int’rests, that fill to the brink, The network of sewer from cesspool and sink, That feed the fish that float in the ink- y stream of the Thames with its cento of stink, That supplies the water that JOHN drinks.

Punch, London. July-December, 1849

***

Further Purefinder research that inspired but didn’t end up in the book.

For anyone interested, this was in the 1st and 2nd drafts of the book but not the final.

Colin’s first interview with Mr. Palethorpe.

John Leech, frontispiece from Colin Clink, by Charles Hooton, London, 1841.

***

This is, as so many of my posts will be in 2013, unused research from Purefinder.

Centauress carrying a bacchante on her back.

From Antiquités d’Herculanum (antiquities of Herculaneum) vol. 1, by Tommaso Piroli, Paris, 1804.

***

This is further unused research from Purefinder, my debut novel.
[There's no way I could have included both a representation of a centauress and a bacchante together. Seperate...well, you'd have to read the book to find out.]

Butterscotch candy wrappers, (Restoration period: 1814-1830)

From Papeterie & papetiers de l’ancien temps (Stationery and stationers of the past), by John Grand-Carteret, Paris, 1913.

***

This is more unused research from Purefinder.

Though I don’t usually like to comment too much on this unused research, I found these wrappers particularly weird and wonderful. Telling of the time’s sexual politics [in France, yes, but more than likely over Western Europe also] but also of some of the strangeness and wonder of craft at the time.

But when two dancers with movable joints appeared on stage, enthusiasm grew boundless.

From Un autre monde (another world), written and illustrated by Jean-Jacques Grandville, Paris, 1844.

***

This is further unused research from Purefinder.

What landscape has that texture?
What culture has that calm?

This is more unused research from Purefinder.

Take two highlighters: one pink, one yellow.

Make two books out of one. Like so:

Now, you have two books in one.

Read the pink one, if you will; read the yellow, if you will.
If you don’t know what a battenberg is, click here.

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