Two New Books

Electric Boy Scout:: Guerrilla Typewriter is a largely non-fiction book dealing with the pressures on Control and the possibility of using art and literature as methods of social resistance. Part essays, part interview, part stories, and part something else, this book takes you on a trip to the future and beyond.

Get a copy of the book from Amazon here or email lachlan.mcdougall@gmail.com to order direct from the publisher

File Folders: Painting in Ephemera is a brand new book of art featuring stunning paintings from a personal collection made during 2022. A great way to bring home a thrilling series, you can get copies of the book from Amazon here or email lachlan.mcdougall@gmail.com to order a copy direct from the publisher.

Submissions Open for D.O.R issue 2

SUBMISSIONS CLOSED

Hi all,

I’m happy to announce that the LJMcD Communications literature and arts magazine, D.O.R, is opening up for a fabulous second issue.

I’m looking for poetry, prose, and art on the edge of sanity. Bold new experiments in text and form. Anything that pushes the boundaries of what we can do with language and symbol. Full details below.

POETRY: Send up to five poems as a single word document. No restriction on form or subject matter, just make it interesting. You’ll find I’m more interested in experimental poetry than I am in traditional sonnets and the like, but I’m open to anything. Up to a million lines, but make them count!

PROSE: Up to 5,000 words in a word document. Short stories, prose poems, essays on contemporary magick, whatever ya got, just make sure you’re doing something new with your words. I want my head to spin with the modern world.

ART: Send up to five high def images in a single email along with any additional information you want published like titles and media.

Send all submissions to lachlan.mcdougall@gmail.com. Please include a brief third person bio in the body of your email to accompany your piece if it is accepted.

Unfortunately, I cannot offer payment for accepted pieces, but all contributors will get the option of a print copy of the magazine at printing/shipping cost.

You can check out the first issue of the magazine in pdf or print copy here

Now, go forth and send me your best and weirdest work!

Electric Boy Scout:: Guerrilla Typewriter pre-order and proof copies

Hi all,

The largely non-fiction book from Lachlan J McDougall, Electric Boy Scout:: Guerrilla Typewriter, is comin out in June and pre-orders for the print book are now open.

The book deals with language and symbol and how we can manipulate these to bring about a social artistic revolution and end the influence of Control in our day to day lives. Let’s see what the Amazon blurb has to say.

The future is now and there’s nothing left but the recordings.
This book is a program for taking on the world at large. A step by step guide to bringing about the revolution from within. You may try to fight the change, but when the Scouts come calling, there’s nothing else you can do.

A deconstruction of the role of language and a prescient dissection of the modern Control virus, Electric Boy Scout is full of helpful and practical tips for circumventing the Control narrative and substituting your own. Learn to take control of your life. Learn the limits of what you are doing and how to push them ever further. Learn a few tricks from the master at work.

You can pre-order the book by emailing lachlan.mcdougall@gmail.com with your order details and a print copy will be sent to you soon after release date in June. Or, to get the book sooner (as well as getting a limited collector’s edition), reach out and see if any of the limited proof copies are still available. In addition to your proof copy, LJMcD Communications will send you a free pdf of the book so you can get reading straight away.

So, get in touch and order your proof copy, or pre-order a print copy today!

Recent Reviews

Hi all,

I’ve been a bit slack on book reviews recently, so here’s a small collection of reviews in brief for the books I’ve missed.

Letter to my Mother by Georges Simenon—an engaging little read. At times boring, but overall quite interesting and really draws you into the deathbed musings of a long and strained relationship. A quick and simple read, I’d recommend for a rainy day. 3/5 stars.

Death the Barber by William Carlos Williams—fine poetry, but overall didn’t engage me that much. A quick read, there were some lovely images at times, but I think I was expecting more. 3/5 stars.

The Waste Land by T S Eliot—you can smell the charred landscape, the trash the death the strained amd curt relationships. It’s a wonderful poem and there’s not too much to say that hasn’t already been said. 4/5 stars.

The Problem that Has No Name by Betty Friedan—this is where it’s at. A wonderful feminist piece cataloguing the despair of the mid-century housewife and also the passion of the early feminists. Every word is powerful and resonates all to well in the modern world. 5/5 stars.

Schisms by Joshua Martin—another wonderful installment in the Martin cannon, this book teeters on the edge of sense and leaves you to draw your own lessons from the chaos of the text. A great, quick read, there’s nothing quite like it. 5/5 stars.

I’ll try to keep up with my reviews going forward, but there might be more of these reviews in brief coming your way.

Lachlan J McDougall

Review: ‘Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems’ by Allen Ginsberg

The wild beat hullabaloo where it all began in resounding howl over rooftops and tenements. Vision through the skies and over land, unflinching language to settle the scores. I love Ginsberg, and this is a fabulous collection of some of the best of his writing. “I am old father fisheye” writes the maestro and we see him there.

There isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said. ‘Howl’ is ecstatic, wild, a bop kabbalah for the ages. The rest of the poems follow suit. Each link in the chain is a drawing back of energy waiting to be unleashed into the universe. Every bit as powerful as it was back in the late fifties.

I highly recommend this book. If you need poetry in your life—this is it.

Review: ‘Omon Ra’ by Victor Pelevin

A scathing indictment on Soviet Russia and their flair for theatrics, this book presents itself like Catch 22 nourished on Kafka and put through the bleak Russian mill of Dostoevsky. I loved this book—it made me laugh and weep and rage with bitter impotence.

The coldness with which it treats the bureaucracy of the USSR is all the more interesting considering just how shortly after the fall of the state it was published. It holds back no punches and really goes to town on the two-faced doublethink of a nation bent on one-upping the West. It is not your usual critique though, it does not declaim a failed communism, but a failing of men and political advisors. It is a failing of the spirit and it has infected the Russian consciousness as far as Pelevin is concerned.

The story centres on a young man, Omon, who is being trained for a flight to the moon to show the Americans who’s boss. But really it is about the malicious scheming, the resigned indifference, and the callous cruelty of the systems in place around him. He has wanted to be a cosmonaut since he was a small child, so why is this great feeling so hollow?

Overall, however, I think this book speaks in a very modern way to the vast cannon of Russian literature. It speaks to Dostoevsky, to Gogol, and even to Pushkin. It speaks of despair and the urge to life in the face of adversity. This is a truly terrific book and I highly recommend it.

Review: ‘Dark Days’ by James Baldwin

A collection of three essays on the condition of black people in America, this book is steeped with a gentle melancholy and a slowly boiling rage. Baldwin feels the plight of his brothers and sisters and doesn’t shy away from cold, hard facts. There is nothing reserved and no punches pulled when it comes to the pervading system of white supremacy and this is not an easy book to digest.

Part of the digestion issue, I must confess, stems from a l sense of overwriting at points which can confuse the issues. This is a rare occurrence, but one which made me prick up my ears more than once. It detracts, in my opinion, from the hard realities when Baldwin traces back through too much poetry.

On the whole, however, this is a relatively straightforward read and a real eye opener for white readers which, I’m sure, is the intended audience of at least two of the three essays. Baldwin knows he has something to say to the white man (although he claims he can’t have conversations with them) and by hell is he going to say it.

It’s a good book and it doesn’t make you feel good about it. It is a languid call to action and a bitter indictment. Reading it will pulverise your outlook, but it might just make you a better person.

Public Artist: Unceremonious Nudes (NSFW)

Images exposing the ugliness of flesh the stark naked reality devoid of sexuality. The artistic conceit is complete—completely open, completely nude. Photographs and digital manipulations to highlight the fractured nature of reality the stark poses of an artist whittled down to a fine point.

The focus is on the body as a system of disembodied parts. The public artist is a fractured sensibility each shred of self subject to infinite dissection and replication. The focus is on the body as an object of abjection, the usual sexual vigour drained away to reveal a vicious ugliness. There is also a softness and vulnerability there—the artist is forced to be open by the nature of their craft, they are forced into nudity, prostitution and a fractured self.

These images belie the world of the modern artist—I am the artist when I am open. They are a prostitution of the senses gleaming cold reality from a distant eye. You as the viewer are complicit. You take the images as aesthetic slices, pieces of the artist to eat up and digest. You are looking through the keyhole into a private world exploded into the public eye. . Where does the art world draw the line?

Each image is available in a limited run of 10 signed and numbered prints with the option to release more in the future. There is also an unsigned ‘print on demand’ option for art accessibility. There was originally going to be a folio art book released to coincide with this series, but personal circumstances have brought me to withdraw some of the images and the set you see before you is incomplete. I did not feel comfortable releasing a book of the incomplete set and so you book lovers will have to wait until June for the File Folders: Painting in Ephemera book to be released with the fabulous file folder series of painitings.

To purchase prints of any of the images in this series visit artpal.com or email lachlan.mcdougall@gmail.com with your order and I will get back to you with pricing and print details.

See the series (incomplete) here:

Four Cocks Meet

Undressing

Hair in Excelcis Deo

To Examine the Body

Hand Fractured Flesh

Suggestion of a Sex

Hand in Movement

Pubic Hair Opening onto the World

Nipple in Light

Pubic Hair in Shades of Light

Nipple with Tattoo

Penis Flaccid Contemplative

Penis Disembodied Ghost of Past

Penis Head in Bloom

Fountain

Review: ‘Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?’ By Hans Fellada

Three rather dull stories attempting humour but falling flat each and every time. I did not enjoy myself as I wandered through Fellada’s trite mundanity, and I felt like my time could have been better spent reading almost anything else.

It reminds me in many ways of a Germanic rendition of something like Rudyard Kipling and I can’t even begin to tell you what a bore he is. Boredom—that is exactly the word for it. I read three distinct stories and yawned the whole way through.

Maybe another reader might see more humour here than I do and maybe there’ll be a point to one of these stories in a different set of eyes, but for me I was left out in the cold with nothing to go on. I can’t recommend this book and out if all the Penguin Modernist books, this one ranks amongst my least favourite.

Review: ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ by James Joyce

A thoroughly modern look at the mind of the poet from boyhood growing into a young man. The language gleams pristine, especially in the early chapters, and Joyce’s genius shines through in a subtle and engaging way.

Not too engaged in formalistic experiments as later works, this one is an easy and engaging read only occasionally running off into dense thickets of prose. It touches upon many subjects but keeps things tethered to the strained mind of the young artist as they strive to find their own voice and identity.

I will say that there is a section towards the end where our protagonist begins a rant on aesthetic theory—this section of the book is exceptionally dull. It does pick up again when we return to musings of poetry, young love, and infatuation, but this is a definite flaw in an otherwise fantastic book.

Overall, I like Joyce and this is one of my favourites. It’s easy and tethered to reality in a way that something like Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake are not. If you are to read one Joyce, it’s recommend this or Dubliners but definitely read this if you get the chance.