Dance On Fire

As you may have noticed from the sidebar, I have published a novel at Lulu.com, entitled Dance on Fire. As it says in the sidebar:

What do you do when sex and drugs and rock and roll are no longer enough? At one time, Transmission were probably the most famous rock band on the planet. Now, even as they approach their twenty-fifth anniversary they are still up there, one of the top ten bands of all time. However, each of the surviving members of the band feels something, somewhere, has gone wrong, and the rock and roll dream they used to believe in so much has become an empty and hollow routine. Dance On Fire is an exploration of the relationships between the remaining original members of Transmission, and their manager, as the band enters their 25th year together. The novel charts their growing realisation that rock music no longer has any meaning for them, and they are - at best - still going through force of habit - "We've become our own tribute band." Dance On Fire is a novel about the shallowness of everlasting adolescence and the vacuity at the heart of the rock and roll mythology.

Sample it, and – please – buy it here.

If it goes well I may publish more books in this way, including a collection of poems, a short story collection and maybe even another novel.

Gordon of the Dead

A Whither the Left? piece by Jonathan Rutherford at the good old Grauniad’s CiF.

My comment:

The Left is dead, I'm afraid, and most of us who were once on the Left now realise that.

The problem now is that when the Left died it turned into a zombie.

A zombie that not only wants to eat our faces, it also wants to eat our hearts, our minds, our souls, our freedoms and our identities.

Monday Poem: The Snow Falls

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

The Snow Falls
The snow falls,
closes us all down.
We stop and all things
come to a slow halting.
We stand motionless.

The snow falls,
hiding our tracks.
Turning the world white,
erasing all our pasts.
History is lost.

The Snow falls,
we could forget.
Leave it all behind.
Just wipe all these landscapes
of memory clean.

The snow falls,
as we wait here.
All we can do, is
watch the world disappear
under its blankets.

The snow falls,
slower, then stops.
Time begins again.
A new land emerges,
ready to begin.

Talking Dirty

Mark Lawson in The Grauniad on ‘bad language’ on the TV. ‘So, now that which used to be called bad language is standard in large areas of daily life, there's clearly a case for broadcasting to relax its own bans.’

My Comment:

I’ve often wondered what it is about ‘bad’ language that is actually… well… bad.

I mean, it is all right to say, say, ‘sexual intercourse’ , but not fuck. So it can’t be the real meaning of the word that is ‘bad’. So that can’t be it.

It is all right to say words like duck, luck, buck and so on, so it can’t be the sound of the word that is – somehow – offensive to the ear. So, that can’t be it, either.

It can’t be the context because it is acceptable to say something like ‘Oh, flip!’ or somesuch when you spill your coffee over your keyboard, or hit your thumb with a hammer. So, it can’t be the context.

It can’t be that these are crude Anglo-Saxonisms when polite folk are speaking good old Norman French either, because swearwords seem to exist in all languages.

So, I can’t understand what the fuss is about….

Except that… I know that modern TV and film scripts that seem to be based on the premise that it is ‘realistic’, ‘edgy’ or ‘down with the kids’ or whatever, seem so dull, so monochromatic, in their overuse of these words. Like all attempts to outrage in art and entertainment, once what was once shocking becomes ubiquitous, commonplace, it merely becomes tedious as post-Duchamp ‘modern art’ so clearly demonstrates.

True Knowledge and Wisdom

Knowing how and why does not diminish the brightness of the stars, whatever their true distances. A leaf is still a leaf with all its beauty still intact, despite chlorophyll and osmosis and cell structure.

There is more wonder in knowledge than in all your inchoate romantic fantasies. Mystery remains a mystery, but knowledge grows like a strong healthy tree, spreading deep routes and budding forth a truer wisdom than any naïve mysticism.

Time Passes

Now, the time has come to move away from this place. We have been here for too long. It is time to move on. This place is worn out. We are tired of it. It is time for something new.

The words we find here are old and stale now. It is time we found a new place with new words.

Things do grow old with time. Everything changes, except time. Time just marches on, regardless. It will not wait for us, or allow us to step back to a few days, months, or years ago to change our mistakes. We have to accept whatever it gives us.

Learning to live with time is the hard part. Learning that there is no going back, that we have to live with what happens and can do nothing to change it - that is the hard part. That is why so many people fall apart in one way or another. Time damages us. We suffer from time sickness. It will - of course - kill us in the end. Time is always fatal. There is no cure for time.

Time is there all the time. Even while you sleep, the seconds it allows you are running down the drain of your personal history. There is no escape. You cannot wake in the night and hold back that streaming away of time.

Spring Morning

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Spring Morning

I can see how it will happen
on some new spring morning
when the day is eager to begin
in sharp sunshine and birdsong.

The way you rise up, naked and free
to taste the sun on the bright air
from a flung-open window.

Then to turn, smiling, to welcome
a whole world of tumbling children
deep inside your outstretched arms.

Gathering all this up together
to throw it out over green grass,
where laughter and loud games
will set this world turning once again.