There is an increasing narrative that we will all inevitably contract some variant of COVID at some point and that we should all accept this fact and allow our government to get on with conducting business as normal and not have any further restrictions placed on our (economic) freedoms.
This is just herd immunity under another guise. It is immoral, pernicious and plain wrong. For the reasons I give in his video.
Stay safe and get boosted.
So in the light of my fury at Cop26, I drew up some ideas for cartoons and called on my old cartoonist collaborator Wilbur Dawbarn (we'd collaborated on a series soon after Trump's inauguration).
This is what we came up with. It's what happens we you vote into power a bunch of middle-managers, who can only think in terms of economics, rather than the value of human life. Happy Christmas!
On July 15th my new novel "Stories We Tell Our Children" is published by Lendal Press. A novel in 30 thematically linked short stories, which explore many different types of story and narrative that we offer our children in their early years. From the early picture books, through fairy tales to detective and science fiction, to non-literary narratives such as advertising, boy bands and fandom's social media, football, Punch and Judy, ballet and visual art, the novel examines what these narratives offer, how they are structured and whether they are healthy or not, in what is increasingly becoming a more complex world.
REVIEWS:
JoyZine "The book has been written by an author who is intelligent, an acute observer of our society, well read and loves his art. Combined with the ability to make you smile and cringe on occasion, it’s a job well done."
Never Imitate "The overarching theme may be the stories we tell our children and how these impact their development, but the tales also bring to light the stories we tell ourselves."
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There are quote cards with short examples from the book here.
The video below is a reading from one of the chapters "Father Trismus"
Language is a key component of children's play. They voice dolls, action men, football games and the like. But adults lose this sense of story, because their play takes much more rigid lines, such as competitiveness in sports, or the art of creation where the art form is the narrative.
I talk about retaining the playfulness of language in "Stories We Tell Our Children" and how writing itself can be playful simply through language.
When you talk about the constituent elements of a novel, one that is often left out of discussion is that of time. Time is multi-faceted in novels, working in three different ways and I talk about these different applications
The novel is available from all good UK outlets, but I would encourage you to support local and independent bookshops to help them recover from the pandemic by ordering from here if you can't get to those shops in person.
So in 2018 for the publication of my previous novel, I put up a cryptic clue literary quiz where all the answers were book titles. You can view it here and the answers here.
So with a new book out in exactly a week's time, the quiz is back too with a whole bunch of new clues. The answers can be viewed here
An example of how the quiz works. I give the year of publication and the country of the author and then a cryptic clue which in true crossword style, is a play on the words of the book's title. So for example, after giving you the year ad country, the clue might be UNADORNED NOONTIME REPAST. For which the answer is William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch"
Enjoy and feel free to post your total in the comments. Try and avoid posting the answers.
1) UK 2018 THE GUY WHO MAKES BELFAST DOORSTOP DELIVERIES?
2) US 2017 POTUS 16’S BUDDHIST SOUL SEARCHING?
3) US 2011 DISPOSITION OF AWE
4) UK 1928 BIOGRAPHY OF DISNEY WORLD?
5) Mexico 2017 SALT & PEPPER TROPICAL STORM?
6) US 2020 BETWEEN SOHO AND THE THEATRELAND OF THE MIND
7) US 1993 A FISTFUL OF CHASTE SELF-IMMOLATORS
8) S.Africa 2003 ELVIS’ SOUTH AFRICAN AUNT?
9) UK 2006 CONSTANTINOPLE’S ILLEGITIMACY?
10) US 2020 METEOROLOGY
11) UK 1995 PLANETARY GIRDLES MADE OF ICE AND ROCK
12) Australia 2018 JUVENILE CONSUMES ALL THE MILKY WAYS IN EXISTENCE
13) US 2000 RESIDENTIAL FOLIAGE
14) UK/ Ireland 2016 SUBJACENT NEIGHBOURS OF THE MORAVIANS?
15) Japan 1994 COPPER MNEMONICS?
16) UK 2020 THOMAS MORE’S HOME ADDRESS?
17) UK 2020 LEXICON FOR A PERJURER?
18) Chile 2014 ANSWER A, B, C, OR D
19) US 1996 THE JOKE’S ON YOU IN PERPETUITY
20) UK 1962 25 CARAT MOLESKIN?
21) UK 2020 PETTY ABRASION?
22) US 1992 SECOND GENERATION DIVINE OFFSPRING?
23) France 2015 SEPTIMAL FACULTY OF FRENCH, OR LATIN, OR ENGLISH OR DANISH…
24) Palestine 2017 LESSER MINUTIA?
25) UK/India 2019 BEAUTIFUL CORPSES?
26) Mexico/US 2013 FIRST PERSON CHRONICLE OF DENTITION?
27) US 2011 SENDING THE BOYS ROUND?
28) France 2018 NOCTURNAL SANGUINARY SHADE
29) US 2020 OCTO-GRANARY?
30) UK/Ireland 2020 SIDEREAL TOW
31) UK 2015 COMPLETELY SURROUNDED BY A SEA OF GLOSSY FABRIC?
32) UK 2020 EINSTEIN’S DEVOTED METHOD?
33) US 2020 SSSSH!
34) Germany 2015 THE THREE OF THEM ARE NO LONGER HERE, THOUGH YOU MIGHT STILL CATCH
THE LAST ONE
35) US 2012 SHADY MAN’S NYCHTHEMERON TOME BOUTIQUE
Some short samples from my upcoming novel "Stories We Tell our Children" published July 15th. It's a novel told through short stories and explores the many different types of narrative that our children are exposed to in their development, both those in books, but also those non-literary narratives such as advertising, Punch and Judy and unspoken parental aspirations.
You can pre-order my new novel "Stories We Tell Our Children" (also available for international shipping) from here https://uk.bookshop.org/books/stories-we-tell-our-children/9781912436941
I talk about the rather strange origins of my upcoming new novel "Stories We Tell Our Children" published by Lendal Press on July 15th.
Touching on partial writer's block, life-creativity balance and the role of careers' counselling, as well as how much of the book involved autobiographical material and how much was purely the work of the imagination.
You can pre-order my new novel "Stories We Tell Our Children" (also available for international shipping) from here https://uk.bookshop.org/books/stories-we-tell-our-children/9781912436941
The story of the cover https://sulcicollective.blogspot.com/2021/06/cover-reveal.html
My new novel "Stories We Tell Our Children" is published on July 15th. Here's a short video revealing the cover and talking about where the concept for it emerged from.
Six months before I was born, my parents bought themselves a cat. He was an ordinary black, non-pedigree moggy and went on to live to the ripe old age of 23. Once I was moved out of a cot and into my bed, that cat slept on my bed every night until his death, even when I was no longer living at home having gone to university.
He was my animal familiar. Not in terms of he and I collaborating in performing black or white magic, just that we communed with one another and had a deep bond. After he died, I never had such a connection with any other animal, but I did mentally opt for new spirit animals. And here is where I would describe it as performing magic, in the similar manner to the Tarot or I-Ching. Not in any sense of supernatural divination; rather you double down, consider the questions you bring to the table and with the aides memoire prompted by the yarrow stalks or cards, you perform some self-divination and gain some self-insights around the questions you were asking.
So when I say my adopted spirit totems of the tarantula and the vulture, it is purely in this theoretical way rather than that I had with my black cat. While I have stared into the black, black void of a vulture's eyes at a zoo, I certainly wouldn't want either creature perched on my bed while I lay asleep. Both animals served as aides de memoire. Aspects of their physical being and behaviour, allow me to conceptualise and relate back to things about life. I have written flash fiction stories about both, "Eight-Legged Amy" (tarantula), "Rich Pickings" and "Cop Aesthetic" (both vultures), about life, death, rebirth, criminality and war.
But move over guys, a new familiar is in town. Or rather the oceans. For I have become infatuated with jellyfish. One of the oldest species in the history of the planet, these remarkable beasts have a whole host of associations and images that they conjure up. Firstly there is the rather unique case of the
Hollywood had fallen as easily as a stage flat. Militias from Idaho and Montana were dispatched to de-core the Big Apple and root out every last maggot. The President was equivocal over assailing Wall Street, but they had carte blanche on deviant lawyers, journalists and artists housed in Gotham. They were also encouraged to hunt down radical Islamic terrorists who were assumed to be embedded there.
The campaign started with simultaneous assaults on MOMA and the Guggenheim. Sculptures were attacked with chisels, mysteriously transformed into harmless palette knives on first contact. Tins of house paint were hurled against paintings mounted on the walls, but some inherent shaman-artistic force bunched the paint splashes like Hokusai waves, before sending them slithering to the concrete floor, whereupon they proceeded to reproduce a variety of Jackson Pollock canvases. The only blow these crack squads landed was successfully shooting up several Jasper Johns’ Target paintings, scoring perfect bulls’ eyes. Museum curators felt this added to the paintings’ interactive spirit of the familiar, though art critics felt it merely exhibited the AltRight’s two-dimensional literalism. The discourse raged on, with this first wave of shock corps oblivious to their part in the colloquy. An Islamic Anti-Blasphemy squad came across them at the upper echelons of the Guggenheim, launched a copy of their Taliban and ISIS Guide To Perfidious Art into the gallery they occupied and then fled. The manual had just a lone page, a photograph of a stick of dynamite. The Breitbart Division mined the top story, but their hoped for Helter Skelter failed to materialise. Instead they were thrown off balance and tumbled all the way down the Guggenheim’s spiral incline and were bounced out by their own philistine perspective, followed by all the creative energy their blast had liberated from behind glass.
They took their war to the streets, but New York’s awakened soul defied them at every turn. Broadway turned Boogie-Woogie and seethed and pulsed with animated light and color that refused to offer itself up for landmarks by which the militias could orient themselves. Other Mondrianic effects warped and disarrayed the grid pattern, so plunging the troops into anomic motion homesickness. The mid-Westerners didn’t trust the solidity of Joseph Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge, so Brooklyn remained unmolested for now. When Koons' creations walked the streets, these supermen thought them to be real cartoon characters and halted their operations to sit down and enjoy their progress, reliving their own bucolic childhoods. The sexualised scents emanating from the O’Keefean blooms that bedecked New York’s flowerboxes, made them sick just below their paunches and scores fell away invalided from the campaign with inexplicable erections. Many saluted Lichtenstein’s Flag and were frozen in patriotic Old Glory immobility. KKK Quartermasters tried to secure rations from One Hundred Cans, but they stubbornly refused to multiply in order to feed the five thousand. The image of Leutze’s Washington Crossing The Delaware employed for their banners, mysteriously transformed in NYC’s rarefied air into Colescott’s version, which saw them jumping up and down on their own cloth and setting fire to it, the only art they managed to burn throughout the whole campaign. Finally, a man in leathers was crouched crosstown, with a whip protruding from his rectum, at which point an Islamic terrorist cell fled for their lives at this visitation by Shaytan himself.
The Young British Artists pledged their support for their fellow American BoHos. But no matter how exhausted the New York resistance were, none could bring themselves to resort to Tracey Emin’s donated bed for rest and recuperation. While Damien Hirst’s leering jewelled skulls were felt to be a hex, though the diamonds proved useful in supplementing their lasers and machine tool production in the fight against the Übermensch. Hirst’s dead shark was wheeled into a New York thoroughfare, its case opened up, but the formaldehyde just pooled in the gutter before disappearing down the sewers, while the fish itself lay forlornly in the street holding up traffic, though no one considered this the least bit surreal, nor worthy of comment.
The Neo-Nazis retreated from Manhattan, but they had successfully liberated Marsden Hartley’s Portrait Of a German Officer and managing to overcome their own vertiginous revulsion at its bewildering Cubism, at least they could center themselves in the insignia of the German army at its heart. Thus they regathered themselves to storm Brooklyn, bolstered by reinforcements from Ohio and Florida. They put aside their antagonism with the Islamists for a joint onslaught. They dug themselves in, erecting an Eruv of gas ovens at their perimeter in order to sap the will of the besieged. However, Rothko canvasses appeared everywhere and at every angle, like a Roman Legion’s tortoise formation. The AltRight couldn’t get their ovens to work, the gas to flow, the flame to light. When they sent in their engineers, they observed how the oven doors were indistinctly and imprecisely edged, being of poor fit and allowing the chemicals to escape. The gas too had condensed into thick pigmented layers, rendering it too dense to ignite. Rothko’s hues sucked the heart and space out of them, demanding a crepuscular meditation they just could not offer up. Instead many jumped inside their own ovens and begged for combustion to take them completely away from this claustrophobic Hell. And so a retreat from New York was engendered, back to the snowy wastes of the Heartland.
