Sounds of Simon

A number of people have expressed a desire to see what my writing is like when framed in a more up-beat context, so here is a contracted review of my favourite musician, instigated by the glorious (and most likely once in a lifetime) experience of having seen him in concert this week.

Disclaimer: These opinions, while stated as fact for the purpose of publication, are entirely my own. You are perfectly free to disagree with the ideas presented here, in the same way as I am perfectly free to hold them in the first place.

Unless you are a complete heathen – and I am aware that such people do exist – it seems to me to be impossible not to appreciate Paul Simon on some level. A master wordsmith and the embodiment of versatility, his career has spanned over half a century. Does that mean that he had a career and then spent the proceeding few decades milking it and thanking heaven that he didn’t die along with so many of his contemporaries? Certainly not! His current tour is not a mere nostalgia trip: he is in fact promoting his 16th studio album (that is, not including soundtracks, lives or compilations), So Beautiful Or So What. Nor is it a comeback, since he never really went away. True, he is not churning out an album a year, or whatever the going rate is these days for those new artists who manage not to be a one-hit wonder, but his last was only 5 years ago. When you consider that he is a family man, still semi-regularly touring, approaching his 70th birthday, who has produced a record containing such beautifully and intricately arranged original tracks, that timespan suddenly moves from the mundane to the phenomenal.

Why do I say he should appeal to everyone? The expert spanning and conjoining of genres and, indeed, cultures – as witnessed by the African/Caribbean influences and collaborations in his recent works; the mix of subtlety and transparency in his wordplay, generating the span from tears to chills, to laughter; the glorious instrumentation and rhythms, causing an inescapable urge to move and give in to the call of the beat; his ability to remain continuously relevant, with old and new material alike; his continual productivity, and his general, all-round ‘nice-guy’ attitude combined with his dedication to his music, his band and his fans are but a taster of the virtues of a man whom I have no compunction about describing as an artistic genius.

Have Stamps, Will Write…

I am an amateur writer. I’m not particularly fussy about what I write, I have tried my hand at poetry, fiction and letter-writing, and am even an occasional essayist.

Obviously, there is also this ‘blog, although I will admit that I am unsure as to the classification of this particular type of word-play. I suppose that it has become a class of its own over the years, but it must have developed from something previously established. The derivation of the term (originally web-log) is, of course, from logging in the way that Sea Captains and the like would chronicle events of a certain period of time. As such, my instinct would be to assume that it is a type of mongrel literary species, primarily from the journal genus, which is itself a combination of letter-writing and essaying. However, I digress.

Essentially, the purpose of this post is to tout for “custom”. If you are the sort of person who likes to receive random ramblings through the post, then let me know.

I like to write to people: There’s generally a letter involved, but often I am prone to include things such as snippets of poetry; whole stories, or excerpts from a longer one; essays on random topics, or little origami models.

If you’d like to know more, or are willing to take a punt in the dark and see what inanities I can come up with, send me a message, with your address, and keep an eye on the letter-/inbox!

Trawling through old material...

... because work and life were getting too much.

I write a lot of random (and quite weird) stuff. Currently I'm writing an exposition about why you shouldn't pretend to be an expert on things which you really don't understand, but that will probably be a bit heavy-going, so before that I thought I'd give you something a little less moody.

This is an introduction to a piece of fiction which I have planned and may or may not write (I have numerous plans for different stories in various stages of development)... It's not very good, but it's certainly not as unpleasant as the essay that's on the go at the minute.

I'd value people's opinions on this as I don't normally share prose (in fact, it's fairly rare for it not to be burned upon completion).

Story Beginnings...

(This links to a Google Docs page, please follow it and take a look)