SPRING CLEANING.

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While the rest of the world sighs and winds down after summer, here in the Never Never we are moving into spring. The frosts are that bit less frosty each morning and the fogs over the paddock clear earlier. Washing dries again, hoorah!

Cobwebs and dust have built up and I should be filled with excitement and the joy of nesting, but I decided to indulge in reminiscence instead. I watched Rocky Horror, Velvet Goldmine and JC Superstar to recall the history that never really was, but I fantasized about anyway. Frankie said, 'Don't dream it, be it,' in a small town picture theatre in north Queensland and loaned me dreams above my station.

This bent for melancholy recollection started with Penny Goring's lovely Temporary Passport. We were hippies and students too, so we knew the poverty and the gypsy soul, but it was a decade or two earlier in the twentieth century and the cities in Europe might as well have been on the moon. Those I know who made it to the far off brighter lights were the sensible souls who studied nursing primarily, then did Europe on a dollar a day or backpacked in packs without the obligatory pack, worked bars in London and squats in Brixton.

I vet nursed and file-clerked for drinks money and left them all with catastrophic finality.

I do miss that time.

Before we learned we were all destined to burn in a nuclear holocaust, we knew we should husband the earth and that men didn't have the right to take as long as the planet kept giving. We knew it.

Then the great fear was perpetrated and most of us became yuppies and lived well in glass and chrome and very nice cars. Tried to run ahead of the fear, or celebrated the who-gives-a-fuck-anyway. We remembered life before the sexual revolution and yet we let the media strangle and distort the message so that women were left with the right to say yes. And only yes. To everything.

And all the guys became girls anyway. The straight boys were pretty, the gay boys were macho; we all wore leather and feathers or tartan and painted our hair to match our clothes. When there was plenty of money we dressed in labels and drank all day. When there wasn’t we knew all the best came from op shops [before current affairs shows taught the senseless how to forage].

Now I'm listening to Queen's first album, from back when they were poor. I miss Freddie.

I should be tipping great online reads. What have I found lately....

You could breeze by ALTX. I lost a day or two there this last week. Loved it. Is it ironic to call digital fiction that which relies upon its fundamentally digital presentation, its core of nodes and techno doodads, and yet to offer it for sale in print copies?

I’m still pimping pixelnyx as the best on the worldwideweb, even tho there’s been some need to justify, as I understand it. Odd. Still. Always worth a look. Grab a pizza, a cab shiraz and a comfy seat, settle in and read.

Go to ERGOfiction, of course. Webfic Wednesday brought out some excellent names to peruse at leisure. And Gavin Williams dropped in to chat about Diggory Franklin.

Tonya R Moore has done some renos at her Tremendous Universe – which it undoubtedly is. Check it.

Cat Black has been at work on Blue Dog. New poems, new prose, trying some new forms.

A M Harte has been busy since her hols, jotting, jotting, and giving away J Timothy King’s Romance novel! Good show, that girl. Top hole.

People everywhere have been creating, budding, blooming, fruiting ART – like some magical bush out of a Clive Barker novel. Jump about and roll in it, you won’t even get ink on your fingers or stains on your clothes.
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