Reading through the proof of Under the Poppy on this really very warm late afternoon: watching a manuscript, a story, become a book is always a satisfying process, but never more so than with this story.

I’ve lately had/heard/read through a lot of conversations and disquisitions with other writers and artists (and I mean a lot: it must be very much on the collective creative mind) about creating for the market, and after all the arguments one can honestly conclude that what’s made in love, for love, tastes sweetest and lasts longest.  This is no question of what’s “hot” or popular or literary or whatever-have-you: it takes no notice of commerce: it’s Lewis Hyde territory and is really no “question” at all.  Love of the making and love of what’s made is how we make art: that’s my best understanding of the process.

Love, note, does not connote softness.  Love is the most tensile and ferocious substance there is.

The eventual readers of Under the Poppy, whether they like the story or do not, will still know, I hope, that I loved the doing and the making, word by word by word, and page by page.

Charles Isherwood reviews Peter Stein’s adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Demons” – whew, and wow.  Exhilarating material, a long tightrope walk; I’d love to see this production. If you have, comment, please, on what the demon-haunted said to you.

If a deadline tickles your sense of urgency, or you just love a challenge, then by all means hop over to our Kickstarter project page and help us tug those knickers all the way up!  You can also watch the delightful “Making-Of” video for the book trailer, posted here for the first time ever.

We’re three days out and in need of angels ….  Aren’t angels and floozies natural allies, anyway?

The Little Professor’s got some very interesting shoots and tendrils curling about the idea of Victorian/”Dickensian” fiction, with shout-outs to the great Sarah Waters (whose own trio of fierce Victorians – Affinity, Fingersmith, and Tipping the Velvet – I came to just this year) and others whose work can be classified as neo-Victorian.  As Under the Poppy is my own first venture into the waters of historical NV fiction, I can browse the LP’s checklist and confirm that yes, there is sexuality present, in various forms and formats, and yes indeed, there is stink. (Sidebar note: smell, scent, olfaction is so visceral and such a powerful descriptive tool, everything I write has stink in it. Yum.)

As for the actual history — well, the fact is I didn’t think beforehand about the book as historical fiction, as any “kind” of fiction; I understood in a backdoor sort of way that it would be part of a genre per se, but other than that I thought not at all; I just wrote. When I needed to know if a certain activity or device was present and/or available in my variant Victoriana, I looked it up (and sometimes became pleasurably lost among the byways of the pince-nez and buttonhook et al) and then added, or did not, accordingly.

What was most important to me, what is always most important to me when I write, was recreating on the page that world I saw so clearly in my mind’s eye: the universe of Rupert and Istvan, that most faithful and intimate world they had built and sustained between them, and all the concentric temporal worlds of society and custom, the road, the stage, the brothel and the salon, through which orbits they passed in turn and tandem on their way. Anthony Lane’s wonderful observation about Flaubert’s use of detail – his research “furnishing and feathering a world that had already taken shape within his mind” – is exactly my model.  Everything on the page is there to feather that nest, to hold you in that world until the story is done.

Is it odorous, sex-charged, boots-and-corset puppet-mad, this world? Oh absolutely. Is it neo-Victorian? It can sit at that table, I hope, without annoying its fellows. Need you wear pince-nez when you read it? Only if you want to. Did I make it all up? Yes and no, like all fiction, like the best fiction it aspires to be. Read it, please, then you tell me.

Joe Stacey, your lush, plaintive “All the World Loves a Lover” has been on extra-heavy rotation today at Under the Poppy World HQ.  Those of you with ears are in for a treat when this music goes live … Joe is also The Pianist at the Poppy, so do be sure to drop a little something in the tip jar, won’t you, in recognition of his powers? Man cannot live on cheap gin’n'absinthe alone, can he?

Setting up readings/book signings for a new novel is always a very pleasant task, and for Under the Poppy there’s the added component of performance, a new boon. Shall we ask a floozy or two to sit in (or lie in, I guess, depending on the venue’s layout? (lieout?))? Should we get some Champagne? Every launch needs Champagne!  Why not a puppet MC?  Will I get my top hat back from the cleaner’s in time? And the musical component: there will be musical accompaniment (live, at the NYC reading); watch this space for eventual MP3s …. Being able to present a novel to its readers in this very personal way, this one-night-only moment, is to tie a lovely, gaudy, ephemeral bow around the whole, to offer a different kind of peek behind the curtain. Reading is performance. Writing is performance, is seduction, is a continuous flowing gesture of sleight-of-hand from “Once upon a time” to “happily ever after,” and if it’s done well it continues, a performance forever in the reader’s mind, whenever the book is recalled.

And if you should find yourself sitting next to a puppet, well, so much the better.

Via Clive Hicks-Jenkins, the gorgeous dervish-y devils of Berga, blind, burning, otherworldly.  This is theatre, folks! Follow the link to peek beneath the costumes, under the fire.

[Photo courtesy Clive Hicks-Jenkins.]

… and Eileen Blumenthal, since I was happily wading, again, in the gorgeous swirl of her Puppetry: A World History, to B) console myself for not being able to get to the toy theatre blowout in Brooklyn, and A), be ravished anew by the grave and astonishing, rebellious and terrible performance of the eternal corps of extra-human actors she spotlights … Like Ilka Schonbein, say.  Put some money in the little girl’s bowl, sir?

Very happy to see the gentleman of the road Chasing Ray this morning. And loved her reference to “Moulin Rouge” (very recently rewatched, in fact, by Diane and me) – it’s a movie that either ravishes or overwhelms you, a dichotomy familiar to the staff Under the Poppy ….