From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Pastoral Scanlines
Pastoral Scanlines: Selected Works '20–'25 is a retrospective omnibus of prose, poetry and plays by C. W. Smith, gathering work from across 2020–2025. Spanning approximately 465 pages, its contents include Saltando, Leaving / Leading, Garden Monologue, A Billiard Table with Five Balls and Twelve Cues, Pugil, Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time, an extract from the novella Antinomicity, and Scenes from A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight, among others.
The collection takes its epigraph from Patrick White's Voss: “Then he grew calmer, and the vessel was carried on and reached Newcastle.” Its back cover describes the range in Smith's own idiom — "language as sense data, psychogeography and sweet nothing" — from inquiry into ontological incompleteness and the one-sided coin to psychogeographic walks through Newcastle. As a 2025 retrospective, Pastoral Scanlines postdates A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (2020) by up to five years; it is best read not as a precursor to the novel but as the compendium that gathers the intellectual scaffolding running alongside and out from it.