AudioBoo: Moths

One touch easy recording, that's what an Audio Boo claims to be. So I had to try it out on my new shiny toy. This is a poem that's supposed to be appearing in a magazine at some point but that was about a year ago that they said so, thus I wonder if it will ever come to be (impatient? I don't know what you mean!). So here's a lovely Atlas Moth photographed by my pal Ayub at the Butterfly World Project (which I'll be seeing this spring!).






Alert readers may recognise the opening line swiped from a news story headline (thanks again, Mark H-J, for bringing it to my attention) that also appeared in another, somewhat more serious, poem "Lullaby" that appeared in Chronogram last summer:

Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds;
Mothers hear the sound of unspoken words;
Fathers know the wishes in your heart;
The magic of love is the only true art.

Massively busy this week: and Bertie's coming to visit next week. Much to be done, yet there is still time for the idle creation of memes:

Publication: The Last Ant

My short humour piece "The Last Ant" is up at Wild Violet, the literary magazine that also published the even more esoteric piece "Corrections to the Rules of Fimble Fowl (for 3 players or 4)," the semi-true/semi-autobiographical piece "Me and Margery Kempe" and the MLA-inspired flash fiction story "Wixey" (bonus points for identifying the words swiped from Nabokov). Alert readers who are also Peter Cook fans may notice a theme throughout my pseudo-journalistic essay on the now extinct sub-species of ant.

I had a fabulous time yesterday in Northampton with my wonderful collaborator, the Queen of Everything. We had a delicious lunch at the Lhasa Café with my colleague May and wandered around the main drag, stopping in at galleries and for food and bevvie refueling, including at a coffee shop, The Yellow Sofa, that neither of us had stopped in before and which we found quite lovely. We had an editorial meeting for the journal of The Women's League of Ale Drinkers with the glamourous Vicky Squid in Union Station, laying out our plans not only for this issue, but for the future -- many dreams lie ahead for us to make manifest!

And yes, I did get the story on the wombat fortune (thank you all) -- but where's mine?!

BitchBuzz: The Triumph of the Carpet Beetle

Pop on over to BitchBuzz to read my latest column, a mass of absurdity that squeaks a little bit of commentary under the edges:

We all react to adversity in different ways: some stick out their chins and trudge on, heads held high; some fall into penitence and scourging and prayer; some turn to works of kindness for the very least among us.

Most of us, however, whinge and moan and complain to anyone who will listen. Things didn't used to be like this, we're sure, everything is so much harder now, I can't believe there's not WiFi here!

Read the rest of my paean to the carpet beetle (with a gratuitous mention of Robyn Hitchcock, fellow insect lover) over at BBHQ as always.

Another Facebook phenomenon sparked this. Everything around me can become fodder for my writing, you know, any chance remark or unfortunate event. Be grateful that I usually have to change them; real life seldom makes a good story unless you select and rearrange. This is why you should approach all memoirs with skepticism. Memory is a very unreliable tool.

My dad joined Facebook: I suddenly feel as if my friends and I should all be sitting down with our hands folded. But that won't last long; I'm too accustomed to being myself.