A War to end all Worlds

Last night I finally watched a BBC program on the War Poets that I recorded in June.  It focussed not just on their poetry, but also on the landscape and events that they inhabited around the Somme: battles they fought in, what poems they wrote afterwards, where they died.

And that reminded me of this, which I think sprang from a previous time when I had been listening to Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds in close proximity to reading another account of the first World War.  It's an easy juxtaposition, Martian fighting machines against barbed wire and artillery, but I should (and do) feel a little uncomfortable about it.  I am welding together bloody history and SciFi fantasy after all.

My defence for this latter point is threefold:

1. This was written with the intent of using the fantasy war as a mechanism to highlight the horror of the real war...
2. Wells himself was certainly critiquing the empire building and conquest of his time...
3. You don't get SciFi authors in front of War Crimes Tribunals*

(*Although if any ever do, you can bet the charge sheet with be spectacular.)

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A War to end all Worlds

When the whistles were blowin'
and there was me
there was me and Smiggy
and the two Johns

Johnny C and Johnny F and
nothing for it
but to go over the top.
We could not see

no tripods from where we were
but we knew alright
they were out there somewhere
lumbering in

with beams and gas and voices
like foghorns boomin'
and foghorns seemed to fit
with that black gas.

Smiggy bought it first, smashed
down by steel feet
that fell amongst us sudden
in the wire

we couldn't even stop
though Johnny C
would have headed back
exceptin' I swore.

Johnny F got caught out
in the open
when two tripods came up
and burned down

where he stood.  We cowered
in the water
in a half-collapsed trench
hearing steel grind

closer to us.  Lining up
on the angle
of the trench and we knew
the Martians had us

but a squad of gunners
with a Vickers gun
had set it up quiet-like
and cut them down.

It's a beautiful machine
the Vickers gun
if you like to kill things
and that was my war.

Boy/Girl/Thing

This may be the newest poem I have ever posted, I was editing it as recently as August 7th...  although, as is common for me, it had its origin some years ago and had to sit around in my subconscious/backlog until I was ready, willing and able to complete it.

This is also one of the hardest pieces of text that I've written for some time and the explanation for that is chock full of *spoilers* so stop here and go to the poem first if you want to experience it without preconceptions...



Ready now?  OK, so this is my attempt to get beyond gender.  Gender has been one of the major social battle grounds of the late 20th and and early 21st centuries, and great progress has been made — at least in some parts of the World.

So in this poem I'm attempting to look ahead to a time when gender is completely sorted out, and I'm using the trick of writing in the voices of two intelligent machines that don't have gender.  This way they can look, as it were, from the outside.  I've also added (off stage) some sort of do-gooders who are trying to "give" gender to the two machines — presumably on the basis that it is their (human?) right — but missing the point that the machines may be happier as they are...

...which of course echoes various historical cases of people thinking they know what's best for other people...

...I've even attempted to suggest that wiping over with a lint-free cloth is something of a sex act for these machines (I don't see that sex without gender is at all contradictory...) and finally, just for kicks and characterisation, one machine has a crush on the other (which again doesn't absolutely require gender.)

So why was that hard to write?  Just because English isn't designed to portray conversations between sapients without gender.  We only have the one ungendered pronoun: "it" which is far too loaded to sprinkle around unexplained.  So I had to resort to a certain amount of syntactic trickery (like assuming the person now speaking is the one whom we just just watched acting) and also repeating the two names more often than is common for casual writing.


And as it happens the whole exercise is a complete failure, because having gone to all that trouble: used gender-neutral names, avoided gendered pronouns and generally twisted the text...  I still think of one character as more male and the other as more female—damn!

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Boy/Girl/Thing


This whole damn gender thing  fucks me, says Viv,
so many different ways.  A tiny nod,
a shrug, sets sensor clusters all asway—
and Chris has always been in love
and Chris will never say

one word to the machine called Vivian.
Working together now, they pull
a rusty barrel, probe the casing.
Viv tastes, grimacing; throws the tongue away.
Phenols again, we're broadly screwed
to sell this crap.  A sigh—we'll have to crack
it down to short-chain feed.
A wiggle in the nether parts and Chris
has never seen a sight so fine
as hydrocarbon plant deploys.  Meanwhile, Viv

still ranting on the need for sex:
You see the bit that gets to me...
remember how they showed that vid:
two squirming pink things on a bed.
It bites an alloy thumb.  For me
the only sexy bit was how they'd come:
their car I thought was someone I'd enjoy.

And all the while poor Chris,
while not unhappy being an "it",
feels some appeal in girls and boys,
and beds; and is content to rub a cloth
across his best friend's heat exchanger grills,
but wonders if there's something more.  So asks,
and instantly feels shy: Tonight
maybe let's try again...
but this time both be boys?

From Lark Rise by Standard Candles

Another one written from a prompt on a course.

To my mind this is pure science fiction: uncontaminated by plot or character or spaceships or robots or sexy other-worldly women who want to know about the "Earth thing called love..."

There's the local and the distant, the distant is by definition alien...  But equally if you merely struggle up onto the shoreline and dip your toes in the water, you are already touching the near edge of infinity.

There's a real sense in the opening of From Lark Rise to Candleford that to many of the locals, Oxford is as far away as the moon...

I wonder what it's like to stand on the moon?  White dust...  Stars...

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From Lark Rise by Standard Candles

With a calibrated period-luminosity relation astronomers

could use Cepheid variables as standard candles to determine

the distances to distant clusters and even other galaxies. 

-- www.astronomynotes.com, Nick Strobel -- 

Period-Luminosity Relation for Variable Stars

All along the greensward wanders,
outlining our mile-around;
a frame upon the white road reaching
even so far as OXFORD XIX
where things are so unlike. Why,

it is a different world there.
It is different here for such as we
struggling from our hamlet's mire-dark ways
to stand upon the alien, the local absolute.
Who lurks near? What star here

shines so starkly on the white dust?
Is this road forever?

Death and the maybe

In the words Terry Pratchett gave to Sergeant Colon and Nobby Nobbs, as they balanced on the roof of the distillery with the dragon bearing down upon them:

What's up, Sarge? Do you want to live for ever?

 

Dunno. Ask me again in five hundred years.

 

 

And there is a fundamental point at work here, we live longer and longer, but we aren't 'designed' to live forever.

That said, Death is dying.  Very slowly and with, I am sure, a couple more twisty scythe-based manoeuvres up his sleeve, but we are slowly grinding away at all the things that can make a person not last forever.  There will come a last mortal generation and possibly we are it...

...although, actually, I doubt that, it takes surprisingly long to pull a fully fledged and medically-approved nano-technological body repair system out of your hat, or mind upload technology, or even body-part-on-demand cloning.  But even although it's going to take longer than we like, there is going to come a time when people become essentially undying and we have to face the ultimate socially awkward questions:

How long do you want to live?

How long to you want to live with me?

How long do we both want to live, if the kids have emigrated to Alpha Centauri, and idea of eternity with nothing on the TV is driving us nuts? 

But never mind, we may get hit by a comet...

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Naked celebrity photographs


There is no real connection
between the beautiful and the vertical;
it is only a rule of thumb
but it has held so far,

she thinks,

photographing another letter-Y incision
against the steel table.
It always seems wrong
for the roughly stitched flesh not to swell redly,

but it's not.

This one had a crucifix—
it's in an envelope upstairs—
and a PR agency
who do not now know what to do.

She examines the photo
crosses it off her todo list.



To wish upon


If a comet comes
perhaps by night
wandering through our atmosphere
at a thousand times the speed
of bullets from a gun

the air compressed and burning
a transient and bale-filled sun
that flash-fries everything along its drift
before stepping firmly down to lift
some small Midwestern town

from the planet's surface
like a stamp loosened
in warm water and floated free if badly torn
with a thousand cubic kilometres
of the rocky envelope beneath.

If you are not burned
as you stand wondering or smashed
by falling secondary ejecta
if you are lucky and if, in short,
you are far enough away

then you can flee
the monument
of swelling black
that's eerily silent
coming at you faster than sound.

There is no way to turn
but you could flee choosing
as the commentator put it
a slow death over a fast one but, foolish, I
choose the slow death every time.



Magic


An empty box, a glass of milk,
two table tennis balls, a silken scarf,
no doves in my waistcoat, and no rabbits
or other small mammals
concealed anywhere about my person

but enough of this penny ante stuff.  Let's do magic!
Observe this wand, which came to me from an old,
old magician.  Now,

does any member of the audience have
a recently deceased body, ideally someone dear to you?
A mother?  A son?
A close friend will do...
You Sir?  Your daughter?

Let's give him a big hand!
If you'll just wheel the trolley onto the stage...
Thank you!
I cover her with this cloth
and if I could have total silence
as I wave the wand and rip apart the borders
of the undiscovered country.

I like to call this trick
"And death shall have no dominion."

Releasing a single!

Or rather Hallam London, my musical collaborator, is releasing our song To the Sky, which we dedicate to David Bowie because, as often the case, we didn't realise quite what we had until it was gone.

As usual Hallam wrote the music and I provided the lyrics.  He also got other friends and professionals to contribute, see the bandcamp page for full credits...

This is the song I wrote about last week, explaining its creation story (no radioactive animals were involved, somebody may have fallen to Earth) and also see here for the lyrics.

Anyway, please enjoy the song and if you feel inspired to contribute a small sum to this enterprise, please buy it (for as little as 1€; for American friends 1€ is roughly $1.15 at today's prices...)

Please also share this song promiscuously.  You remember how Andy Warhol promised everybody 15 minutes of fame in the future?  Well it's been the future for over 15 years now and my fame still hasn't arrived...

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The price of life

Some microfauna,
earlier today

We're in the throes of NaPoWriMo and it is eating up a lot of my spare time to try and turn out a poem every single day.

It would probably be easier if I wrote more haiku...

This is a poem from this same festival (is that the term) in a previous year.  2010 if my records are accurate.

This is maybe less shiny than some of my poems, but I think works well done as a performance with some energy.  So that is what I've tried to do in the recording.

This is a subject that I care about quite strongly.  Not wholly from the ecological perspective, although I think that very important, but also from the rawer, darker, more-fundamental scientific angle—there is, within the universe of things that we can reach, exactly one "life".  All life on Earth is the spawn of one original life creation event.  It is all, shitake mushrooms to vampire squid (look them up), the same stuff.  We have exactly one example.

Until we land somewhere where there's more...

But even then there will only be two.  The value of this stuff cannot be overstated.  Taken to its ultimate eschatological extreme it might be the difference between a universe that means something and one that goes 'fut' and passes without comment.  So look after it.

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The price of life


Lot twenty-three, one bucket of mud...

Ladies and Gentlethings,
this is the finest mud that money can buy.

Why? Just look at this chemistry,
poly-heterocyclic rings, carbon chains,

substances, whose full chemical names,
would keep you writing until the stars went out.

And for the avoidance of doubt,
this is because there's Life,

right in this bucket, genuine, natural Life,
in all its unlimited, self-designing power.

There are seventy-nine different types
of bacterium here, ready to feed

on spare carbon compounds
which you might not need

and spew more biomass—
this mud can breed.

Also in here, microscopic worms
eating, excreting, aerating by turns

and food for the slightly larger
microfauna... see, I have micrographs here

tardigrades, lice, hydra,
amoebae too—further ingredients for the stew.

No, nothing as large as a mouse,
but there are... Seeds, nineteen different kinds:

from ruderal weeds with short life-times
(which, yes, fix more biomass)

to shrubs, of various size,
and trees—they need only light,
and carbon-dioxide.

In this bucket, everything you need,
to take a sterile world and clothe it
in a forest so deep, and green,
darkly shaded, pristine,
and if you haven't already got the idea
it's beautiful.

So, what I am bid for this bucket of mud?

I might add that it's rumoured
to come from the fabled blue-planet itself.

Shall we start the bidding
at ten, sterile star-systems?

To the Sky...

You haven't heard much from me about my on-going collaboration with German Rock Musician Hallam London.  Partly this has been because we had a bit of a slow period (as documented here) and partly it has been because I've been busy changing my job, delivering the kid to/from University, saving the World from killer rhubarb (don't ask) etc etc.

Also another reason is I've been busy with the songs themselves.  Hallam and I just had an amazing six week burst of creativity during which we finished five songs.  (For a given value of finished, music production goes through many, many stages such as arrangement, performance, production, mixing etc etc...)

However, it is not of these songs that I wish to speak.

In January this year, David Bowie died.  Hallam and I were just starting a new song when we heard the news.  We had some cause for introspection.  We'd never discussed Bowie, but as you can imagine he was a formative influence for us both.  We thought about doing some sort of song as a tribute, and then we had to wrestle with the question of how hubristic that was.  After some soul searching, we realised that all of our music comes from a very Bowie place anyway: it's all about gender and sanity and slices of everyday or unusual lives; we're also frequently a bit SciFi; often trying to push some envelope or other; and as every song is very different, I think we're reinventing ourselves even faster than he did!

So anyway, we got on with the song.  Unusually we reversed of our usual way of working.  Hallam recorded the musical idea first, and I analysed the metrical structure of his "na naaa nah" place-holder lyrics.  Then I wrote a prototype chorus.

So far so good, but we had to decide what the song was about, and we kept cycling back to Bowie-like (Bowiesque?  Bowiesian?) ideas.  In the end we were drawn strongly to the ideas in Major Tom and Space Oddity—and who doesn't want a space launch in the middle their song?—and a love story, obviously...

And now it's finished.  It's partly a Bowie tribute, but obviously also has to stand as a song on its own.  Hallam has gone beyond the mere "teaser" quality of our previous releases with this one.  He's hired a great drummer, and an engineer to do the mixing and production.  He's currently finalising the artwork.

It's called To the Sky, and next week Hallam will release it as a single!

Yes, you do have to wait until then...  but in the meantime here's the play-list with our previous two teasers Anger Bob and Identity...

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And BONUS! a recording of The rain in certain car parks (yes I did call a song that).  This live recording isn't polished as Hallam's studio recordings, but it does have a live band and audience...

 

Bootstraps (revised)

Why would I post nearly the same thing twice?

To demonstrate the creative process, of course!

Also to show how the only constant is change, nothing can be taken for granted, no plan survives contact with the enemy, and we are our own worst enemies.

But mostly because I am not a revisionist.  Events are events and even if we subsequently forget what they were, they still are what they were.  Similarly history is written by the victors, and thus not real; but it is what was written and always will have been...

...so I can't simply replace the previous post and thus erase the historical record (I only do that if I make an embarrassing mistake.)

Let's call this the history of the World, v0.2-patch-level-1...

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Bootstraps


First floor — survival gear: axes chipped
from patient flint; animal skins stitched
with skill and bone needles;
tribal leaders
arguing beside the standing stone;
berries gathered in the sun; fires kindled
in the gloom to keep the toothier beasts at bay; going up...


Second floor — farms and agriculture; cats to keep
the rats away; dogs and scrawny goats; the spinning
year and fleeces; fleas in every rush pile
bed; people sleeping on a platform,
animals beneath; pots built from the local clay and fired
by the clan who have the knack; orange/yellow copper
in the kiln ash, a young man prods it thoughtfully; going up...


Third floor — city states: law and orders;
walls; gates; men with wise beards,
meet, casual in the forum; politics; decorum, until
the food gets scarce; princelings swapped with
worldly powers to guarantee the peace;
philosophers on temple steps; priests
at watch, nervously; a man who writes everything down; going up...


Third floor mezzanine — libraries and scriptoria: days
spent, short and candle dim; rude notes
illustrated in the margin, to the greater glory; a story
captured and defined, here and there a line
of mystery; history, on the lectern, written by scribes
in the chapter-houses of the monasteries of the victors;
a new fear of fire; books from half the World, traded, copied; going up...


Fourth floor — industrialism and empire: men
in clever top hats; lines on maps or diagrams which change
the game; labourers becoming craftsmen, speaking plainly
of pounds per capita per square imperial inch;
unflinching duty; railways; educating lesser races;
ignore their anger, they are children; government buildings
in grandly inappropriate style; social reform; going up...


Fifth floor — total war: wondering what it's all about in a foxhole;
shells; war poets; dysentery; seven new kinds of mud
to drown in; gas, artillery and wire; cunning inventions
to burn up everything you've known;
fragments of bone in your hair; high explosive
which de-constructed your buddy, hearing, presence of mind;
ACHTUNG MINEN! no leaves on the trees; rumours of a treaty; going up...


Fifth floor mezzanine — teenagers and youth: sex and drugs;
hugs and messages of vague well-being; seeing things
in new lights; days lost in what used to be reverie, but now
is chilling out; tearing down old certainties, while still
living
within them; distant mystics, sexier than the local ones;
rolling the stones; liberty, equality, hints of progressive policy; going up...


Sixth floor — technology: machines for making machines that make
decisions; tension round the rate of change; every day strange
and bravely whirled; Internets; commerce; the people, connected
and loving and arseholes, in equal measure; treasure
sieved from big data; advanced manufacturing facilities
and people drawing squiggles
to sell them on-line; connections for the World, for your mind; going up...


Seventh floor...

Top floor — future: worlds beyond number;
World without end; machines that think
they are men; vice-versa; change here for: space
elevators, interstellar colonisation, Dyson spheres, generation ships;
the stars like sand upon the beach of every island paradise the mind imagines;
there is no ceiling...

...I'd put your head between your knees,
it takes some folks that way Sir. If I were you
I'd wait
until it all stops spinning
then take the other car.

Everybody else: please hold on tight...
this lift
only
goes
up...

Bootstraps

Who doesn't want to write a history of the World?

This is a slightly unusual posting, as this poem isn't necessarily finished.  What happened is, I put it on a couple of forums, and I got some enthusiastic responses, and also some suggestions for improvements.  Then somebody asked if they could share it on Facebook, and I thought: why not?  However Facebook loses formatting, so it on my blog for her to share...

...so here we are, but it may be subject to further edits later.

Call it a history of the World, v0.1-beta...

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Bootstraps


First floor -- survival gear: axes chipped
from patient flint; animal skins stitched
with skill and bone needles;
tribal leaders
arguing beside the standing stone;
berries gathered in the sun; fires kindled
in the gloom, to keep the toothier beasts at bay; going up...


Second floor -- farms and agriculture; cats to keep
the rats away; dogs and scrawny goats; the spinning
year and fleeces; fleas in every rush pile
bed; people sleeping on a platform,
animals beneath; pots built from the local clay and fired,
by the clan who have the knack; orange/yellow copper
in the kiln ash, a young man prods it thoughtfully; going up...


Third floor -- city states: law and orders;
walls; gates; men with wise beards,
meet, casual in the forum; politics; decorum, until
the food gets scarce; princelings swapped with
worldly powers to guarantee the peace;
philosophers on temple steps; priests
at watch, nervously; a man who writes everything down; going up...


Third floor mezzanine -- libraries and scriptoria: days
spent, short and candle dim; rude notes
illustrated in the margin, to the greater glory; a story
captured and defined, here and there a line
of mystery; history, on the lectern, written by scribes
in the chapter-houses of the monasteries of the victors;
a new fear of fire; books from half the World, traded, copied; going up...


Fourth floor -- industrialism and empire: men
in clever top hats; lines on maps or diagrams which change
the game; labourers becoming craftsmen, speaking plainly
of pounds per capita per square imperial inch;
unflinching duty; railways; educating lesser races;
ignore their anger, they are children; government buildings
in grandly inappropriate style; social reform; going up...


Fifth floor -- total war: wondering what it's all about in a foxhole;
shells; war poets; dysentery; seven new kinds of mud
to drown in; gas, artillery and wire; cunning inventions
to burn up everything you've known;
fragments of bone in your hair; high explosive
which de-constructed your buddy, hearing, presence of mind;
ACHTUNG MINEN! no leaves on the tree, rumours of a treaty; going up...


Fifth floor mezzanine -- teenagers and youth: sex and drugs;
hugs and messages of vague well-being; seeing things
in new lights; days lost in what used to be reverie, but now
is chilling out; tearing down old certainties, while still
living
within them; distant mystics, sexier than the local ones;
rolling the stones; liberty, equality, hints of progressive policy; going up...


Sixth floor -- technology: machines for making machines that make
decisions; tension round the rate of change; every day strange
and bravely whirled; Internets; commerce; the people, connected
and loving and arseholes, in equal measure; treasure
sieved from big data; advanced manufacturing facilities
and people drawing squiggles
to sell them on-line; connections for the World, for your mind; going up...


Seventh floor...

Top floor -- future: worlds beyond number;
World without end; machines that think
they are men; vice-versa; change here for: space
elevators, interstellar colonisation, Dyson spheres, generation ships;
there is no ceiling;
the stars like sand upon the beach
of every island paradise the mind imagines...

...I'd put your head between your knees,
it takes some that way, Sir. Shall
I drop you somewhere?  The Victorian Era?  The Renaissance?
Very good Sir.  Going down...

Feminine principle

Is this about feminism?  I don't know.

I don't like to be political.  It comes from having been brought up in science fiction and we only moved to reality when I was fifteen.  When you've sat up late at night arguing with two land squid and a talking metal box about whether the souls of extinct nihilist cacti should be allowed to marry...  well any minor differences of colour, gender or political persuasion begin to look irrelevant.

This definitely does come from challenging the idea that mechanical men should automatically be assumed to be, err, men.  Even the word "android" is inherently masculine.  "Gynoid" is the feminine equivalent and you don't hear that a lot.  "Homonoid" should probably be the correct term, but then there's "hominid".  Androids probably are hominids, which will freak the palaeontologists...

And don't get me started on the bias in assuming robots should be shaped like people—I mean it's barely true in the real world anyway.  You don't see many industrial robots in sit-down strikes.

Anyway, is this feminist?  I don't know.  Interpretation is, as ever, left as an exercise for the reader.

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Feminine principle

Victoria builds a woman not from ribs.  Sugar, spice :
these also do not feature, this is a different creature...

If you have seen those sexy chromium androids,
drawn by that one guy from Japan.  Gynoids, I should say,
they're not right either, but one might do
as a starting point, although it needs some work.

Titanium blades to turbine round in thousands
of revolutions, a system always humming
if you press her with your ear.  You can also hear
the click of relays as she decides—to love or not to love—

so many losers she can't choose
who to reject first.  This is no bride for any Frankenstein,
this is Kevlar reinforcement on a spine of optical fibre.
This is nerve, in spades, and a cryogenic cool

as she slits fresh fruit with one surgical-steel nail
and raises it to bite.  You might,
and I will, envy the apple,
but, as Victoria says: that isn't the point.

The Red Planet Blues

 

Not exactly about David Bowie.  Not exactly not about David Bowie either.

If we've learned anything, it is:

1. embrace the ambiguity
2. reach for the future
3. never stop reinventing yourself.

Iain Banks wrote in Excession of the Zetetic Elench a faction split from The Culture who believe in investigating the Universe by allowing themselves to be actively transformed by the beings and cultures they meet.  The Elencher ideal is that if a member of another advanced civilisation, say The Culture, were to meet a member of the Elench twice, they would have no way of knowing it was the same individual.

Does that sound at all familiar?

OK, enough waffle, on with the poem that isn't about David Bowie.  I must have others that aren't about him either, but this is the one I remembered just now.

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The Red Planet Blues

Ziggy played guitar,
     jammin' good with Weird and Gilly...

There are no spiders
on Mars, spinning
in bone-cold canyons
to trap unwary space cadets.
There are no great domed cities, shining
pale in the brave red sunset. There are no get
of Edgar Rice burrows;
no green, six-armed warriors
riding thoats or laying eggs
in odd moments
out there in the rusty desert. No Martians for the chronicler
to document their steady decline
after the Earthmen came.

Earthmen must come.
It is necessary.
Pick up the pickaxe.
Start digging a canal.

A slightly drunken message from the geeks

Geek sensibilities, earlier today

Geeks are, of course, the sub-set of nerds who can realistically be hired and set to work with  normal people.

Also, apparently, the geeks are going to inherit the Earth—I'm expecting to receive the paperwork any day now.

In the meantime, it would be wrong to say that geek sensibilities were 'special' and that people "just don't get us"—or rather it would be true, but no more than it is for everybody else.  Everybody has their own desires, wishes, aesthetics; and everybody thinks they're not appreciated, and everyone thinks nobody understands.

Obviously some industries run almost entirely on geek power, and sometimes non-geeks take the credit.  This happens when 'leaders' do not realise their role in the process.  They imagine they have 'vision', 'drive' and 'clarity'; when what they really provide is 'naivety', 'stubbornness' and 'blind luck'.

Be all that as it may, one day the geeks may decide they've had enough, and then...

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A slightly drunken message from the geeks


Be not afraid, for though we are much cleverer than you,
although rogues are a proper subset of thieves
and liars a superset of leaders
I have enumerated them all
(appendix A). Good day

if you are reading this message then we are missing
presumed... well this is the question
to be, have been, be being
and yet to not be present at the desks,
terminals and laboratory benches
where previously we lived.

Yes, we were paid.
No, that was never the point
and basically the point,
the point is that you never understood
the beauty of a well-crafted subroutine,
gear train, enzymatic inhibition feedback loop
which was all we ever wanted. So...

if you turn your questioning eye
to somewhere on a cloudless night
in Autumn and the direction
of the galaxy's core you will find
a tiny point of light red-shifted
almost into nothing. And that's us. Cleverer.

Bright Girl

You can take the girl out of the reactor...
...but you can't take the reactor out of the girl.

This is the lyrics for the song "Bright Girl" that Hallam London and I wrote, and which he performed in the first round of Emergenza.  Luckily for you I won't try to sing it, I'm just reading.

See my previous post for things I have learned about writing lyrics.

What I am reading here is v2 of this lyric.





The general process goes:

1. I write, erase, rearrange, scrap, edit. swear, laugh, cry etcetera until I get a first draught of something that is both coherent and rhythmical, this is v1.  I give it to Hallam.
2. Hallam has a list of my v1 lyrics.  He looks them over until he gets inspired with a musical idea.  He records a small piece with a rough approach (his idea of rough is already impressive) and shares it with me.
3. We discuss what's working and what's not.  This generally leads to a rearrangement of the lyric: stronger chorus, simpler break, one less verse etc etc.  This is v2.
4. In the meanwhile Hallam has been recording longer segments and usually fits v2 to the music as soon as we have it.
5. Then we discuss some more, and now we change smaller things like single phrases that don't work.  Another common adjustment at this stage is inserting more repeats of word phrases at points where the musical phrases require them.  This leads to v3.

So the main difference in this case is that v3 contains more repetition repetition.  That works beautifully for the music, but for just reading aloud the less lyricky and more poemy (technical terms) v2 is best.

So that's what you get.

Below the video I have pasted the lyrics expressed in RLDL (Rock Lyric Description Language).  I suspect I'm far from unique in this, but it goes: verses on the left, choruses in the middle, break on the right.

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Bright Girl


Cherenkov reactor light shines blue
and pure and bright and deadly--seems she's home
behind the shutters in her attic room.
How might she spend her evening?  You don't know:
maybe splitting atoms with a finger nail,
or biting spiders into superheroes?

You suspect she is atomic,

they must have hushed her up.

She dazzles through your sunshades

and if this close isn't safe, it isn't close enough.

Leave other girls tattoos and piercings,
their slightly freaky needs;
this one has reactor shielding,
a double fail-safe coolant feed,
and if her heart is wrapped in graphite bricks
perhaps they're cracking now?

You believe she is atomic,

she outshines the very day

a blast-wave ripping through your life

that blows your burning heart away.

You've just got to appreciate

the way that girl can radiate.

She's really glowing!

Does she really need that shielding?
Do you really need your hazmat suit?
If you dare to knock upon her steel-wedge door
and stammer somehow that she's cute,
drink a glass of something blue and glowing.
You need to make your move, she is on fire...

...because you know she is atomic,

the armed guard shows that you were right

her lips melt through your visor

and you feel you are alight.

You know she is atomic,

she outshines the very day

a blast-wave through your bedroom

that blows the ashes of your heart away.

A love song for geeks

A Theta-Ray, earlier today...

This dates from 2011, I cannot recall just what I was thinking when I wrote it...

One thing here is to smile kindly at all those old 1950/60s Sci-fi plots that I grew up with.  The 1970's were still a work in progress in those days, and Cyberpunk was still in its bedroom looking under the bed for some interface leads.

However, as you might imagine I write about geeks, geek subjects, and geek sensibilities fairly often; and the point here is also, at least partly, to confound a stereotype—something else I often want to do.

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A love song for geeks

These creatures are impossible,

Professor Blood-Fugue said.
I was staring through the visionscope
in the farthest infra-red

at the shape of you sleeping
a ripple beneath my duvet,
a breath of girl-scent delicacy
and curves of skin and tracery
of careless hair.

So when Martians attack
—in stereo, technicolor, force—
I will grab the theta-ray, of course,
and try to fight back

in total silence. I will not wake you.
You'll never understand
how completely I am mazed,

marooned and overwhelmed in such science-fiction days
where no story could be more astounding
—as Captain Oblivion told the mind-fiend—

than the fact you are still here.

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The other benefit of writing this poem was that when I posted it on Poets' Graves, one of the other members drew my attention to the following:

—and I've incorporated Nerina Pallot into my wide musical tastes.

Image attribution: By Joost J. Bakker from IJmuiden (Space Pilot X Ray Gun  Uploaded by Oxyman) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons