Tomorrow night, in Batley, it’s the annual torchlight procession. This historic
tradition, sometimes called the "Lourdes of the North," brings
together the Catholic community of Batley and surrounding areas in a display of
faith and devotion to the Virgin Mary.
The first I ever saw of it, I was 11 years old. There were hundreds of people walking
past our maisonette, each with a candle glowing in a paper holder. They sang,
or chanted“Ave Maria.” The line of
reverential people went on, in the cold Autumn night, for almost half an hour.
My own family was not religious. I’d been to a protestant church two or three times in my childhood, and a Catholic church never. I had never seen churchy people outside a church or churchyard, and the effect on me was much like that of a somehow unsuspecting local of seeing the Padstow ‘Obby Oss come past unexpectedly. To my eyes, it was a “folk tradition” of people venerating an unfamiliar entity – a Wicker Man scenario, but reversed, as I was the pagan, and they were the Christians. (And, as far as I know, they didn’t barbecue anyone afterward.) There are many Festivals of Light at this time of year, and now, fifty years later, I can slot the procession in as one of these – comparable with Diwali, held this year on October 31st, Imbolc and Kwanzaa. It’s one thing to read about it in a book, quite another to see people enacting it on your literal doorstep.
The
procession was kicked off in 1951 by the
arrival at St. Mary’s of Father Gallon, lately of St. Patrick’s Sheffield.
The event is still organized by St Mary of the Angels Catholic Church on Cross
Bank Road and has become a significant part of Batley's cultural and religious
calendar.
The procession begins at St Mary's Catholic Primary School
and wends its way to St Mary of the Angels Church. This route through the
streets of Batley creates a river of light and sound. The sight of hundreds of
flickering flames moving through the streets is visually stunning and moving
for spectators and participants alike.
Like many public events, the Batley Torchlight Procession went into hiatus due to the pandemic. The 2022 procession marked a triumphant return, with the community embracing the opportunity to participate in this august tradition.
Despite my best judgment I ended up watching KAOS on Netflix. The premise seems to be, "What if O Brother Where Art Thou met American Gods and had a threesome with a high school book of Greek Myths?
Which sounds fine, I guess. The main problem - or attraction - is its use of a device I call Stolen Valor. (I'm aware that calling something Stolen Valor that isn't Stolen Valor is in itself Stolen Valor, but I can't think of another name.) This Stolen Valor - Mark II, perhaps - is bringing in legendary slices of pop music at chosen moments to substitute for an Eyeball Kick the visuals can't provide. I can understand why it's done, but the calculatedness takes me out of the moment.
The very first scene of the series is double-underlined and italicized by the use of the stonking introductory riff of Dire Strait's "Money For Nothing." Whatever you may think of Dire Straits and their legacy, there's no doubt that guitar sound makes the heart beat faster. What was weirder is the director kept it going when the vocals started, yea unto the line "Look at them yo-yos." Slight loss of dignity there, I thought.
One after another the hits kept coming, with a high point for me being a few bars of The Kills' "Future Starts Slow," another track where the guitar sounds as if it's about ready to burst its skin and swoop down to eat your face.
By the third of fourth episode I'd gotten used to it, and then they used just a smidgen of Dawn Penn's 1993 reggae classic "You Don't Love Me (No No No)."
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| Flyer for book signing - details reproduced below |
October 13th at 2pm at Book Carnival, 348 S. Tustin Street, Orange, CA 92866.
Snacks and door prizes will be provided - along with book signing, obvs.
Even if you don't want to meet the Blood Fiction authors, come along - Book Carnival is a wonderful bookshop. Just mosey in and browse!
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| My Joan the Wad |
During the 19th and 20th centuries, little
figures of Joan the Wad were produced for humans to wear as lucky charms or
carry in their pockets. They’re still made, I understand, as souvenirs for
visitors to Cornwall. They are made of brass and depict Joan nude, seated, with
her arm over her head. My mother carried one in her purse all her adult life.
Unfortunately, I don’t know where her Joan ended up after she passed away, but
a few years ago I was fortunate to find one exactly like it, and I keep it in a
pocket.
"Good fortune will nod, if you carry upon you Joan the
Wad"
I'm very pleased to announce that I have two stories in Blood Fiction v3 (curated once again by Mark Sevi).
Crossmatch is a tale of exhausting on-call work in a hospital blood bank, with a twist at the end.
Mummy Wheat is a story about pregnancy, birth, and death, but not in the usual order. There's a digression on Mummy Wheat, once found in Ancient Egyptian tombs and guaranteed to sprout upon planting, even after thousands of years accompanying a mummy deep in an underground tomb.
Apropos of nothing much, I remembered the time I was running down the sidewalk of Tiller Road, London, and woman shouted out of an upper window, "You should wear a bra. Den you woudn go bouncin' down de road!"
I remember it because I was wearing a bra at the time but couldn't work out how to get that information across while running for whatever I was late for. It's less memorable than the time I walked towards the stairwell, saw a woman holding a baby, and said, not unreasonably I thought, "Hello, baby." The woman replied, "F*ck off, you lesbian c*nt." Ah, memories of the East End.
The property was Hammond House, where students from Queen Mary, University of London were housed. It's on my mind because I'm writing a story about a garbage chute. A lot of the properties in London had them. They have access hatches in the stairwell on each floor, which you open and chuck your rubbish into. In theory, it goes down a kind of chimney and lands in a dumpster. In practice, it often looked like the photo below.
Three stories from me and many more in this excellent anthology of speculative fiction. Unauthorized Departures, edited by Rick McGrath, from The Terminal Press.
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The San Juan Capistrano Swallows Day Parade was held during a rare March downpour today. We didn't stay to see the whole thing, having worn non-waterproof hoodies.
This pair stood out with their spectacular horses.
Publishing science fiction can be a mad scramble between getting it in print and it starting to come true in real life.
My recent story "The Burn Out" (in Fission #3, available here) features a pop star. But he's not the story. Like many rich young musicians, he uses something to keep his edge sharpened, and like many rich young musicians, it's the younger female fans that provide it to him.
In his case it's a combat soldier implant.
The unit was optimized for combat soldiers in shock—like after a bullet wound. It instructed the sympathetic nervous system to shut some things down and dialed other things up to compensate. The telemetry package monitored the activity of the ganglia. Gully Foyle said, and this sounded like much more fun, that the upgrade allowed the user to experiment with changes that beat anything you could get out of a needle.
Because anything that changes the human body or brain is going to be used for porn first and recreation next.
For our hero, use of the technology ends about as well as can be expected, and that's coming from me, the person who hates the trope "there are some things man was not meant to know."
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Evergreen Meme |
Anyway, in the grand tradition of the Torment Nexus, the kind of technology referenced in the story has been invented and is being openly bragged about.
You should be able to get it on the Dark Web within a year (winky smiley) but you oughta read my story before you use it.
I’m a fan. I became a fan when my musical taste came on-line in late 1971—which I think of as “The year Led Zeppelin IV was released.” Since then, fandom has occupied most of my time, energy, and money. Any attention span I have left over, I spend writing. Sometimes I combine the two, as I did in my story “The Burn Out.”
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| Fission # 3 |
I was born at the
wrong time to absorb the British Blues Boom as it happened. Tons of Sobs,
Free’s first album from 1969, was on my Must Buy list as I worked backward from
’71. On the list also were Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck. All the heavy rock bands
worked the same Blues coalface back then, and the similarities between Truth
(Jeff Beck’s first), Led Zeppelin I and Free’s Tons of Sobs are
plain. The band slams through such classics as the barnstorming lust
locomotive, “The Hunter” (Albert King)
and the deathbed macho boast “Goin’ Down
Slow” (St. Louis Jimmy Oden, via the
Howlin’ Wolf version). Free’s sound is raw and aggressive, testosterone-laden
sweat flying from the speakers.
Free comprised
four white British teenagers (15-18 at the time of recording) and it seems
bizarre that they should attempt songs with lyrics begging the listener to
write the singer’s mother and tell her the shape that he’s in (and moreover,
that his health is fading and he needs forgiveness for his sins). They do, they
pull it off brilliantly, and a lot of that credibility comes from the
guitarist, Paul Kossoff, who effortlessly soars through the solos with a
gossamer-light feel underlying a snarling attack that rages continually against
the dying of the light.
Koss, 17, almost certainly did not know that he himself was going down fast. He was dead inside eight years.
I never saw Free
live. The ban split up when Kossoff’s drug problem became too hard to handle.
Koss made efforts to get clean but never got back to full health. I bought his
solo album, Back Street Crawler
(1973) but despite its solid white blues feel, and a guitar sound like heavy
whipping cream poured over double chocolate cake, something about it seemed
off—it conjured up its own title, let’s put it that way.
When I heard that
electric folkie John Martyn had taken the faltering Kossoff under his wing in
1975, I was elated. I put aside my anti-folk bias and ventured to Leeds to see
them play together. I went with a friend. As we neared the auditorium in the late
afternoon, we heard an inordinately loud Marshall-amplified Les Paul. The
rehearsal/sound check was underway. Koss was the only person who could produce
those sounds from a guitar, and the realization stopped me in my
tracks.
“Probably just a
roadie,” my friend said, urging me along. I was 16 at the time and that is
still the most cynical thing anyone has ever said to me. I assumed I’d hear
more that evening, so I moved on without objecting. My assumption proved to be
incorrect.
I wasn’t a big
John Martyn fan. I knew his Solid Air of course, and “I’d Rather be the
Devil” (Skip James) but I had little interest in a man who was perpetually
drunk and had what we nowadays call a “problematic” relationship with women. He
was a rowdy folk singer accompanied on this tour by an even rowdier stand-up
bass player (Danny Thompson) and a drummer (John Stevens). I didn’t know, going
in, that shenanigans had started much earlier in the day. Koss had already got
himself punched by the offended boyfriend of a girl he coveted, followed by a beating from Martyn himself for lying about the incident backstage. But I
heard about all that much later.
I knew Koss would
not come on stage until the encore, but John Martyn kept me interested in the
meantime. He played an acoustic guitar with a pickup taped across the soundhole
as well as a contact pickup taped to the body. The signal was fed to an Echoplex effects box, producing a
hypnotic, pulsing reverberation
above which he played chords and melody. Married with his famously slurred
voice, the effect was hymn-like and meditative, an effect that was shattered
every time a song ended and the band recommenced swearing at one other.
Eventually, Paul
Kossoff appeared, swigging from a bottle of Crème de Menthe. The bottle was
half empty and Koss made a strenuous effort to finish it during the set.
Together the band played three songs.[1] I was delighted to hear
him play live but I noticed a significant deterioration between his playing
during the sound check and the post beating, post liquor evening performance.
He had less than a year to live. Koss died on 19th March 1976. He
was 25 years old.
There are two stories out there giving a cause of death. The book Heavy Load claims “Unconfirmed reports have Kossoff picking up some pills before the all-night flight ‘off some dozy bird who was hanging around’.” No source for the information is given in the book.[2] Later, it presents this version:
“Paul’s death certificate read cerebral and pulmonary edema. Drugs didn’t appear to be in his system. Sandie, Paul’s girlfriend at the time, says drugs are what led up to the tragic conclusion that day but did not cause his death on the flight. ‘No one told us that you should not fly with a blood clot condition for about a year,” says Sandie. ‘And after his heart attack and the blood clot in his leg…I think the altitude moved the clot to his lungs’.”[3]
A second book, Free at Last, elaborates on the first claim. Bandmate Terry Wilson is quoted as saying,
“Paul was on his way out. He'd died earlier; his heart had stopped, about a year earlier in England when we were back there after the first record. Paul was in the hospital and they brought him back and told him if he ever did drugs again he wouldn't live.” Wilson goes on, “There were times when Paul had so many friends around who just wanted to comfort him. […] I walked into his room and he had a couple of his friends there that brought some barbiturates and some other stuff. I walked in and was so pissed at the girl who was there. Her name was Leslie I think, but went by the name of Dale. […] A day later we were on the plane going to New York to play Atlantic Records the new album when Koss died—from the very drugs Dale or Leslie or whatever her name was scored for him. It turned out he had gotten heroin, valium and Seconals from her.”[4]
I have participated in various fandoms ever
since that late 1971 musical fangirl awakening. Whether it was Led Zeppelin, or
Star Wars, or Harry Potter, I’ve long been immersed in fan culture and hung out
with the fans. The realization that a fellow fan may have killed a hero
of mine really frosted my cookies.
I understand a
fan’s dedication to the object of their fandom. The word is a shortened form of
‘fanatic’ after all. Anyone who has observed a weeklong argument on social
media over whether a Star Destroyer could defeat the USS Enterprise
knows that fandom is serious business, and anyone who has seen a young girl in
tears outside a concert hall because she got to touch the star’s hand knows
that emotions run sky high. I was 55 years old when my current crush answered a
question of mine on a fan forum, and I told everybody who would listen that
he’d written back to me. I didn’t wash my eyes for a week. I’m quite aware what
a fan will do to get close to a star.
Write what you know, they say. To get the bad taste out of my mouth, I wrote a short story about a tween fan who gives a gift to the member of the boy band she most admires but then has to watch helplessly as the gift puts him on a self-destructive path . I’m a science fiction writer, so the gift is not a drug, but a technology.
That story, “The Burn Out,” is featured in Fission #3 from
the British Science Fictions Association (BSFA). The online anthology is
available to BSFA members and the print
version can be obtained from Amazon right now.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_at_Leeds_(John_Martyn_album)
accessed October 15th,2023
[2]
Heavy Load: Free by David Clayton & Todd K. Smith 2nd Ed., 2002
p 248
[3]
Ibid, p 249
[4]
Free at Last: the story of Free and Bad Company by Steven Rosen, 2001 p 168-169
Led Zeppelin's fourth album is untitled. It's known as IV or Four Symbols, or Runes, or Zoso (one of the 'runes' looks like those four letters, stylized). Back at the time of release, Atlantic sent out type blocks with the symbols on them so the album could be listed and correctly typeset in the Hit Parade charts, but that was of no use to punters, who still couldn't pronounce it. Let's call it IV.
The cover of IV famously shows an old building, half torn down, with a tower block visible through the demolished wall. On the remaining part of the old wall, there's a photograph of an old man in a countryside scene, bent double under a load of sticks.
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Mystery has always surrounded the identity of the old man. The official story is that Robert Plant (the lead singer) found the photo in a junk shop in the British Midlands (alternatively, in Berkshire) and that's it. Fans have sometimes been unable to consider the photo as simply a found object and prefer to read extra significance into the man. The fans' stories have ranged from the photo depicting Aleister Crowley (an occultist - guitarist Jimmy Page is a student of his methods) to the photo showing George Pickingill, a farm laborer more excitingly known as the Father of Modern Witchcraft.
Good news! There has been a breakthrough in identifying the man and the photographer. The BBC is reporting that the 'original' photo has been found. I'm not sure what 'original' means in this context, as Plant must have thought he was buying the only copy. (People didn't make a lot of paper copies of photos back in the day.) The beeb describes it thus:
The figure is most likely Lot Long from Mere in Wiltshire, photographed by Ernest Farmer.
Brian Edwards, from the University of the West of England (UWE), found the original picture when looking through a photograph album for other research.
"I instantly recognised the man with the sticks - he's often called the stick man," he said.
The article shows the photo in situ on a photo album page, with three other photos taken by Ernest Farmer. The album is dated 1892 in Farmer's handwriting. The photo itself is labeled "a Wiltshire Thatcher."
Mr Edwards then set about researching thatchers from that time period, and said his research suggested the man pictured was Lot Long, who died in 1893.
