Meet the cover star: Jean-Pol

Ponytail Issue #3 is almost ready for a fully fledged flurry of excellence right in your eyes and ears. Comin'atcha January 2012.
It's the best issue yet in my opinion.
In the mean while here's a 'teaser' for you- a photo of our cover star Jean-Paul. My mum kissed Jean-Paul on a school trip to Belgium in 1972, from which she returned with 3 stale baguettes and this passport photo. On the back of the photo she has written Jean-Pol. Belgium 1972. She has always been very organised like that.
Jean-Pol came on something of a lover's pilgrimage to Croydon of all places, and declared his love to young Sharon in the doorway of my grandparents' house (he was inexplicably never invited in) and returned dejected and dare we say a little wiser to Belgium.
He is occasionally referred to as "the one who turned up on the doorstep who was the spit of Sacha Distel" by my Nana over a sherry or two.

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.

Issue #3 CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Hi it's me....I'm sorry I haven't been in contact for a while but you look great!
Are you seeing anyone else at the moment?
Write for me.... I missed you so bad.
Issue #3 has been a long time coming, but Ponytail is back- loud and proud with a new design to boot!


Issue #3 is all about 'The Other'... a theme which you can take from the deepest psychoanalytic sense to the conversation you overheard on the bus the other day; basically Ponytail wants anything to do with you, your interactions with others, the time you were the Other...send it to me: prose, poem or comic.


DEADLINE: 31st July 2011

Submissions to ponytail.zine[at]gmail.com