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Fiction

print	String of Bright Moments in Brand Literary Magazine Issue 4, April 2009
print	Doorknobs and Bodypaint Fantastic Flash Fiction, an Anthology Pandemonium Press, ed. Leila Rae, 2008 (co- editor and contributor)
print	Little Stints in Gay T ravels in the Muslim World , Haworth Press, 2007, ed. M.T. Luongo, (as Des Ariel)
print	Twelve Days in a Week in Foreign Affairs, 2005, Cleis Press, ed Mitzi Szereto ( as Des Ariel)
print	Toothpaste Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Journal, Vol 4, No 4, ed. T Long,2004.
print	The Beach Hut, in Erotic Travel Tales, Cleis Press, ed M.Szereto, 2001
print	The Apple Falls, the Penny Drops in Full Body Contact, Alyson Press, ed G.Herren, 2001
web	Invitation to the Underpass in Clam City, October 2002
web	My Barcelona in Tattoo Highway, 2000
web	Dune Head in Pif Magazine, no 36, 2000
Web and print	A Thousand and One Nights and One Night and a Half in Doorknobs and BodyPaint Issue 17, Winner of Hayward Fault Line Short Fiction Prize January 2000 Just published in ’50 Best: Flash Fiction from Doorknobs and Bodypaint’.

Poetry

In Breakfast in Bed, (1987) Oscars Press, ed. P. Daniels.

Interviews

print& web	Rabih Alammedine in The Mississipi Review, 2001
print &web	Colm Toíbín in Lit Magazine, 2001
web	Dale Peck in Pif Magazine, 2000

Non Fiction

Print ’24-Hour Atrocity Cabaret’ in Pigeons and Peacocks: Issue 9, May, 2016.

Let’s face it politics is a tired old Punch and Judy show presenting us false choices and adversaries; the big pharma has strangled the health of millions, inventing new diseases and promoting epidemics to continue selling us lethally addictive drugs; perpetual war is provoked and created to sustain a perpetual state of high alert insecurity where we demonise whoever the latest enemy might be; the media is a non-stop cabaret spinning image of chaos, using doublespeak until up becomes down, and the divide between legal and ethical is poorly concealed; advertising is propaganda exploiting people’s vulnerabilities and toying with their fears, aspirations and hopes for a better life; shopping malls are the new towering edifices of Babylon offering the sacrament of consumerism as the main driving force of our inner vitality, replacing a genuine search for self-exploration and enquiry; sex and death have become main fodder for edutainment threaded into the aneasthetised retail servicescape; and genuine shock has become that rare phenomenon in an age of exhaustion, information-overload and compassion fatigue.

It’s the curse of modernity. And that’s before we even get to the internet and its alleged massive impact on our brains. The net has become an all pervasive sheath of our inner selves, acting as a non-local extension of our brain, networking direct to our visual cortex. It is a reality-warper, fusing the external with the internal, entangling the real with the surreal and the hyperreal, the documentary with the mockumentary, until the blend is so fused we barely notice. We can also disseminate idealised personas via selfies on Instagram, or on Blogs, with a reach across the globe that no one could possibly have imagined 40 years ago. But it’s still a choice we don’t have to make.

I often turn to great works of fiction for divinatory insight into what might be the direction to take in the labyrinth before us. Works with a visionary perspective by Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, J.L. Borges, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Junior, Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick, Chuck Palahniuk and others can be dipped into for understanding and solutions. But few can reach the intensity of J.G. Ballard. In a Dazed interview in 2003, he said the net was an ‘amazing development’. But, he also said, in the hunger for ‘reality’ “it’s difficult to find the ‘real’ because the environment is totally manufactured.”

Fiction, according to Ballard, is less to record the actual or remain stuck in the obsession with nuances of a bourgeois class system, than to liberate the imagination. So that’s what he did, in a disquieting way, and slowly we’ve been catching up to him. His novels were vilified as psychopathic aberrations, namely The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1974). Yet, Ballard seemed to have his finger tighter on the pulse of what was happening than any other English writer. In High Rise, the film (2016) we revisit a novel he wrote back in 1975. He probes into cracks in the social order with the precision of a brain surgeon, outlining how those fault lines are enshrined in the hierarchy of upper to lower floors. This was the book most favoured by Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, and it belonged on David Bowie’s list of 100 favourite books. Ballard forensically located this social psychopathology in a series of high rises on the north side of the Thames, exactly where, ten years later, Canary Wharf arose like a taller spectral shadow city of London. The foresight is astonishing.

It is often claimed that books are dying, if not already dead. Yet, the contrary is true; books are experiencing a Lazarus-like rebirth. Seems you can’t stamp them out, even if you order a book burning festival. Print and digital books and multi-media formats exist in a synergy sparking interest in variety, and the rivalry, like many alleged rivalries, turns out to be false. This would seem a healthy development. Another typical belief comes from writers like Tim Parks. In his recent Guardian article he alleges that the internet is dumbing us down, and reducing attention spans. Novelist, John Banville, disagrees saying “We haven’t changed intellectually because of technology.” The number of people reading long novels requiring concentration was always a smaller percentage of the population anyway. It may be true that teenagers have shorter attention spans than non-urbans or the older generation, but that does not mean anything about their intellectual ability. It might be that millennials take less time to absorb more information and do it better.

What fiction says about our current state of mind regarding the overwhelming presence of the net is worth considering as we now occupy a liminal space where anything can develop – and fast. But it is still poorly understood and fears abound. Are we addicted to the net or just find we compulsively like certain images? That’s a qualitative difference that does not pathologise our interest. Staying poised to celebrate it but yet remain wary of its consequences is a tightrope walk. Ballard’s prose poem I Believe is useful here where he intones: “I believe in… alcoholism, venereal disease…..fever.. exhaustion…pain. .despair.. children.. maps.. diagrams, codes.. chess games.. puzzles.. airline time-tables.. airport indicator signs.. excuses.. reasons ..hallucinations.. anger.. mythologies.. lies.. fantasies.. evasions. .the mystery and melancholy of a hand.. in the kindness of trees..in the wisdom of light.”

Sounds a regular session surfing the net, where we don’t just self promote, but also self educate, so perhaps obsession with it may paradoxically lead us to this kindness and new inner light?

From Ballard we learn that the strangest planet is this one: the real aliens are right next door, so the focus is not planet Zykon X in galaxy B1346 – except to make an allegory of what’s the latest sickness of modernity is – but to zero in on the now, or five minutes in the future and peer into the dark core of suburbia, English red-brick houses with gardens and cars in the drive, or high rises, rooms full of consumer goods, and people inside with their heads glued to their laptop screens and kids inseparable from their smart phones. What that means however is still open to interpretation.

http://www.jgballard.ca/uncollected_work/what_i_believe.html

Writing-As-Healing-2010

Other Writings

print	Shosholooza Meyl: Johannesburg to Capetown in Looking for Love in Faraway Places, Haworth Press, ed. M. Luongo, 2006 (as Des Ariel)
print	Beyond Giza in Between the Palms Haworth Press, ed. M. Luongo,2005
Essays
print & web	Everyone’s Alexandria in Harvard Lesbian & Gay Review, May-June,2002, Volume IX, No 3
print & Web	LGBTQ Arts Encyclopaedia ed C. Summers, 2003 • Arcangelo Corelli • Bathing Scenes • European Art: 18^th Century • Islamic Art • Latino/a Art • Lindsay Kemp • Psyche • Set & Costume Design • Symbolism
	LGBTQ Arts Encyclopaedia ed. C. Summers 2005 (as Des Ariel) • Alexandria • Aldo Busi • Wilfrid Thesiger
Articles
web	The Core List ed. M. Chesnut, 2007 • Out of Africa African Designers • Gutshot: Poker • Pronoia: Robert Breszny
	Dubai American Express Travel Guide, 2007
print & web	Canaima Venezuela in VịVa Latin America Travel Guides ed P Newton, 2006
Print & web	Best of New York 2001 The Village Voice , 2001 • Best Street Bookseller • Best Burlesque
print	Beyond the Valley of the Kings, Metropolitan Magazine, January 1989

Poetry

In Breakfast in Bed, (1987) Oscars Press, ed. P. Daniels.

Interviews

print& web	Rabih Alammedine in The Mississipi Review, 2001
print &web	Colm Toíbín in Lit Magazine, 2001
web	Dale Peck in Pif Magazine, 2000

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