An Abstract Coherency of Poems, Short Stories, and Essays.
Hello everyone! {Ahem ahem} I must say it’s an honor to be able to contribute to OMFG where many of the amazing blogs discuss celebrity excitement and other such renowned entertainments of the mass media. While I’m clearly not famous as such, I am, in fact, very famous in my own head, and in some other heads too, like my dear mother’s. So when Stephanie the Magnificent offered me the opportunity to blog about my recently self published book, “Sea Light: Selected ‘6 to ‘9,” I must admit, I clicked my flamboyantly heterosexual heals and danced for joy. OMFG keeps us gloriously distracted thrill-seeking art-trash junkies connected cerebrally, as well as physically, in our ATL youngster community. So it’s Open, wide open, like an all night dance party on the cosmic edge of free market capitalism (I too am unsure what that really means but I believe it’s something great). It’s genre crossing: local electro to pop icons. It’s not just music and it’s not just fame. It’s also personal, indeed, from thence the expressions derive! So yadda yadda yadda... Oh my fucking God, you get the point and it’s time I got there too.
In the way described above, my book is kind of like this blog site. It’s whatever I wanted it to be and, even much more realistically, it’s whatever you want it to be. Having obtained an English degree from UGA, it’s obvious that I’ve always wanted to be a writer. The tough part is that the anxiety of influence (the writings of the past) are so powerful and strong that so much has already been done before (I mean I’m not Shakespeare for God’s sake). So I’ve discovered that my goal is to make reading more interactive. I hope to someday write a book composed entirely of found text where every sentence can hyperlink to a movie or book or song from where the writing came from (copyright issues!). For now, I’ve written Sea Light, which is, in material form, quite simply, a book.
The book is kind of like a comic book (or a graphic novella to be more pedantic) devoid of any illustrations (although I wouldn’t mind changing that. Any artists out there?). Like a comic book, each page is meant to appeal to your visual sense and so each writing is brief and, I hope, quick to the punch (product of our culture, right?). Each writing is entirely unique and different in form and style. Some pieces are short stories, some are free verse poems, some are entirely found text, some are essays, etc etc. What they all have in common is that they are all mostly works of fictional storytelling and they all attempt to illustrate some point about human nature, which nothing to me can be more fascinating. While all the pieces in the book are entirely disparate, they are also all carefully unified and connected (kind of like OMFG, the internet, humanity, the universe), and thus holistic. Each piece tells a story and all the pieces together tell a greater story. The story is about the outside of up from below and in between throughout.
The central theme of human nature in Sea Light is how paradoxes and opposites compliment, complete, and bring each other into existence thereby forming a third being. There is sea. There is light. Together there is Sea Light. Yes, it sounds cheesy and it is (so what? havarti is one of the tastiest foods ever). It’s also the fundamental nature of our existence, which becomes more and more mysterious the deeper one gets beneath that pasteurized surface. All of writing, and all art for that matter, is a struggle and balance between narcissism and altruism. So my voice is very present throughout the writing and completely hidden at other times. Again, the goal of the book is for the reader’s voice to take over, for the listener to speak, and for someone else to finish my sentence.
On that note, I attempt to send my book out to the masses, for even if one person reads, really reads, Sea Light, even if I never know of it, then my gratitude be released! The link below gives a few sample pages, and the option to download it for 5 or order it for 10. Often, I have copies for sell in person for 12. (I’m not exactly making the yacht club on this one people!) So go ahead, inflate the ego of a middle class urban white guy in America just a little bit more, put on your reading goggles, and take a nice deep meander through a place called Sea Light.
- Mark Anderson 08/20/09
http://www.lulu.com/content/7155552 
