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!

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: ‘The Book of Breeething’ by William S Burroughs

A sort of scattered set of musings on language and symbol mixed with a thrilling collection of illustrations, this book is a short, wandering piece that reads like a knowledgeable ramble. Burroughs certainly has a point, but he refuses to make it, allowing it to grow organically out of abstract, dreamlike prose.

The illustrations are just gorgeous and Robert F Gale has done a fantastic job bringing the strange prose to life. Without the illustrations, this book would not work. With them, it is lifted to a high plain of fancy and wonder.

It is not Burroughs best book, and certainly not his clearest, but it is an interesting little addition to the cannon. For a collector like me, it is a must, but if you’re looking only for content, you can find these thoughts better expressed in other books. Still though, it is a fascinating excursion.

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

Nagasaki Blues

My latest novel Nagasaki Blues has just been released!

This wild cut-up science fiction novel is a thrilling ride through a world on its last legs. The crab planet invasion is in full swing and EarthSphere is in danger of burning out to a dry husk. Only the academy stands in the way of total destruction, and perhaps they are not all they seem…

Get a copy of the book here

Or, if you’d like a signed copy (or just don’t feel like giving money to Amazon), email me at lachlan.mcdougall@gmail.com and I can arrange to have a copy sent to you.

Enjoy the book!

Review: ‘Junky’ by William S Burroughs

A bleak tour de force of the sordid reality of opiate addiction, this book balks at nothing and really gets to the heart of the matter. A stark and blistering view of a grimy underworld, Burroughs does not shy away from much and allows himself to come off the worse for it.

Much more straightforward than his later work, this one is a very easy read. The prose, however, is still lovely in its own gritty way and the early notes of abstraction are there for anyone to read. Burroughs is a master of atmosphere and dreams and this book is flooded with both while still being firmly rooted in a serious realism.

I can’t recommend this book enough. For Burroughs fans it is an absolute must and for the casual reader, this is a great place to start. You’ll definitely get something out of it, even if that something is revulsion. But more likely you’ll start a love affair with WSB that will last throughout the years.

Review: ‘Metempoiesis’ by Rose Knapp

A lurid array of poetry breaking down the barriers of language and sense, this book reads like a stream of consciousness look through interlanguage and the halls of dada. It begins dark and smoky, a surreal, barely readable trip through New York streets and slowly the language evolves on you bringing forth a shattered dreamscape that leaves faint impressions on the mind.

Knapp’s book is not ‘readable’ in the traditional sense, but in a dada barrage there is a glimmer of reality that bursts forth and gives a sense of meaning. These poems go beyond simple language experiments (although they are interesting enough from this point of view), they also have a shadowed point to make.

I enjoyed reading this little book quite a lot and I’m eager to see where Knapp takes her crazed sense of language next. The play between languages mixed with tge stream of consciousness diatribe and the wicked punning and scrambled word salad forms an impressive edifice that was a delight to read. I would definitely recommend this book.

Review: ‘Trafficking and Sexual December’ by Dav Crabes

A vast and sprawling cut-up text that is part acerbic pornography, part humorous vignette, and part medical report, this book reads fast and furious through the dark realms of physicality. Crabes’ way with words and skill with the scissors shines through at every turn and there is something here to shock every reader.

Reading this book I am, however, reminded of a Ginsberg quote on the cut-up method—to paraphrase, ‘you have to have something to begin with’. Now, Crabes certainly has a lot of material, but does he have the real guts that deserves to be cut up? Is there something new and powerful that arises from the random juxtaposition of words on the page? On these points I am undecided. What I do know, however, is that the nature of these cuts leads to them running together and becoming a tad tiresome.

I think the problem is that where Burroughs has mastered the art of inserting the suggestion of narrative in random text, Crabes has opted for a wall of abstraction. There is no impetus forcing the reader on and we are sometimes left to feel like we are reading the same experiment over again. It’s a good experiment, and I enjoyed it at first, but at 250 pages we end up reading it an awful lot.

What Crabes does very well, however, is retain the forceful amd distinct voice that is so perfectly crafted as his own. Cut-ups have a tendency to obscure or obliterate the author leaving a cold, lifeless mass of text. This book does not suffer this fate, each page is unmistakably Crabes and the particular use of language hooks the reader into his sordid world of anal sex and prescription drugs.

All in all, I am undecided on this book. At first I thought I didn’t like it, but I found that it grew on me quite thoroughly. It is not without its flaws, but it is by no means a failure in its experiment. I think the only sensible course of action is to try the book for yourself and see where it leads you.

Copies of the book can be purchased here

New Erotic Fiction from J. Ollie Manoeuvre

Hi all,

LJMcD Communications is proud to present the first erotic story of 2023 from my good friend J. Ollie Manoeuvre.

Jail Birds is a heavy piece of queer smut, and if you’re in the mood, I highly recommend it. Manoeuvre may be an erotic artist, but her way with words is truly exceptional (which is why she’s such a staple in the LJMcD roster).

You can get a copy of the book here

Diaries 2022

Hi all,

My diaries for the end of 2022 have just been released as a full colour volume to read and cherish. You’ll get a wealth of abstract musings as well as titbits of writing, a behind the scenes look at the artistic process, daily photographs and other images, and a day to day view of what life is like in the creative world of McDougall.

This will be the first in a series of diaries I will be releasing and is a good place to get to know me both for fans and newcomers to my work.

You can get a copy of the book here

Happy hunting folks!