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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Sara Jiménez I am no great fan of dancing but have always liked flamenco, the guitar playing, the singing and the dancing. It is so powerful a form of communication that one can hardly ignore it. Over the years of YouTube, I have occasionally discovered videos of flamenco in the streets of Spanish cities and in places where tourists gather. I thought I knew flamenco well and then, just recently, I came across the work of this amazing (and scary) lady who demonstrates that I had seen nothing yet. She expresses the ethos of the music so well that there is nothing to say but wow. In this first video that I urge you to watch, she is using the castanets which is fairly rare in modern flamenco as they concentrate heavily on the footwork. But it’s the completeness of her dancing that is so riveting. She can stand completely motionless, move in slow motion, strike poses so dramatic that we can hardly understand what drives her and then burst into a flurry of speed and sound that is breathtaking, and still we are transfixed. And, all the time her face says exactly what she is feeling - she is an accomplished actress as well as a dancer. Every movement evokes a response in us, even the barely discernible shake of her head at times and the brief flash of a softer expression at times. This is artistry at the extreme edge. The second video is closer to the kind of dance you can see performed by street artists in Spain but, when Sara shows how it’s done, even the most resistant of us must surely be undone. Never a foot wrong and pure passion from beginning to end. As I said before - wow. Note how she stays in character throughout. Even when the audience bursts out in applause at a particularly difficult section, her expression stays in the mood of the music. Only at the end when she re-enters for applause, does she allow herself a faint smile. And, when her hair begins to escape from its combs, she turns her back briefly while she adjusts them but never allows our attention to slip from her. We are totally hypnotised. Word Count: 379 |
Today I wrote a poem for myself, a rare occurrence these days, with all the contests that take up my time. Knowing that it could lie hidden in my portfolio for ages, I thought I'd advertise it in my blog, thereby killing two birds with one stone. Here it is:
Word Count: 50 |
| Worldly Wise I think I have figured out why I have been drawn into the horror camp in spite of not really liking horror stories and movies. It’s because there I can be in worlds other than this one. My main interest has always been fantasy (scifi to some extent) and there, again, is my dislike of today’s reality. The way I see it, reality is what we’re trying to get away from when we read. People who’re into it go to dinner parties, climb mountains and learn to fly small planes. The rest of us read to leave this world and go somewhere else. And, when you survive in WdC through the contests, you have to go where you know you can write. In other words, you look for the prompts that encourage the creation of new worlds and different situations. And guess who has the best prompts in WdC. SCREAMS!!!, Dark Dreamscapes and the like. It’s no wonder that so many of my short stories of late have been attempts at horror. And quite a few of my poems too. Understand, I’m not saying that everyone should feel the same. It’s just that it has long been strange to me that I write so much horror now, after never writing it before WdC. And now I understand why. I no longer have to worry about falling into the clutches of the dark side - I’m in control! Word Count: 236 |
| Had one of my amazing feats of memory today and recalled, in full, a poem I wrote in about 1970. This was made a little easier by its being only two lines long. You could say it's pithy! If you want to read something from the Jurassic Age, have a look at this:
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| On Free Verse Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about this creature called free verse. Well, you have to give it some pondering if your entry into poetry was untutored in its historical forms and this (apparently easy) style stands ready to do your immediate bidding. It seemed to me in those early days (when the fresh light of a new day was bright in the dawn of my youth and that sort of poetic nonsense) that the thing that divided free verse from prose was the flow of the thing, what the traditionalists would call meter. Something in me made me attend to this from the very start and I tried to avoid awkward and lumpy constructions, allowing the reader a smooth ride from the first verse to the last. And then a voice from the past spoke to me and I understood (or, maybe, convinced myself) that the way I wrote poetry was a matter of genes. I had long been interested in the Anglo Saxon period, that time known as the Dark Ages, when England first came into being. There were things about those ruffians of long ago that I recognised in myself and I read everything I could get hold of that spoke of them and their culture. They were, as I saw it, my ancestors. There came a time when I read (where, I cannot remember) a consideration of Anglo Saxon verse, the technique of those scops (as they called what we know as bards). It seemed that they were not interested in rhyme or formal meter but composed their tales, the best known of which is Beowulf, with careful attention to the flow of the words. They were, after all, going to sing these lines to the people and a difficult sentence construction could halt the flow and destroy the magic of the story. Inevitably, my own thoughts on free verse came to mind and I discovered (or imagined) yet another connection to my distant forebears. And it remains so, in spite of all that I have learned about other poetic forms under the shelter of WdC’s roof. This might go some way towards explaining why I might experiment briefly with rhyme and form, but my heart remains with free verse and, when I have something to say that matters to me, it’ll be said in free verse. Word Count: 394 |
| The Writer’s Greatest Fear I know you can imagine the scene. Somehow the secret is out and they know you’re a writer. Grit your teeth and hang on grimly because here comes the inevitable response. “Oh, you’re a writer? Well, I’ve written a novel/book/poem and I wonder if you’d read it and let me know what you think.” The heart sinks as you search for a way out, but there is no escape - you’re trapped and might as well give in gracefully. You agree and, in due course, the promised manuscript is delivered. We might as well face it. Friends and family have absolutely no idea of how to write. Once you’ve said yes, you’ll read the thing, you have to come up with a nice way to describe something that is, frankly, unreadable. As an exercise in tact and diplomacy, this is, no doubt, highly beneficial. But it’s pure torture while it’s happening. There just aren’t the words in the English language to describe the solid chunk of boredom these optimistic offerings invariably turn out to be. Not that you could use them, anyway. No, you have to be nice and say encouraging things to soothe the expectations of the perpetrator. This is a friend/relative we’re talking about, after all. Now all we have to do is try not to depart too far from the sunny uplands of the truth in a judgement that is as kind as possible. Sometimes the only way out is emigration. Things aren’t as bad when it’s a writer who asks for your opinion. You stand a reasonable chance of avoiding the typical friend/relative scenario outlined above and, even if the work turns out to be pretty bad, you’re bound to find a few good things to point out in it. And, if you’re incredibly lucky, you could get to read something really good and have an easy job of detailing your positive response. This happened to me a few days ago when a WdC member I’m just getting to know asked me to take a look at a novel he’d written. Knowing that he could write, I agreed straight away and now, having read it, I can say that I’m glad I did. It turned out to be easily in the same class as books by well known authors writing in the same genre. If there were any justice in the world, he should have no trouble finding a publisher for it. But that’s a big if, of course. The world being what it is, he’ll struggle to get agents and publishers to read even a chapter or two and he’ll have a fine collection of rejection letters in no time. Meanwhile the air-headed celebrities will continue to have their ghost-written tomes of nonsense fought over by the publishers. There are still a few decent publishers out there, mostly the little, unnoticed ones that specialise in particular narrow genres but it’s not easy finding them and hitting at the right moment - before they’ve completed their publication list for the coming year, in other words. Good luck to the guy - he deserves to be in print. But me, I’ll just pat myself on the back for having given up on the whole thing and carry on writing because that’s what I do. I suppose I might agree to publication if they came begging to my door but I’m certainly not going to go looking for it. I’m not built for that amount of rejection. Word Count: 580 |
Seven days since I posted anything in my blog. To celebrate, I wrote a poem that has nothing to do with that. And then I posted this announcing the fact. It keeps the thing ticking over.
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| There has to be something ironic in the world remembering Yorick only as a skull. |
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