luka

Well-known member
famous. i thnk i am in about at least 10-12 books as a ghost presence now which is not the global fame i was expecting but will have to do
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
The calm satisfaction of having been influential, in some unquantifiable way, behind the scenes, without any of the hassle of anybody's actually having heard of you. No-one can evaluate your contribution, hold it up to criticism or scrutiny. You can't be excluded from the pantheon any more than you can be included in it. But you can point to those who are in the pantheon and say "ah yes, well, I had my own small part in getting them where they are today". And of those not in the pantheon you can say "perhaps if they had listened to me...but each must choose their own destiny...". Here and there you are mentioned in the acknowledgements of others' books - some very fine books among them - and in a way isn't that almost as good as having written books of your own, books which might have been disappointing or sunk without a trace? Of course there is that very small volume you once put together, which sits on the shelves of a handful of those very much in the know. A minor gem, they assure you: no-one else has ever written anything quite like it. You've demonstrated capability; there's really no need to labour the point by writing anything else. You were in talks once with a large publisher, well-known, but you really couldn't see eye-to-eye, they wanted different things, commercially viable things, and you couldn't put your heart into a project like that, a pity but there it is. Ultimately you just don't have the necessary vanity, you know, to seek a wider audience. You are reconciled, wholly reconciled, to being a minor figure, but you hope that others' biographers will trouble to account for your influence, where it mattered. At the very least they could get the name of your bloody blog right.
 
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poetix

we murder to dissect
Of course I hope in future years to be able to say of acclaimed poet and psychedelic thought-leader Luka "ah yes, I was privileged to offer him encouragement and guidance when he was still unknown to all but a very few, myself and Gaby Roslin, we gave him the confidence he needed to propel himself to the next level, did you know we're both thanked in the acknowledgements of his very fine book, just after Jeremy Prynne..."
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
"No, no, I've never met Gaby, but you know, if we were to meet, I should say to her, 'believe it or not, Ms Roslin, you and I have something remarkable in common'..."
 

sufi

lala
famous. i thnk i am in about at least 10-12 books as a ghost presence now which is not the global fame i was expecting but will have to do
some future person will dig through the sources, connect the dots to paint a ghostly picture of this shadowy figure, they will be a researcher struggling with ancient formats, trying to make sense of the crappy tech we all use, and then make that case that this hitherto peripheral figure was hugely influential, overturning academic conventions about the k-punk legacy, the Prynne succession, early 21st C thought, the demise of the Johnson Junta, in the light of new insights gleaned from close examination of the primary sources, it's better if they have to work for it a bit, they will be your most passionate future advocate
 

luka

Well-known member
i have a chapter in a book about filthy street urchins that came out recently too. i get interviewed about my life
as a desperate filthy street urchin. the book is called 'let me take you by the hand'. 😅
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
that guardian review you linked to on twitter had some weird statements about the book too lol. e.g. "Her lack of condescension or patronage must be down to her long experience of working with the homeless and other marginalised groups." basically implying that only someone with years of training could talk to any of the people featured in the book without condescension. "yeah, it's really admirable how the author managed to talk to this luka character without screaming 'just get a job in finance you hippy' even once!"
 

luka

Well-known member
its a really weird book. shes put everything down verbatim down to everyones ums and ahs and elisions. its very artless and under-conceptualised.
 

luka

Well-known member
someone approached me today and said they wanted to tell me a story about a poem i wrote. he showed me a picture of a younger me
wearing a t-shirt with the number 23 on it and he said this was 2018. i'd asked you to write me a poem for a friend of mine, an amercian
professor of english literature who used to visit me here a lot and we would go to shakespeare plays and go for walks and so on and he
was dying and you wrote him a poem and i took it over to him and read it to him and he cried and cried and two weeks later he was dead.
that poem was buried with him. so there is a cemetary in a very small town in Iowa with your poem in it.
 
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