Steerpike goes to auction

"Publication - is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man'

So said Emily Dickinson and, you know what, she was probably right... It's no doubt a good thing therefore that nature conspires to keep this sleazy little phenomenon at such a healthy distance from the purity of my art. In the meantime however, there are a few little spots of notoriety; for example, I popped up on this blog:

http://mervynpeake.blogspot.com/

on January 12th with a heavily derivative piece of poetry penned in a melancholy mood on New Year's eve. I'm afraid I cannot claim credit for the fantastic opening line, 'O love, O death, O ecstacy'- (in fact, it turns out I can't even spell it right and I've kept the heinous attempt at the last word here for dyslexic posterity); it's a shame though, really, as they are the verse's only redeeming feature. The wonderful apostrophe belongs to Peake himself, one of my greatest inspirations- remembered as a talented writer and an artist but also a good friend of Dylan Thomas and a poet in his own right. Mervyn Peake's poetic output falls somewhere between the liberating nonsense of Lewis Carroll and the practical existentialism of a war poet like Wilfred Owen! Notably, it is some of the only verse that I know by heart...

...In my defence, the blog in question is maintained by his son so I must have done something right. Perhaps, like Peake's own character, Steerpike, this is the first sign that my mundane apprenticeship will soon be over and I can head for the 'pinnacle of the itching fancy - some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to [my]self; where [I] can watch the world spread out below [me], and shake exultantly [my] clotted wings'.

Perhaps. I doubt it.

Sometimes I wonder if the trials Peake elaborates upon in the kitchens of Gormenghast would be preferable to the sketchy drudgery of stolid, old Surbiton!