ESCAPE ARTISTS: The Dandy at Dusk- Philip Mann in PostMistress Press Anthology 1

By Ruth Skilbeck, Editor of  'Escape Artists' PostMistress Anthology 

Updated 15 October, since publication of The Dandy at Dusk by Paris Paysan Press.

Today’s featured artist in the 'EscapeArtists' PostMistress Press Anthology 1 is Philip Mann. We are delighted to be publishing a chapter from author Philip Mann’s forthcoming book The Dandy at Dusk: Stories of Elegance and Nostalgia, an elegantly written and provocative work, now published by ParisPaysanPress.  This is the first book to explore in depth the phenomenon of the dandy, in its social, cultural and political ramifications, in terms of gender and the self.

However, our pleasure was tempered by our regret, for Philip Mann, at the series of difficulties for the author in the course of his book contract negotiation with a highly regarded and long-established mainstream publisher. This is the kind of story that is not unfamiliar to those who work in publishing, and of course to the many authors who are finding it increasingly difficult to publish.

Under the title Dandies at Dusk, Philip Mann’s book was going to be published by Flammarion, a long established publisher in Paris. But then Flammarion changed hands. Philip Mann was informed that Flammarion still wanted to publish his book. But then there was unwelcome change. Flammarion, following the trend of many mainstream publishers now, requires that an author have a sponsor to back the publication. They require a sponsor or self-funding of a substantial sum. Even after the book was up on Amazon as a pre-order (where it can still be seen). In January, Philip was told that Flammarion would, regretfully, not be going ahead with the publication, which they have worked on for two years.  Here are the details of the book description from the Amazon site- which even though Flammarion sent Philip Mann a letter in January breaking the contract to publish is STILL on the Amazon website with the details of the book as if it is about to be published:

Author Philip Mann dispels the myth that dandyism centers upon aestheticism through portraits of the first dandy―Regency England’s Beau Brummell―and six twentieth-century figures: Austrian architect Adolf Loos, The Duke of Windsor, neo-Edwardian couturier Bunny Roger, eccentric writer and raconteur Quentin Crisp, French film producer Jean-Pierre Melville, and New German Cinema savant and “inverted dandy” Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He chronicles their style, identity, influence, melancholy, and often untimely demise, using a mélange of photography, biography, and anecdote. Weaving their stories into an extensive and entertaining history of tailoring and men’s fashion, he offers incisive perspectives on the dandy’s aesthetic concerns, pensive nostalgia for the golden Edwardian era, and a nonchalant persona. He contextualizes the relationship of dandyism to decadence and to modernism, while simultaneously portraying the cultural development of a century punctuated by two World Wars and social upheaval.

This volume presents dandyism—the embodiment of aesthetic and intellectual ideals—from its origins with Beau Brummell to its major twentieth-century representatives. Author Philip Mann dispels the myth that dandyism centers upon vanity through portraits of the first dandy—Regency England's Beau Brummell—and six twentieth-century figures.

 Illustration for The Dandy at Dusk by Floc'h, in 'Escape Artists' PostMistress Press Anthology 1

 Floc'h the well known French artist drew the illustration above for The Dandy at Dusk.

postmistresspress.com

ESCAPE ARTISTS' ANTHOLOGY: 

This anthology project, and founder Ruth Skilbeck's author publishing projects of her books, that she has sold mainly via communication with people on facebook, have attracted and drawn together a strong, supportive creative movement of artists and writers whose works are in the anthology.

 

Ruth Skilbeck, PhD, is a widely-published author, art writer, and photographer, and has lectured in several Australian universities.

The Anthology is being published on the Fuguescapes imprint.


FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY HERE

There is now a way you can support the publication of this new anthology here.  
 
 

Time to Celebrate a New Book, the Old Telegraph and Post Office, and Newcastle, New South Wales.

Time to celebrate a New Book, the Old Post and Telegraphy Office, and Newcastle, New South Wales.

As the long journey to the publication of my first novel draws to a close, and my book is being prepared for printing, it is time to reflect back on the good things that being here in Newcastle has provided me with over the past years, leading to this last year as a publisher.

For a start there is my house, the old post office, after which the publishing house is named, Postmistress Press. This was by chance, we found out through seeing an article in the local history section of the Newcastle Herald, way back in the mid 1990s, when we first started living here (my ex, now grown up children and myself) that the cottage we had moved into was the first post and telegraphy office in Adamstown, an inner city area of Newcastle.

The house had not been built as a post office, it is a humble weatherboard cottage, of the style of a miner’s cottage, with a verandah on the street, a front door in the centre and two windows on either side, if you are looking at it from the street. When we arrived it was very bare and unprepossessing from the street. We planted three ‘street trees’ that the council was giving to residents then to green the city.  They are now tall trees, which provide shade and foliage on the street, three Echinaceas which have vibrant yellow blossoms. Our neighbours opposite also planted Echinacea trees, with red blossom, and next door have Echinaceas outside the house with red and yellow blossoms, so we have coordinated quite well.

The street which when we moved here was treeless is now an arbour.

I also planted a fern garden on the street level outside the house, with a few red flowering geraniums, and with the strip of grass under the trees, it gives the street more of a garden feel.

I found out by chance, or rather through the Lost Newcastle facebook site, that there was a postmistress here at the old post office for many years. I have photographs of her, and her husband and daughter, and a line up of locals on the front verandah from over one hundred years ago, which I will scan and post – or at least include in a publication soon.

That is the inspiration for the name of the publishing house, or one of them. I was attracted to the concept of ‘postmistress’ as women who worked in telecommunication, post and telegraphy offices in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were able to work on a more or less equal level with men, especially during times of crisis such as wartime. So telecommunications and telegraphy offices signify an opportunity for women to play a vital role, at least that was how it eventuated in new forms of communication. There are further resonances of female emancipation- from the mistress- and also the resonance of equality in education, a post grad is a Master, why not a Mistress. All these resonances will chime with the themes of the books I publish.

Which brings me to the new publishing house I have set up here. I am using the newest form of publishing, online publishing, to publish my books as both print books, available in shops and on global platforms such as Amazon, Kobo and more, and as eBooks.

I have now spent the last year (and prior to that another year in research) researching and working in the production of the first books.

There have been trials and tribulations that I have recorded here on this blog, and in social media, which I won’t reiterate now.

However the first year, and the worst of the trials seem to have almost been passed, and my first novel Australian Fugue: The Antipode Room, has been published and sent to supporters of my crowdfunding campaign, as a Special Collector’s Edition PDF eBook. 

Now the printed book is in the final stages of production. It will be available on Amazon in the coming two weeks, I hope.

I am also in the process of producing my PhD book, The Writers Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity (Thesis 2006) as a printed book, to be available via Amazon and other platforms, as a print book, and as an eBook very soon.

The first Postmistress Press Anthology, with contributions from writers around the world, is in production.

So despite the trouble, trials and tribulations, no less the grinding lack of money (though we hate to mention it) in the past year, and most especially in the past six months, since April when things began to get rather tough, it will soon all be worth it.

This is certainly not for the faint-hearted I have found out. But I hope that it will all come to fruition soon, and may prove to be a sustainable business.

So, despite the difficulties I feel I owe my thanks to the Old Post and Telegraph Office, and to Newcastle, and to the New Enterprise Initiative Scheme, which is designed to help new enterprises start in Australia, for the chance to do this. Even if at times it has felt like being in a grueling and impossibly challenging reality TV show. It was always my strong wish to publish a print book, and that is about to happen, so it will all be worthwhile.

Ruth Skilbeck

Publisher and author

Postmistress Press

The Old Post and Telegraph Office

Adamstown

Newcastle

These Writing Nights

 On Reversing One’s Hours 

The only, minor, disturbance I have so far encountered with writing all night and sleeping in the day, is missing a relaxing evening drink. One does not feel like a glass of wine on awakening at 7 or 8 in the evening and the thought is equally unpalatable at 10 o clock the next morning. So instead I am drinking a lot of coffee, and water. But soon my first novel, Australian Fugue: The Antipode Room will be published and up on the fabled platforms of Amazon, Kobo and so on, a transformation into virtual reality which seems at the moment somewhat akin to its ascending to the mythical Olympus. I look forward to inhabiting daylight hours again and celebrating in the ‘real’ evening with a glass or two of nectar from the local vineyards of the Hunter Valley. Until then, the mind is clear and this night is full of gods and constellations.

Ruth Skilbeck

Sex, Art, Fugue and the Antipode Room- Trends in Literary Publishing

by Ruth Skilbeck 

One of the fastest growing trends in new literary publishing is the new movement of author-publishers, and women publishing self-based literary books as e-books and printed books, via the internet.

There are several things that this shows: first women have been empowered through new publishing technologies, and the opportunities to network and create new communities online, that has given rise to the thriving new author publishing movement. Second, that new forms of literary writing and new hybrid genres are proliferating in the new world of publishing, which has proved to have only increased the number of books published and read, contrary to the dire warnings of a decade ago that books were dying.

Far from books dying, and authors becoming redundant, books have been rewritten as e-books, and authors have been reborn as author publishers, able to have the freedom to publish their own works, as they want to, and what this has done is to increase the reading public, and number of books being published online exponentially.

                                                      Pre order through The Antipode Room  

In this conducive and creative environment, women have emerged as strong voices in new ways: creating books about the inner life of women, and their relationships, books written from angles and dealing with subject matter that until now has been considered as inappropriate or vulgar, or smutty. Now women are writing and reading intelligent thoughtful and authentic stories about how women feel and live, in their real relationships with significant others, and with just others. This means writing about and of the body, and women are doing this in many ways, from the extraordinary stories (and success) of erotica E.L James, in her ‘Shades of Grey’ series on “bdsm” and the way this changes the life of the protagonist, to women’s memoirs and the creation of new genres such as romantic vampire thriller, to write about the inner world of women’s lives metaphorically and of course central to this is writing of sexuality and sex.

Until now, literature has been the realm of genres of books that have been termed erotica. Yet these have been seen generally as distinct from literature (except in the hands of the intellectually regarded authors such as Sacher von Masoch, author of the influential Venus in Furs, or George Bataille author of Story of the Eye and Blue of Noon, amongst others. These have been highly regarded and discussed in universities and amongst the intelligentsia. Yet, men have written them, about women. Now, at last literature is able to catch up with the changes that revolutionized Art in the 1970s, when women were able to participate as equals (well that is the idea, in reality it is not so conclusive) – by enrolling in art schools and universities in large numbers. Yet it was at this very time, that in universities, the idea of ‘the death of the author” took hold (I know this is not meant to be literal!) however it too neatly coincided with a dismissive attitude that arose to the idea of “originality” in authorship. One of the effects of this was to silence, or sideline life stories by authors in their own voices, confessional, first person, stories that lost credibility in the academy at that time. Yet this is the kind of writing that women in particular excel at, and love to read- and write.

In the new publishing world, where author publishers are rising into a strong new movement, that began in the US and spread to the UK and is now beginning to start up in other countries, such as Germany, and I hope will too in Australia, women have come to the fore- writing and publishing the stories that they like to read and write. These books are literary, they are serious works about what it means to be human from a women’s perspective. (Of course there are others as there always have been in publishing, but I am focusing here on serious literary writing by women).

To be honest and write authentically as a woman one must write about emotions, feelings, the body, sexuality, eroticism, and one’s own deepest experiences, which tend to be sexual, erotic, the experiences that have most deeply moved and affected us, as humans. New generations of women are writing about the inner world, of feelings and relationships, as lovers, mothers, sisters, friends, as workers and unemployed, or as “casual” workers and exploited, as successful, and as aspiring, in all the modes of life that we live for our selves.

Women are driving the new author publishing movement in new forms of literary writing about what it means and feels to be human and female. They are writing about all the stages of the life cycle, from childhood, through to teenage years and rites of passages, coming of age, to the struggles to develop relationships and assert oneself in ones twenties, raise families perhaps, or discover alternative ways of living and relating, alternative sexual lives, and/or focusing on careers.

This is a literary movement of women’s empowerment that women have been able to develop in the vectors of social, cultural and technological change enabled by new media communications technologies. In this new machine age of digital technologies, a new wave of humanity has swept forth as if we are redefining ourselves as human in this new matrix of digital media.  This coincides with women’s cultural movements of ‘the fourth wave’ of feminism, and the new movements of young women, which interesting involve bodily nudity, as a political statement of self-empowerment and new feminism.

There is a naked turn in culture and in author publishing where women are striving for the truth, and naked expression is part of this. There is a purity and innocence to nudity, as William Blake for one knew. Women are writing from their own lives and perceptions and from the body, and this is creating an interesting new movement in author publishing.

The new series of books that I am publishing is called Australian Fugue. The first book in the series is The Antipode Room; it is the first of two novels based in Australia and London and which tell the story of Roxanne-Ruby’s journey from a state of fugue, loss of awareness of identity, to self-knowledge.

The series is about women’s self-empowerment through culture, and the process of art writing, and the stories it tells are of sex, art and inner world- and how it feels to be an intelligent and artistic woman in different stages of life.

You can support the project of new artistic literary writing and publishing by pre-ordering a limited first edition copy of The Antipode Room as an e-book or as a printed book, through pozible a site for creative projects, that is based in Australia but which is now taking payment from the US.

Details on the book and on how to order it can be found by clicking this link.

The Antipode Room     http://www.pozible.com/project/174238

The e-book is only $19 and the printed book is only $34 – the original photographic cover art is also for sale in a limited edition. This is a unique opportunity to participate in a moment of literary history in Australia, the first book publication by the first author-publisher house, Postmistress Press.

I hope that you will enjoy the book.

All the best and happy reading,

Ruth

Project sponsors and acknowledgements:

Ruth Skilbeck and Postmistress Press thanks the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, and New Hunter Business for their support.