Vaughn's Vision Is Older, Wiser And Harder

I Write As Someone Who Has No More Time For Repressive Islam Than He Does For Repressive Christianity Or Judaism, But At Least Look At The Face In The Hijab - And Try To Imagine The One Beneath The Niqab - Before You Depersonalise Its Wearer.

Just As The Blurring Between Childhood And Adulthood Has Produced The Kidult, So The Stretching Of Middle Into Old Age Has Fostered Another Peculiar Chimera: Septuagenarians With Apoptosis Sporting The Depeche Mode.

I'm Going To End Up Like One Of Those Old Weirdos Who Lives In A Network Of Tunnels Burrowed Through Trash - Yet I Do Not Fear This.

Modernism Has A Reputation For Being A Forbidding Phenomenon: Its Visual Arts Disconcertingly Non-representational, Its Literary Efforts Devoid Of The Consolations Of Plot And Character - Even Its Films, It's Argued, Fall Well Short Of That True Desideratum: Entertainment.

There Can Be No More Thrilling Idea Of Intimacy That Connecting With Someone Through The Agency Of The Written Word. Here We Meet, On The Page, Naked And Unadorned: Shorn Of Class, Race, Gender, Sexual Identity, Age And Nationality. The Reader I Seek Is A Tautology, For He/she Is Simply Exactly The Person Who Wants To Read What I Have Written...