Friday's Inspiration: Gordon and Shelley

Love and The Other.

Thursday's Inspiration: Michel et Patricia

Today's inspiration comes from the 1960 film A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) by Jean- Luc Goddard. Without giving too much away (besides posting the final scene) the plot can be summarised thus:


Love! Betrayal! Crime! Cigarettes! Paris!

Patricia's otherness comes from her foreignness, both in France and the criminal underworld she finds herself involved in. This clip shows how a wall of verbal misunderstanding heightens her otherness, and her communication with Michel is reduced to gesticulation. Maybe you can write about an experience living in another country, the feeling of never being able to express yourself completely in a second language, or if life has taken you that way life in a criminal underworld in which you grass up a French man.
Various translations of the ending can be found here.

Wednesday's Inspiration: JD Salinger

"Offhand, I can remember three girls in my life who have struck me as having unclassifiably great beauty at first sight. One was a thin girl in a black bathing suit who was having a lot of trouble putting up an orange umbrella at Jones Beach, circa 1936. The second was a girl aboard a Caribbean cruise ship in 1939, who threw her cigarette lighter at a porpoise. And the third was the Chief's girl Mary Hudson"

JD Salinger, 'The Laughing Man' from For Esme With Love And Squalor. Which you can (should) buy here or if you're in London, here.


So Wednesday's idea is the Other as an object of desire. But really, just an opportunity to share two things: a piece of The Laughing Man, my favourite short story and secondly, the wonderful image of a girl throwing a lighter at a porpoise. Not that I condone animal cruelty- eat dolphin- friendly kids.

Tuesday's Inspiration: Miranda July on Strangers at The School of Life.

Something to get the think box revved up for Issue #3 (are you writing something? Write something! Do it!). I recently attended a sermon by super-human Miranda July on Strangers at the brilliant School of Life.I was late and sweaty and at the back, so I didn't have a stranger to hold arms with, I held my own arm which felt sad and familiar. The idea of strangers, and the strangeness of interacting with unknown people in a situation like this feeds quite nicely into Issue #3's theme of The Other.

Miranda July on Strangers from The School of Life on Vimeo.

Monday's Inspiration: Dorothy Parker

"To her who had laughed so much, crying was delicious. All sorrows became her sorrows; she was Tenderness. She would cry long and softly over newspaper accounts of kidnapped babies, deserted wives, unemployed men, strayed cats, heroic dogs."
Dorothy Parker, Big Blonde

It's been a while. Forgive me.

I have been a terrible zine editor, and spent far too long indulging my own literary ambitions. That's the bad news, and I can but get down on my knees and beg your forgiveness for that. The good news is that I'm endeavouring to be better, get my finger back on the pulse and treat you right.
But I am alive, you are alive and so is Ponytail (in a way). And I know I've been a real lazy susan in putting together Issue #3 but it's on its way. There's still time to SUBMIT. That's what I was going to tell you. I bet you thought you'd missed the deadline and threw your story against a wall or out of a window. But you haven't so go fetch it and send me your words on the theme of The Other to ponytail[dot]zine[at]gmail[dot]com
You can do this until 30th November.

I've missed you my children.