Lift The Siege 2 - Waco

Waco, the game changing siege in the US. With its long tradition of non-conformist communities, and the protected rights of both religion and gun ownership together with a less palatable tradition for cults and apocalyptic beliefs, all of these came together in the Branch Davidian community in Texas who lived in an armed compound over 77 acres in Waco. 

Trying to execute a warrant to search for illegal guns, a gunfight broke out with fatalities on both sides. The authorities retreated and thus began a 51 day siege. Finally the FBI decided to end the siege by moving in, which saw 76 cult members die and the compound go up in flames, the cause of which is still disputed. The besieged garnered a lot of sympathy in the face of perceived unjustifiable lethal Federal Government intervention and Waco was one of the causes cited by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. 

Waco was the reference point for the siege in my novel, while cults of course are also not unique to the US and the Om Shinrikyo cult in Japan that carried out deadly poison attacks on the Tokyo metro also forms a section in my book. 

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"Three Dreams In The Key Of G" has three female voices in a state of siege. One a young mother in sectarian Northern Ireland, just after the Good Friday Peace Agreement has returned paramilitary fighters from both sides back into the domestic realm for an uneasy peace there. The second a Waco-like siege in Florida, as the FBI, DEA and ATF surround a compound full of women, which they see as a threat to all of mankind. The third is in laboratories all over the globe, the Human Genome is being besieged by scientists as they try and uncover its code for life. 

 The siege will be lifted 26/07/2018

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

Lift The Siege #1 - The Siege Of Troy

Lift The Siege 1 - The Siege Of Troy

Possibly the most famous siege of all, one that gave rise to perhaps the apotheosis of epic poetry in the form of Homer’s “Iliad” and the lasting image of the Trojan Horse which finally secured victory for the Greek besiegers after ten years of stalemate. Trojan Horse, Achilles' heel, the face that launched a thousand ships, Greek gift and Cassandra, have all passed down into our modern usage, as well as ones drawn from "The Odyssey" such as siren's voice, between Scylla and Charybdis and lotus eaters. 

Heroic figures such as Ajax, Achilles, Hector, the quixotic passions of the Gods, the perfidious women such as Helen and their noble antithesis such as Hecuba and Andromache making impassioned pleas to save their children from sacrifice by the victors. All of this has passed down and still resonates over a score of centuries later. 

The historical and archeological record is fairly minimal, so we have our knowledge of events passed down to us largely through art, in the form of Homer's epic poem. We have drama rather than reportage. We have developed characters rather than historical agents. And we have meter and rhyme. 

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"Three Dreams In The Key Of G" has three female voices in a state of siege. One a young mother in sectarian Northern Ireland, just after the Good Friday Peace Agreement has returned paramilitary fighters from both sides back into the domestic realm for an uneasy peace there. The second a Waco-like siege in Florida, as the FBI, DEA and ATF surround a compound full of women, which they see as a threat to all of mankind. The third is in laboratories all over the globe, the Human Genome is being besieged by scientists as they try and uncover its code for life. 

The siege will be lifted 26/07/2018

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

Six Degrees Of Literary Separation

J. Randy Taraborelli - "Michael Jackson"

I was never a fan of Jackson, so I can’t honestly say I’ve read this, but he does make an appearance in my upcoming novel in the form of someone wanting to change their skin pigmentation. That is, to deny and defy their genetic fate.

Now here’s a strange thing, Michael Jackson has not one, but two connections to English football (soccer for American readers). Firstly he had a statue erected to him outside the ground of Fulham Football Club in London. Not quite as random as you might think, the then Chairman of the club was a good friend of his. Now that the chairman has moved on from football, the fans couldn’t wait for the statue to be removed as it caused them a lot of ragging from rival supporters. I’m kind of curious where that statue is now, or whether it’s been melted down. 

The second connection is a bit looser, or what we writers call ‘poetic licence’. Michael Jackson had a pet chimp called Bubbles and another London football club West Ham United’s song is called “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”, which also caused much hilarity when the lewd spin was put on it by some wag or other. 

Cass Pennant - “Cass” 

West Ham United were one of the clubs with the worst reputation for hooligan violence. They turned it into an art form, literally since as they aged disgracefully and gradually left the field of conflict, they turned their experiences into books and films. One of the most notorious was Cass Pennant, who has both a film and production company to his name to promote his stories. Not a bad business empire for a football hooligan, but I wonder what his next magnum opus is going to be. 

Italo Calvino - “Our Ancestors” 

There were so many movies made about English football hooligans, that they generated their own spoof movie en homage. It was called "The Hooligan Factory" and featured a leader of one of the football gangs called 'The Baron'. 

Calvino was a marvellous writer as this collection of three stories based on Italian folk tales demonstrates. Three stories about knights in the dying days of the chivalric code. One is a story about an empty suit of armour who behaves and acts as though it is still occupied by its former knight owner. "The Baron In the Trees" is about a young aristocrat who rejects his inherited Baronetcy by going to live up a tree. The third is about a Viscount who is cloven in half by a Turkish cannonball on the battlefield in Bohemia and becomes two people, one unerringly misanthropic, the other altruistic, yet both make the recipients of their respective actions uneasy.

Mathias Enard - “Zone” 

I only read this last Christmas but what a fantastic read. Basically the relentless history of conflict in the Mediterranean of Europe, the Balkans and North Africa. All told in one unending sentence that mimics this repeated, remorseless history of grudges and bloodshed.

Steven Galloway - “The Cellist of Sarajevo” 

One of the more recent conflicts in the area of Enard’s “Zone” was the terrible conflict in Bosnia and this book is a portrayal of both the desperation and the soaring nature of the human spirit. After 22 people die in a bomb blast, a cellist sits at the spot and plays an adagio every day for 22 days in their memory, in full sight of the snipers who could kill him with one bullet. Haunting stuff.

Michel Faber - “The Courage Consort” 

A small novel, but so beautifully drawn by a master craftsman. A vocal ensemble are rehearsing a really hard modern composition for voice and the book very simply dissects the relationships of the ensemble in such a precise, laser-like way, yet still retains the warmth of humanity behind all the tensions and petty squabbles.

So a strange journey from the Prince of Pop, through the king of football hooliganism, through Italian folk tales updated for the modern reader, the history of conflict in Mediterranean Europe, classical music in a warzone as an act of defiance and finally the petty conflicts of a vocal quintet. 

 

Half-Year Book Review

So, 6 months into the year, 42 books read, of which 36 are fiction, with works from Iraq, Chile, Brazil and France among the UK & USA titles.

Here's my video from Booktube summarising the 6 months to date.




Other videos Mentioned
Philip Roth "The Great American Novel & Rana Dasgupta "Solo" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqAV48sdOuU&feature=youtu.be
Jaroslave Kulfar "The Spaceman Of Bohemia" https://youtu.be/OlwSnIept8Q

Ali Smith "Autumn" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfHge45VOMY&feature=youtu.be

Nicola Barker "Happy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHwKh...
Franz Kafka "Amerika" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ3a8...
Will Self https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCzX7...
Why I won't watch film adaptations of novels https://youtu.be/zGoeqH8-lSM
Book Covers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDfvp5cR8sk&feature=youtu.be

28 More Random Questions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9BNWEDTTbA&feature=youtu.be

B1nary - Flash Fiction

1’m standing with the streetlamp sp0tl1ght1ng my n1ghtly catwalk str1ptease.

Bar1ng plenty t0 h00k the j0hns, c0vered up just en0ugh t0 thr0w 0ff the c0ps.

Th0ugh they kn0w us, s1nce un1quely they are fam1l1ar with our faces.

F0r the rest, n0 k1ss1ng, n0 r1mm1ng. M0uth and backd00r rema1n 0ff l1m1ts. 

Access granted s0lely t0 the pr1me 0ne 0f my zer0es. 

0nly 1n return m1nd f0r s0me 0f th0se pr1nted 0n p0und n0tes. Preferably the 0ne with the f1gure f1ve bef0re the zer0.

Step r1ght up, d0n’t be c0c0nut shy, cum 1nt0 my 0r1f1ce.

0ur mutual l0ve c0ntract, y0ur pen1s, my h0le, ten0n and m0rt1se.

Th0ugh y0ur number 0ne is t0 be encl0sed 1n a c0nd0m at all t1me.

D0uble the length, d0uble the pleasure my guarantee, 0n my h0n0ur.

And y0urs the 1 pr0m1se t0 pay sanct10ned by Her Majesty the Queen’s f1zz0g 0n th0se there bankn0tes, c01n 0f the realm. 1llegal but tender.

Her Maj the l0ne key that turns the l0ck of my chast1ty belt, p0rtal to my vaj.

Payment up fr0nt 0r 1 dr0p d0wn the p0rtcull1s 0n y0ur ard0ur. Deflated l1b1d0 rap1d0. 

0h yeah? Well 1 kn0w a1k1do. Yeah that’s right, beg0ne with y0u. Ta1l between y0ur legs. And when 1 say ta1l, 1 mean of course… 

D0esn’t help bus1ness any. N0 matter h0w many n0ughts there are.

W1th0ut a 0ne bef0re them 1 bear abs0lutely n0 value. 

Pestle And Mortar - Flash Fiction

My mother was a casualty of the war they call life, or life-giving. Sapper me tore her up from inside. Bayonetted trench warfare as I emerged from gerrymandered dimensions of the tunnel complex and out over the top into the light. I detonated into the world. The medics stitched her back together down there, but she was no longer fit for active services to parturition; a pessary to prop up the collapsed sump and berm. Awarded an honourable discharge, with blood clotted me serving as the dishonourable discharge that emerged from her. She wasn’t fit for much in the way of anything. Shellshocked or gassed, it amounted to the same nullity. She regressed in her behaviour even as I advanced. She got down on the floor and played with my sister’s dolls as if they were Action Men. She pulled them out from beneath her skirt pleats like hand grenades and then flung them across the room. I knew they were representations of me and my unwitting violence heaped upon her, unfriendly fire apparently. I enlisted for a permanent tour of Freudian duty, a casualty of war in peacetime as I devoted my unconscious life to reconstructing the fragments of my cluster bomb that had blasted my mother apart.