My pamphlet The Terrors was launched last night at The Market Trader, Middlesex Street and is now available to purchase from my terrific publishers Nine Arches Press for £5. (Go, do it now!)
The Terrors is a sequence of imagined emails to inmates at Newgate Prison in the eighteenth century. It’s been described by Iain Sinclair as ‘Dark London history, dredged and interrogated’ and by Gists & Piths as ‘a truly remarkable sequence, alive to the possibilities of what language can do, totally confident in its creation of a hyperreality where past and present mingle and bleed into one another.’
ALSO I will be reading at East Words at Museum of Docklands on Thursday 2 April, from 6-9pm. Other readers include Tim Wells and Siddartha Bose. East Words is a great night run by Christopher Horton and Richard Tyrone Jones. And it’s free entry. Details here and on Facebook here.
Tom Chivers 
It is wholly absurd and existentially, a totally false premise actually Chivers, writing e mails to 18C inmates of Newgate prison, because
1 – e mail technology didn’t exist then, as you well know.
2 – if it had and they got them, they would be so freaked out at the method of delivery, that this supernatural event would have been recorded in the media of the time, and would have been known of now, because of the massive historical importance of it.
As it isn’t, that suggests what exactly?
That you are making it up Chivers, and they never received any and in effect what you are doing is committing a very major act of dishonesty and fraud – creative perhaps and not against the law (indeed your type, arty types probably feel very pleased with the invention, mugging off reality and making poems on a fictional and such silly foundation as pretending thus)
Well you won’t get away with it you know, because in my capacity as a misanthropic git who likes to piss on the chips of those who i stalk..i mean police the internet to stop the spread of such dangerous pretend – i am reporting you to the moderators and host of this website, telling them in no uncertain terms that you either desist from fanatsising in such a way as displeases me, or I will take the matter to a higher authority in my quest for justice on this matter.
~
I know many reading here wil think this is harsh and extreme, but keeping up standards is imperitive for us if we are to be a group who intent on acting civilised and fairly to one another under the aegis of my custianship and guardianship here at Misanthroic Git HQ.
You don’t fool me with your *e mail to the 18C* flannel pal, no way, and i think i speak for a lot of concerned bores on this issue Chivers. People who DO (do do do) want this sort of thing stamping out.
Terrible, appalling and worse, flying in the face of decency and good taste. You are a disgrace Chivers, and are never going to appear in any publication ever again, not if i have any say in it you don’t.
A disgrace!!
Dear Git, if I may,
I am delighted to have roused such passions/suspicions in your heart with regard to my fantastic tales of spam email and mythological digital missives. Decency and good taste are *nat me bedfellawes* I’m afraid, and never have been. It’s true, I am disgraceful, in the purely theological sense of not yet having come face-to-face with God the Master and Almighty, and having received the Grace of his Holy Stare. As for your damning praise for my make-believe pretend, I refer you to the groundbreaking case Pan vs Hook of 1902.
With regards,
Chivers
🙂