Sometimes, things can pass you by for no reason at all. This album - Dregen - is five years old (maybe more) and I didn’t know it had even come out but this weekend, I found it and made everything right in the world again. If you’ve ever surveyed the landscape and considered rock n roll as you once loved it to be dead and buried… dream on sucker. What a great record this is for all the right reasons and somehow, digging it out of the earth with my bare hands has made it even better.
Meanwhile, I went wandering in search of wholesome brain food and Daisy Jones and The Six might be a very decent meal. I haven’t started this yet but everything is pointing towards it being a class act for all the right reasons and if my memory serves me well, it’s also heading for Netflix as a series sometime soon. I’m hoping it will shape up to be one of those books I’ll finish and wish I had written:
We appear to be in a great place for books at the moment. Despite - or in spite - of the world proclaiming print is dead, I swear I am finding more things to read than ever… or maybe I’m just open to different kinds of things, but I don’t think so. I’m treading the same path I have always trodden really. For instance, I picked up Gwendy’s Button Box - a novella by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar - and umm… sat until it was finished (bar a couple of breaks for coffee).
King has seriously come back to the table recently. This is a great read and - with a nod to the post I made a couple of posts ago about the Pushkin Vertigo novellas - I’m seeing an awful lot to love about the novella these days. So much so, that as a writer, I’m thinking the format might suit me more than anything else. There’s something immensely satisfying about them that I can really relate too. Stairway to Heaven is a fantastic (perhaps the greatest) piece of music to get involved in but sometimes you simply need that four minutes of Back in Black to plug your spirit into the mains of the universe.
The days are gone when I had the capacity for huge novels like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (maybe not forever but certainly for the foreseeable). Not that I don’t have the attention span for such things - rather that I have other things to do. At least I think that’s the reason.
Maybe I just like reading novellas and that’s reason enough.
Sion Smith: King of the Novella. It has a ring I could get used to… and more importantly, a shape to it that suits my brain.
Now and again, I dig some poetry too. Not every day like some people do, but occasionally my heart demands it. This is pretty cool if you like such things:
Oh… I forgot about this - mostly because I bought it, tossed it in the car and haven’t actually been out in the car since:
Never really paid a lot of attention to John Cooper Clarke’s work but I went into HMV to see why some Canadian thought it still had legs as a brand and for a fiver, I figured I’d give it a whirl. It’s the kind of thing I usually look at and think “I could do that” and then don’t do because when you really listen, find it’s harder to get right than you ever thought it could be.
But hey… the thought is there.
I have a dog to walk and work to do and so should you.
Later Gators…