David Lynn Clucas and the Buttermilk Road

Friends, you’re sleeping if you’re not swooning in the sweltering goodness of David Lynn Clucas reading his short fiction Buttermilk Road.

My friends, this is 18 minutes and 5 seconds of  the good stuff!

Download mp3 or stream below

Read along in The Diamond & the Thief

The sound of the Black Rider: David Lynn Clucas

Download David Lynn Clucas reading Buttermilk Road as featured in The Diamond & the Thief 2010.

Or stream it here:

Black Rider Lines: Masquerade; Or, How I stopped worrying and learned to love the fact that I would never find the jewel-encrusted rabbit in England

by David Lynn Clucas

Ever read this book?

Masquerade, by Englishman Kit Williams, was as much a source of pain and frustration around my house when I was a kid as it was a wealth of entertainment and hours of escape into a truly weird, lush, awe-inspiring, and often nightmarish place.

I say pain and frustration because this book is actually a very intricately designed treasure map that led to an ornately jeweled golden rabbit buried somewhere on public land in Great Britain, and although my family was rich with some of the highest levels of intelligence ever assembled under one suburban roof, we just couldn’t crack the code of the great lost treasure of Jack Hare.

Okay, so here’s the gist: in the book, the Moon Chick falls in love with the Sun Dude [articulate gender delineation mine], and crafts a beautiful gold pendant for him, sending her trusted subject Hare to deliver the amulet to her Apollonian crush. Jack Hare braves many wild and woolly adventures to fulfill his quest, only to find upon his arrival that he has lost the trinket del amor, leaving it to the reader to decipher the clues strewn throughout the magical and befuddling illustrations.

The treasure

This riddle proved impossible for my family, and I’m pretty sure we had given up on solving it long before it was announced that someone had deciphered the puzzle and found the treasure. Of course, it turned out that the X marking the spot had been located through devious and cunning methods involving the former lover of Williams or somesuch. I’m not sure anyone would have figured it out in a reasonable timeframe, considering the solution rested in discovering that clues were revealed by drawing lines from the eyes of animals in the illustrations through the longest digit of the animal to letters on the borders. Or something.

At least it was pretty to look at.

Black Rider Lines: Mark Kurlansky; Or, How I stopped reading and learned to soak it all in

by David Lynn Clucas

If you know the name Mark Kurlansky, kudos to you. If you’ve even read his books, please take a moment to high-five your screen.

Ever been completely engrossed in a book that was totally devoted to the history of one breed of fish?

I have.

I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s been about a year since I last read it, but I liked it so much I’m constantly talking about it to friends, who, I’m sure, think I’m a moron for getting all pumped up on Gorton’s Fisherman.

At any rate, my enjoyment of this work truly speaks to the talent of Kurlansky, who has the wondrous ability to take the histories of seemingly mundane subjects and create page-turners out of them. Passages like the following somehow put me on the edge of my seat:

The Basques were getting richer every Friday. But where was all this cod coming from? The Basques, who had never even said where they came from, kept their secret.

Kurlansky has my head filled with images when I read something like that. Dark men in dark clothes in dark boats, nurturing a secret commerce and winking to each other when their less-than-successful market-stall neighbors grumbled about the Basques’ mysterious source of product.

The last fish to truly stoke my imagination in this manner was this guy:

Although I was surprised by many of the things I learned about cod, I was not at all surprised by the fact that there was so much to learn. Kurlansky had done a fine job of prepping me for that by writing this book, which I had read prior to reading Cod:

Yep, you guessed it. It’s about salt. And it’s one hell of a story. Kurlansky, through the tale of the only rock we eat, even turned me on to the language and poetry of the Basque people (who factor in largely to this fish story) to the extent that I had a poem by Basque poet Gabriel Aresti tattooed on me, and my wife and I have plans to have another of his poems done together. There’s blood and ink and pain and love all bound together in those little white crystals.

Next on the Kurlansky list?

If he can turn a fish and some flavor into two of my favorite reads, I can’t wait to see what he does with this.  Read Kurlansky, and I promise you, you’ll never look at these little guys the same:

David Lynn Clucas had ‘Porch Kiss’ appear in The Diamond & the Thief – Ocotber 09 edition and ‘Buttermilk Road’ in The Diamond & the Thief – March 10 edition.  Hear Clucas read ‘Porch Kiss‘ as part of The Sound of the Black Rider.