13-05-21. Fugitives & Futurists has just published ON THE MULTITUDE OF DISTRACTIONS TO BE ENCOUNTERED WHILE MAKING LOVE TO THE CAP DE L’HOMY PLAGE . It joins AND LIFE, ORBITING A MAIN SEQUENCE STAR II on the excellent F & F website.
MULTITUDE is a favourite of mine. I wrote it in 2004 and it appeared in quite a few publications before Daniel at F & F said he was happy to republish it. The idea for MULTITUDE came from a long holiday on France’s Landes Coast, where seemingly endless pine forests meet the Atlantic Ocean.
The story is a love hymn to that Arcadian region, and the memories of time spent there. It combines a number of seemingly random themes that were clattering around in my head at the time. Some had actually happened (the USS Scorpion disaster and The World Trade Centre atrocity, for example), whereas others may or may not have happened. All events – real or otherwise, were separated by different time streams, so I thought it’d be fun to mix these streams up.
Some years ago, a reviewer of MULTITUDE concluded by saying that “I really don’t understand this story, but that doesn’t matter, because I just really like it.”
Sometimes, an honest and simple review hits the spot.
The header image is mine, by the way. A full size version can be seen on Instagram.