The Emperor of Icecream

i think i should start by putting down some ideas about my second book, 'the emperor of icecream'. it's about a character called miroslav low (the bastard son of the poet miroslav holub), who lived in glasgow some time in the 2oth century, i think. the book will be a collection of ideas, revealations, experiments with form, tone and style, and i have absolutley no idea where i am going with it. if the first book (which i am now editing, a year after completion) was a reaction to 'women in love', 'portrait of dorian grey', 'mrs dalloway' and freud's metapsychological papers on narcissism and melancholia, etc, this is a reaction to 'ulysses', 'crime and punishment' and the '120 days of sodom'. why not?

miro is both the subject and object of the book, and is only the unstable preciptate of a paranoid experiment. the paranoia comes both from him and myself as ('A'uthor), and is based on a fear of narrative. i wonder if such a phobia has a name? i'll look it up. i know it has a psychical reality. it is maybe a (mild) dissosiative disorder, an over-willingness to forget. he also suffers from a universe-wide guilt complex, maybe a satan rather than christ complex, where he feels he is to blame for every little catastrophy in his everyday life. maybe an amoral elemental comples?he is the everyday mad man who appears at a police station claiming to be the yorkshire ripper, the arsonist that set the local school alight. but there is no smoke without fire, right? one of his stories is that he is the son of a fictionalised ice-cream van owner and drug dealer, and it was he who killed the family in glasgow's 'icecream wars'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Steele - hence the title. the title also refers to the poem of the same name by wallace stevens, which hints at the style and concerns with creating the kind of 'second modernism' that dominates the book.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

the 'emperor of icecream' is also the ghost in the machine, the name of the absent centre of subjectivity, for the purposes of this book. it's the self aggrandising subject generated out of repetion, the everyday, the unconscious, the abjected aspects of the self, etc.

my spelling is lazy and i am sure my grammar and punctuation will be all over the place in these cosy little posts. it'll be a bit tighter when i am writing 'seriously', and putting bits off the developing text up for perusal.