Dylanish

In a recent blog entry, M. John Harrison lists what one assumes are his favourite Dylan songs. Here's a YouTube playlist featuring all of them in cover versions for reasons that will forever alienate hardcore Dylan fans. Cheers.

Ticket Of Leave (a.k.a. The Widow) by Georges Simenon

'It was odd: there were forty passengers, and only one of them, the widow Couderc, looked at the man any differently than you would have looked at just anybody.The rest were placid and quiet, as it might be cows in a meadow watching a wolf browsing in their midst without the least astonishment.'

'Twice, and twice only, in the whole of his life, had he known this innocent peace, once when he'd been ill and had ceased to consider school a reality; then again here, this very morning, as he strode towards the village and waited with the gossips behind the butcher's van...'

Writing news

My story 'Dancer of the Dying' has been accepted for inclusion in Urban Cthulhu: Nightmare Cities, an anthology of Lovecraftian stories. It's Lovecraftian in the sense that it takes cues from 'The Music Of Erich Zann' and 'The Festival' but the nightmare city in question is, of course, Bangalore.

bitter

survive

'Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward.

It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity.'

  

'...that thing that's taken refuge there in that zinc bucket, without a wife, a career, a conapt, or money or the possibility of encountering any of these, still persists. For reasons unknown to me its stake in existence is greater than mine.'

'a funny world, kid'

'We're living in a funny world kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the good people are fighting to keep it from us. It's not good for us, know what I mean? If we had all we wanted to eat, we'd eat too much. We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry. That's the way I understand it. That's about the size of some of the arguments I've heard.'

 - Jim Thompson, 'The Killer Inside Me'