Marc Nash's Blog, page 46

Never Mind The Jackson Pollocks - 10 Songs about artists

Lyricists namecheck their literary heroes often enough, but a few also honour their inspirational artists too. Here's 10 artists immortalised in song.

1) "Andy Warhol" - David Bowie
Written when Bowie went to New York and hung out at The Factory with the artist. Apparently Warhol was not best pleased with what Bowie saw as his tribute. God it was if Bowie had never heard the Velvet Underground's album. This live version of the song is bizarre in the extreme, starting out as jungle or dub step almost, before reverting to it's carnivalesque pub stomp from the original Hunky Dory album.


2) "Pablo Picasso" - Jonathan Richman And The Modern Lovers

Jonathan Richman goes to the heart of the matter and ditches Picasso's artistic merits, instead concentrating on the man's magnetism. And I love it. The track was used in the film "Repo Man"


3) "David Hockney's Diaries" - Television Personalities
The king of ice cool art here honoured by the British kings of indie lo-fi pop. Note, despite the proud/ironic boast of the cover art "They could have been bigger than the Beatles", the TVPs were so far ensconced in their niche that couldn't even be bigger than the Television Personalities.


4) "Born Toulouse Lautrec" - New Bomb Turks
Slightly odd alliance of US prole-punkers and fine art, but there you go.


5) "Vincent" - Don Maclean
Not only does Don dedicate the song title to the famous artist, the song proceeds to describe Van Gogh's paintings.


6) "Music For Jackson Pollock - Morton Feldman
because they not only knew each other, but the avant garde muso wanted to draw parallels with the revolutionary artist. A fertile period in US arts with the two art forms informing one another. Plinky plink music for slithers of dripping paint. A perfect symbiosis.


7) "Music For Marcel Duchamp" - John Cage
More plinky plink minimalism to honour the prankster godfather of the avant garde, he who recycled a toilet urinal and made it art, Marcel Duchamp. Cage wrote a piece of music without any notes or sounds at all. The "players" were still instructed to turn over the music score even though they weren't playing  their instruments.



8) "(I Want To Be) Tracey Emin" - These New Puritans
Quite jaunty tribute to the queen of jaunty trash art aesthetic herself, la Dame Tracey. Their genre is described as "Art Rock" which is quite fitting really. Don't forget that many of the early punk rock bands in the UK were formed by art college students.


9) "Painting By Chagall" - The Weepies
An example of lazy writing. Why come up with your own metaphor when you can just reference the style of a proper artist like Chagall. Dreck.


10) "Goodbye Toulouse" - The Stranglers
And so Toulouse gets 2 songs dedicated to him in this chart. This song doesn't really work for me, the wistful lyrical description of the street scenes painted by Lautrec, propelled by an ultra modern bass thrum, that's more stampede than café flaneur.

Friday Flash - "Flatpunchline"

To celebrate the publication of my third collection of flash fiction I made a video reading of one of the stories. 
Enjoy!

24 Hour Party people - 10 'party' songs

I know it's Tuesday and that friday & the weekend looks a long way off, but here's something to look forward to: 10 songs around the themes of partying.

1) Beastie Boys - "Fight For Your Right To Party"
The granddaddy of all party songs, or perhaps the snotty grandson might be more appropriate. Crass, crude and a killer guitar riff sample, this one should get them flocking on to the dancefloor, fists pumping the air. The video even has custard pies to underline its schoolboy level. There's a wonderfully fey version of this by Scottish indie band BMX Bandits and a typically mournful & lugubrious version by Coldplay on the occasion of Beastie Boy MCA's death from cancer last year.


2) Velvet Underground - "All Tomorrow's Parties"
From the ridiculous to the sublime... Art noise Velvets with the uninflected emotionless vocal of Nico, is anything but inviting. I used to get stuck in a corner at parties with dead-eyed men or women like Nico trying to extol the virtues of whichever god they followed. I don't go to parties anymore...


3) Bob Marley And The Wailers - "Punky Reggae Party"
Bob Marley recognises the kinship between the 1977 punks and reggae, as punks like Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer acknowledged their love of reggae and DJ Donovan Letts spun reggae tunes before the bands at London punk venue The Vortex Club. He was a bit late on the bandwagon, as reggae band Culture had already released "When Two Sevens Clash" (two sevens as in 1977), which is a far better song that this pretty lame effort. Can't see the punks pronouncing it as 'par-tay'


4) Minutemen - "Maybe Partying Will Help"
Punk-funksters Minutemen slice up another slice of jerky rhythms to set the hips in motion. God I loved this band and was one of my regrets that I never got to see them play live before lead singer/guitarist D.Boon died in a road accident.


5) Black Flag - "TV Party"
Black Flag with Henry Rollins at the helm were always regarded as this intense hardcore punk band, but they had a sense of humour too, as this witty ditty suggests. Sort of Frat Boy level like the Beasties, but done with a little less leaden satire I feel. When I was growing up, America seemed to have a slightly different take on partying to us in the UK. There it was sex, cocaine and weak beer. In the UK it was sexual repression, heaps of booze and maybe a spliff or two. Times have changed and we've caught up.


6) Nelly - "Party People"
I don't have this song in my collection, but YouTube didn't have the Parliament song of the same name so you're stuck with this piece of audio and visual dreck. How hard can he be, he's got a girl's name for flipssakes! Parliament's song is much better believe me...


7) Beat Happening - "Pyjama Party In a Haunted Hive"
I'm really surprised this is on YouTube so low-fi underground were this band, but delighted all the same. Very off the wall and with those deep, deep vocals, bliss!


8) Lesley Gore - "It's My Party (And I'll Cry If I want To)"
You just knew this was going to appear right? Well it was either this or that godawful Whigfield song. Pop music just wasn't made to party... You need something a tad stronger with all those emotions flashing around!


9) Cool Kids - "Basement Party"
Restoring the cool quotient a tad, Cool Kids are a contemporary hip hop that only do old school stuff. And more power to their oscillating elbows I say


10) Happy Mondays ' "24 Hour Party People"
For the ultimate hedonistic dance band, this sentiment summing up everything about them is actually pretty terrible. But what's interesting to me about it is how trained and all played out Sean Ryder's singing is on this track. Like it's all caught up with him and left him on the precipice. We all have to come down eventually.



Bonus Track
Tupac Shakur - "California Love"
Doesn't have 'party' in the title, but the lyric says it all, "California knows how to party"

Quaternary Life - Friday Flash's Fourth Anniversary Blog Hop

                             


Friday Flash Dot Org, a body I owe a lot to in my writing development, is 4 years old having started in May 2009 (I first contributed in November 2009 and have since written about 140 flash stories). I've tried to kick the habit a couple of times as I return to writing novels, but always I come back to writing flash. Once the bug has bitten you...

So in honour of FFDO's 4th anniversary, they have organised a blog hop among their contributors and I am proud to be one such. A 400 word story (or thereabouts) on the theme of a 4th anniversary.

Thanks FFDO for all your tireless efforts on behalf of us writers and happy 4th Birthday!

*

The scrawny dog was lapping the water that had collected in the cracked tarmac. And thereby initiated the foreshortening of its life expectancy. Not that anyone was collating statistics and calculating averages anymore. Mutations were accelerating at a furious rate. New species, or variants on an old one at least, being created with every mouthful of toxic water. Evolution had never witnessed such a rapid turnover of progeny. All of them dead ends. With the emphasis on dead. As in extinct.
Dogs used to be aged in a calendar of their own. A multiplier of seven to equate to their human masters. Those who had betrayed them now. Telescoping seven years into seven days at the genetic level, as amino acid and protein whirled their totentanz tango with one another. Half-life? Existence wasn't even granted that bare fraction of life now.
The dog shook its head to banish those uningested droplets clinging to its maw. The fast growing tumour had already squatted in its jawbone, so that on the return swing of the skull, the protuberance interfered with its own proprioception. The dog lost its awareness of its own dimensions in space and toppled over under the alien weight. It pawed the air, swatting away the imaginary blowflies of Hell. The real cadaver flies having perished from earth, after their unremitting modern diet of irradiated flesh.
Humans too were stricken with the radical changes to their physiology. While their bodies managed to hold their overall integrity even with the cellular buboes, their brain chemistry fared less well. Memories in particular were sorely afflicted. Hence any human being barely maintained a sense of their own continued existence. Each new lesion or bone-sprouted contortion of their anatomy, combined with the loss of recollected self-image to mean humans couldn't remember themselves from the previous day. They were born anew each morn, though still possessed of the basic impulses to feed themselves and evacuate the waste.
Day may have followed interminable day, but there was no annual cycle. Crops and seasons had been outblasted and blighted by radiation. Sun and snow had slithered out of chronometry behind a wall of industrial fug. Day and night had split their differences and settled on a lugubrious energy saving greyness.
No human had the powers of recall to mark today as the fourth anniversary of the start of the war that had so spited the earth. Historians had been the first to lose their calling.

Why the murder in Woolwich was not a terrorist act

one has to be very careful when bandying around the term 'terrorism'. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, President Obama was careful not to immediately dub the act one of terrorism. For so associated in the Western mind is Islam with terrorism (pace Bush & Blair), that to announce any act as one of terrorism conjures up in the general public an image of a radical Muslim and that can lead to reprisals on innocent Muslim members of the population. The Oklahoma bombing was not Islamic. And a Spanish government lost an election when they were so ingrained with the perception of Basque Separatist terrorism, that they accused them of the Madrid train bombings rather than wait for the evidence that it had in fact been homegrown Al Qaeda sympathisers.

The definition and purpose of terrorism is to cause terror in the general population. It is a method of conducting an asymmetric war, by applying pressure on a population to change a government policy. It's asymmetric, because the terrorists know they can match the state's military force, so they seek other means to wage war by. Because of the disparity in force available to a state and to the terrorists, it's exceedingly rare that the terrorists can defeat their enemy. If there is an upswing of popular support for the terrorists, then it may veer into an uprising or revolution, (such as developed in Algeria in the 1960s), but at best the terrorists can get some concessions from the State around the negotiating table. The histories of the State of Israel and more recently Northern Ireland show this.

So some terrorists have political objectives, while others are more motivated by sheer criminality, be it money or the love of mayhem equating to death cults. There is a difference between ideology that is a mere patina gloss over criminal behaviour and that terrorist activity which emerges solely out of the ideology and the ideology informs the precise nature of every terrorist act, such as the nature of the targets. Some terrorist groups will only attack police and army. Some, such as the Angry brigade in the UK, would not target people, but only property. (of course the nature of the beast when dealing with explosives is that some people still die however unintentional).

Events in Woolwich yesterday did not constitute a terrorist act. Yes ideology and political objectives were spouted, but the act was a) too small scale and isolated an attack to constitute an attack on the state b) the perpetrators overtly did not target the civilian population, thus they did not seek to cause them terror and even engaged in conversation/discussions with the citizens there.

You could argue that they wanted to terrorise the State, maybe make government think it was the start of a larger, more sustained campaign and indeed Cameron rushed back from a diplomatic trip abroad and gathered the emergency panel of COBRA. But while flying 5 airplanes into the White House & Pentagon (as intended) as well as the Twin Towers can be rated as a direct attack on the State, the brutal slaying of one soldier is a token and symbolic act and no more. It is so pathological a modus operandi, even to the point of waiting for the police thereby ensuring no sustained campaign beyond this one act by the perpetrators would be possible, that it could not be part of anything strategic or tactical. It was to send a message and the message was the attack on a soldier (Crusader), the attempt at ritual beheading and ensuring that social media spread news of their deed. One murder changes the array of forces not one jot. But the recruiting drive of spreading the evidence of it, as with footage of suicide bombers or IEDs (improvised explosive device) ensures others will aspire to similar acts.

This has been the horrific genius of the Al Qaeda legacy. It provided a way of operating, a loose ideology that meant any local person with their own set of grievances could easily adapt the loose credo to justify their actions, while providing the practical means of making bombs or other hostile acts. There is no defined political ideology or agenda, it is whatever the local perpetrators decide upon. There is no endgame. It is more akin to death cults, killing for the love of killing and to kindle a low-level but ongoing war against an unspecified target. But these are essentially criminal acts, a perceived way of 'getting even' for whatever list of grievances and injustices, a lashing out and a striking back, but little more. It feeds itself and damages its own community who get smeared by the image of radical Islam, which in turn provokes the reprisals that can harden attitudes on both sides.

You've heard the term have a go hero, well this is sort of the inverse of that. Have a go anti-heroes, people full of personal fury, given the outlet for murder by a seemingly justifying ideology that is absolutely only a gloss on a criminal mindset.

Woolwich was a pathological act, dressed up in the symbols of an ideology. Don't be fooled that it was anything else.

Twist and Shout? - The literary twist considered

Is there anything quite as clichéd as a twist (or sting) in the tail (tale)?

Personally I recoil from both writing them and reading them in books. I say recoil, maybe that's a bit strong. Besides, it depends on how exactly you define a 'twist'.

At the level of a dictionary defintion, a twist is an altering in shape, usually through coiling or spiralling. Winding either the two ends of the same thread around one another, or interweaving two discrete strands together.



So either the key element is the altering in shape. That somehow the twist takes a story and contorts it into a whole new shape through its ending; or that two completely separate strands are woven together, that may in fact not bear the weight of being brought together at all so you get distortion.

In both cases, I would make a distinction between a plot twist in the resolution of a story and an undercutting of the preconceptions laid by the rest of the story to take the reader's perception on to a whole new plane. The former, a twist in the plot of the "Phew, it was all a dream" type, or "it wasn't Smith who had died, it was his twin", are the twists that don't really interest me. Expectations may have been confounded, but the story is wholly resolved. All tied up with a bow.

Whereas with the latter, the reader may have to completely go back and reconsider every line in light of the new perspective called upon by the denouement pulling the rug from how the story had been read up until that point. They may even have to read it again in the new perspective. The story keeps resonating with the reader beyond its conclusion, because there are reverberating layers supplied by the mechanism of the ending acting upon the reader's comprehension.

As an example of this, in my new collection of flash stories "Long Stories Short" I have a tale where the narrator is walking behind someone and is fascinatedly describing the ripple in the tights and the contraction of the muscles beneath in the gait of the pedestrian. It definitely has the feel of male gaze voyeurism, but the ending as the identity of the pedestrian is revealed- and which I won't spoil here-  turns the whole set of perceptions and why these motions are being described, utterly on its head. It's not a resolution of plot, but a vertiginous, spiralling into a whole new way of envisioning just such a scene from the perspective of the narrator.

But I would like to go further in this. For me the issue is the very notion of endings, together with beginnings and middles too! I know Aristotle posited that stories required beginnings, middle and ends, but I think the writer's palette is potentially far richer than that.

I write flash fiction stories. Stories of 1000 words or less. There is no space for introductory exposition. You are launched right into the world of the story within line one. And to an extent, this is true of any piece of fiction of any length, since the reader has to find their bearings in the fictional world established by the author. However, in a flash story, there are even fewer words to help convey the reader into the world of the story, since the ending is fast approaching.

Nor is there any room for a saggy middle in flash fiction. The action/character development has to begin with word one and continue apace throughout.

And so on to endings. In the same collection I have a story called "A Series of False Endings", which as its title suggests, instead of a beginning, has a series of end scenarios. When the story reaches its conclusion, there is no twist, but the ending of endings in this story chockful of them. It is the complete finality, because of the context of what has gone before. It is the only ending possible that banishes all the prior endings offered up in the story.

                                          

DNA molecules are helical, that is they twist and spiral around their twin strands. And that's an apt structure for such a metaphor, since endings ought to emerge organically from what precedes them. That doesn't mean you can't veer away in a surprising direction with your denouement, but it must be of a consistency with the rest of the story. That is it must be in proportion to what has gone on before. The transition doesn't have to be seamless, but it must be credible. It must have its roots in what has occurred prior, and not seem to lurch out of left-field.

And this would be my issue with the twist ending. If the structure of the story is conventional beginning, middle and end, then the emphasis is on this fairly rigid structure being faithfully rendered by the story's plot. That is the ending tends to take on more importance in its own right, rather than emerging organically from the story leading up to it. It has to have an ending, that ending probably has to be surprising and unseen. These external demands on the device of the ending I think too often risk dissociating it from the tone and flow of what precedes it. Twists can seem tacked on, or are asked to carry too much weight in taking the whole story in a different direction. If the story is one permeated by love, but ends with a sudden, unexpected murder between two lovers, then the tone radically shifts. Unless there are hints throughout the story of the incipient murderousness between them, I don't think such a twist works - it's too radical and abrupt a shift in tone and mood. Twists can't be abrupt. The story is the ending and the ending is the story, but only if it prompts further reflection after the ending of the story. If the story remains frozen by the ending, twist and all, then it's probably failed to some degree.

The opening story in my collection "Love Net", contains about as traditional a twist as I have ever approached. It's about dating, the search for love and the ending sees this reversed for its polar opposite. But I hope the words throughout are written so as to hold both the romantic motivation, but also on second reading, to suggest a far darker search too. The two strands of language's DNA coiled tightly around one another and informing each other.

Music Can Be Murder - songs about killing

Rock and roll lifestyle eh? It's one thing throwing a telly out of a hotel window, but the business sure is obsessed with songs about the ultimate crime, that of killing and murder. Here's 20 of the best.

1) Roberta Flak - "Killing Me Softly"
The grandmammy of them all, Roberta's purring delivery slays me every time. So sweet, there's almost no hint of the menace behind the lyrics.



2) MC 900ft Jesus - "The Killer Inside Me"
This guy was so criminally overlooked as a performer that it kills me (see what I did there?) Lots of dark undertones in his delivery have jaunty, half really sinister. Genius.



3) Talking Heads - "Psychokiller"
Can't remember if this was their debut release, but what a song to announce your arrival with. New York art-punk, with French in the lyrics just to underline the artiness of it! From when they were still you know, like good.



4) Neil Young - "Cortez The Killer"
I was never a big Neil Young fan, his voice a bit too reedy for my tastes. But plenty swear by him so I honour that. An American singing a song about imperialism, what are the chances?



5) Barrington Levy - "Murderer"
This has the uncanny feel of someone discovering a body, and screaming murderer, murderer into the air to announce it to the whole community so they come running. I love it so much, I used it in my novel "Time After Time". The French call and response audience aren't really up to the challenge!



6) 999 - "Homicide"
Another overlooked minor classic, this is a rare British example of the genre. Musically pretty sophisticated for what was essentially a punk band. Don't you just love the scratchiness of the video? Ah punk nostalgia...



7) Mekons - "Kill 1980"
Actually scrub that, as the next few show, there are plenty of British examples of the kill song genre. Post-punk-turned country-folk-punk Mekons this song saw the introduction of the violin to their line up and to good effect I can't help but feel.



8) The Cure - "Killing An Arab"
This song gets into many of my charts, as it was seminal to both my musical and literary development. An older cousin of mine suggested that I listen to this song and then read Camus' "L'Etranger" both of which I duulky did and was blown away by both. The 'cool' points at school I was initially seeking after from consuming both just no longer seemed to matter...



10) Robert Cray - "Killing Floor"
Classic blues, there are lots of versions of this from Howlin Wolf to Led Zeppelin, but most weren't live & in colour!



11) Bodycount - "Cop Killer"
Yup, that song that caused all the furore in the US. A very average bit of thrash metal, elevated to legendary status by the outrage. Will the authorities never learn? As John Lydon once sung, "Ignore it and it will go away"



12) Dead Kennedys - "Kill The Poor"
... or the other way is to do it with lashings of humour and irony. Mind you I think this still managed to upset some folks who thought the sentiments were real.



13) Angelic Upstarts - "The Murder Of Liddle Towers"
Liddle Towers was a minor professional boxing trainer who died after being arrested by the Police. Two different bands (The other being Tom Robinson Band) penned songs demanding the truth about his death to be investigated, possibly something of a record, but one of those moments when music tries to advocate for something useful.



14) Adam And The Ants - "Killer In The Home"
When Adam Ant suddenly hit on the formula for chart success in both music and look, this song was the only one from that period that I actually liked. Mind you he still slipped in one of his trademark pirate/red Indian/highwayman references in that trite way of his.



15) Carter USM - Midnight On The Murder Mile
For a duo, this band sure made a racket. They signed my copy of their album when they did a set in the record shop I was working in. Since all their songs were paeans to South London, I asked them to sign it 'to a North Londoner'. Nice chaps.



16) Muse - Assassin
The idea of Muse being angry enough to kill anyone makes me snort! Still, fair song musically.



17) John Lee Hooker - I'm Gonna Kill That woman
... unlike blues singers who you entirely believe they're capable of murder. Awesome. One of the few songs Nick Cave hasn't been able to do justice to in his cover versions.



18) The Bug - "Murder We"
Lots of The Bug's songs are exceedingly angry no matter who the guest vocalist is. An angry man clearly. And dubstep is usually so mellow...



19) Rage Against The Machine - "Killing In The Name Of"
I dunno, I always found this song a bit too bloated to get its sentiments across, but when it was hijacked to prevent some crappy UK TV talent show winner becoming the Christmas chart topping number 1 that was just fine by me. Still didn't go out and buy it though.



20) Snoop Dogg -  Serial Killa
Hima so bad he drop 'is 'aitches when  he raps. Can't take this seriously though I probably should

Just Aphasia Going Through - Kinetic Typography Video

A kinetic typography telling of my flash fiction story "Just Aphasia Going Through"



For a some thoughts on the current relationship between literature and kinetic typography, my post here
   

The Interplanetary Flaneur - Friday Flash

The interplanetary window shopper noticed that tote bags were not the only thing bearing logographical logos. Since T-shirts too evinced mottos and slogans. Projected outwards by the aspect of human bodies. “Babe” read one fleshy awning. “Foxy” exhibited another. A rapid straw poll revealed it to be the female who had best mastered (mistressed?) this pithy self-promotion. For one male’s stressed fabric, while barely stretching to cover his rotund abdomen, artlessly self-diagnosed “Beer Monster”. A second bannered the legend “I’m With Stupid!”, underscored with a cartoonishly sleeved and cuffed arm pointing to the right of him. Where could be found... nothing. Was this the point perhaps, that he was far too superior to hang around with a stupid person? Or was it more, that stupid though his absconded partner reputedly was, he still managed to give his pal the slip? But for now, these seemed like doodlings. Mere first drafts of bon mots, compared with the delicious proverbials emblazoned across female hoardings.
Here approaching was another citation, “No Angel” , with the added flourish of a halo. She slackened her progress in order to juggle with her packages, seeking to locate a distress signal emanating from somewhere deep within her bundle. He too wound his gait down, counterfeiting rifling through jacket pockets with what he took to be casual insouciance, but must have more resembled the flapping arms of an anthropomorphic chicken impression. At least that’s how he gauged the daggers being shot at him by files of pedestrians, as they arced around him, before resuturing their surgical headway. He becalmed his arms and settled for blowing his nose as his excuse for loitering.
She had by now found the instrument and was mouthing into it. Yes, just as he had initially surmised; the geometrical middle of the halo precisely, and he did mean with the utmost exactitude, cradled the lady's glandular protuberance. Or, he supposed you could say, that the protuberance transected the halo’s epicentre. Further research was mandatory. Only, by now the woman had caught his studious contemplation and whipped around on her heel, presenting her uninscribed back to him as she continued her confabulation.
He had been dabbing at his nose beyond the chafe-free threshold and so he desisted. There were plenteous messages in flow. “Forbidden Fruit” admonished one embossed in pink. “No Prisoners” counselled another in lime green. “Out Of Your League” trumpeted a third, bedecked in burgundy. This was cryptographic heaven! “Post-Modern Irony” inveigled the next, abutting a roundel target. And was the centre of the bullseye framing her nipple too? He cottoned on. These were not secret codes, rather free-ranging broadcasts. Roving sandwich boards, only without the disfiguration of such a ridiculous mantle. He had a strong inkling to digitise all this for later reclamation. But he sensed this was not a sound stratagem.
He refluxed another reflected in a boutique window, imparting just two letters, “T” and “O” . This failed to spark any recognition, so he stopped at the selfsame display as she, though he was scanning the glass pane rather than what lay beyond it. “TO”, “TO” , still not ringing any bells. Of course basic physics! A vitreous optical reversal! It was “OT” . As in Occupational Therapy! As the women ceded her vigil and chanced turn in his direction, he noticed an occluded wrinkle worming out from the penumbra of the “O” , converting it to a “Q”. “QT” , he muttered, as her gaze narrowed in passing him.
This was curious and beginning to irk him. For he had detected a constant pattern on the distaff’s side of the perusal exchange. Some had their smiles dislodged from their countenances, while others merely stared straight through him. Oh well, no time to ruminate, for along came a further sample, bearing no words, rather a line drawing (sulci and all) of a brain over each mammary. Its very incongruity forced him to ponder as to whether this ought to belong to the subset under consideration, even as she sauntered by. Was she indeed possessed of two brains? A reference to a twin, or a consort perhaps? ( “I’m With Brilliant” sans directional indicator?) But then why was it that somebody else’s cerebellum held joint title over her bosom? And then it struck him, not two brains, but “Brains 2” . “Two.” “Too!” That was too much! Another level altogether. Now he fully comprehended the sliding scale of the communication engendered. Some, were more up front than others.
He was suddenly dazzled by a shard of light piercing his eye. He shielded his brow with his hand, before plucking sufficient pique to peek beneath his peak. What assailed him was a spangle of bouncing light. He reacted quickly during the waning period and appointed that he was being scintillated by a sharp reflection from a woman’s posterior. Swerving hither and thither as she walked in advance of him. Then it hit him with crystal clarity, except it being on the return swing, he was actually temporarily somewhat blinded. Something was embedded upon the non-reflective matt black material her bottom was upholstered in. Studs of some sort. Rhinestones. Sequins. Who knew? Not him certainly. That was not a canon he’d ever referenced. He was about to veer away, when he tumbled to the non-symmetrical arrangement of the tail-mounted cats’ eyes. It behoved him to penetrate the pattern, for he refused to allow himself to be further stymied in his fact-finding mission. He needed to synchronise his sway to match hers, in order to efface the parallax that was shaking his vertical hold as he zoomed in.
And then it coalesced upon his retina. Her stippled rear was speaking to him! Not literally of course. But the coloured pimples picked out a word all the same. In petite calligraphy, since the word appeared to have four syllables, when she was not exactly trailing a wide load. “Bootylicious”. ‘Booty’, he knew, referred to treasure, piratical or otherwise. Assuredly the suggestion of ill-gotten gain. A plundered yield. But ‘licious’? As he was later to discover from his user interface pandect, no such lexigraphical construction formally existed. It politely inquired as to whether he had intended one of the following: ‘luscious’; ‘loci’s’; ‘vicious’; ‘delicious’; ‘malicious’; and when it feebly proffered ‘lice’ as his possible erratum, he shut off further consultation. However, since the delineation was located proprietorially above her gluteus maximus, he gauged it as a continuation of the T-shirt telescoping trend. Or maybe even its apotheosis.

Guest Post - Vivienne Tuffnell

"Kissing Moths Not Frogs"

I'm delighted to be hosting friend and wonderful writer Vivienne Tuffnell on the occasion of her latest book, a collection of short stories called "The Moth's Kiss", several of which I had the privilege of reading as they were being written.

Viv and I share the imperative to interrogate life and our surroundings, to really dig deeper under surface appearances, although we take different stylistic approaches in our writing. But while I content myself with sitting at home and processing everything as thought experiments, Viv has a huge wealth of knowledge and experience in many different fields which she brings to her writing and being. Deeply spiritual, she has a wonderful blog about all things to do with the human psyche, both the things that damage it and the things that help heal such assaults.

Viv never veers away from dealing with deep, deep emotions and she doesn't sugarcoat the darker things in life whenever she happens to be discussing them in her writing. I can't recommend her writing enough.

Over to Viv-



Folklore fascinates me, and it's younger sibling, the urban myth comes a close second. Once you start looking at them both, you realise there is a hoard of inspiration for writing but also they're something that thread through much of modern consciousness. When it comes to superstitions, most people claim to be above it all, but there are things that seem to undermine that.
The tear-drinking moth is one of those things.
I thought it was a myth and I casually asked my brother to confirm this. His area of expertise is lepidoptera, and I grew up with bugs of all sorts so I'm deeply grateful that he stuck largely to butterflies and moths as his primary interest. He's had a room full of tarantulas since I left home, and would like to breed scorpions too. When I mentioned the moth that drinks tears he surprised me. It exists, and he sent me links to some photos of it. It looks harmless enough until you realise that this moth does not merely wait patiently for tears to spill from sleeping eyes, but rather it provokes them. It uses its sharp proboscis to poke the eye and make it water, causing serious irritation and spreads various disgusting diseases. Creepier still is the evolution of a moth that drinks not tears but blood: http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2008/10/081027-vampire-moth-evolution-halloween-missions.html
I'd be lying if I said I set out to write a story about the tear-drinking moth. I didn't. I'd got to a part in a novel I was writing where I needed to step back and look at the narrative from the outside. The novel in question is the third in a series, the first of which is The Bet, and I was trying to create a penetrating sense of menace, of that creeping sense of being watched. So I stepped outside and in a number of pieces, I became the observer, watching and waiting and plotting. Most of it is liable to sit on my hard-drive, unseen but the short story I named The Moth's Kiss for its reference to the tear-drinking moth was obviously capable of standing alone as a story in its own right.
I enjoy writing short stories; it's a very different discipline to that of writing a novel. As a result I write a few in bursts and often do nothing more with them. I've published one collection of shorts, with a theme of ancient deities interacting with the modern world, and I wondered if among the many stories stuffed onto my computer I had sufficient to produce another collection with a theme.
That's when I had the idea of The Moth's Kiss as first tale in a sequence of stories with related themes. Initially I thought of it as scary stories, but on reflection I realised that each of the selected tales dips into some well-embedded folklore and urban legends. A Devil's Pet visits the abiding belief that cats are uncanny and evil. Black Hole is entwined with some quite new beliefs, made widespread by such books as The Secret, that we can draw to ourselves what we need or deserve by merely focusing our thoughts on our goals with sufficient confidence; I took this so-called Law of Attraction and had a little fun with it. Both Green Willow and Bitter Withy  incorporate both ancient folklore of the willow tree being the champion of the discarded lover and other more recent legends, such as the oracle of iPods on shuffle.
Each of the ten stories links to some abiding belief whether ancient or modern or a combination of the two. I have heard that Einstein is said to have recommended that for intelligent children you should read them fairy-tales and for more intelligent children, read them MORE fairy-tales. I'm not convinced about the intelligence bit but fairy-tales, folklore, urban legends all emerge from various strata of the collective unconscious and point not just to our primal needs but also our collective primal fears. This is why we can be transported back millennia by a good story well told; it takes us back to a time when that prickling feeling of being watched was worth heeding for it may have meant that Smilodon or other ambush predator was lurking in the long grass licking its lips. Such a tale reminds us of our fragility even in our technological bubble and there's really nothing like being shocked by a brush with death (even fictional) to make us feel vibrantly alive again.   
The Moth's Kiss is available from Amazon UK:  USA: 

I blog at: http://zenandtheartoftightropewalking.wordpress.com/
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