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Austin Macauley Publishers - PJ MacNamara

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110 pages

English

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EGOTIST CIRCUMVENTS TIME-TRAVELLER PRINCIPLE! " . . . Art and Ego are impossible to separate. We could argue all day and all night about what's Art and what isn't and who's feeding his Ego and who isn't - but even Plato and Socrates could tell you (if they were still with us,) that an Entertainer can be proven to have a limited shelf-life beyond which his market value will be reduced exponentially, whereas an Artist can't. If that's the only way to tell the difference then to spot an Artist you need hindsight, but I'm not so sure it is, and I have a couple of pointers of my own: "All Artists have a tendency to believe that if they flog their words, colours, sounds, designs or blocks of stone for long enough they will somehow find themselves a little closer to re-assembling their broken mirrors and seeing in them exactly what it is that compels them to pick so much fruit. Maybe it's God, but my guess is it's the Ego, and if Art only exists to feed it, who else but an Egotist could appreciate the crowning irony of 3rd Person, which while claiming it isn't Egotistical allows its users the delusion of Omnipresence? "All Artists are both broken up and Egotistical but they quite often don't have much else in common with each other so, as the old saying goes, if you want to know an Artist, look at his Art!"

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Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers
Date de parution	10 décembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781528982702
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0175€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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PJ MacNamara
MAN STRUGGLING WITH UMBRELLA
The First Book in the
KILLING TIME
Legacy Series

Copyright © PJ MacNamara (2020)
The right of PJ MacNamara to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528982696 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528913997 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781528982702 (ePub e-book)
ISBN 9781398415706 (Audio book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ

Writer, Astrologer, Film and Music Lover, Doctor Who Fan, Card Collector, EBayer, Old Soul, Nonconformist. PJ MacNamara is uncomfortable with labels. He ploughs a lone furrow and endeavours to keep a low profile. Naturally he is not married and has no children.

This book is dedicated to all my musical heroes. Foremost amongst them:
Ray Davies and Pete Townshend
Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell
Roger Waters and Jeff Lynne and Bryan Ferry
Paul McCartney and Elton John
Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder
Grace Slick and Debbie Harry and Diana Ross
Jimmy Page and Rick Wakeman
Paul Weller and Andy Partridge
Gary Numan and Bono and David Byrne
and of course, Benny and Bjorn, Agnetha and Anni-Frid.
Sadly, some of my musical heroes are no longer with us. Foremost amongst them:
Karen Carpenter and Cass Elliot
Jim Morrison and Lowell George and Jimi Hendrix
Marc Bolan and David Bowie
Stevie Marriott and Ronnie Lane
Freddie Mercury and John Lennon and Keith Moon.
Thank you to all my musical heroes, to the living and the dead, both mentioned here and unmentioned. You have all made a big, big difference to my life, and as long as I live on to remember you, you will never truly die.
You showed me your souls. Gave me your all. Brought beauty, meaning and sheer spectacle to a life which, without you, would have been excruciating, mundane and empty.
Without all your work to inspire me, very little of what follows would have been possible.

a rose, by any other name…
When Austin Macauley accepted this book for publication on 11 April 2019, it was known as Enigma Variations . A week or so later, I discovered somebody else had put a book out with the exact same title in 2017. It seemed to me that I had to change it to avoid future confusion and I spent an entire day coming up with alternatives and checking them out online. Here are just some of them: State of Flux , Shades of the Past (in Italics), Point Zero , Days in the Rain with a Strange Friend , Combination of the Two , The Sinking of the Incompatible , Love in a Void , All Things Being Equal , Business Services Elsewhere Unspecified , The Missing Ingredient , Nothing Is Beautiful (in Its Own Way) , These Things Happen!, Kill the Darlings , Experiments in Linear Format , In the Footsteps of Mr Thompson , His Presence Alone Speaks Volumes , Resequencing the Dictionary for Fun and Profit , A Mary for Every Occasion , Swans Reflecting Elephants , For the Girl Who Has Everything , Nothing Is More Certain , The Right Thing to Do , The Party of the First Part , A Thing of Beauty , Better Things , Something Better Beginning , Last in Line when the Names Were Given Out , Here’s One I Made Earlier , Lost in Music , How Can I Be Sure?, The One True Constant , ***** Is not Dead , Should We Talk about the Weather?, They’re Playing Our Song Again , Stiff Competition from Beyond the Grave , This Is Where It Goes , Deep at One End and Shallow at the Other , Nameless Darlings , So Much Larger than Life , Neither Rashly nor Timidly , Micronesia , While You Were Sleeping , The Last Day of June , Rockets, Bells and Poetry , They Don’t Even Know that They Want It (…not just yet) .
All of those and more seemed appropriate to me for the contents of this book, believe it or not. Some were better than others, so I ditched the worst ones. A few were good but too long in my opinion so I ditched those too. Then I set about consulting the internet on the remainder. Well over half had already been used, and quite recently too, if not for books then for films, and in one case, for a TV series. Finally, I had a shortlist of two. The other one that almost got used was The Sinking of the Incompatible a title I derived from an old Ealing Comedy which is either known as All at Sea or Barnacle Bill depending on where you are when you’re watching it. But the more I mulled that over the more convinced I became that it might give potential readers a false impression of what the book is about. This is not a naval yarn. Furthermore, the words ‘sinking’ and ‘incompatible’ both sound far too negative to me and I didn’t want potential readers to avoid it because it sounded like a bit of a downer. Now Man Struggling with Umbrella …well, it may not be the best title I came up with but it doesn’t sound nearly so negative and it’s not easy to get the wrong idea about the book from it either, am I right?
For anyone living here in the UK, Man Struggling with an Umbrella will immediately bring something to mind. It’s a phrase we’re all familiar with, kind of an in-joke, about a road sign, of all things. It’s a red triangle containing what looks like a man trying to get his umbrella up in a hurricane. It actually means, ‘Warning: Road Work Ahead’ but that’s the last thing you’d ever expect if you didn’t already know it meant that. We have a similar favourite sign that we refer to as ‘Low-Flying Motorcycles’— that one is supposed to mean ‘No Motor Vehicles Beyond This Point’.
I am well aware that the rear cover blurb and the cover artwork don’t give a great deal away about the nitty-gritty of this book. Added to that, we now have a jolly but baffling title open to no end of interpretations. That’s exactly why I’ve decided to write this foreword. The truth is that the contents are so diverse that to acquaint you with any one of them out of context is to give you the wrong idea of the book as a whole, and as I’m sincerely hoping this is just the first in a whole series of such books, the last thing I want is to alienate any potential readers by singling anything out. This is not a novel. Neither is it a collection of short stories or suchlike. The pieces you are about to read are like the tantalising relics of a lost civilisation, recently unearthed, cleaned up, and displayed in the purpose-built museum that is this book. Each piece exists in isolation. You need to treat each one with respect, give it room to breathe and time to percolate through your subconscious. This is simply the first layer of discovery. In subsequent books there will be more artefacts to consider and digest. You will assemble the jigsaw puzzle in your own way. It’s an unfortunate fact of archaeology that there will always be gaps, voids that can only be filled by individual suppositions. You need to join the dots, create a timeline. Your picture may not be quite the same as someone else’s, but it’s not meant to be. This is your journey, not theirs. It’s personal. It belongs to you.
My books are the way they are, i.e. uncompromising, intense, different , and containing everything but the kitchen sink, because I like them that way. If you prefer your books to be flabby and predictable with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end…well, you may find this to be an unsettling experience.
Like any artist, I sincerely hope these books of mine can find the big, appreciative audience they deserve. But that may take time. Meanwhile, there are men in suits sitting in a boardroom somewhere, and it won’t be all that long after publication that they’re getting cold feet, looking for an opportunity to pull the plug on this so they can spend their money on cookery books and shit. If you don’t want that to happen you need to stand on a chair and SHOUT about how good this book is and how desperate you are to read all the others.
Something wonderful is being born here. Don’t let it die.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot

Special Oc casions
Balloons, I remember. Party hats, crepe paper, and those irritating things with a feather on the end that uncoil when you blow into them. But it’s the whistles that really paint the picture for me. Many, many whistles. The crackers contained them instead of toys— different colours, sizes and pitches, but all whistles. If I concentrate, two or three dozen anonymous, tone deaf children can still be heard blowing frantically into them, drowning out the Christmas songs and souring people’s liqueurs.
The Brookhouse Hotel was on the main drag through Fallowfield— or at least it used to be— and almost exactly opposite was the Willowbank. We’d alternate our Christmas and New Year get-togethers between the two; sometimes we’d do both, always we’d stay at least one night, and I found it all very exciting. This particular year I got my UFO Interceptor; I got other, more expensive things too, but they were mostly dull, the Interceptor captured my imagination, and as I was only allowed to take one small (technically) unopened parcel out with me on Christmas Eve, despite a profusion of “Wouldn’t you rathers…” and some thinly disguised intimidation, I’d screamed the place down and refused to leave wi