Tales From The UniversE No 23 - This week's newsletter: The Emperor's New Clothes - greatest yarn ever (fore)told; Adventures in LovE - part 6 LIVE!!!; Exclusive poem - The Stars of Baseball; more…
The Las Vegas Strip never slumbers - or does it??? Pic: Paradisio Publishing
Welcome and find 7,000-PLUS stories written since 2002 for The Guardian and Observer HERE
1. Adventures in LovE - out now!!!
My tale of sun-baked romance, crime, dancing, and teenagers Nancy and Joey boosting 1,000 ecstasy tablets from Lancaster’s Mr Big and punting these out and trying to flee to a Balearic isle for the rest of their lives is LIVE - 1st week FREE; 6th part OUT NOW
Cover: Paradisio Publishing
Take an annual subscription to my Substack for £50 (10% cheaper than monthly) and receive a free autographed copy of my first novel, Night Time Cool. Sign up here and how to receive the signed NTC will follow…
2. The Emperor’s New Clothes - the greatest yarn ever (fore)told
Life: what you perceive it to be. Pic: Paradisio Publishing
Imagination.
This is the world.
Go to Las Vegas and it’s pure Wizard of Oz time. You want a hotel, we’ll give you one with a rollercoaster in it.
You want a boat ride, we’ll give you Venice on the Strip.
You want to gamble, we’ll give you free beer as you splurge your money.
You want a stage show, we’ll give you endless nights of Celine Dion.
Behind the Wiz of Oz curtain:
The rollercoaster-hotel remains a joint that is leashing beds and pillows.
Venice on the Strip remains water and floaty things.
Drink all your free beer but your moulah will still vanish.
Celine Dion is a woman with decent pipes lit up by a spectacular bunch of lights. Nothing else.
It is all - ALL - facade, PR, surface, style, a hamming up of the same thing.
Artifice.
Artificial.
It is The Emperor’s New Clothes. Which makes Han Christian Anderson’s seminal tale the greatest yarn ever told.
For this IS the world - what we imagine. How stuff is dressed up.
In The Emperor’s New Clothes a pompous ruler is tricked by a pair of con artists (from Las Vegas, you say?) into having the finest garb made for him by the finest silk.
The commoners, the dumb and the unsophisticated ‘cannot see’ this finest of fine silk, the emperor is told - and thus fooled into believing, as anathema to him is being considered a peasant with a minus brain cell count.
Guess what: the clothes made for him are non-existent, the yarn about the ‘finest silk’ a facade. Yet still he strips to put his new threads ‘on’ and thus parades NAKED.
Think about it.
No one dare say anything - especially not the emperor.
The “plebs” - the dumb and unsophisticated - and the “royalty” - the emperor - keep up the pretence, the artifice.
Only a child, in the end, volunteers that the emperor is wearing NADA. But still he continues on parading.
This is the world in a nutshell: the selling of the con, the dream. Las Vegas, the city centre, the town square, the village green, what’s beamed into your living room via adverts and TV shows.
Illusion.
The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Fun isn’t it?
$$$%%%&&&&
P. S. The tale is itself a case of the emperor’s new clothes as Hans Christian Andersen’s yarn is ‘taken’ (borrowed, stolen, ripped off?) from a 1335 collection of yarns, Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor.
