For myself, I tinkered with the preceding stories in an internet caff off the Magnificent Mile in central Chicago. This is no more than coincidence of course – we’re jobbing writers, and we go wherever the job takes us – but, being a writer, and thus given to a quasi-pareidolic interpretation of events, I’m going to wilfully draw a symbol from this and read into it the notion that, wherever we travel in the world, in whichever places our emotional or career obligations take us to, the Mabinogion, like luggage, follows us there. This is a good thing. The weight of a deep cultural history is a beneficial one to carry, and I feel safe and secure and settled when ancient masonry and memory are at my shoulder; castles and megaliths and ruins and the like, and the human histories they hold in their stones. I also feel this way when the nomenclature of a country is intimately related to its mythology; the many place names in Wales that contain the word ‘moch’ or derivations thereof testify not to the localised history of porcine hus-bandry (of which there is none, or very little) but to the overnight stops made by Gwydion in his journey across the country with his personal herd of swine in The Fourth Branch.
What do You think about The Dreams Of Max & Ronnie?
