From Carlin and Gandhi to Pink Floyd

At SF Signal, James Aquilone asked writers and editors about their influences outside of the literary world — what or who has influenced their work? The answers ranged from George Carlin to Gandhi, the Beatles and Pink Floyd to Wagner, from food to paintings.

I was one of the contributors who spoke of music: “Composers with a flair for the dramatic make me want to write because images imprint themselves on the insides of my eyelids…Siegfried’s funeral march from Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the sweeping theme from Dragonheart, the theme music for Game of Thrones makes me see things.”
See the rest of what I and the others had to say:
Mind meld
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Novelist error messages
From the Gallery of Dangerous Women, a site that celebrates ” Women with power — intellectual, political, sexual, personal — are always dangerous to the patriarchy. Here you’ll find saints and sex radicals, social justice crusaders and pirate queens.”
I can relate to these error messages:
Error messages
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15 books you’ve read that will always stick with you
A Facebook challenge. Here are the rules for anyone else who might want to try their hand at it.
Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. 15 books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me so I can see which books you are reading. The end.
Here’s my list. in random order – cheating a little, perhaps, because some of these ARE multiples:
1. Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
2. The Amber books, Roger Zelazny
3. Once and Future King, T H White
4. Kindred, Octavia Butler
5. Dune, Frank Herbert
6. Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric
7. My Son, My Son, Howard Spring
8.Through Desert and Jungle, Henryk Sienkiewicz
9. Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay
10.The Merlin trilogy, Mary Stewart
11. The Callahan books, Spider Robinson
12. Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairy tales
13. Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales
14. Thousand and One Nights, shall we say Scheherezade…?
15.Time of Death, Dobrica Cosic
Why don’t you give it a try?
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Amazing Shadow Sculptures
From discarded wood, welded scrap metal, broken tools, cigarette packets, soda cans and piles of trash, Tim Noble and Sue Webster make assemblages and then point light to create projected shadows of people standing, sitting, smoking, drinking or anything easily recognizable. Marvelous digital magazine shows us the startling, and sometimes creepy, results.
Every debris is precisely set in place, taking into consideration its distance from the wall, and its angle with the spotlight. The result is surprising and powerful as it redefines how abstract forms can transform into figurative ones.
REAL LIFE IS RUBBISH, 2002, Mixed media
Shadow sculpture
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She knew it like the back of her hand
The National Archives holds a vast accumulation of historic maps but few are as unusual as this one, Andrew Janes writes at The National Archives.
Map on a glove
It’s a leather glove painted with a map of London landmarks and was designed to help fashionable ladies find their way to and from the Great Exhibition held in London’s Hyde Park in 1851. As far as we know, the glove was never produced commercially.
Today, of course, we’re more likely to use the palm of our hand where our smart phones are fused.
Hand map
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Quote of the Day
“A lot of people think they can take my books and analyze me from them. On that principle Agatha Christie would be a serial killer.” ~ Muriel Spark
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Alma Alexander
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