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Traces in the Cloud Chamber of Time (the half-life of Bold As Love)

Thursday 10th December. Grey skies (of course), cool and still; 10 degrees outside. Sitting at my windowside desk, I'm watching a thrush, who is watching a young male blackbird pick bright red holly berries from our bush, now there's a photo opportunity. If my eyes had cameras in them. Oops, gone . . . Every now and then, having spotted that Bold As Love the novel is still leaving traces in the cloud chamber of the internet, I have a look to see what I can find. Here's my latest discoveries

Reviews, esp. in retail venues, don't usually count in this game, but Bob Sherunkle is a star, just for this observation:

. . .The book’s appendix has long lists of rock albums and of books (mostly about rock music) supposed to have inspired the story. I recognised many of the song quotes, e.g. “just a singer in a rock and roll band”, but if the book contains explicit motifs based on these sources I had trouble finding them, and I own half of these albums! I fear the list is no more than Gwyneth's fave raves..
Bob Sherunkle (amazon) June 2015

Fantastic. Bob, you are the first person ever to comment on my discography, and you are absolutely right! The dilemma, way back then: Bold As Love obviously should have a discography, but how to construct this fictional artefact? The solution was to go down to our basement and survey the Dead Media Wall, with special emphasis on the vinyl. My criteria were simple. An album has to be first, a beloved favourite of mine*, plus either be contemporary with the Hendrix album, or have some direct relationship (even if known only to me) with the action in the novels; or, preferably, both. Eg, "Cigarettes and Alcohol" as a chapter heading, that gets Definitely Maybe in.

PS, Wow. You review a whole lot of stuff!

Here's a nice one. A Fiorinda inspired Bold As Love Playlists, from July 2015

& here's an unexpected honour, Barefoot and Pregnant The things those Wikipedia people come up with!

And, although I probably posted this before, a podcast of the original story (via Dark Fiction magazine)

The two beautiful Anne Sudworth pictures (Lost Thoughts and Footprints) featured as cover images for Castles Made Of Sand and Midnight Lamp. The "Ax Preston" portrait is by Bryan Talbot.


Bold As Love (1) ebook, is available on Smashwords. The whole series (ebooks) is on Kindle. Print copies are readily available from many dealers. You can even buy them from me.

That's all for now!

Watching

There's no DVD and none planned says the BBC; you can't buy it, but someone has posted Shoulder to Shoulder, the BBC 1974 series on the Suffragette Movement, on Youtube. I think the whole thing is up, I've watched two episodes so far. The video quality is not exactly HD and the sound is a bit blurry, but it's worth the effort. NB, the first episode, pocket bio-pic devoted to the Manchester middle classes radical-leaning Pankhurst family, is slow going, but this is history, so I don't begrudge them their backstory. Besides, there's a line referring to the place where I was born (Blackley village). Anyway, don't give up. Episode 2 is gripping. I find I remember it all surprisingly well, especially the character of Sylvia, the most complicated Pankhurst. More engaging, and more challenging than the recent movie, which I ended up feeling was rather tepid. This is the real people (flaws and all), who had the ideas and did the deeds, not some luvvy imaginary characters.

Reading

I've just finished A River Runs Again. I read the last chapter, on gender inequality, this morning. Brilliant.

The first time I went to India, I was genuinely shocked by billboards in Delhi, advertising new tvs with the image of a dark scrawny fist flinging a stone at a middle-class plate glass window, with the tagline "DON'T ENVY! BUY IT!" (On the never-never, I suppose). Envy was something I had never been taught, and never ever seen openly encouraged like that. It's a mean-spirited, demeaning emotion, what do I care if you've got a fancier car? Nice car, congrats, but we're all as good as each other . . . I suppose I was brought up in a more equal society than India's masses have ever known. Everything's changed now. I've learned how to feel resentment, irysha. I do indeed resent post-capitalism's super-rich. I bitterly resent all those bloated, domineering corporations and smirking tax-dodging billionaires. And I've learned not to be decently reticent and measured in my demands; in my protests. Reticence is not the way to change this world.

"To negotiate such changes is to ask for everything you want, knowing you might only get a fraction. It is to remain unflinching as you look forward into the future of (India's) women and girls, and the generations they will bear . .."

Just started Johanna Sinisalo's The Blood of Angels

Special mention (Carol made me think of this) Wylder's Hand, Sheridan LeFanu. Which I read as part of my Gothic spree this summer, having remembered liking it very much, years ago. Not only a great Victorian Gothic thriller, but also a perilous love story, and . . . I can't tell you, must avoid spoilers. If original period Gothic, unexpectedly and subtly Sapphic, appeals to you, seek it out.


*including Definitely Maybe, beloved favourite Gwyneth? You were a bit long in the tooth, weren't you?
I am never going to be long in the tooth.
Plus, beloved favourites of Gabriel, my niece Catherine and Gabriel's best friend Pat Mays also qualify (except Fat Boy Slim), esp. owing to my cunning ploy (which I have mentioned before) of making my 2 heroes the exact same age as Gabriel and Pat, so I wouldn't have to wonder what their musical tastes had been, growing up; I would know



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