Daytime Insomniac

A Nomad's Life

2011-12-20T23:27:00.000Z

For the past six months
I've lived the life
Of a nomad
Fucking East European girls
Who wore pink hot pants
Feathery white leather boots
Bras with edible candy balls
The colour of children's crayons
Panties with rips & double entries
Behind King's Cross Station
While reciting Paul Eluard
At the top of my voice
The reach of my lungs
Hauling across London
Bags stuffed with trophies
Of lace & silk & nylon
Visiting unknown pubs
Walking unchartered streets
In the footsteps of Blake & Rimbaud
Sitting alone at midnight
On the hills of Primrose & Parliament
Trying to catch a glimpse
An inkling, a rumour
Of things to come, to do
To see, to feel
Beer frothing jubilantly
Memories & imagingings
Merging in confusion
& indifference
Wallowing in the familiar
Rather than the dangerous
The unknown

Image: Marcel Dzama

Best of 2011

2011-12-18T20:08:00.004Z

I'm not saying this was my favourite year. Six months in Chitose and six months in London. Missed people I love. Miss a certain cat I love. But he's now in England and putting himself about. A very strange 12 months. I've not read anywhere near as much as I usually read. Anyway, here's a breakdown. I read only 81 books - Gazooks! - which works out at a book every 4.5 days, nearly half my usual average. I could blame stress, writing projects, goldporntube, but I think it's because I struggled to find things I wanted to read. Authors most read - Geoff Dyer, James Sallis, & David Shields with three each. Genre - 2 drama, 48 fiction, & 31 non-fiction. Countrywise it went: Austria, Chile, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Belgium 1, France 2, Russia 3, Japan 8, USA 28, UK 34. Best book I read in 2011 - tight, but Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf just pips Michel Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory. Worst book - Tim Binding's The Champion.

Music - well, what a swap around from the beginning of the year... So, I'll do a top five from January to June, and July to December.

Jan - June:

Month Of May - Arcade Fire

Tightrope - Janelle Monáe (brilliant video)

Zebra - Beach House

Infinity Guitars - Sleigh Bells

Coronado - Deerhunter

July - Dec

Invisible City - Crystal Stilts

Tell Me - Tom Waits

Broken Bone - Iceage

Bicentennial Man - Black Lips

Life in Paper - Fucked Up

Pubs

The Kenton Arms - Hackney

The Tavern - Finsbury Park

The Carlisle Arms - Soho (blistering rockabilly night)

Chitoseya - Chitose

The Princess of Wales - Primrose Hill (always)

That's it... Let's hope 2012 is easier on my heart and mind...

Things to look forward to - the Ginsberg bio, Nothing Matters from Snubnose Press, a retro Crombie, and, yes, a Kindle...

'appy noo yeer, geezers and gals...

Book Report - Sept/Oct/Nov 2011 & Other Stuff

2011-11-21T21:41:00.003Z

Fuck me, I've hardly read a thing in the last three months. Just not had the time. News - I've signed a deal with Snubnose Press to publish my long poem/crime novella Nothing Matters. Should be out some time in 2012. I've been working with the wonderful people from Hackney Hear on their new GPS-driven interactive app & a story of mine set in London Fields will be part of it when released in the near future. Quick review or links to reviews of books I read during the Autumn.

Iain Sinclair - Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire. Usual Sinclair mix of lyrical fireworks & psychogeographical history. A book that needs a special pocket when you're in the borough.

Stewart Home - Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie. Mr Home on top form. Sexing up new media, deconstructing, plagiarising, and basically giving a good seeing to to narrative and form.

Kazushi Hosaka - Plainsong. Japan Times review.

Robert Service - Trotsky. Solid biography of the Stranglers' hero.

Naoyuki Ii - The Shadow of a Blue Cat. Japan Times review.

James Sallis - Cripple Creek. The remarkable James Sallis does it again. Brilliant writer.

Stuart Neville - Collusion. Good sequel to The Twelve - looking forward to the third.

James Sallis - Death Will Have Your Eyes. See above comment but more so. Sallis's stand-alone novels are very good.

Neil Bartlett - Skin Lane. Enjoyed - sort of a cross between Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, & Jean Genet. Can't be bad.

Michel Houellebecq - The Map and the Territory. Bookmunch review.

Roberto Bolano - The Third Reich. Bookmunch review coming soon.

Glen Duncan - The Bloodstone Papers. One of my favourite writers but I didn't get on with this one. Probably not in the mood.

Haruki Murakami 1Q84. Japan Times review.

Jez Butterworth - Jerusalem. Awesome state-of-the-nation, in-yer-face theatre. Can't wait to go see it.

Hope to resume a more regular service soon.

Image - Marcus Jansen.

Book Report - June/July/August 2011

2011-08-15T16:36:00.000+01:00

Not been reading much... Well, not as much as usual... Too many things to finish & I seem to be unable to say no to projects & people... So, only 13 books read in the period from 1 June until 15 August; ten of those non-fiction, three novels, four re-reads, & not one I didn't enjoy. as I'm living in E9, here are nine-word reviews.

Dennis Cooper - Smothered In Hugs. Enjoyable collection with title stolen from Guided By Voices.

Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho. Brilliant satire on the eighties & nineties, laugh darkly.

Nicholson Baker - Human Smoke. Strangely moving diary of events leading up to war.

Bruce Chatwin - In Patagonia. Somewhere between reportage, history, fiction, & downright pork pies.

Karl Marlantes - Matterhorn. The leech scene had me squirming & grimacing somewhat.

Jon Ronson - The Psychopath Test. Bookmunch.

Iain Sinclair - Ghost Milk. A guide to the black hole of east London.

Tiqqun - Introduction to Civil War. Must read book for those interested in the present.

Aidan Andrew Dun - Rimbaud, Psychogeography. An excellent little book on Rimbaud, Verlaine, & London.

Owen Hatherley - A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Must read book for those interested in the UK.

Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22. Honest & funny, beautifully written, hopefully not his swansong.

JG Ballard - The Atrocity Exhibition. Still shocking, fun, & prescient after all these years.

Geoff Dyer - Working the Room. Good collection from one of our best cultural critics.

Cool. I hope to have some news soon about two publishing deals & a very exciting project I've - yes, unable to say no - agreed to work on. Geezers. Later.

Pic via Kill Your Pet Puppy.

Pond Scum Re-vivified...

2011-08-01T20:02:00.002+01:00

American Simplex - the fifth chapter... published eary October 2004.

To begin with, you don't know it's there. Then there is a slight tingling – the prodrome stage – and discoloration of the lip. If you touch it with your tongue, there is a hard lump small but containing growth. You feel irritable and headaches are common. Inflammation occurs and the lip is tender to the touch and so are, sometimes, the gums. If you look closely, and try not to fog up the mirror with your feverish breath, you can see a number of tiny fluid-filled blisters. After a day or so, these begin to weep – the ulcer stage – and suddenly you're contagious – this is also called the get-away-from-me-with-that-scabby-cornflake-on-your-lip-if-you-think-I'm-kissing-you-with-that-hideous-labial-monstrosity-you've-got-another-thing-coming stage. Then it begins to crust. To scab. It burns. It itches. You worry it with your tongue. It flakes. It begins to heal. It scars. Small white points on the red of your lips like white toadstool warts. This is herpes simplex virus type 1 (not to be confused with herpes simplex virus type 2 – or genital herpes). No, this is HSV-1, recurrent herpes labialis, fever blisters – the cold sore. “Herpes” – to creep or crawl. “Herpetology” – the study of reptiles and amphibians. Hold on. Let me check my notes. My handwriting is appalling. I seem to be going off at a tangent. Now I remember. My notes to this week’s column read “cold war” not “cold sore”.

It amazed me when I read in Thomas Powers’ Intelligence Wars that America didn’t have a secret service until June 1942 when Roosevelt established The Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Huh? Why not? Were you naïve? Was it ego? I can’t think of a time when Britain didn’t have a secret service. From Christopher Marlowe to Daniel Defoe to Graham Greene – even our writers have flirted with spying.

In The Human Factor Graham Greene writes, “An enemy had to remain a caricature if he was to be kept at a safe distance; an enemy should never come alive.” America has created an enemy who sits on your sofa, watches your TV, drinks your Buds, eats your corn dogs, and kisses your ma. It was easy during the cold war – the Russians wore furry hats, had potato and rutabaga visages, swilled home-brewed vodka, the only Russian they spoke was “do svidaniya,” and their female shot-putters wouldn’t have been out of place in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex. This time, you have a faceless foe. She could be your manicurist. He could be your pool boy. Whom are you fighting in Iraq? In Afghanistan? In America? How do you spot a terrorist? Suicide bombers are easy – they’re the ones wearing hijabs and the Leonard Cohen T-shirts.

You’re not fighting armies; you’re fighting shadows on a wall created by your blood-soaked hands. Did you find it so difficult to wage war on al-Qaeda, a war to be fought in camera rather than on camera, that you invaded Iraq to make the unseen enemy visible? You need your enemy to be recognisable, to be a caricature – VC, gooks, Charlie – in order to fight it. As Elmore Leonard puts it in Cuba Libre, “The war begun and he was in it because he was American and he was here. It seemed to simplify his understanding of his role, knowing he liked the idea of being in a real war. He wouldn’t have to wonder anymore what he was doing here.” Or as Powers puts it, America believes “anything can be achieved with a big enough wrench.”

Is America distributing democracy to the rest of the world as Britain once spread “civilisation”? Is the democratisation of Iraq and Afghanistan just an excuse for imperialism?

In the news this week were images of a bound man encased in a wire cage, staring in terror at us. He is dressed in the uniform of Guantanamo Bay, the orange jumpsuit, once the apparel of Devo, Beastie Boys and, more recently and post-ironically, Bart Simpson. He is Kenneth Bigley. These visions from Iraq, and arguably from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, reinforce a point Christopher Hitchens made in Regime Change that “if everything is terror, then nothing is.” By caricaturing the enemy as fanatics, we cannot know them. By not knowing them, we deny their rights. By denying their rights, we deny them their humanity. We fear them. By fearing them, we discriminate against them.

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an exposition on fear. Roth insists the novel is not concerned with contemporary politics. The America that is in danger of being lost in the novel is a protective America, constitutional and egalitarian. The novel is about being American – it conveys the fear felt by all that that is what you are not. The government in Roth’s book is anti-Semitic. The present (ie 2004 – George "Dubya" Bush) US government is anti-American.

Where did this schizophrenia come from? I don’t mean a Jekyll and Hyde split personality, I mean the full RD Laing. There is a rupture between US thought processes – the government/military – and emotions – the American people. (Britain’s last schizophrenic phase was 1979-1990 during Margaret Thatcher’s government.) Reality is confused. You hallucinate enemies. Delusion has replaced apple pie. Paranoia appears in everything from DeLillo to Disney. You are regressive. You are anti-social. You have had a complete personality change.

Power is a virus – paranoia is a symptom. I believe the British are responsible for spreading that virus – it was under pressure from our government that Roosevelt formed the OSS. You now carry this virus. The lesions opened by war cause any cosmetic democratic government to catch a variant strain. You infect your own body. You cause mass irritation. You may become brain dead through encephalitis, a form of imperial egoism – the neo-cons are neo-egoist. Nobody will want to kiss you with that suppurating pustule of war on your conscience.

Fact – 85-90% of all Americans have cold sores.

Fact – 70% of all Americans have visited Disneyland/Disney World.

Fact – 22% of all Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder.

Image - Dorothy...

Pond Scum Re-gurgitated...

2011-07-25T08:20:00.000+01:00

A Tale of Three Cities - the fourth chapter... published late September 2004.

It is observable that those who own dogs do so in order to shout at them. Walking across the park each morning, on my way to Soho, dodging the joggers – British joggers are unhealthy, unfashionable, and uncoordinated, whereas American joggers are fit, trig, and tuned – I hear the stentorian commands of masters and mistresses, berating, browbeating, and doggone plain hounding their pooches. "Sit!" "Stay!" "Fetch!" "Leave!" All the commands appended to ridiculous names. I live in Primrose Hill, and the names are of the Nigel, Ralph (pronounced Raif), Kevin (an Irish Setter, poor love), Isabel, Eileen (I kid you not), and Zanzibar kind, rather than Spot, Rover, Rex, Fido, or Patch. The dogs sniff, piss, shit, and chase squirrels, and their owners shout at them to cease and return in order to chide the dog for something that, to the dog, is merely an appetence.

You think I'm going to argue that Paul Auster's Timbuktu, and Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated are inferior to John Berger's King: A Street Story and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Well, you’re wrong. But I am going to argue that people own dogs for the same reason they go on holiday – to feel powerful, to feel superior, to feel in control. Who are the worst offenders? Why, fellow travellers, it’s the British and Americans, of course.

Well, that’s how I planned to start my column. One problem, in Berlin, where I’ve been on holiday for the last week, I didn’t encounter a single American. I thought I’d got lucky at breakfast on my last morning. Wafting over the salami, blood sausage, cheese, and coffee came an unmistakable transatlantic accent. I listened. Canadian. Where were you all? Then again, there were hardly any British tourists, hardly any French, or Spanish. The majority of tourists in Berlin were German. And I was constantly mistaken for a German; I was asked directions, assumed into conversations. I ‘did’ German (I can’t say ‘studied’) for three years at school, and specialized in Anglo-Saxon at university, so, language-wise, I got by – surprisingly.

The clouds were the colour of oysters, the colour of old computers, and as the plane came out of them, the Earth appeared camouflaged as if expecting attack.

I spent one day walking around Berlin with a bag containing the head of Friedrich Nietzsche. Not his actual head, silly, but a bust I’d picked up in a small antique shop in Charlottenburg. After six hours of walking, the going was getting as heavy as the Third Essay of The Genealogy of Morals. I planned to visit art galleries – I’m a big fan of Richter, Kiefer, Beuys, and Grosz. So, off I went to the Martin-Gropius-Bau. It housed a retrospective of Sophie Calle. She has worked with Paul Auster – she’s a sort of anal-retentive Tracy Emin. Then to the Nationalgalerie to see the Caspar David Friedrichs – the gallery floor was closed. Then to the Neue Nationalgalerie and I found a travelling MoMA exhibition – yeah, yeah, American cultural hegemony, blah-blah. I bought a ticket anyway. Then I saw the sign – a seven-hour wait. Then I saw the queue. It reminded me of a Ronald Sukenick story 'Who Are These People?' in which a guy queues to get into the Uffizi, the queue is so long that people join it when they get on the plane at San Diego. I decided to come back the next day. I got there at 0700 – the waiting time had increased to 11 hours. I was flying back in 24. I could have flown to New York, visited MoMA, and flown back in the time it would have taken me to stand in line.

I watch the city thrum and buzz, it guides me along, and other tourists come and go – touch, flirt, and separate. I had known cities like this all my life, cities that were familiar in unknown ways.

The districts of Berlin spread out like little chaps and double crosses around the jigsaw crossbar that is Mitte. There’s not much left of the wall – a long stretch along the Spree and a fragment near Potsdamer Platz. It occurred to me how much Berlin has covered its tracks. It conceals its recent history whilst glorifying its past. It is a palimpsest – it is history written over; it has eradicated any vestige of the 20th century whilst preserving 19th century buildings and constructing a new 21st century city.

London, in comparison, is a dusty, calf-bound tome you’d find in an antiquarian bookshop; the cover damp to the touch, and as you open it, amidst a small blitz of dust, you find pressed leaves, old bus tickets, insect husks, paper angels.

I lived in New York in the late '80s and early '90s; it was like living inside a graphic novel. But what will New York be like after 9/11? Will New York become like Berlin? Will it erase its recent history? Become new? Remake itself? Or will it become a museum of trauma? Just off Potsdamer Platz is the only evident sign of Nazi horror – the Topography of Terror. Will the new memorial – Reflecting Absence – actually reflect on absence? Or will it reflect an absence. Will it mirror that loss by constantly recreating and rewriting memory and history?

Let’s go back to Nietzsche – whose bust now squats frowning in my living room. If London, Berlin, and New York can be seen as antiquarian, as a palimpsest, and as a graphic novel respectively, the three cities can also be seen as embodiments of Nietzsche’s theory of the three uses of history – antiquarian, monumental, and critical – or the historical, suprahistorical, and unhistorical. While antiquarian London aims to preserve the past, and monumental Berlin wishes to learn from or emulate the past – the preserved buildings are pre-Nazi, pre-Cold War, Classical, and the new buildings are monumental, they are colossal – critical New York strives to forget the past, to live in the present, free of the claims of memory. Or does it? Is New York, and therefore America, becoming overly concerned with history? Do you ache to be antiquarian? Do you yearn for the monumental? Is America acting out, in a short period, its own genealogy of memory?

What is history? It’s a dog with fleas. A dog no longer free to sniff, to piss, to shit, and to chase squirrels. A dog constantly beckoned by its masters – war, politics, and power. “For the man says, ‘I remember,’ and envies the beast, which immediately forgets and sees each moment really perish, sink back in cloud and night, and vanish forever.” (Nietzsche.)

Image: Adrian Ghenie, Dada is Dead, 2009

Pond Scum Re-generated...

2011-07-18T17:36:00.001+01:00

Mutatis Mutandis - the third chapter... published early September 2004 (with a few emendations)...

Two weeks ago, at a wedding in the Neo-Tudor splendour of Girton College, Cambridge, I found myself – amidst vegan entrees and carnivorous main courses, scowled down upon by an obscure Stanley Spencer androgyne – sitting opposite a philosophy lecturer – an American philosophy lecturer. Out of the mouths of babes into the lap of good fortune. Actually, it wasn't that fortuitous. My friend lectures in morals and ethics (strange – my ~~ex-girlfriend~~ comes from Essex), and his ~~wife~~ lectures in philosophy of the mind, with a special interest in qualia (strangerer – my ~~present girlfriend~~ comes from the land of the koala). Anyway, I found myself on a table full of philosophy lecturers, some British but the majority American.

Conversation started as it does at many weddings, 'So, how do you know the bride/groom?' We moved on to an interesting discussion about accents. I don't have an apple-and-pears-me-old-china-rub-a-dub-gor-blimey-guvnor Cockney accent, but I do have a London twang. The Americans at the table insisted I spoke Standard English. I said I didn’t. They said I did. I said I didn’t. They said I did. This must be the Logical Pantomimist school of philosophy. I said I couldn’t tell where they were from by their accents. They explained that, coming from California, their accent is what Brits (and the world) understood to be 'American'. It's what we hear on TV. That's true. OK, we know New York (well, Brooklyn), the Texas drawl, the cartoon-like backwoods ‘hyuck’, but that's it. The rest is Californian.

That's not where it stopped. There are, apparently, subtle differences in Californian accents – Southern Californian and Northern Californian, San Francisco and Los Angeles, city and valley. It dawned on me that these people were talking about America as if it were some dusty thorp or dorp in the Gobi desert, untroubled by humankind for tens of thousands of years, with its own language, its own customs, with a host of secret signs and mysterious places. 'The Grand Canyon is a must-see. Have you heard of it?' 'Me? No. Where is it?' Irony. 'Arizona.’ 'Really?' Irony. 'The Colorado River runs through it.' 'It's in Arizona but the Colorado River runs through it?' Irony. I know this. Why were they telling me this? It's not as if I hadn't heard of the biggest hole in the world. The conversation continued and I was bombarded with little known facts about the USA – the capital is Washington, 9/11 happened, George Bush Jr is ~~the president~~, Chicago is windy, New Jersey is the new Brooklyn – Is it?

“No place to go but inward” (Perelman) – and that's not a metaphor for the American pioneering spirit. America is becoming insular. Where once the Coca-Cola/McDonald/Microsoft diaspora went unchecked, it's now herding in, enclosing. America no longer wants to be understood. America wants to be left alone. It’s as if your formative years have passed and you've turned into a surly teenager, sulking in your fizzing sack, staring at your yeasty sock, explaining your version of the world to anyone who will listen.

Insularity is a British trait. Or was. Britain is not European, it’s not open to new ideas; it has its village greens, pubs, cricket, bowler hats, and fog. I believe America is becoming as insular. America is no longer hermeneutical, it’s hermetical – its outlook is parochial and its politics circumscribed. Before George Bush, before 9/11, before Afghanistan, before Iraq, the world viewed America as progressive, sanguine, and indulgent, it is now benighted, diffident, and illiberal. It is as if events have left the USA with retrograde amnesia. You can’t remember who you were as a country before the trauma.

The USA has fragmented into 293 million pieces, each with no understanding of its neighbour, no understanding of a world outside its own experience – I’m back to solipsism and memoir here – see Salon 08/27/04: Paris Hilton to publish 198-page memoir – nuff said. So, is Britain outward looking? Is Britain becoming extrinsic? Are we finally becoming European?

In literature, I would point to Coe’s The Closed Circle and Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Both novels question Britain’s near past, question Britain’s role in Europe and the world, and how changes in social perception affect the British. Delillo’s Underworld and Franzen’s The Corrections, although apparently social in outlook, are actually inward looking; they create a sort of instant paranoid historiography, which includes the social and the self but only as narrative checkpoints, the political and the personal are not consanguineous. The subject bears no relation to the predicate. The problem? The subject is always I. Always I, never we.

To return to my philosophic wedding feast – the dasein – being there (and I was, and I wish you were, it was a great wedding) can be broken down into the history of the USA. Factuality: the reality of being or actuality – the Pilgrim Fathers, American Revolution, and the Constitution. Existentiality: the purpose in life – to make the world democratic – and to make authentic that purpose and to establish a unique identity – World Wars I & II, the Cold War, and the space race. And, finally, fallenness: a move into inauthenticity, simulacra, actions without purpose – Afghanistan and Iraq – a hidden being; habituated, living in a prefabricated world of forgotten guilt, forgotten origins, in the world of the occult.

Image - Dorota Mytych

Pond Scum Re-connected...

2011-07-14T12:59:00.001+01:00

Idiot Empire - the second chapter... published late August 2004.

How do you read? I strip down to nothing (steady, now), zip into my swimming trunks (Speedos, naturally), feel the cold of the pale blue ceramic wall against my back, take a deep breath, and hurtle full pelt across the grainy verruca-ridden tiles, then, hands wrapped around my knees, in bomb position, I'm in – splash! – words up my nose, in my ears and in my eyes; after the first paragraph, I rush to the surface, lungs exploding, heart pounding, then leisurely stroke to the side, where I spend the rest of the session waiting for the heavy petting to commence. But, recently, I've chipped my tooth on the bottom, pinged my coccyx, scarfed my elbow. “Why’s that?” I hear you say. Well, lately the reading waters have been – how shall I put it? – shallow, man, SHAL-LOW. Do we no longer tread water in the fathomless depths of the novel? No longer scuba dive among the intricate coral of the novella? Have we lost our desire to wade in the warm lagoon of the well-crafted short story? Or frolic with the papilloma virus in the pre-pool footbaths of the prose poem? Nuh-uh. It’s all autobiography: Me. Me. Me. I. I. I.

Whom do I blame? I could blame Dave Eggers. He started it, miss. I could blame A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in all its po-mo memoir glory. But it was intelligent and fresh. I could blame Lowell, Berryman, and Sexton for their confessions, but that poetry had heft, man, it had insight, it had balls. Whadda we got these days? We got James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. A million? Hey, Jimmy, a million little pieces works out at every 12 minutes of your 23-year-old life. It couldn’t have been THAT interesting.

The instant autobiography used to be the domain of the pop singer, the sports star, the actor. Not anymore. Anyone who has lived long enough to tie a shoelace, have an orgasm, smoke crack – in no particular order – is writing a memoir. Charlotte Bronte wrote something about each person having a different story to tell, but she was talking about a story of family, history, passion, not Cabbage Patch doll collecting. Heidegger’s theory of bestand comes to mind – a transformation of a person’s raw material into something they believe to be more valuable. Nothing is left unrevealed; experience, such as it is, is auto-cannibalised. Nothing is ironised, nothing is revised, nothing is understated. Your date stood you up on prom night, you have a psychological problem (Doctor, I think I’m interesting), and six fingers, but I don’t want to read 300 pages about it. It’s an I-did-this-and-I-did-that world. Is one experience enough for an autobiography? Is life no longer experiential? Do we live in an Idiot Empire? Idiot – private person – one who lacks professional knowledge.

On Amazon, I typed in “autobiography”. I got a man’s life with chin, man’s life in care, woman’s life with big tits, man’s life with bike, man’s life with snow, man’s life with food, man’s life with brother, man’s life with faith, man’s life with gangs, woman’s life in TV. I want to read a book in which all of these things occur. Imagine a novel in which spies with silicon enhanced breasts eat bouillabaisse while chasing the mysterious and shape-shifting Chin (Thomas Pynchon methinks). Put them together, you have a story. Apart, you have a self-obsessed view of a life not yet lived, a history not yet written. Is that it? Is it because there is no history, nothing to anchor us in linear time – I’m thinking Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians or Wordsworth’s The Prelude.

Reading should transform life. There is no longer a “passionate will to know everything about the life of another human being” (Bellow). I want the world remade in its own image through imagination. I want history, culture, politics, even dogs, made new. Memoirs of stamp collecting, judo, and giraffe wrestling now measure out a life. I do not want to read a recollection of a life less lived. I don’t want to read about how you found God, a plastic surgeon, a rare disease, a Rohypnol-laced daiquiri, how you spent a month on your knees performing oral sex on the Boston Philharmonic. If poetry, and I think this can be extended to fiction, “is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,” these McMemoirs are merely emoticons remembered in banality.

An obsession with the ordinary – the self as a Don Quixote of the quotidian – is responsible for the growth in this genre. A singular worldview of an irrelevant life that “cuts (it)self off from seeing and from understanding what (it) sees” (Bellow).

I hoped to argue that this was an American phenomenon. Is it? I believe British writing can be insular, but, even though it sometimes misses the big picture, it does provide depth. If British writers drop a pebble into the well of autobiography, they wait to hear it hit the bottom, look into the darkness, and speculate. American writers stare at their own reflection in the water’s surface. I give you Martin Amis’s Experience rather than Rick Moody’s The Black Veil. But I believe it is a contemporary reaction to the human horde. It is the city and the mob that have created the imaginary lives of giants out of the experience of dwarves. Is the individual dead in novelistic terms?

Autobiography – self life writing. Self-penning. I see the novelist as Argus, the many-eyed giant, commanded to watch over Io (the world, civilization), but Argus is put to sleep by that tricky Hermes and becomes the memoirist – the peacock – the self-preening bird with the tail (tale) of I’s. The novelist is “armoured in scepticism” (Hitchens), whereas the memoirist is armoured in solipsism.

Image - Jindrich Styrsky, The Statue of Liberty, 1934.

Pond Scum Re-animated...

2011-07-12T17:47:00.000+01:00

Pond Scum - the first chapter... published late August 2004.

On a chair in the middle of a room stands a woman. The woman is naked. She begins to dance. A bare bulb above her head is the only light in the room. Slouching around the edges of the room, spaced out so as not to touch each other, are twenty men dressed in raincoats. Underneath the raincoats, the men wear various national costumes. The woman cannot see these men. The woman dances in time to the slow jazz playing. The woman is not at all self-conscious. The woman is of indeterminate race. As they watch the woman dancing, the men touch themselves. Although the dance is rhythmic, it is not overly provocative, not overly erotic, yet the men become sexually excited. Maybe it is the nakedness. Maybe it is the sleaze. After about five minutes, there is the sound of low yelps of pleasure and exhaustion. After ten minutes, the noise is of the rustle of handkerchiefs, the scrabble for trousers, and the whoosh of zips. The woman stops dancing. The lights come up. The woman stares at the men. It is high on her right forehead where the first egg strikes, the second strikes below the naval. The woman looks forward at a point in the room no one else can see. Her body, covered in eggs and eggshells, tomatoes and banana skins, beer and saliva, trembles as it settles, like an engine cooling. A few half-smoked cigarettes bounce off her, the animal eyes of their coals expiring on the sodden floor. The woman does not attempt to cover herself. I, unseen by her and by the men – and by you, dear reader – step forward. I reach up and help her down from the chair. I ask her name. She looks at me, her eyes tearful yet sparkling with pride, 'America,' she says.

'Oh, come on,' I bet you’re thinking. That’s a little melodramatic. Well, yeah, guy, of course. That’s what it’s all about these days – melodrama – the simple conflict between good and evil, emotionally exaggerated, excessively sentimental, and implausibly sensational, and with a happy ending to boot. However, I think there is another side to melodrama, the melodrama not of television soaps or airport novels but of ‘literature,’ of ‘politics,’ and I think it is more of an American trait than a British one. Do you want to know what I think melodrama is? Well, it is being frank; being honest. Telling it like it is, no matter how mawkish, how violent, and how black and white. It is like this, mate. Yes or no. I am telling this story. In melodrama, personal horror illuminates government obfuscation. State violence is seen for what it is only when it touches the individual. It is the metaphoric link between the melodramatic and the politic that America does so well yet, inevitably, gets so wrong. It is the Iraqis, hooded, naked, tortured, and sexually abused by our American milk-and-cookies next-door neighbours at Abu Ghraib, who have become the oppressed heroes of this melodrama. America, by fault, has turned itself from the hero into the moustache-twiddling evil landlord it set out to confront and overcome. The invasion of Iraq has turned into pure Gothic melodrama. Iraq, like so many airport novels, is thick with plot, yet has very little in the way of characterization. Good/Evil. Right/Wrong. USA/The World. Melodrama and the future of the American nation are ‘dramas and contrivances of God's providence’ – Sharp – but only as America would have us believe.

Let us look back at my first paragraph. The prostitute/dancer (America) dances on a chair under a bare light (the media) watched by men in raincoats (the rest of the world), they masturbate (leisure/stimulation, consumer society/simulation), and then begin to abuse the dancer (guilt/truth). This is not how I think of America. I think this is how America thinks of America. If America lost its cherry in Vietnam, America is now selling itself on the street. America is wearing cheap make-up, America’s pantyhose have runs, and there are sweat stains under the arms of America’s red, white, and blue sequined top. The cars are driving by and no-one's stopping. No one is buying, babe. No one wants to spare his or her dollars.

In American politics, in American wars, in American literature, in American song, there is an insistence on the extravagance of emotion. That is why the (old) world has a problematic relationship with America. America puts itself out there in the open, for all to see, for all to admire, for all to masturbate over and the result of this is envy, then guilt, then embarrassment, and then piss-boiling hilarity that we ever took America seriously in the first place. Yet America continues to seduce us with its youth, its exuberance, and its give-it-a-go attitude; and in the face of this, the old world smiles, pays it lip and hip service and remains old, laconic, and reticent. I mean, check out that semi-colon.

Whatever America does, whatever way America does it, will be good for America, will feel good in the short term. America is still mapping out its A-Zs, its mandalas, constructing its horoscopes, and Britain has folded its once pink-stained map back into its tweed jacket pocket and is ready to make America the navigator of the future. Trouble is, America doesn’t know where it’s going, and we are bloody following. But that's what the British enjoy about America – we like watching you fail. We want to laugh at your naïveté while admiring your spunk (as they say). “Westward the course of empire takes its way; the four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time's noblest offspring is the last” (– Berkeley).

We will join in, if given the chance. We will copy your food, your clothes, your music, and your art. We will copy your literature. The ‘maximalist’ novels of Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith are called ‘post-colonial’ but aren't they ‘new-empire’? Aren’t Smith, Rushdie, and even Martin Amis, novelists of the new sound and glory, the fame and fury that are American by nature? We have our stand-ins in literature. But forget culture (as a lot of Brits think that’s just what you have done), we are also your stand-ins in the “drama of war” (– Thackeray).

Is that how it is? Is it “meladrama” (melas = black) rather than melodrama? Is America heading for darkness? Is darkness already here? Has America reached that point? Where pastoral dreams have turned into urban nightmares – see Milton. From the forests of New England to the streets of Baghdad; from dumping tea in Boston Harbor to clamping electrodes on Iraqi gonads. Is terror a universal response to impotency? Is torture a universal prerequisite of power?

I have lived in London and I have lived in New York. I find the differences between people I know in these cities minimal. But from this side of the pond, America seems to be enacting some sort of psychological revenge on the world, as if guilt for its past and its parents' past is bubbling up inside. Watching America from this side of the pond is like spying through a keyhole on a therapy session. Watching America from this side of the pond is like watching Oprah or Jerry 24/7. America wants a happy ending, not just to the Iraq situation, but every day, every hour, every minute, no matter how artificial. Under melodrama – see sentimentality, see burlesque, see farce.

And how do I see America? I could argue that the British are a calmer people (mellowdramatic?) – phlegmatic rather than phlogistic. Just look at the difference between the criticism of James Wood and that of Dale Peck.

Again, I ask, how do I see America? Me, personally? What is my angle? Where am I coming from? Do I have another vision, one that differs from the melodramatic? Why, yes. It goes like this. I'm looking through the biggest telescope in the world and it is looking through the second biggest telescope in the world and it is looking through the third biggest telescope in the world and so on, and through this mechanical snake-like magnifying contraption thingamajig, I can see a world very similar to our own, and it is pivoted so I can make out an outline of a continent that resembles North America, and on that continent is a country that looks like the USA, and that country is all lit up in neon lights, and, as I adjust the telescope apertures, I can see that the millions of neon lights are in fact cloned and shining Marilyn Monroe-shaped Tinkerbells waving their tiny wands in my direction. Trouble is, from where I’m standing, those wands look like guns.

Pond Scum Re-visited...

2011-07-11T19:01:00.001+01:00

In response to Simon Crump's Facebook quip about Gordon Brown and the eternal demise of the Stodola's Me Three, I thought I'd post some old Pond Scum columns. Here's one from 2005 about the UK general election...

Never Mind the Ballots

George (Jihad) Galloway – the man who once said of Saddam Hussein, ‘Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability’ – is now Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow in east London. He ousted the incumbent Labour Party MP Oona King by just 823 votes. The party he belongs to is the RESPECT party, an alliance between the Muslim Association of Britain and the Socialist Workers Party. RESPECT is an acronym/backronym for respect, equality, socialism, peace, environment, community, trade unionism; strange, because in my book that would be RESPECTU, which sounds like a character from Pokemon. But I really don’t want to quibble with a man who revels in the nickname ‘Gorgeous George,’ calls himself a Stalinist but cannot live on less than £150,000 a year, is anti abortion, and pro capital punishment. RESPECT: reactionary, extremist, Stalinist, pro-life, evil, c***, Taliban – just a little bit.

While watching the election, every time they spoke of ‘the count’ I was waiting for Michael Howard to appear in black satin cape and fangs; and now he’s resigned – he’s too old, apparently, to lead the Conservatives into the next general election. But who will be the leader? Oily Letwin? Surely not. Bore-ish Johnson? You’re having a laugh. Theresa May? Theresa may not. No one stands out. There’s no obvious candidate to counter the smooth professionalism of Labour.

The Liberal Democrats won 62 seats, up ten from the last election in 2001. I believe if they had a more charismatic leader, and their issues weren’t so beige, that they could form a serious threat to Labour. Having grown up (yes, I have) under Margaret Thatcher… Oh, oh, an aside… And this fits in neatly with the title. OK. Let’s start with punk. People still believe that punk was a reaction to Thatcher’s Britain. Well, it wasn’t. Thatcher was in power from 1979-1990. If anything was a reaction to Thatcher’s Britain, it was the New Romantic movement – look at the similarity in hairstyles – Nick Rhodes was a more feminine Margaret Thatcher. British punk was a reaction to the economic difficulties of the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. And, while I’m at it, there were only four proper British punk bands – Sex Pistols, The Clash, Subway Sect, and the Buzzcocks. Not The Damned – art school Goth; not The Stranglers – pub rock tosh; and don’t get me started on The Jam – soul-boy tossers. But it didn’t last long –1976-1977; by the end of 1977, it was moribund and Johnny Rotten nailed it with his, ‘Have you ever had the feeling you’ve been conned’ line. And, yes, we have been conned by Tony Blair and it will be a shock if he (mis)leads the country for the full term of the next Labour Government.

Tony Blair (Labour) stood against 14 different candidates: Conservative, Liberal Democrat, UK Independence Party, National Front, Veritas, Blair Must Go Party, Senior Citizens, The Pensioners Party – I reckon these old-age pensioners formed the Senior Citizens Party and then forgot they had done so and then formed the Pensioners Party – five separate Independent candidates, including Reg Keys whose son was one of six soldiers killed by an Iraqi mob in Majar al-Kabir in June 2003, and I must mention Boney Maroney Staniforth who was candidate for the Monster Raving Loony Party.

You should’ve seen the look on Tony’s face, standing on the rostrum waiting for the receiving officer – the person who reads out the results of the voting and is an assistant to the acting receiving officer. Go figure. Tony looked less than presidential. There was no need for nerves, he had a huge majority, but you felt he didn’t want to be mixing it with these people. It was great. He was twitchy, sweaty, running a finger inside the neck of his shirt; he looked – in London parlance – like a well-dodgy geezer.

Tony looked shifty and worried but he knew he would be back in 10 Downing Street this morning. Labour didn’t really hang on by the dermis of their dentures, but they are no longer the apis’s genua in the eyes of the British public. But they will be again, once Tony stands down. When will that be? I reckon two years. Then Gordon Brown, every time just like the last, on our ship tied to the mast, will take over.

A few women I know have erotic dreams about Tony Blair. (I know one who has erotic dreams about the leader of the Veritas party, Robert Kilroy-Silk. I dunno why but the name Kilroy-Silk reminds me of handkerchiefs.) According to these women, all sane, intelligent people, Tony’s a considerate dream lover, a veritable stud of the unconscious, an immitigable incubus; these women wake breathless, panting, and panty-less, gasping for more, crying out his name. It is said that Prince Charles thought Princess Diana called out Tony’s name in the night, but it was just another fit of bulimia – ‘Blair! Blair! Blair!’ Tony, the bronzed somnirapist, steals their hearts, their diaphragms; he’s insatiable, constantly on the hunt for a bit of bush – so to speak. I wonder if these women will dream about Gordon Brown texture like sun, lays me down with my mind he runs, throughout the night, no need to fight. I doubt it; not unless the reason he keeps dropping his jaw is to control that anaconda-long tongue he’s rumoured to have.

Did the election result shock me? Not really. Not as a much as I was spook-surprised by the result of the 2004 American presidential election. Will it change my day-to-day life? No, I don’t expect so, not as much as it did when Labour defeated the Conservatives in 1997, when all of a sudden the monochrome world of the Tories turned Day-Glo under Labour. What about the war, Steve? How could you vote for Tony after all the porkies he told? I didn’t vote for Tony – I voted for Labour and a world in which… Hold on, I’ll get the election leaflet… a world in which we can get free assorted steamed dumplings and a litre-and-a-half bottle of diet Coke if we spend over £15, plus free delivery… Shit...

From Hokkaido to Hackney...

2011-07-03T17:34:00.002+01:00

Victoria Park, ringed by pubs - the Royal Inn on the Park scene of ex-Krays' associate & Richardsons' enforcer Jimmy Moody's gangland assassination back in 1993 - pushes north in East London up to the black hole that is the Olympic Stadium site. The River Lea, measled with weed on its graffiti-reflecting surfaces, swans nesting on the banks amid takeaway cardboard coffee cups and black, red & gold cans of Polish lager, slugs its way south to Limehouse. Broadway Market where black-pudding scotch eggs vie with eel pie & mash & stinking bishop cheese for the salivary attention of passing hipsters & bicycle messengers. Mare Street lined with dodgy mobile-phone retailers, closed-down bookstores, shops that sell anything from Japanese anime to replica blunderbusses. I grew up in West London. I've lived in South London - Battersea. North London - Bounds Green, Highgate, Primrose Hill. I've lived and worked in Central London - King's Cross, Soho. Now I've gone East. To Eden? The sixteenth-century philosopher Giordano Bruno said, 'I can imagine an infinite number of worlds like the Earth, with a Garden of Eden on each one. In all these Gardens of Eden, half the Adams and Eves will not eat the fruit of knowledge, and half will. But half of infinity is infinity, so an infinite number of worlds will fall from grace and there will be an infinite number of crucifixions.' — On the Cause, Principle, and Unity, 5th dialogue. I can see where he's coming from... Reading Iain Sinclair's Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk.

Wunderkammer, rejectamenta, found objects, & abandoned buildings

2011-06-18T12:05:00.003+01:00

I like finding things - objects that shouldn't be where they are - the strange plastic keyring of a tortured Freddie Mercury, the Gundam mecha in a don't-fuck-with-me stance, the bone-handled knife that someone then stole from me. Below are links - there are many more - to sites dealing with rejects, found objects, abandoned buildings, things of curiosity & chance.

rejectamentalist manifesto

how to be a retronaut

th e hauntological society

object-oriented philosophy

& nick land's academic breakdown

Book Report - May 2011

2011-06-05T15:40:00.003+01:00

I'm still finding it difficult to get excited about new fiction. The writers I'm enjoying are the ones I've enjoyed before. Maybe I'm becoming conservative in my reading habits, maybe there aren't that many good 'new' writers out there. New(ish) fiction writers I like - Lee Rourke, Ben Myers, Brett Butler, Joshua Cohen, Wells Tower... Hmm... Books I want to read that don't exist: a history of British subcultures by a mutant Roland Barthes / Simon Crump / David Peace, a walking guide to an invisible city by Iain Sinclair / Stewart Home / Stephen Barber, the best bars in the world - a ten-year odyssey by me. Come on, publishing industry, gimme an advance. I've nearly finished the book on necrophilia - the research has been depressing, shocking, funny, & sad. I'm re-reading Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho as research & this afternoon watched Brian De Palma's Body Double - a truly bad film that I think I used to like. At least taste changes - imagine being stuck liking the things you did when you were 15 years old - hold on, I still like the Clash & the Sex Pistols - I'll shut it, zip it, put a sock in it. Hush, quit, still my raging mouth. Here's a book blog I should have linked to earlier - This Space. Not much else happening. Finishing paper on The Wire for London University conference at the end of June, which, at the moment has bells & whistles & the Clash & Deleuze & Airplane & sheeit. Image - Miwa Yanagi.

Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir Trilogy (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, German Requiem): Kerr's an amazing writer, he moves from genre to genre with ease & never allows his writing to go slack. This trilogy is tightly plotted, great characters, the history is well researched, & WWII Germany eerily relived. I recommend this & Kerr's brilliant Philosophical Investigation & fun Esau.

Anne McKnight - Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity: Japan Times review here.

China Mieville - Embassytown: He does it again. Mieville's world building is second to none. After the existentialist Borgesian noir of The City & The City, & the Moorcockean cerebrocephalotheotica of Kraken, Mieville (sorry, the diacritic over the e messes up) moves into linguistic overdrive with a tale of exotic/esoteric aliens, the immer, immersers, & questions what it is to be human, & how language works. Impressive.

Donald S Lopez - The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography: see forthcoming review in Kyoto Journal. Quick thought in the meantime - why do a lot of translators have initials in their name?

Vladimir Sorokin - Ice Trilogy (Bro, Ice, 23,000): To quote a friend of mine, this book is 'mad as cheese' - part Russian folktale, part thriller, part sci-fi, part new-age bollocks, this had me enthralled, maddened, & so bored I felt like dipping into my old Anglo-Saxon textbooks for some laughs. But its sheer madness &, I suppose, freshness, kept me at it. Not a holiday read - unless you're stranded in Siberia.

Thomas Glavinic - Night Work: Good stuff. If you like Ballard, Matheson, Bradbury mixed in with some Bernhard, Handke, Blanchot. Jonas wakes up to find that every person in Vienna has disappeared; as he investigates, he realizes he is the only living animal on the entire planet - or is he? Hair-raising exposition of loneliness, slowness, decision-making, & madness. Highly recommended.

Michael Moorcock - Mother London: A re-read - one of the best novels about London, a love story to the city, its inhabitants, its history - the centrepiece chapters about an unexploded bomb will set your spine fizzing with anticipation & dread & your mind cavorting with admiration & jealousy. Ackroyd, Sinclair, Home, & Moorcock - London is lucky in her scribes.

It's beween destinations that fresh adventures occur...

2011-05-29T13:06:00.000+01:00

I wake up. My first mistake. My mouth tastes like…Then I think, 'Do things taste or does your tongue translate chemicals into flavours?' Sour – my memory. Sweet – fuck all. Bitter – like Chernobyl raindrops. Salt – of the earth. Umami – how I love ya, how I love ya... Then I try not to think. Concentrate. My mouth tastes like someone's filled it with puke, soaked it up with cat litter, washed down the swollen gravel with two-week-old vindaloo, and then rinsed it out with sour and chunky milk. My name is Slavoj Datapanic. Da – as in damn, ta – as in Taliban, pan as in the goatfucker, ic – as in if you have one, I’ll scratch it for you. Slavoj – like saveloy but strangled by a drunken and toothless grandmother. Like a Cockney chip-shop barker shouting the odds in reverse. The ids. If I can stand, pull on a pair of trousers, button a shirt, slip my socks into my beat-up Converse, I’ll say I'm on the run. At the moment, I’m on the bed and, with the nauseous throb of a thought, I realize I've no idea whose. I sniff the sheet - yeasty with a hint of cheap perfume. Easing myself onto my elbow, I look at the pillow – the centre stained a darker white – sweat and hair gel. My beard crackles when I scratch it. Reaching down into my underpants, I hope my cock and balls don’t do the same. Electricals. I swing my legs around, sit up. My head pulses as if programmed by a ragga-jungle sequencer locked on a full-volume bad-trip loop. Fuck this for a game of soldiers.

Image: Francis Bacon - Head 1.

Smithereens

2011-05-21T14:58:00.002+01:00

I've always liked this word - perhaps from Irish smidiríní (small fragments), first-known use 1829... So, ninety years later, one might have heard something along the lines of, 'Padraig, have you seen the Dúchrónaigh (Black & Tans), they've been blown to fecking smithereens...' Or not. It's also the name of a 1982 film directed by Susan Seidelman - Richard Hell's in it - about post-punk New York/New Jersey with a soundtrack by the Feelies and the Voidoids.

Fragmentation, deconstruction - it also occurs in Vladimir Sorokin's maddening, brilliant, & boring Ice Trilogy (Bro, Ice, 23,000). Part Houellebecq, Dick, Russian folk-tale, & new-age bollocks, I find myself wanting to burn the bloody thing & then hooked on it... Animals that live in water would not notice that the things which touch one another in water have wet surfaces. I have the same theories about sex (not condoms, though). There is the most important difference of all between real & intentional objects. Real objects are sliced apart into private, mutually exclusive vacuums, with none of them ever touching their neighbours. Or elbow, twisted : fractured ; flute rolling on ground ; shepherd, grabbing rein in free hand, standing, moaning, spittle running pink between lips... Denotation as detonation, explication as explosion, datapanic in the year 2011. The beam of a torch flashes through our self-generated gloom.

The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?

2011-05-12T15:18:00.000+01:00

A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and countercurrent, of back-wash with other flows - the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other - two flows in what relationship?

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.

The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.

If you're trapped in the dream of the other, you're fucked.

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

Words from Gilles Deleuze. Image via 50 Watts.

Book Report - April 2011

2011-05-08T15:29:00.003+01:00

David Simon & Ed Burns - The Corner: Relentlessly depressing, powerfully written, meticulously researched non-fiction about Baltimore's drug corners - inspiration for television series The Wire & The Corner. Stunning representation of urban life. Scene from the book rewritten by Richard Price.

Niall Griffiths - Ten Pound Pom: Review on Bookmunch.

David Shields - Reality Hunger: It reads better than it lives. He made the fatal error, he came clean with her. This could just have easily been my place, a home where a man could drink in boredom and repent in violence and be forgiven for the price of a beer. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay." So there we are and there I was. I only knew her three days and two nights yet it took off like a fully developed relationship. She was blaming me for stuff that had nothing to do with me. Riotous Assembly. In prose fiction I saw the distinction between dialogue and narrative as a summation of the political system; it was simply another method of exclusion, of marginalising and disenfranchising different people, cultures and communities…

Patti Smith - Just Kids: Bookmunch review here.

Gordon Burn - Happy Like Murderers: If you want transgressive - forget Dennis Cooper, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Pierre Guyotat - think Gordon Burn on Fred & Rosemary West.

Keigo Higashino - The Devotion of Suspect X - review coming soon Japan Times.

Renzo Piano - Shard of Glass

2011-05-06T15:38:00.005+01:00

Buildings have been man’s companions since primeval times. Many art forms have developed and perished. Tragedy begins with the Greeks, is extinguished with them, and after centuries its “rules” only are revived. The epic poem, which had its origin in the youth of nations, expires in Europe at the end of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees its uninterrupted existence. But the human need for shelter is lasting. Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception – or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation. Walter Benjamin.

Seen from Platform 2 of London Bridge Station by Rob Telford.

Is she weird, is she white, is she promised to the night...

2011-05-06T15:26:00.000+01:00

Morphological Mutations

2011-05-03T15:06:00.012+01:00

Glass Hombre - once Seppuku My Heart - will become Daytime Insomniac very soon. The same url but metamorphosing into a more visual, quote-heavy blog, with the occasional analysis, book review - so more videos & pics, more posts & links, more music & stuff. The title comes from Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster - 'The writer, daytime insomniac.' Please be patient during the transition - things may not appear exactly as they seem, do not adjust your computer screens, please turn out the lights as you leave the building, & replace the air in the inflatable with the foot pump provided. It invades but only for seconds, unleashing its information through the medium of light, the ears perverted by desiring organs, the mouth despotic in its neediness, the nose assailed by the gas chamber sickness of freedom. Bombarded. Castigated. Exhausted. The spasm of larvae. The seismic expression. The connective tissue. The incommensurable distance between me & I. Image - Mikko Kuorinki.

Considering the End

2011-04-22T14:12:00.005+01:00

Glass Hombre is three & a half years old. I don't usually look at blogger statistics but I did the other day & it's obvious that nobody reads the bloody thing any more. So, why bother continuing? I'm not surprised. To be honest, I don't read that many blogs, maybe M. John Harrison, k-punk, China Miéville, Stoya. I would read Dennis Cooper's blog more often but it always crashes my Safari. Are the days of blogging over? I'm not talking about websites - I'm thinking blogs, things that people update, keep new, what used to be ejournals, ediaries. Many people use Facebook for similar reasons, methods, information. Tumblr's great visually. Twitter's OK once you get into it. My cat's blog gets more visitors than mine & from all over the world - my views are from UK, USA, Australia, & Japan - I've had none from South Africa in last few months & I'm supposed to have friends there. I know book publishing is going through a slow revolution, but the internet also seems to be changing - more corporate, ad driven, legislative & litigious. I'm very interested in where epublishing is heading, what it means to authors, publishers, what it means to readers. I just tried to read 'Covehithe' by China Miéville online but it's 22:30 here & I've been staring at the screen all day & my eyes are like pepper-sprayed assholes. But I will get into bed and read a book... Hmm.... Anyway... Glass Hombre is outta here in the very near future... Thanks for reading. Image: Palle Neilsen, 'Running Away', from Orfeus og Eurydike, 1959 via But Does It Float..

Book Report - March 2011

2011-04-06T13:52:00.006+01:00

Martin Amis said this week in the Guardian that "very literate people admit they can't read books any more. And just as the literate brain is physically different to the illiterate brain, the digitally savvy brain is different again. It's a physiological change, not just a moral one." & he's right... Who has the time to read books these days? Where do we read books? Where is the space for reading? Where is the time? I squeeze mine in (reading that is) in the bath, in bed, on the sofa between writing & playing on the Wii, propped up against the draining board while cooking... Anywhere really... But it's a constant battle to find the time the space the energy... the book... but here are some I read in March...

Geoff Dyer - Out of Sheer Rage: A clever (in a good way) & funny investigation into the art of not writing a biography of the ginger-bearded wonder.

Ken Bruen & Jason Starr - Slide: The second in the Max & Angela noir-fest... lots of violence, sex, drugs, in-jokes, & music.

Keizo Hino - Isle of Dreams: If you like JG Ballard, you'll love this - Japan Times review.

Tim Binding - The Champion: Oh, dear... Bookmunch review.

Philip Roth - The Humbling: I enjoyed it, John Crace obviously didn't.

Dennis Lehane - Moonlight Mile: Bookmunch review.

Ryu Murakami - Popular Hits of the Showa Era: Great fun from the more edgy of the Murakamis. Japan Times review pending.

Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl: Smart, throbbing with ideas, gets a little over excited with itself in parts but set in a near-future Bangkok with a humanoid Japanese girl & cyberpunk Graham Greene characters it can't be all bad... Comparisons to Gibson, Dick, & Mieville are lazy & a tad premature, but looking forward to reading more from Mr Batshitgoloopey...

AJA Symons - The Quest for Corvo: A stunning 'experiment in biography' in which Symons attempts to piece together the fascinating life of Fr. Rolfe - failed priest, self-destructive writer, artist, & cadger extraordinaire.

TC Boyle - When the Killing's Done: S'OK... I skipped Boyle's The Women, wasn't interested, this just about held my attention but seemed formulaic.

Reading should be about enjoyment & learning, whatever the percentage, not something we try to fit in between other events. Drag yourself away from the screen(s), pick up one of those musty paper things hanging around on the bookshelves taking up too much room... I remember falling asleep in the bath and dropping Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. When I woke up, I saw it just beneath the surface - like a mine or clump of seaweed - the size of Stephen King's The Stand. Imagine dropping your Kindle or iPad in the bath... Pfft! Ssszzzpppprrrttt! Fut!

Photo: Ryoichi Yoshida.

Some Finbow Japanese Medical Records

2011-03-30T15:04:00.004+01:00

Note from Dr X, Internal Medicine, Chitose City Hospital, Hokkaido, Japan:

You became hospitalization with coma by diabetic ketoacidosis on December 19 & the blood glucose level of on admission was 973mg/dl(54mmol/l) HbA1c 10% & accompanied acute renal failure by dehydration, pancreatitis & bacterial gastroenteritis more. We treated you in fluid replacement by isotonic sodium chloride solution & continuous intravenous infusion of insulin. Furthermore, we treated you with antimicrobial drug for bacterial gastroenteritis & gebaxate mesilate for pancreatitis. It accompanied paralytic ileus in the evening of December 19 & added a treatment by pantosin. Hepatic disorder to seem to be dehydration & influence of drug use on December 20 developed & added a treatment by glycyrrhizin pharmaceutical more. It passes smoothly afterwards & cancels fluid replacement & continuous intravenous infusion of insulin from December 24 & treats you in the insulin which you brought with you. From quantity of your meal of the present, glycemic control is done by a treatment of 16 insulin dynasty & 16 evening units. Adaptation of quantity of insulin is necessary in future when quantity of meal increases. Your insulin secretional capacity dries up when you evaluate 24 hours urine C-peptid, &, in that case, you must hit insulin three times or four times. You become a plan of a hospital visit on next time January 12 & I look forwards to coming to this hospital & wait for you.

Note from Dr Z in the Department of Gastroenterology, Chitose City Hospital, Hokkaido, Japan.

Diabetuc ketosis, coma. Hypovolemic shock. Acute pancreatitis. Paralytic ileus. He has felt nauseous & thrown up since Dec. 16. At about 22:30 Dec 18. He suddenly fainted in his room, & was rushed to the emergency care unit of this hospital by ambulance. He was in a coma, & in a state of shock (his blood pressure was 60/-). In the blood examination, his blood sugar was 870 mg/dl, & hyperamylasemia & renal dysfunction was also shown. In the X-ray of abdomen, ileus was seen. We diagnosed his illness as diabetic ketosis, coma, hypovolemic shock, acute pancreatitis, & paralytic ileus. He went into the intensive care unit. Isotonic sodium chloride solution & insulin was done intravenously to revise dehydration & hyperglycemia. Gebexate mesilate etc. was used for acute pancreatitis, & panthenol was prescribed for ileus. On Dec. 20 he recovered consciousness. His blood sugar level was under control by insulin injection. Acute pancreatitis & ileus was also cured. He started eating food on Dec. 22.

Image from Morbid Anatomy...

See You Later, Allen Ginsberg...

2011-03-22T13:28:00.006Z

I'm nearly done. Three more chapters & the endpiece to proof, then it's off to two people I trust to give me their honest opinions & thoughts. Need to get permissions & photographs sorted & then send to my editor. It's been a strange experience. How does one decide - in a life that spanned 70 years - what to keep in, what to leave out? Allen became so famous that things everyone thinks he did, he didn't, he wasn't there. & how does one approach a life, deal with the 'facts', detail a person's thoughts & emotions? One can take the Joseph Frank route - five chronological mega-biographies of Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Leon Edel's equally exhaustive life of Henry James; but one can also go the Geoff Dyer, Nicholson Baker, A.J.A Symons way & write meta-biographies of D.H. Lawrence, John Updike, & Frederik Rolfe. My favourite biographies fall somewhere between - Geoffery Wolff's Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby - great title, Ruediger Safranski's Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, & the magnificent James Joyce by Richard Elmann. I'll miss it. I'll miss being with Allen every day. I won't miss certain things - I'll hint at one - NC.

"No matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down" - Guillermo Cabrera Infante... Nuff said. Photo - Hart Crane - check out Paul Mariani's fantastic biography of Crane - The Broken Tower.

Constructivisthmus

2011-03-10T12:57:00.005Z

I've gone all Constructivist design over at Indifferent Multiplicities - go take a look. A few people have been changing their blogs or switching to Tumblr. One of my favourites - A Journey Around My Skull - is now 50watt.com. Just as good, different, easier to navigate page - visit if you like book covers & book design. Other places I've been looking at late in the evening when it's just me, a bottle of red wine, & iTunes - currently playing Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds 'Curse of Millhaven' - A Piece of Monologue for all your serious literature & philosophy needs; Ballardian for all things, well, Ballardian; k-punk for everything Capitalist Realism (not updated for a while but worth a look); Morbid Anatomy for when you can't get enough dead bodies; Object-Oriented Philosophy for what it says on the tin; Reality Studio for extensive info on William S. Burroughs - if only all author websites were this good; Stoya for an intelligent & alternative take on the porn industry from an insider (I'll pass on the puns this time). Gorillaz - 'Superfast Jellyfish'. In the next few days, a Kindle edition of my long short story / novelette Circus Circus will be available via Amazon and Amazon UK (not sure of price but I'll link to it). An early version of a sample chapter is available here on Thieves Jargon. Beach House - 'Zebra' .

Book Report - February 2011

2011-03-02T13:18:00.005Z

What news? The Ginsberg crit-bio nearly done, final draft, proof, then attach & press send. Will be weird living without it. But then I'm on to The Wire, Homicide, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, Dennis Lehane & the shifting perspectives of narrative & dialogue in the translation from prose to screen & back. & then I have to get first draft of necrophilia book finished for end of September. Oh, oh, & novel finished for the summer. Plus all those book reviews I still owe Pete Wild. Any wonder I have time to read for pleasure, but I do. This month mostly re-reads & non-fiction. Good novels in short supply here; well, their availability plus the fact that I haven't seen anything reviewed that catches my eye, tickles my fancy (that idiom always brings to mind Coleridge dressed as a chicken for some reason)... Right... Onward...

Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed: Liked. Interesting premise that a man is addicted to walking, has an unbearable compunction to walk - it breaks him, breaks his marriage, breaks him mentally & physically. Disturbing, well written, superbly paced.

David Foster Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: A re-read (rr), some great essays, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" & "Greatly Exaggerated" must reads for anyone interested in contemporary fiction and criticism.

WG Sebald - Austerlitz: (rr) Beautiful, haunting - you know, all those cliches, but Sebald does something with the novel form that (& I could be wrong) stretches it but in a caring way - not abusive like a Burroughs or a Sukenick - more lovingly like Perec & Calvino. Reading it feels like you're slowly slipping a tea cosy over your favourite balloon to keep it warm, safe, & vibratingly pink... But these are memories of mass transport, the holocaust, alienation... Thanks to Anonymous for sending me this link to a very good Sebald website...

Tom McCarthy - (rr) Tintin and the Secret of Literature: Mind & genre-bending piece of intellectual rigorous pleasure from Mr McCarthy - tongue either wedged firmly in cheek or protruding outward & waggling at all those grey-beige-taupe theorists... What fun!

Cormac McCarthy - Outer Dark: (rr) An incestual dual road trip & chase, deep woods, dark subject matter...

Kanoko Okamoto - A Riot of Goldfish: See review in Japan Times - coming soon.

Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast: (rr) Papa's memoirs of the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s... Boxing with Ezra Pound, drinking with Fitzgerald, falling out with Gertrude Stein - some scathing portraits of Wyndham Lewis & Ford Maddox Ford - & a certain page or two - I would argue - inspired Joe Brainard's I Remember & George Perec's Je me souviens.

Geoff Dyer - The Ongoing Moment: I know nothing about photography but I know a little more after reading this interesting, entertaining introduction to (mostly American) photography - I now have a great respect for Edward Weston, Robert Frank, & Garry Winogrand (see image above).

Nicholson Baker - U and I: Baker's funny, cringe-worthy, armpit-scorching, hugely egotistical - with great gobs of humility - onanistic study of Updike.

DH Lawrence - Studies in Classic American Literature: I prefer Lawrence's non-fiction to his fiction. I prefer the travel pieces, letters, & criticism - this study of Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne etc., is stream of bonkersness for a better word. Mad & brilliant... Exhilarating & silly... My head ached because I shook it so much in plain unbelievability... What criticism should be - writing from the blood & plasma not the Liquor cerebrospinalis. Here's a link to my favourite Lawrence short story - 'The Man Who Died' (or 'The Escaped Cock').

That's it. Need to read some new novels (as in recently published - paperback preferably)... Any recommendations?

Every day, I get up and pray to Jah and he decreases the number of clocks by exactly one...

2011-02-19T14:40:00.003Z

I love this photograph. It's by Steve Schapiro who took some iconic photos of Ali, Warhol, Baldwin, Beckett, Ginsberg, & created movie stills & posters for Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy, & The Godfather. But no Wiki page... Odd... The photograph would make a fantastic book cover & looks like the opening or closing scene of an existential thriller - Three Men in New York, 1961.

I found the image in Geoff Dyer's excellent book on photography The Ongoing Moment. Geoff Dyer does have a Wiki page but it's not very good.

In my last post, I bemoaned the lack of a decent W.G. Sebald website but 'Anonymous' kindly sent me a link to an Anglo/German site which looks good to me...

Itching to read Bruce Chatwin's letters, Elmore Leonard's Djibouti, & all the books that are in a box somewhere between London & Hokkaido... hopefully in the air & not a yak cart... Cheers...

Noir Renoir Peignoir - Or, Isn't Life A Bitch?

2011-02-09T13:43:00.005Z

I always say I'm not going to & always do it anyway...

So, in the latest Beat the Dust - the crime/noir edition - you'll find dark doings, cerebral seances, & a fromagey homage from yours not-so truly... Stella(r) work from Cathi Unsworth, Gary McMahon, Sarah Pinborough, Matthew Stokoe, Alan Kelly, Jonathan Woods, Mark SaFranko, Gary Carson, Kim Elliott, D Otis Wesselmann (aka Otis Twelve), & Seamus Scanlon (aka James M McGowan)... Sorted, assaulted, & er...

Been re-reading W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz - stunning, beautiful, mesmeric, poignant... Why isn't there a dedicated website to this man's work & life? Huh? This is the best I can find with an interesting link to a Patti Smith reading list...

Metabiography - that's what I've been working on...

& I've been reading Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel (no, not where Princess Di crashed) but a study of 'the Science of the Mind & the Myth of the Self'... & he states 'A much more recent phenomenon emerged only a couple of thousand years ago—the conscious formation of theories in the minds of human philosophers and scientists. Thus the life process became reflected not only in conscious individual organisms but also in groups of human beings trying to understand the emergence of self-conscious minds as such—that is, what it means that something can "appear within itself."' Yet, no mention of Julian Jaynes' groundbreaking The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind first published in 1976.

I'd say I will never do it again, but I know you know I will...

Image from the amazing Owen Freeman who designed these superb William S. Burroughs' book covers...

Book Report - January 2011

2011-02-02T14:22:00.002Z

Just a quickie, cos I'm getting on & need all the time I have to complete certain tasks... So, only a few links, a list, & observations...

Jo Nesbø - The Leopard: Bookmunch full report...

John Lanchester - Whoops! If you want to know what happened to all our money, this'll make you cry & laugh...

Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas: My first Banks Culture novel... thoroughly enjoyed...

Don DeLillo - Point Omega: A chilling return to form...

Peter Conners - White Hand Society: A refreshing take on the Ginsberg/Leary nexus, cuts through the bullshit & (self)-mythologizing...

David Shields - The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead: Interesting take on autobiography/memoir, reflections on aging, death, father/son relationships, fleetingly funny...

Stuart Neville - Twelve: A re-read... v.good... check out the sequel... Collusion...

Cormac McCarthy - Child of God: necrophilia-gothic-noir...

Charles Nicholl - Somebody Else: My favourite Rimbaud biography, focusing on his years in Africa and Arabia...

David Lipsky - Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: Interesting for DFW's train of thought, his leaps of imagination & intellect, the way he speaks... I'll keep schtum about DL...

David Shields - Enough About You: Bit annoyed as at least a fifth of this is in the one above... Grrr! Great title... along with The Replacements 'Pleased to Meet Me'...

That's it for now & for a few months...

December 2010 Book Report - Late Or What?

2011-01-19T07:19:00.009Z

Been busy - getting my head around the Ginsberg rewrite, gearing up for a landmark birthday - half depressed / half excited, applying for grants (fruitlessly so far), co-ordinating papers for later in year, & listening to some new(ish) music - Against Me!, The Black Keys, Animal Collective, The Walkmen, Superchunk, Wavves, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Beach House, The Gaslight Anthem, Best Coast, The Black Angels, Deerhunter, MGMT, Avi Buffalo, Neutral Milk Hotel, Pulled Apart By Horses, & various others. I think if I formed a band today, I'd call it Black Beach or the Haunted Coast or Radical Cheese Motel. I am very excited that there will be a fifth & final volume of Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, aptly called At Last. Don't be put off by the upper-class, public-schoolboy anti-hero - the books are honest, caustic, & extremely funny. I love this quote from Some Hope: "Scanning the shelves, his eye fell on a volume called The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and next to it a second volume called More Journals of a Disappointed Man, and finally, by the same author, a third volume entitled Enjoying Life. How could a man who had made such a promising start to his career have ended up writing a book called Enjoying Life?" Brilliant - & there's a Martin Amis biography due out... at some point. Anyway, books I read in December 2010 with ten-word reviews & links...

William Goldman - Marathon Man: fast-paced literary driller-thriller, Nazi dentists & diamond smugglers.

Michael Robotham - The Night Ferry: post-Xmas embossed-cover thrillers - tense, international human-trafficking noir.

Kotaro Isaka - Remote Control: near-future conspiracy-paranoia fiction, hints of DeLillo & Dick.

Nicholson Baker - The Anthologist: return to form in fiction, a novel about poetry - quotable.

Jack O'Connell - The Resurrectionist: Gripping weird noir from one of the best - nightmare-inducing.

John Harvey - Gone to Ground: embossed-thriller II - tight plot & writing, great British crime.

David Foster Wallace - The Broom of the System: a re-read & nearly 25 years old - funny & shimmering.

Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: must read for anyone interested in contemporary politics & philosophy.

Brian Evenson - Aliens: No Exit: Evenson's take on the Alien franchise - brutal, fun, & poetic.

Peter Straub - Poe's Children: Not overly impressed by many of these "new horror" stories.

That's it. I have no idea who the image above is by - sorry...

Because I Have Nothing Better To Do Best of 2010 Books & Music...

2010-12-26T04:31:00.032Z

This is what I've been listening to and reading in 2010, not necessarily released or published this year.

Books ~ On first view, it looks like I've cut down on my reading - only 112 books this year (down 16 on last year), that's 3.25 per week, or one every 2.15 days - but then, I've not included any of the Ginsberg books I've been reading for research... It breaks down as 91 fiction, 19 non-fiction, and 2 books of poetry. I read books by authors from: Australia, Austria, Belgium, China, South Africa, Sweden, International - 1 each; Slovenia, Ireland 1.5; Norway 2; France 2.5; Russia 3; Canada 6; Japan 11; UK 27.5; USA 49. Most read authors: Douglas Coupland, Jon McGregor, Brian Evenson, Glen Duncan, Thomas Pynchon.

Best Fiction – Brian Evenson – Last Days, Tom McCarthy C, China Mieville - Kraken. Honourable mentions should go to Lee Rourke's The Canal, & Ben Myer's Richard - both of which I enjoyed.

Best Non-fiction – Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism: a short, must-read polemic on the state of the left, Bob Dylan - Chronicles: Volume 1, Stephen Greenblatt - Will in the World (that's how to write a biography).

Music ~ the year was bookended by the deaths of two of my music heroes - Alex Chilton & Don Van Vliet, plus the untimely deaths of Peter Christopherson & Ari Up, not to mention Malcolm McLaren... My top ten plays of 2010 were:

Thirteen - Big Star

Oh What a World - Rufus Wainwright

Return of Jackie & Judy - Tom Waits

Mannequin - Wire

Down at the Rock and Roll Club - Richard Hell & the Voidoids

Cars & Girls - Prefab Sprout

Zero - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

See You Later Allen Ginsberg - Bob Dylan (can't find a decent video of this, so here's Allen singing Old Pond from First Blues)

Zig Zag Wanderer - Captain Beefheart

Sometimes Always - The Jesus & Mary Chain

Thanks to the usual suspects for making the year a good one... Melissa Mann, Gary Hughes, Lola Brown, John Murphy, Lize Terblanche, Mike Brady, Olesya Mishechkina, Brendan O'Keeffe, Vince Wade, Brian Stubberfield, Paul Tinkler, Declan Shaughnessy, Kerrie Slavin, Lee Rourke, & good to meet & have lunch with Allan Guthrie... but most of all, thanks to V for everything. Oh, and the boy for being both funny & infuriating. & with that awful pun, I'll get my coat for 2010... see you all in 11. The image above represents my New Year wish for the UK...

There Was Goo...

2010-12-22T12:36:00.011Z

With V away in England - & it being f****** freezing in the apartment - at 8pm each evening, I've been ensconcing myself under the kotatsu (weird covered low-table heater thingamajig) watching movies with Kuma nestling between my knees. So what, I hear you say. But, the thing is, I never watch movies. So far I've seen The Bourne Identity, Inception, Children of Men, The Thing - including one of my favourite lines in film history: "I dunno what the hell's in there, but it's weird and pissed off", Videodrome, Inland Empire, Howl, Following (interesting but the main actor is awful), Werckmeister Harmonies, Mulholland Drive, & an anime series called Tokyo Magnitude 8. Inland Empire is Lynch's masterpiece, I would argue. Have you noticed that the colour of Lynch's interior walls is the same colour as the back of your eyelids? James Franco is uncanny as Allen in Howl, &, although there are a couple of anachronisms, I enjoyed it. I have Sin City, Naked Lunch, Dogville, & Crash (the Cronenburg/Ballard one) to watch over the next four nights & then I'll raid the UbuWeb film & video page. I'm reading Aliens: No Exit by BK (Brian) Evenson & thoroughly enjoying it... bit of mindless (but well written) fiction for the holiday period. I'll do a best of & most read / listened to etc., in 2010 next week.

On 22nd December I appeared on the The Strand - the BBC Word Service arts programme - to discuss Shuichi Yoshida's Villain - you can listen in here.

Image by eb.er.

Docx Bollocx - & Beat the Dust Antichristmas Issue

2010-12-13T12:32:00.012Z

Towards the end of a supremely smug Guardian article Edward Docx states 'So, if we are to save our excellence in this (the English language) from its slow extinction, then we simply have to find a way to bring the finest writers of the language more often to the attention of the carriages of people up and down the country who are evidently still willing and able to buy novels for the journey.' Earlier, he had bemoaned the fact that people were reading Stieg Larsson & Dan Brown novels on the train. Having read neither, I cannot argue against his prejudice but I can argue that genre writers (or writers who have flirted with genre) are among the best novelists working within the English language - Daniel Woodrell, M John Harrison, Jonathan Lethem, Jack O'Connell, Brian Evenson, Ken Bruen, James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, Peter Straub, Steve Erickson - & 'literary' writers who have written 'genre' novels, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Denis Johnson, Martin Amis, John Banville attest to the fact that genre writing is as literary as 'literary' fiction... & what about Slipstream novelists such as Scarlett Thomas...? I'd put crime writers John Harvey, Cathi Unsworth, David Peace, Allan Guthrie, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Eoin McNamee, & Stuart Neville in a room with any literary novelist & let them duke it out. &, who are these 'literary' novelists? Docx cites Franzen, Coetzee, Hollinghurst, Amis, Mantel, Proux, Ishiguro, Roth - at least three of whom have heavy-petted with the thriller &/or science-fiction format - & isn't Elmore Leonard one of Martin Amis's favourite writers? Who is Mr Docx to say what is & what is not good for the English language? What a plonker. We choose who we want to read, who gets us off with words... Is he really arguing that the English language has not been enriched by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, William S. Burroughs, Derek Raymond, JG Ballard... I could go on... but I'll stop before I give myself a brain hernia...

In other news - Melissa Mann's Beat the Dust's Antichristmas issue is here, with anti-stocking fillers from - Darran Anderson, Stuart Evers, Belinda Webb, Ford Dagenham, Simon Crump, Salena Godden, Catfish McDaris, Heidi James, Ashley Stokes, & a rare poem from me called 'I Do' - not, as many of my friends think, my answer every few years to a registrar in some London town hall - but my first poem in a decade or so & probably my last for the same amount of time - in fact, the next will probably be a self-requiem... pant-swelling violins... rampant tuba... bucking-bronco bassoons...

Image by Zoe Beloff by way of Morbid Anatomy...

November Books & News

2010-12-03T13:37:00.003Z

Not much news, actually. Earthquake yesterday between here & Sapporo... much shaking of building, but that was it. I learned today that, like Tokyo, Sapporo is waiting for 'the big one' as they call it in seismology circles. Bookmunch has a 'best of 2010' you can vote in here. & Pete Wild's put together a handy guide to next year's books here. Should have three of my own coming out next year - the short stories from Grievous Jones, the Ginsberg from Reaktion, & another one, which I'm keeping schtum about... & hope to give two papers, one at the University of London & the other at the University of Northumbria - where I used to teach... Seems like a lifetime ago...

Books I read in November with three-word reviews:

Nicolai Lilin - Siberian Education: brutal & cold.

Allan Guthrie - Savage Night: brutal & sick.

Slavoj Zizek - The Parallax View: his magnum opus.

Michael Gardiner - At the Edge of Empire: The Japan Times.

Brian Evenson - Last Days: apotemnophilia-noir masterpiece

Dan Fesperman - The Warlord's Son: literary Afghan thriller.

Steve Erickson - Our Ecstatic Days: weirder than Ballard.

Bob Dylan - Chronicles: Volume One: must-read memoir.

China Mieville - Kraken: Squidtastic cephalopodic thrills.

Greil Marcus - The Old, Weird America: best music critic.

Snows still haven't arrived, while the UK is covered in the stuff. What's occurring?

Image - Francesco Sambo via Artodyssey...

Notes Towards a Diagnosis

2010-11-21T11:38:00.011Z

It started two years ago. Crossing Waterloo Bridge, I had an overwhelming desire to jump off. A voice kept urging me and I found myself pulled to the parapets - I fought the sensation & managed to get across the river. I've always had a phobia about bridges but this was much stronger & I had to get the Tube back. Now I have a fear of heights. I live on the sixth floor & find it nearly impossible to go onto the balcony. In the last six months or so, I have been suffering from an acute sensitivity to loud noises & bright lights - not practical when I live close to a railway station & an airport. Loud noises - jets, express trains, banging doors even, bring on a panic attack. Bright lights - flashes rather than intense lighting - make me want to hide under the duvet - I get an instant headache that lasts for hours. Then there's the rocking - I feel I am rocking back & forth all the time - just a gentle rock, almost as if I'm aware of & trying to compensate for the earth revolving - how it feels when there is an earth tremor. The strangest symptom manifests in words - sometimes words take on different colours on the page - mostly red, blue, and yellow, but sometimes pale grey & - in a separate problem - words change - 'certain' becomes 'sistine' 'tomorrow' becomes 'gonorrhea' 'just' becomes 'gold.' Researching the symptoms - combined or singular - so far it's a choice of sinus troubles, hyperaesthesia, inner-ear problems, synaesthesia, or I'm going insane. Image ~ Morbid Anatomy.

Grievous Bookily Harm

2010-11-15T00:56:00.005Z

Grievous Jones Press has a special offer on. Buy the first five of GJP's beautifully produced & wonderfully written books for £30 ($35) - postage free an' all - & you'll be holding in your hands works by John Dorsey, D.E. Oprava, Melissa Mann, Joseph Ridgwell, & Lara Konesky. Plus you could take a punt on James Rippingale's Tear Gas. Keep your eyes on Grievous Jones' news...

Reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, & very good it is; fresh, honest, & insightful. Only one person writes better about Dylan than Greil Marcus & that's Dylan.

It's snowing, I'm off to Sapporo to buy books, if you want somewhere interesting to go - go here.. Marwencol... Mark Hogancamp was "beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, to assist his rehabilitation, rebuild his memory, & learn to interact with the world once more, he built a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard, populated with dolls representing his friends & family & created life-like photographs detailing the town's many relationships & dramas. Playing in the town & photographing the action helped Mark recover his hand-eye coordination & deal with the psychic wounds of the attack. When Mark & his photographs were discovered, a prestigious New York gallery set up an art show. Mark's homemade therapy was deemed "art", forcing him to choose between the safety of his fantasy life in Marwencol & the real world that he'd avoided since the attack." Or something like that...

Imperial Boredoms

2010-11-02T12:28:00.006Z

I am bored. Not in a Lee Rourke way, wallowing & enjoying it... I am very bored... But I'm not sure what with or why... The Ginsberg's going well - second draft finished, fact-checking, sources, now need to edit. Fiction also coming along. Reviews done & dusted for November. Read some OK books - see below, with very short remarks... Enjoyed watching Generation Kill... Looking forward to Boardwalk Empire... Don't know... I love winter, so there's no seasonal ennui... I am not usually prone to boredom, I find most things interesting... But nothing's ticking those boxes at the moment... No book makes me want to rush back to it... Theory & philosophy are disappearing up their own fundamentals & even my favourite websites (no, I'm not saying which ones) hold little or no interest... Hmmm.... Books I read in October:

Allen Ginsberg - Collected Poems: Well, it would have been careless of me not to read this...

JM Coetzee - Summertime: Third instalment of his autobiography... now my most read author since 2003.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Beautiful &, in parts, impenetrable.

Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story: Disappointing after his first two - kinda forgot about the humour and went for full-blown satire... Too long.

Stephen Greenblatt - Learning to Curse: Super essays on the Renaissance.

William Gibson - Zero History: See Bookmunch review.

Barry Miles - Ginsberg: A Biography: See above.

Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City: Too many MacGuffins.

Douglas Coupland - Player One: Enjoyable &, as usual, the surface shallowness hides reverberating depths (if that makes sense...)

Judith Butler - Gender Trouble: provocative theory.

I will try to cure my boredom by reading these two blogs: one on Speculative Realism - Speculative Heresy & another on contemporary cultural studies networkologies - from where I half-inched the picture above.

Look forward...

September, I've Got October On My Mind

2010-10-01T14:52:00.006+01:00

Books I read during September:

Natsuhiko Kyougoku - Loups-Garous
Christopher Miller - The Cardboard Universe
Mark SaFranko - God Bless America
Jean-Philippe Toussaint - Self-Portrait Abroad
Thomas Pynchon - Vineland
Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End
Stephen Greenblatt - Will in the World
Ben Myers - Richard
Michael Hoffman - Little Pieces

September: finished first draft of Ginsberg critical biography; found out a few things I didn't know, & couldn't remember quite a lot I should - I was there... Also finished novella with a twist - will keep you informed. & just realized out of the nine books I read in Sept, five were for review - need to get a life... Gonna get back to work on The Tokyo Dead next week... That's it..

Pic - Joel-Peter Witkin...

Drive, He Said...

2010-09-18T15:32:00.012+01:00

One of my favourite poems - Clark Coolidge one of my favourite poets - the manipulation of language & how we think about words & their relationship to each other, throb of syllables, & thrust of nouns when we are unsure that they are that. Rhymes & half-rhymes, be-bop Beefheart jazz blues of sound & meaning. Quiet apocalypse of words we know we know yet not quite as here. Charles Bernstein, writing about Coolidge's earlier work: "All that is being done in this genre of poetry is the dramatization of the possibility of language to mean as sound, as texture, as physical presence, avoiding the double edge that lets words mean in the world (i.e., in a sentence) and beside it." Heir to Jack Kerouac & Bob Creeley, contemporary of Ron Padgett & Joe Brainard, see L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. I've never really got on with British post-war poetry - Paul Muldoon & Dan Paterson are OK. I quite enjoyed the Martians - particularly A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, but I prefer the more experimental work of Tom Raworth & JH Prynne. Why am I writing about poetry when I haven't written a decent poem in 15 years, the twenty-six of you who read this blog might ask. Keep 'em peeled...

I Drove Through This Old World This Afternoon

and it was ancient, quite, lean and brass
peach gas in bean stacks, babes on bikes of wood
humans held in shelter of their lives

The earth spread wide in folds beneath the turns
of men though new their stores of use were old
as if nothing had stopped that once had turned to brown
alarms of act all casual seemed a gown

I passed the rows of brick where Easter neared
with eggs of varnished ice that vanished not
in air as blue to touch as mountain's thrust is rough
on windows hard with dust that I had traced there once

The town then filled the notch with laddereed woods
and brightness hives of stuff all hands grow bare to touch
in crowds that leaned at noon contrariwise
would knot my route make prisms of my eyes

So casts the light this land no time at all
an eddy of the force to elbow shirts
as far beneath the ledge the needle drops
that banisters protrude from stories fast and small

I smell the fall, I dodge the urge
I whistle through the rates of atoms dear
the sky so clear the land to bulge
mere mention of halt plan a care

The light is over
man a boundless stare

2.

Then stood upon a bench that ruled my car
through venturesome whole days far by all unmarked
and watched the boardsides strand an ankled past
by turbines locked by keys of empty glass

As home absorbs the time that held it up
I fill to amber with the light of days
held waste till afternoon had turned them up
and held my mind in furnish of their state

Whole hills of housing edges fold
then massed will each thing fully last
and time come to boil the each turn dark
that breath will cool to beads upon a mast

And as I pass to catch the lost anew
is praps to spy the end of things ahead
and none more bogus than the thing that's new
that fades into a background still more fast

The old ones state their case as plain as sum
I leave them there as thought of one day done

Currently Reading

2010-09-16T00:35:00.002+01:00

And there is a fantastic reader's guide here...

I Am Bored

2010-09-06T12:54:00.004+01:00

That sounds like the title of one of my cat's blogs. But it isn't. I am bored. I am rarely bored. But I am today. Bored. The Ginsberg is going well - 40,000 words and it's only 1965 - actually, it's still 1965 after three days of work - big year for Allen - Cuba, Prague, the Royal Albert Hall shindig, & the Berkeley Poetry Conference... But it's leaving me little time to work on my new novel - or do any work on my last novel, which is so close to being finished I can see THE END sign blinking blinking blinking redly. Reading - yeah, that normally helps but I can't find anything that stimulates me & keeps me coming back for more. I'm reading Christopher Miller's The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank - I take it you can guess from the title what it's about - it's well written, funny, clever but, I don't know... Maybe it's me. I have Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City on order, as well as Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story. I'll probably buy Franzen's Freedom (good review by Hari Kunzru in the FT) just because it'll be easily available. The new William Gibson is on my list as well as catching up with any Glen Duncan novels I can find that I haven't read (see BTD). I'm late delivering my necrophilia book & lucky I have an understanding publisher. Walking - yeah, I love walking but soon tire of forests & rivers & lakes & mountains - I prefer cities. The salmon are trying to swim, leap, hurl themselves up river to spawn - that's interesting - to a certain extent; but there are only so many fish you can see thrashing around in a river before that, too, becomes boring. I notched up the level to 'hard' on Wii FIFA 2010 - Liverpool are currently 10th after getting spanked by Sunderland 5-2. I made a 'drive' playlist - & when I played it, it was the same as all my other playlists. I want to go to the pub to read & drink Stella & eat pork scratchings. No, I don't. I do. I don't. Things that have not bored me over the last two months - books: Tom McCarthy's C, Lee Rourke's The Canal, Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice (check out this page-by-page wiki); television (why does that word seem so old fashioned?): Mad Men, Bored to Death; blogs: A Journey Around My Skull, A Piece of Monologue, Reality Studio. It's 21:17 in Hokkaido. On days like these I want to go back into hospital - the routine, the non-eating, the painkillers, the endless supply of books you just know you have to get right - the energy, the energy the ener... Right. Fuck it. None of this. I am going to read the Pynchon wiki, drink some Sapporo Classic, fight with Kuma, make a start on Ben Myers' Richard, & play some Captain Beefheart - that should do it. Thanks for listening. Cheers.

Image from Bob Black's The Abolition of Work pamphlet via A Journey Around My Skull...

It's Been A While...

2010-08-21T14:47:00.005+01:00

Been busy with the Ginsberg biography & a reformulation of my writing philosophy & method. I won't bore you with it. Can't wait for the snow to start falling & the humidity to f**** the f**** off. Been on a bit of a Coupland jag - he's good, funny, not precious. The new Sam Lipsyte is one of those books that annoy your friends & loved ones because you can't stop reading out the choice sentences, the one liners - Lipsyte & Gary Shteyngart are the true heirs of Mark Leyner - think Philip Roth but funnier & with less blancmangey gynaecology. There is a great article by Gary Lutz in The Believer online about the sentence & how you go about writing one - although the piece is over a year old, it's worth reading & a necessary one for all those who can't wait to reach a full stop - period. I've just finished writing a novella called Nothing Matters, trying to find an ending to The Tokyo Dead, & started writing a new novel - a complete change to what I've written so far. Oh, & watching Mad Men - it's good TV but the main character sucks. That's it. Back in the garage with my bullshit detector...

Books I've read since the thousandth...

Alain Badiou / Slavoj Zizek - Philosophy in the Present

Yoko Ogawa - Hotel Iris

Glen Duncan - Love Remains

Sam Lipsyte - Home Land

Patrick DeWitt - Ablutions

Cathi Unsworth - Bad Penny Blues

David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

Douglas Coupland - The Gum Thief

Glen Duncan - A Day and A Night and A Day

Jon McGregor - Even the Dogs

William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

Geoff Dyer - Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Aska Mochizuki - Spinning Tropics

Stephen King - Under the Dome

Bill Morgan - I Celebrate Myself

Tom McCarthy - C

Douglas Coupland - Generation A

Pierre Guyotat - Coma

Lee Rourke - The Canal

James Ellroy - Blood’s A Rover

Douglas Coupland - JPod

Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

Cheers...

Pic from Morbid Anatomy...

Flying & Stuff

2010-07-16T05:00:00.006+01:00

Back in Hokkaido. The flight from Heathrow to Frankfurt, delayed by 45 minutes, meant I had to sprint to make the Tokyo flight. The plane, one of the new double-decker Airbuses, squeaky clean & comfortable, had more toilets than I've ever seen on an aircraft. 15 hours after leaving LHR, I arrive at Narita for an 8-hour wait for my flight to Sapporo, 4 hours of which I filled by trying to find my suitcase which I later discovered was still somewhere over Siberia having missed the connection. I would get it on Friday... Two days later... It has just arrived. Strange to think that your belongings are elsewhere in the world & you have no control over them. Like that thing about the soul following in your wake, except my soul was replaced by socks, underpants, books, presents, & insulin.

I am reading Geoff Dyer's Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi & very good it is. It reads like a cross between PG Wodehouse & Paul Theroux - but with more laughs & less ego than Theroux. Some great lines:

'The point is that it took this trip to Saudi to make me realize that, all things considered, for the last thirty years, I have loved beer, if not more intensely then certainly more constantly, than anything else in my life.'

'She was really nice but, to be honest, I've reached the age where even fantasies about older women involve women younger than me.'

Looking forward to getting back to work - novella, novel, necrophilia book, Ginsberg bio, & what seems like three-million book reviews.

If you haven't done so, check out my cat Kuma's blog... I Am Kuma... Nothing to do with me...

Image: Alex Grey.

Cheers

One Thousand Books in Seven Years

2010-07-06T14:52:00.005+01:00

I've been putting this off but here it is - I've read one thousand books in seven years from July 2003 until end of June 2010. It doesn't seem a lot to me. I keep a list of books I've read - for various reasons - encroaching senility, anal retentiveness, that weird thing I still have from a kid for tables - if only I had the time to make a cardboard-cut-out league ladder of writers like Shoot! magazine used to do at the start of the season for football teams.

This is how it breaks down: 2557 days in that period means I read a book every 2.557 days - that seems about right. I read 758 works of fiction & 242 non-fiction. Country breakdown: Argentina 5, Australia 11, Austria 2, Belgium 10, Brazil 2, Canada 7, Caribbean 7, Chile 6, China 2, Columbia 3, Cuba 3, Czech Republic 10, France 42, Germany 12, Iceland 1, International 5, Ireland 10, Israel 1, Italy 10, Japan 47, Korea 1, Mexico 1, Netherlands 5, Norway 3, Peru 2, Poland 1, Portugal 2, Russia 6, Slovenia 2, South Africa 19, Spain 10, Sweden 2, UK 286, USA 466, Yugoslavia 1 ~ or thereabouts.

Top ten authors read: Martin Amis 13, TC Boyle 13, JM Coetzee 13, Elmore Leonard 12, Paul Auster 11, Vladimir Nabokov 11, Don DeLillo 10, JG Ballard 9, Patricia Highsmith 9, James Sallis 9. Slightly conservative but I suppose the more radical writers I read haven't published that many books.

1st book read in that period: Philip Roth - The Facts; 500th - Peter Matthiesson - The Snow Leopard; 1000th - Bret Easton Ellis - Imperial Bedrooms. Worst book read in last seven years: Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (oh, dear god....).

Now for the next thousand. I can't be arsed to research the name of the American idiot who said that fiction is dead (doesn't someone say that every week?). But here are some writers to look out for over the next decade - or catch up on their back list - Glen Duncan, Jon McGregor, Willy Vlautin, Patrick DeWitt, Cathi Unsworth, Blake Butler, Sam Lipsyte, Tom McCarthy...

Image by Todd Schorr...

Cheers

Book Report - May 2010

2010-06-04T06:17:00.004+01:00

It's been all go in the Finbow household. We've moved to Hokkaido. Our apartment here is huge - three bedrooms - one will stay a bedroom, one will become a classroom, & the other my office by day & crashroom by night. The living room has wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows/doors & the balcony stretches around the whole of the front of the apartment - it's rather scary as I suffer from acrophobia - it usually manifests itself on bridges (gephyrophobia) - I'll have to get over it (not the bridge) if I want to sit out & read while topping up my tan.

Walter Tevis - The Hustler: Fantastic novel about pool, gambling, addiction, relationshps, & America. Tevis can write rings around most other authors. One of the best sports novels I've read, only Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes surpasses it in quality.

Walter Tevis - The Man Who Fell to Earth: David Bowie's best film & one of the strangest science-fiction novels I've read. A visitor from a dying planet comes to Earth in order to save his world only to become more human than he can bear. Eco-aware before its time, haunting, & poignant.

Jon McGregor - If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things: I must admit to not having read McGregor's work before. The covers put me off. But this is a powerful novel beautifully written. One event changes the lives of all those who witness it - at once lyrical & quotidian.

Jon McGregor - So Many Ways to Begin: The story of an ordinary man whose life & history is not quite what it seems. What McGregor did for events in his first novel he does for decisions in this. Memory, family, identity, & trust - a huge novel packed into 350 pages. Looking forward to Even the Dogs.

Paul Auster - Invisible: A full-length Auster novel for a change. Usual stuff - identity, doubles, New York, writing, poetry, sex. Enjoyed it. More sinister than recent work - Auster does the aftermath of violence well & his sex writing is better than most.

Will Self - The Butt: haven't read any Self since the excruciating Dorian. Maybe a tad long for its subject matter but, like McGregor's first novel, Self shows how the results of a single act can change one's life. A funny satire (that's not always the case) with barbed assaults on Australia, Iraq, medical companies, the law, & personal censorship. Think I'll give The Book of Dave a go now.

Jake Arnott - The Devil's Paintbrush: Arnott steps out from the sixties & seventies to take us back to Paris, London, & Ceylon in 1903. A fictionalization of the meeting between closeted gay war hero Sir Hector Macdonald & the beast himself Aleister Crowley. Think Buchan meets Huysmans. Really rather spiffing.

That's it. I'll be on my travels between June & July, so not sure if I will post again. But I just might & it could be something special. Cheers.

Image by Trevor Brown.

Book Report - April 2010

2010-05-03T13:13:00.003+01:00

People visiting, not enough time to read, to write, but having a good time. Made some important & overdue decisions in my life, feel better for it, more able to move into the coming years. About time. It's all about time. So, I'm looking forward to watching the World Cup - England maybe, Spain or Brazil probably, & as usual I'll be supporting Argentina as my second team. Going up to Newcastle, Edinburgh, & Glasgow to see friends & watch the games but most of the time I'll be in the British Library & London pubs, researching, writing, drinking beer, & watching as many matches as possible. This is a bit of a dog's dinner, a mutt's meal, a bow-wow's breakfast of a book report as most of the things I've read have been for review or research - but here goes.

Ken Bruen & Jason Starr - Bust: Bruen & Starr have fun with the hardboiled genre - great fun, tight plotting, good writing, a one-bite read & published by the wonderful Hard Case Crime.

James Lasdun - It's Beginning To Hurt: review on Bookmunch.

James Salter - Solo Faces: A beautiful novel, tense, existential, prose as tight & poetic as,... er... John Keat's condom. Salter is one of the best in the business. I bet M. John Harrison loves this novel.

Yasutaka Tsutsui - The Maid: review on Bookmunch.

David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: review forthcoming in The Japan Times.

Allen Ginsberg - Indian Journals: Research for forthcoming book. Very interesting - Allen at his observant obsessive self.

Paul Auster - Man in the Dark: I think this was an offshoot from research for The Brooklyn Follies, but still enjoyable, like Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle mixed with J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man. By the way, no one seems to be updating any of Paul Auster's websites... Hmm...

Right - my new life starts now... Well, when I've finished this beer... & maybe one more...

Wiiliam S. Burroughs & J.G. Ballard

2010-04-25T09:34:00.004+01:00

Probably my two favourite authors - definitely the most influential on my life & writing. So, two great sites: William S. Burroughs' book covers from around the world here & a J.G. Ballard book-cover timeline here. The new Penguin Modern Classics covers for WSB's books are beautiful - want - but I have them in other editions... Present, maybe... Ah, damn it, I know I'm going to buy them... News soon of a book on Allen Ginsberg... Just waiting to sign contract... Big earth tremor yesterday, apartment seemed to pitch forward & then shimmy... Murder in next block towards Ueno... That's about it... In BTD next month …from a Paragraph in Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster – Echoes & Reverberations...

What I Am Doing For the Rest of April

2010-04-20T13:05:00.007+01:00

After adventures in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Kyoto, & various other places - including Gary hopelessly lost on numerous occasions, taking the wrong train & falling asleep - he's home safe in London, arriving just ahead of the volcanic ash. Phew. So, for the rest of April I will be putting the finishing touches to my novella, writing a few book reviews, penning a piece of literary criticism for BTD (probably on Blanchot), getting back to grips with my novel, & preparing for a visit from Clair & a move to Hokkaido. on July 3rd, I'll be appearing at Joseph Ridgwell's Degenerate Sweethearts and Rebel Scum reading, venue to be arranged. Others reading that night include Kevin Williamson, Dan Fante, Mark SaFranko, Tim Wells, Jenni Fagan, Darran Anderson, UV Ray, Michael Keenaghan, Paul Ewen, Lee Rourke, Dave Oprava, Andrew Gallix, James Rippingale, Mark Walton, Iona David, & Scurvy Bastard. be good to see Tim, Jenni, Darran, Paul, Lee, Dave, & Mr Bastard again & to meet Dan, Mark, UV, Michael, James, Mark, Iona, & to finally meet Andrew Gallix. Cool.

Book Report - March 2010

2010-03-29T07:32:00.010+01:00

I just paid £200 - two-hundred f****** pound - for drugs - NON-recreational drugs - for my various ailments. Long live the NHS. & that was with my Japanese Health Insurance discount - I only pay 30% - so they would have cost me £600 for two months' worth. Grrr!

March's book report is a couple of days early because one of my oldest friends - Gary Hughes - is coming to Tokyo for two weeks & I'm taking time off to show him Tokyo, & then - with V along - we are going to Hiroshima, Kyoto, & some mountains & forests & stuff.

Craig McDonald - Rogue Males: A follow up to McDonald's Art in the Blood, Rogue Males is a collection of interviews & conversations with (mostly) crime writers such as Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, James Sallis, Daniel Woodrell, & Pete Dexter - McDonald knows his stuff. A good intro to contemporary crime writing & writers.

James Ellroy - White Jazz: & because I read the above, I thought I'd revisit one of the books featured. When this novel first appeared in 1992 it redefined crime writing - not subject matter - rogue cop, the mob, dodgy politics, & nymphomaniac broads - but stylistically. This was the first of Ellroy's telegraphic, machine-gun prose works, short sentences, sparse and tight punctuation, stream of consciousness voice. The fourth in Ellroy's LA Quartet following The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, it is violent, highly charged, hugely influential (ask David Peace), & my favourite of Ellroy's novels. Apparently, the original 900-page manuscript Ellroy submitted to his publisher he edited down to 350 words, eliminating all the verbs.

Allan Guthrie - Kiss Her Goodbye: A cool and nasty piece of Tartan Noir from Allan Guthrie - part of the wonderful Hard Case Crime collection. With its brooding castle overlooking the city, Edinburgh's a great setting for crime and Guthrie adds a new layer of darkness & violence to its shadowy streets - tough & bareknuckled, fast & furious, poetic & pithy.

Dmitry Bykov - Living Souls: see review on Bookmunch.

Jo Nesbø - The Snowman: review forthcoming on Bookmunch.

Joyce Lebra - The Scent of Sake: see review in The Japan Times.

Tom Rob Smith - The Secret Speech: I read Tom Rob Smith's first Leo Demidov novel Child 44 in Thailand last year & enjoyed it - sometimes the plotting was a little over-complicated & the coincidences a little unbelievable but it kept you reading & was well researched & written. The Secret Speech is also well researched & written & has a breakneck narrative rush to it that means you don't want to stop reading but do because you can't bear the thought of yet another episode of ultraviolence, bad luck, or bad judgment happening to Leo. He's like the Geoffrey Firmin of the political thriller world - a car crash waiting to happen; you keep thinking, "Oh, no, don't do that Leo/Geoffrey," but he does... & you follow along in his (bloody/drunken) footsteps, eyes closed, wishing he'd just stop & go home. The scenes in the gulag are extraordinarily violent & I'm not squeamish. Set in post-Stalin Russia, by the way...

Dennis Lehane - The Given Day: Set in the second decade of the 20th century, this novel is epic in scope, ambitious, romantic, mawkish, violent, & well worth a read. Some critic described it as a cross between Harold Robbins & Don DeLillo - which is just about right. Lehane sometimes overplays the Oirish card & had me squirming in the bath but at other times - the opening chapter on the ad hoc baseball game for one - the writing & action gel, confirming Lehane (with - {strangely} his fellow Wire writers Pelecanos & Price) as one of the best writers around. I'd tilt the balance DeLillo's way, think Pafko at the Wall rather than Robbins' A Stone For Danny Fisher.

Cheers

A Cat Called Bear

2010-03-27T14:57:00.000Z

A Cat Called Bear

Earthquakes: Authenticity & Reproduction

2010-03-16T10:25:00.024Z

A couple of minor earthquakes over the last few days - not very strong ones - 4.5 & 4.9. This morning's, centred between Tokyo & Chiba, shook the bed & made Kuma's tail go fluffy.

I wouldn't think anything of it but last week during a walk I discovered a memorial inscribed Wednesday 10th of March, the 65th anniversary of the night 5,000 American planes firebombed the area where I now live.

32 years earlier, on September 1st 1923 at 11:58:44 am, a quake reaching 8.3 on the Richter scale struck Yokohama and Tokyo.

95,000 people lost their lives mostly in the firestorms created by strong winds, another 45,000 people went missing.

Last Sunday, I visited the Great Kanto Earthquake Museum in Sumida-ku - an eerie place housing a collection of objects burned & twisted by the fires during the earthquake & the bombing, cabinets containing models of the devastated areas &, on the walls, maps of the devastated areas, plus paintings & photos of the death & destruction.

The museum & memorial hall adjoining it are built on the site of the former Army Clothing Depot where 38,000 people were incinerated, their bodies melting with the tarmac, exploding because of the terrible heat.

It's a poignant museum, not overly flash, a little rundown, but definitely worth a visit.

Tokyo, I've decided, resembles Trigger's broom - no one is quite sure what is authentic.

The second picture is of Asakusa.

The photos, taken with my iPhone, are my reproductions of photos in the museum. I'm sure the the reflective glass caused the light to change, but it gives them a strange, ghostly feel. The last one resembling something out of Jake & Dinos Chapman.

Book Report - February 2010

2010-03-03T12:15:00.006Z

I haven't had time to blog. This is how my days are panning out - mostly. 07:00 - Get up, read for an hour, bath, breakfast, read over day before's writing. 10:30 - novel, 14:30 - walk, 15:30 - lunch, 16:00 - research, 18:00 - editing, 20:00 - non-fiction book, 22:00 - prepare dinner, 23:00 dinner, 23:30 West Wing (never seen it before), 25:00 (as they write it in Japan) - bed. There are the odd days where it goes something like this: 24-28:00 - sit up listening to music & drinking beer, 12:00, - get up, bath, brunch, 13:00-20:00 walk, drink beer & listen to music, 20:00 - kebabs/burgers/bento, watch DVDs, 24:00 - repeat. But not many. Honest. OK. Here's February's book report.

Henning Mankell - The Man From Beijing: Review to follow in the Japan Times.

Jo Nesbø - The Redeemer: Just a coincidence I read this after the Mankell. Another Scandinavian crime novel. Nesbø is darker than Mankell, less concerned with international politics & more interested in characterisation. Definitely worth dipping your toes in this crime chiller. Harry Hole is a complex & floored character like all great tragedians should be. Below is something written by the Norwegian author Jon Fosse:

What then about crime fiction, so highly esteemed as literature, at least here in the Scandinavian countries? Is it at all literature? No it isn’t. The aim of this literature is not to ask into the fundamentals of existence, of life, of death, it is not to try to reach the universal through the unique, it is a try to avoid such an asking, such unique universality, by stating already given answers that are not really answers, but just something one has heard before. It therefore feels as a pleasant and safe answer, and what feels pleasant and safe one could also call entertaining.

What a load of bollocks - & that's with my literary critic's head firmly fixed to my shoulders. If the literature of Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, Leonard, Raymond, Ellroy, Sallis, Pelecanos, Bruen, & Peace does not question the fundamentals of right & wrong, does not investigate the morality of death, the ethics of existence, does not approach life with devastating truth - see Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, Daniel Woodrell's The Death of Sweet Mister, or Dennis Lehane's Mystic River (to name but a few) - then what literature does? Crime writing is the pre-eminent literature of this generation, it chronicles urban life... not ivory towers or ouroborosian wank.

Martin Amis - The Pregnant Widow: I need to read this again. I thought it the best fiction Mart's produced since The Information. The writing is sharp, funny, & stylish - as you'd expect. The plot is thin & something on which to hang ideas - as you'd expect. I need to think on it before giving a considered response.

Lawrence Osborne - Bangkok Days: Review forthcoming on Bookmunch.

Yu Hua - Brothers: Review forthcoming in the Japan Times.

Martin Cruz Smith - Tokyo Station: See rant below. It's still a well-researched, well-written book - Harry Niles is no Arkady Renko but he is fun & the portrait of pre-Pearl Harbour Tokyo is excellently drawn. Nearly every day I ask myself why... why did they do it?

That's it. A short month & books to review for other people. But I will revisit the Amis - I will. Right - I took two hours off to write this, listen to music & drink beer. It's been fun.

This just came on my iTunes: Replacements - Bastards of Young.

Image by Conor Ghilarducci.

I Should Have Looked Inside

2010-02-15T05:25:00.005Z

Hunting for secondhand books, yesterday, I came across two novels by Martin Cruz Smith - December 6 & Tokyo Station. I've been meaning to buy them for a while now, not only is MCS a good writer of thrillers, the books would help me research-wise with the history of Tokyo I am writing for Reaktion Books. December 6 published by Pocket Star Books & Tokyo Station by Pan are the same bloody novel. One cost me ¥750 & the other ¥350... Should have looked inside, completely different blurbs on the back covers.

I nearly did the same with Stuart Neville's excellent The Twelve, which is called The Ghosts of Belfast in the USA.

I did do the same a few years back when I bought A Dream Date with Di believing it to be a new collection of short stories from Mark Leyner but turned out to be the UK version of Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog - this is before Leyner started writing those very unfunny self-help/medical books.

Maybe publishers should put a hint on the front or back cover of books with two titles. In revenge, the American version of Tokyo: A Personal History might be called The Sexual Diary of (insert name)...

Despite that set back in my book-buying skills, I have had some very good news that I will share once I have squiggled my John Hancock on the bottom of the contract...

Check out this amazing site - the artist Dan Hillier...

Book Report (sort of) - January 2010

2010-02-03T08:46:00.004Z

It's been snowing in Tokyo, but nothing like the blizzards & drifts of Hokkaido.

Sorry, not enough time to write a full book report, but here's what I read in January with a short appraisal.

Scott Smith - A Simple Plan: A simple well-written thriller.

China Miéville - The City & The City: Think Philip K. Dick, Italo Calvino, & Franz Kafka.

Natsume Soseki - Sanshiro: Forthcoming review in Japan Times.

Peter Popham - Tokyo: City at the End of the World: Architecture & the next big quake.

Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper: Fast-paced & funny medical-mob thriller.

Craig Clevenger - Dermaphoria: Hallucinogenic & clever amnesia novel.

Ken Bruen - American Skin: Violent noir, the Troubles come to the USA.

Derek Raymond - A State of Denmark: Dystopian novel - Jobling as Thatcher/Blair.

Mark Schreiber - The Dark Side: Infamous Japanese Crimes and Criminals.

Eriko Maruko Siniawer - Ruffians, Yakuza, & Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860-1960:

Ryu Murakami - In the Miso Soup: Japanese Psycho, Kabuki-cho killer.

Will Christopher Baer - Hell's Half Acre: Phineas Poe in The Birthday Party?

Fred Vargas - The Chalk Circle Man: Forthcoming review on Bookmunch.

Review of Balzac of the Badlands

2010-01-30T09:56:00.003Z

A Bookmunch review by Alan Kelly. Alan rings all the bells - Amis, Ballard, Coupland, Ellroy - the missing D is Dickens... My writing is influenced by all of these writers. Amis (whatever you think of his politics these days - the euthanasia quips might be satire, do you think?) is a master stylist & a very funny writer, just dip into Money or London Fields. Ballard is a hero from my teens & I read his work whenever I have nothing else to read. Coupland - I like his work a lot - haven't read Generation A yet but it's on my radar. Ellroy redefined crime writing with White Jazz. Here's the opening paragraph of the review...

As the Demon Dog would say, it’s a fever dream, a fever dream…Or a nightmare. Former personal assistant to Allan Ginsberg, Steve Finbow’s debut Balzac of the Badlands sears into the reader’s psyche like a blowtorch. Rendered something like a Ballardian atrocity exhibition.

One day, I might write a Money or a Crash or a Generation X or a Great Expectations or an American Tabloid - one day, we may have porcine aviation; one day, Mothra's giant larvae might attack the Tokyo Tower.

Declined Questions - William T Vollmann

2010-01-28T11:57:00.003Z

Asked to interview one of my favourite writers & sent his new non-fiction mammoth Imperial, I dutifully & enjoyably read the book & came up with questions concerning WTV's latest, previous & future work. Unfortunately, he declined the interview - oh, well - he's notoriously difficult. They're below, if anyone else wants to have a stab at them.

Wonderful site here - Lookshelves - mine are here...

William T. Vollmann Questions

In Imperial, you state, “I don’t care to exclude any detail; everything is precious to me.” Would that be a correct summation of your literary philosophy?

Your books are full of saviours & salvations; in a sense they are acts to change the world, is the world moral or amoral & are you, as a writer, in a position to transform it?

In Imperial, you quote from Asimov, Ballard, Bradbury, Blish, Dick, Harrison, Wells, & the Strugatski Brothers; do you see Imperial County as a hostile “zone”, a dystopia within a fantastic utopia, or as a metaphor for America as a whole?

One of the most disturbing images from your books is the one from The Atlas where the female hitchhiker is flailing her arms around being consumed by mosquitoes – do you write using images and expand from there? (Your work is visual and I know you paint and create art-work books.) Or can anything be the catalyst for your work?

Rising Up and Rising Down I see as a sort of encyclopaedia to your work, which, however beautiful is also staggeringly violent – why is there such an interest in violence in the 21st century? I’m thinking Cormac McCarthy, James Ellroy, David Peace.

Your book on Noh Theatre is published in 2010, what are your specific interests in Noh & what are your thoughts on Japan?

You share a love of guns with William S. Burroughs. Would you count him among your precursors/influences? Who else would you add to that list?

The notes, bibliographies, sources, credits, etc. to Imperial run to 180 pages – longer than your novel Whores for Gloria – are you an information junky?

Do you see yourself as a political writer in a post-political world? Are the old divisions of left, right, & centre meaningless?

What are you planning – writing & travel-wise – in the next five years?

Book Recommendations

2010-01-19T12:14:00.004Z

For those who like crime fiction & a few others thrown in for good measure... Mostly new, some old, in no particular order... Not much else going on. Head down - writing. Head up - walking. Some solid news soon about books to be published this year or early next. Enjoy these links...

Will Christopher Baer - Godspeed
Richard Bausch - Peace
Tobias Hill - The Hidden
Trevor Byrne - Ghosts and Lightning
Wells Tower - Everything Ravaged Everything Burned

Toby Litt - King Death

Lee Rourke - The Canal
James Lasdun - It's Beginning to Hurt
Don Winslow's - The Gentlemen's Hour
Stuart Neville - The Twelve (The Ghosts of Belfast in USA)
Dave Zeltserman - Pariah
Charlie Huston - The Mystic Art of Erasing All Signs of Death
Dennis Tafoy - Dope Thief
Allan Guthrie - Slammer
Craig McDonald - Rogue Males
Nate Flexer - The Disassembled Man
Adrian McKinty - Fifty Grand
Brian Evenson - Last Days
Dan Chaon - Your Reply

Dan Rhodes - Little Hands Clapping

San'ya - Tokyo's Killing Fields

2010-01-11T11:34:00.011Z

I live about five blocks south of the San'ya canal, a covered channel running from the Sumida river. It's now a walkable park with children's swings & homeless men drinking beer. It acts as the southern border to a little-known area of Tokyo called San'ya. The name has mostly disappeared from the map but if you go north from the canal to Minami-senju station, east to the Sumida, or west to Asakusa-Dori you will have walked the streets of San'ya. Historically it was and still is a "burakumin" area - the outcasts of Japanese society. More accurately, the burakumin are made up of two groups: the "hinin", people who had left society, stepped out of the rigid bands of the Japanese caste system - criminals, minstrels, religious mendicants; & the "eta", people whose occupations made them "filthy" - they were animal slaughterers, leather workers, executioners. In this area, one can find The Road of Bones, The Bridge of Tears (where families said their farewells to those about to be executed). The area around Enmeiji Temple (a truly spooky cemetery) & the railway tracks that surround it is built over Kozukappara execution fields where the Tokugawa shogunate (using Eta executioners) killed over 200,000 people - the cemetery is known as the neck-chop grounds. San'ya is undergoing slow gentrification but it's worth a visit if you are ever in the Asakusa/Ueno area. A totally different side of Tokyo, home to day labourers, the dispossessed, violent history, & poignant places. Take a walk through the covered shopping street down to the Yoshiwara. It's there - don't believe the maps - go find it, walk its streets, go for a beer in the bars, grab a bowl of noodles - forget Harajuku, Shinuku & especially Roppongi - San'ya's history needs to be told.

2010

2010-01-03T15:00:00.005Z

Good start to the year - Balzac of the Badlands voted in top ten crime/mystery novels of 2009.

And M John Harrison likes Glass Hombre... Can't be bad.

China Miéville on crime novels.

Forthcoming interviews with Simon Crump & David Peace at 3:AM.

Less is more.

Have a good one...

Book Report - December 2009

2010-01-02T02:34:00.003Z

Some good books to look forward to in early 2010 - particularly Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow & David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, plus The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, IQ84 by Haruki Murakami, Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes, Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis, The Canal by Lee Rourke, & King Death by Toby Litt - check out some more on Bookmunch.

Meanwhile, this is what I read during December 2009:

Takako Arai - Soul Dance: Poetry? Poetry? Yes, & v. good. Check out forthcoming review in The Japan Times.

Derek Raymond - The Crust on its Uppers: Nobody does English crime, sleaze, & class like Raymond. A superbly nuanced novel, well-paced, spot-on dialogue - step back in time with the morries, blaggers, & psychos of early sixties London. Check out Dennis Cooper's longer review in the link.

Mieko Kanai - The Word Book: Superb. review forthcoming in The Japan Times.

William T Vollmann - Imperial: Imperious ~ as in urgent; imperative to read - review forthcoming on Bookmunch.

Ross Macdonald - The Underground Man, The Instant Enemy, The Blue Hammer: If you like your thrillers with twists & plots as tight as a spandex straitjacket, then Macdonald's your guy. Blurbs on the jacket say he's better than Chandler and Hammett... Lew Archer is a great main character & Macdonald's similes are clever & witty.

John Connolly - The Book of Lost Things: This is the first Connolly I've read. Not my usual thing - fantasy - but Connolly does a good job of world building. A coming-of-age fable set in an alternative world during WWII. I'm going to try his crime/horror novels next.

Patricia Highsmith - The Blunderer: Not the best Highsmith but still psychologically taut, the world spinning out of control, a wrong decision that cannot be undone metastasizes until the main character is trapped.

Robert Wilson - The Blind Man of Seville: A clever well-writen thriller, the first in the Javier Falcon series. The flashbacks to post-war Tangier are excellently done with glimpses of Bowles & Burroughs - will definitely read the others in the series.

That's it. Image is by Trevor Brown - a new year's card he sent me - I thought I'd share it with you...

Cheers

More Useless Top Things of 2009

2009-12-30T13:16:00.005Z

My top ten iTune songs played in 2009: Looks like I was listening to a lot of guitar-driven, lyric-heavy alt rock...
Mannequin - Wire

Use Somebody - Kings of Leon
Whole Wide World - Wreckless Eric
Can't Hardly Wait - The Replacements
Sequestered In Memphis - The Hold Steady
The Brides Have Hit Glass - Guided By Voices
Let's a Get a Bit a Rockin' - The 101ers
Where Were You - The Mekons
Soul Deep - The Box Tops
Saturn 5 - Inspiral Carpets

Best bars 2009:

Garage Land - Shibuya, Tokyo

Kamiya Bar - Asakusa, Tokyo

Andrew's Bar - Soi 5, Bangkok

Stonehaven - Vanderbijlpark, South Africa

Best whatever:

Websites - Beat the Dust & 3:AM - natch

Best blogs - A Journey Around My Skull, A Piece of Monologue, The Weaklings, Mister Trippy

Weird shit - Ultraviolencia

Image - Michael Rougier

Best of 2009

2009-12-29T00:53:00.006Z

Strange year - as always: England, Thailand, England, Japan, England, South Africa, England, Japan, Thailand, Japan. Balzac of the Badlands published, Protest! also, majority of research done for two non-fiction books in 2010, my new novel about a third finished, & another shorter one by end of March 2010.

So, my best books of 2009. I read 128 books, that's nearly 2.5 a week, which is about right seeing as there were some monsters in there. 98 fiction & 30 non-fiction. Internationally, it broke down: Argentina 2, Australia 2, Belgium 6, Canada 1, Chile 3, Czech Republic 2, France 12, Germany 2, International 4, Japan 11, Netherlands 1, Norway 1, Portugal 1, Slovenia 1, South Africa 2, UK 34, USA 42. Most read authors: Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Derek Raymond, JG Ballard, Roberto Bolano.

Best fiction published in 2009: 2666 - Roberto Bolano, Occupied City - David Peace, Neverland - Simon Crump.

Best non-fiction published in 2009: Imperial - William T Vollmann, Human Smoke - Nicholson Baker, Columbine - Dave Cullen.

Worst book - nothing published this year that I really disliked...

William Miller will be sorely missed & in his spirit I would like to thank a lot of people. First, I'd like to thank everyone who came to the launch of Balzac and Protest! & bought the books. Cheers. & then Hillary Raphael, James Williamson, & Stephen Barber; Andrew Gallix, Andrew Stevens, & Susan Tomaselli; Brian Stubberfield, & Paul Tinkler; Lola Brown; John Murphy, Brendan O'Keeffe, & Declan Shaughnessy; Tom McCarthy, Stewart Home, & David Peace; Lee Rourke, Pete Wild, Dave Oprava, Joseph Ridgwell, & Paul Ewen; Hamish Macaskill & Cathy Layne; Mio Yamada, Greg Cormack, David Hoenigman; Este Hefer, Jan-Louis & Haidee Kruger; & a big big thank you to Melissa Mann, Gary Hughes, & Lize Terblanche for making 2009 an interesting if somewhat busy year. & of course, the biggest thanks go to V for putting up with me - again.

Image by Mladen Penev.

Balzac Review - Well, Part of One

2009-12-17T10:49:00.005Z

Below is part of a review of Balzac of the Badlands by Yu-Han Chao - you can find it on Amazon and the whole review will be coming soon to Roses & Thorns.

& in other news, I'm off to Bangkok with V for the holidays , meeting Gary Hughes there, & no doubt going out on a few debauched nights with James Williamson. I'm taking some thrillers with me, Scott Smith's A Simple Plan, Patricia Highsmith's The Blunderer, & John Connolly's postmodern fairy tale thingamajig The Book of Lost Things. Nothing too taxing for beside the pool. Image by Van Arno.

If there was a bookshelf in your local bookstore labeled "literary thrillers," a few copies of Balzac of the Badlands would reside there. Somehow art-for-art's-sake and a plot-driven page-turner at the same time, Steve Finbow's debut novel brings together elements that do not usually share the same page: postmodern prose, a gripping mystery plot, love scenes where you can feel every stubble and touch, gangs, militants, detectives, drug smugglers, human smugglers, you name it, it's all in there.

Balthazar Zachariah, in search of a client's missing daughter, brings readers on a Ulysses-style tour across North London, through parks and pubs crowded with sights, sounds and smells. Finbow's protagonist, no henpecked, cuckolded and timid Leopold Bloom, is sophisticated, suave, has a way with words as well as ladies, and has the strange ability to make dogs go crazy upon meeting their gaze. His friend the Mermaid has psychic powers that allow her to converse with people inside paintings and photographs; this ability of hers helps Balthazar get closer and closer to the bottom of an ever-thickening, unfathomable plot full of twists and turns.

You must read the book for yourself---no mere summary of plot or ten-sentence excerpts will do the book justice. The traditional genres of literary or mainstream converge here, and gives us aspiring writers and avid readers hope---that a beautifully written book of prose can at the same time be plot-driven and marketable in content.

I think Yu-Han got it spot on.... Cool.

Hypnagogics & Nipponophiles

2009-12-09T07:48:00.008Z

So, this morning, I'm half-asleep/half-awake & I hear a voice saying something to me. It's dark, just a hint of the Tokyo dawn through the curtains, & I look into the space in front of me & a blue slit appears - I couldn't describe it as a mouth but that's what I'm thinking it is - & it opens & says in a voice neither masculine nor feminine, "She is going to die." & I experience a hypnic jerk & sit up & hear two female voices giggling & then the sound fades. Hmmm... I like hypnagogic experiences - this was one of Andre Breton's...

One night, before falling asleep, I became aware of a most bizarre sentence, clearly articulated to the point where it was impossible to change a word of it, but still separate from the sound of any voice. It came to me bearing no trace of the events with which I was involved at that time, at least to my conscious knowledge. It seemed to me a highly insistent sentence - a sentence, I might say, which knocked at the window. I quickly took note of it and was prepared to disregard it when something about its whole character held me back. The sentence truly astounded me. Unfortunately I still cannot remember the exact words to this day, but it was something like: 'A man is cut in half by the window.'

Over on Melissa Mann's Beat the Dust this month - guess who's guest editor? Yep, in one. You will also find. Hillary Raphael, Kei Kunihiro, Stephen Barber, Takako Arai, Jack Hunter, Kenji Siratori, Matthew Peipert, Yu-Han Chao, & David F Hoenigman.

Book Report - November 2009

2009-12-02T10:07:00.008Z

I've just read a book of poetry by a Japanese poet who, for the time being, shall remain nameless. & I enjoyed it. Two things - I haven't read a book of poetry cover to cover in a long while, & very rarely can I think of 600 words to write about ANY poetry. OK. Let's get to it.

Stephen Graham Jones - Demon Theory: A very clever book, similar in structure to Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves, with its use of endnotes and references. This book takes the history & techniques of the horror movie & applies them to three interconnected novels enforcing while undermining the horror novel genre.

Simon Crump - Neverland: I wrote about this book below. Very very funny. I read it in one sitting & then read it again. You can read an excerpt here. The Michael Jackson/Uri Geller chapters are inspired. I am tempted to slip copies into those table-breaking piles of Jacko tribute books.

Don Carpenter - Hard Rain Falling: An ice-cream book (using Derek Raymond slang)... Geezers, to you. Read my review in Bookmunch.

Mark SaFranko - Loners: Does exactly what it says on the cover. Short stories about outcasts, killers, doomed loves. SaFranko can out-write most others around when he's on form. A welcome edition to the work. Keep it up, Mark & Murder Slim.

Stig Sæterbakken - Siamese: Bleak & terrifying, gruesomely funny & real. Read my review at 3:AM.

Scott Smith - The Ruins: I needed a break after the previous two books - fantastic as they were. I wanted to get lost in a story &, as Demon Theory had me thinking about horror, I tracked down this. It takes a cliched premise - teenagers on holiday who misguidedly go searching for someone in the Mexican jungle, then it subverts everything you think is going to happen. Very well done. Great holiday reading. Going to track down his other novel A Simple Plan. Michiko Kakutani hated it. Well, she would.

Simon Crump - Twilight Time: Crump's first novel & another funny read. Who can dislike a book with a main character by the name of Bruce Glasscock? Claustrophobic & scatalogical, like a toilet on a crashing plane.

Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House: My bones for horror this month took me back to a classic & what a book it is. I've read it before but not for a long time & as I was turning the pages I realised how much House of Leaves (see above) had borrowed from it. Truly scary. Like Patricia Highsmith mixed with Peter Straub - can't be bad.

Donald Richie - Tokyo Nights: A strange but nearly perfect novella from one of my fellow reviewers at The Japan Times; difference is, Donald has lived in Japan for over 60 years, so actually knows what he's talking about. Check out Donald's Film Anthology if you want to find out about underground Japan in the '60s.

& that's it. Off to Bangkok for Christmas - can't decide what to take to read - the new Stephen King has had good reviews but is a bit of a brick to cart around south-east Asia. Any ideas?

Image by Chris Scarborough.

Six Days in Tokyo

2009-11-27T11:08:00.005Z

Melissa Mann's been here for a week and we must have walked 60 miles of Tokyo's streets & riversides - Asakusa, Ueno, Yanaka, Nezu, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ginza, Nihonbashi, Mukojima, Fukagawa, along the Sumida River & a lot more. We went to see the Rebecca Horn show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, visited the Basho Museum, & read at Gamuso - videos of the performances can be seen here. We also went to the Kamiya Bar and Garageland a great punk bar in Shibuya. Cool.

Back to work now - just finished best of 2009 list for The Japan Times, have intro of Tokyo book to polish, Sergeant Bertrand research & writing to do, & a little something called The Trouble with Women... should be interesting.

The image is the severed head of Yukio Mishima - I'm not sure I'm a fan - of Mishima's work, not his head - I find his prose too mannered but I haven't read his novels for quite some time so will revisit. Ben Myers asked me where one finds a Mishima severed head these days? Seppukumarket?

Dalkey Archive & Stuff

2009-11-13T07:58:00.010Z

Is Dalkey Archive Press the best publishing house in the world? I would say yes. But if you wanted to argue - & that's your prerogative - then you couldn't disagree with me that they are certainly one of the bravest. There are other companies that publish "out-there" books - Canongate, Melville House, Serpent's Tail spring to mind, but Dalkey consistently publish experimental, daring, & controversial books. I am 40-odd pages into Stig Sæterbakken's Siamese & am already deeply involved in its peculiar claustrophobic environment. I am also looking forward to Mieko Kanai's The Word Book. Dalkey Archive Press's foreign-language publications all have one thing in common - excellent translations - other publishers please take note.

I saw someone wearing a T-shirt today with Heavenly Piss Buffet stencilled on it... That goes nicely with the Who the Fuck is Jesus? T-shirt I saw & the hoodie with Cum Stains written on the back. Hmm...

Melissa Mann is coming to visit in a week's time & we are both reading at Paint Your Teeth 5. PAINT YOUR TEETH は新機軸文学と音楽、ダンスを披露するライブイベントです。２ヶ月に１回ほど、東京で行っています。 PAINT YOUR TEETH is a live event celebrating experimental literature, music and dance. It’s held in Tokyo every two months or so.

PAINT YOUR TEETH 5 Line-up

-The Annubhava Orchestra

-oninko!

-Steve Finbow

-Melissa Mann

-Sarah MacLeod + Soddy

-Chikanari Shukuka

-the zen stance

-jim²achin[e]

Sunday, November 22nd @ Gamuso in Asagaya

Come along if you are in the area - should be an interesting night...

I Laughed Out Loud and I Never Laugh Out Loud

2009-11-07T08:14:00.011Z

Title of blog from a blurb by Chuck Palahniuk for Sam Lipsyte - who is very funny. Not many authors make me laugh out loud - Martin Amis, David Sedaris, Mark Twain, PG Wodehouse, Kurt Vonnegut - but the funniest book I've read since Mark Leyner's Et Tu, Babe is Simon Crump's Neverland... inspired... a snippet follows beneath:

While over on Beat the Dust, Melissa Mann has John Dorsey, David Blaine, Jack Henry, Ford Dagenham, Jeff Aubert's keyword interviews with Dan Fante and Mark SaFranko and an exclusive extract from Balzac of the Badlands... The Dust on Uppers...

From Simon Crump's Neverland... Classic...

'One time, you know, Lamar, a woman had her son brought to me on a stretcher. They laid the stretcher down on the ground in front of me, and drew back the blanket, and there was an ear. Just a single ear lying there on the pillow. His mother told me that the ear was all that was left of her son after his tricycle strayed onto a driving range.'

'Oh Sweet Jesus, Michael,' I say, 'Golf is so shit.'

'Yes I know, Lamar,' the kid says with no real feelin.

'So what happened, Mike? To the ear I mean?'

'Well, I didn't want to hurt the woman's feelings, so I knelt by the pillow and whispered "I love you" into the ear.'

'Gee Boss, that must have been a magical moment.'

'Actually, Lamar, it was not,' the kid says all sniffy like. 'As I bent down and whispered those magical words, the words that every single human person yearns to hear, the woman began to scream and cry out in anger. She began beating on me and between the punches and the kicks and the tears and the abuse, she told me that her son was deaf.'

Book Report - October 2009

2009-11-06T06:16:00.006Z

I'm looking forward to a shedload of what should be good books being published in 2010. Thanks to Pete Wild's Bookmunch. Where did you get this information, Mr Wild? Spill. Here's part one of 50 books you'll want to read in 2010. I'm sure you can navigate from there. & I found this out because I am now on Twitter.

I read eight books in October - bit slow for me, readjusting to life back in Tokyo & dealing with the monster cat that is Kuma.

Will Christopher Baer - Kiss Me, Judas: Nice play on the urban myth, road, & private-eye genres, Phineas Poe (minus a kidney) tracks the elusive Jude across America encountering addicts, weird cops, & beautiful women. Hallucinatory.

Rieko Matsuura - The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P: Read here in The Japan Times.

Dave Cullen - Columbine: Measured & well-researched account of Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold's spree killings in 1999 - was it really that long ago? - Cullen's prose is crisp & never sentimental. Best account I've read. The one real question remains - why didn't they kill more people?

Will Christopher Baer - Penny Dreadful: The second in the Phineas Poe trilogy, has Phineas involved in the game of Tongues & searching for people who may or may not be who they think they are - multiple personalities plus S&M = a good read.

Louis Paul Boon - My Little War: I have to thank Lee Rourke for introducing me to Louis Paul Boon's work. & sending me a copy. Great book - comically bitter, very real, like a hosed down Louis-Ferdinand Céline. WWII in all its squalor.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint - Running Away: One of the most consistently brilliant contemporary writers. This novel is more "written" than its predecessors, with something resembling a plot which follows a European man in Shanghai & Elba. The bowling alley scene is classic. Dalkey Archive do it again.

Paul Auster - Travels in the Scriptorium. Enjoyed it. Used to be a huge Auster fan but was put off by Oracle Night (I think he had that hidden in a drawer for years, took it out & dusted it off, & said, here you go, Mr Faber). Travels reminded me of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading & Bend Sinister. Looking forward to Man in the Dark.

This was written with sadness. William Miller will be hugely missed and fondly remembered. He would probably have told me on reading this that I was showing off. Sorry, William.

What the F***

2009-10-29T03:15:00.012Z

So, I'm googling myself - come on, we all do it - & I see my name linked to the wonderful HTMLGIANT so I go have a look why & find a published IM between Jimmy Chen & Crispin Best for Tao Lin's grassroots promotional campaign for his new novel Shoplifting from American Apparel. So, Jimmy & Crispin talk about the literary scene, Tao Lin, & mention Chris Killen, Dave Oprava, & myself... Hmmm... Not sure if I should be flattered or not... "old sexy guy"? Older might have been my choice of premodifier... But, thanks, guys...

Thanks also to Lee Rourke for sending me copies of Louis Paul Boon's My Little War - excellent, like a more ruminative Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Plus a copy of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Running Away, which I'm saving for November after I've finished Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium.

& check out the Offbeat Generation at Everyday Genius.

The image is by Eugene Atget.

Beer Machine

2009-10-23T05:29:00.004+01:00

No, that's not my nickname. When I first came to Tokyo there were a fair few of these vending machines scattered around the city but they are slowly disappearing. The result of an admixture of worries about the decline of moral rectitude in Japan's youth & the super-proliferation of convenience stores. Japan likes its beer & there are seasonal ones - a bit annoying when your favourite beers disappear from the shelves - I have to go to a specific supermarket to buy my Enjuku. I tried a different autumn brand the other day - 8% - stronger than Chang & with similar qualities - amnesia juice. This machine is at the bottom of my street & the large can at the top left has my name on it. Segue - there is a triumvirate of writers - Craig Clevenger, Will Christopher Baer, & Stephen Graham Jones - who all share the same website. Check it out - it's called The Velvet. What else have I seen on my cyber-journeys? Oh, yes... brilliant video of The Box Tops miming to The Letter.

So...

2009-10-22T15:40:00.003+01:00

Melissa Mann, Joseph Ridgwell & I have a book out - a collection of long short stories themed around protest - & that's what the book is called Protest! & it looks great - the first publication from Beat the Dust Press - & you can buy it here.

I'm going to get Lize Terblanche of NWU to work her corpus-linguistic magic on it & tell us what our keywords are... I'm sure mine begins with f.... Joe's with b... & MM's with p...

Minimalist Book Reports

2009-10-09T08:20:00.012+01:00

Hey. It's been two months but that's because I was away lecturing in South Africa. On which subject, thank you to everyone there for making my time more pleasurable than it should have been, particularly Esté Hefer & Lize Terblanche for great conversation & laughs & taking me to bars & restaurants. Went to Aardklop - check out Nathani Lüneburg's amazing work. So, no time to write full-on book reports for August and September but here are some minimalist reviews. In chronological order:

Richard Morgan Altered Carbon - speedy intelligent post-Gibson cyberpunk

Jonathan Lethem Motherless Brooklyn - postmodern thriller with brains and humour.

Jeff Noon Vurt - classic Brit slipstream.

William Faulkner Sanctuary - fetid pulp American gothic.

Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls - surprisingly aged prose and plot.

Mieke Bal Narratology - why do I have to read these things?

Rudiger Safranski Heidegger: Between Good and Evil - accessible critical biography.

China Mieville The Scar - pirates and more in postpunk fantasy.

Yasutaka Tsutsui Paprika - Japan Times review coming soon.

Martin Heidegger The Concept of Time - read it and weep.

Susan Onega Narratology - the dryness of academia.

Aleksander Hemon The Lazarus Project - the man can write.

Steve Erickson Zeroville - why is this writer not heralded alongside Pynchon and Delillo?

Roland Barthes Image Music Text - this is what academic/critical writing should aspire to.

Paul Patton Deleuze: A Critical Reader - good introduction to a complex thinker & theorist.

Roland Bogue Deleuze on Cinema - ditto on Deleuze's dense cinema criticism.

John Wyndham Day of the Triffids - fun pre-Ballardean sci-fi.

Roland Barthes Roland Barthes - beautiful & illuminating metabiography.

Anna Kavan Sleep Has His House - surreal & candid memoir/fantasy.

Martin Amis London Fields - one of the greatest British comic novels.

Tim Powers The Anubis Gates - fun time-travelling literary fantasy.

Martin Amis Experience - probably Amis's best work.

Philip Gourevitch The Paris Review Interviews 1 - interesting, particularly James M Cain.

Martin Amis Other People - a Martian sends a novella home.

Saul Bellow Humboldt's Gift - my favourite Bellow, a comic masterpiece.

JM Coetzee Diary of a Bad Year - deft twist on the autobiographical novel.

Kevin Brockmeier The Brief History of the Dead - go out & buy it & read it (thanks, Lize).

Graham Swift The Light of Day - OK ventriloquistic literary thriller.

Martin Cruz Smith Stalin's Ghost - Arkady Renko kicks Rebus's ass.

Irvine Welsh Crime - surprisingly good novel, first Welsh I've finished in a long time.

Above image - Conrad Botes - Weeping Zombie.

Balzac of the Badlands - Promo Video

2009-08-25T12:42:00.006+01:00

The launch for Balzac of the Badlands will be on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009. Details to follow. Music: "Feeling Called Love" - Wire.

Book Report - July 2009 - Addendum

2009-08-01T09:08:00.003+01:00

I managed another two...

Will Heinrich - The King's Evil: Dry prose, ideas as old as literature itself (in a bad way) - just didn't do it for me. The main character - Joseph Malderoyce (er... evil king, perchance?) is a complete tool - I would have nutted the little fucker - Abel Rufous - I ask you... who intrudes on Joseph's life & reality & booted him out long before Rufous had time to gavelize Joseph's girlfriend. Pretentious twaddle. &, please, that author photo. Slappable.

Frank Lentricchia & Judy McAuliffe - Crimes of Art + Terror: Undergraduate swill. One idea spread over 200 pages. After the first chapter, I kept thinking "enough, already, I get it." CliffsNotes style analysis of novels & films fused with old-fashioned criticism. &, sorry, but you are so wrong about American Psycho - one of the funniest novels ever written.

OK. I'm going to elaborate on this in a later post but I want to make a point. I've been cataloguing my reading habits since July 2003 - I started because I was seriously ill at the time & had trouble remembering what I'd read & what I hadn't. During this time, I have read 900 books. That works out at er... don't have enough fingers... er... 2223 days divided by 900... er... so one book every 2.47 days... or nearly 3 books a week. Check out these stats... Hmmm...

Off to London & then SA. Taking Ross Macdonald with.

Book Report - July 2009

2009-07-29T07:59:00.004+01:00

Things getting too busy here. I've had to stop publication of Red Peter as I don't have enough time to read submissions. Thanks to everyone who submitted (well, almost). I may do something in the future. Suffering from hyperglycaemia this week. Not sure why. Heat? Stress? Too much rich food? Just about got it under control. Not had a beer in two days... Back to London for six days on Sunday 2nd Aug and then off to South Africa from 8th until some time in October. Below is July's book report - bit early but I doubt I'll finish another book before Saturday. So...

Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality - Vol 1. Introduction: Foucault rejects our ideas about sexuality over the last 200 years - dismissing repression & suppression of sex & theories of sex to disentangle the power struggles behind the gynecologization of women, sexual perversions, & the sexuality of children - he does so in lucid prose that is often humorous & always interesting. A good intro to Foucault's work as a whole

James Sallis - Driver: Sallis is a consummate author whatever he's writing be it biography, criticism, poetry, sci-fi, or crime. I like him best as a thriller writer. Although this is not the best Sallis, it's still an enjoyable read following the dual life of a stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver. "Been driving all night, my hands wet on the wheel / There's a voice in my head that drives my heel".

Craig Clevenger - The Contortionist's Handbook: This is good. Kept picking it up in bookshops only to be put off by the Irvine Welsh & Chuck Palahniuk blurbs. Clevenger is a better writer than both. Clever use of mutliple identities, conmen, & magicians - all in one person. Well paced & poetic but also tough & edgy. Looking forward to Dermaphoria. Also, check out the link above to Clevenger's shared website - The Velvet.

Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock: I used to be a huge fan of Erickson. Read everything I could find & then forgot about him. He dropped off my radar. Thanks to Clevenger's 10 fave books in the appendix to the Handbook, I read Tours of the Black Clock. It's hard to categorize Erickson - he's a sort of pre-cyberpunk, maximalist, fantasy, existentialist. This novel is an alternative history that - although not the easiest of reads - will get you turning the pages while savouring the beautiful writing. I'm looking forward to Zeroville.

Will Elliott - The Pilo Family Circus: Good to a point. The concept of a circus that acts as a kind of purgatory in which human souls are harvested & used as drugs, ruled over by monstrous owners & peopled by sadistic clowns, violent trapeze artists, freaks, & gypsies is an interesting one. The underlying story of mental illness works well in that the reader questions the narrative's reality. But I found the constant explanations to the reader & the one-liner "see how clever I am, I hope you get what I mean" annoying.

Glen Duncan - I, Lucifer: Brilliantly ventriloquized, this is the story of Lucifer allowed a sojourn to earth to live as a human for a month, who drinks, drugs, & sexes his way around London. This reads like an infernal variation of Martin Amis's John Self. Funny, nasty, & one reads it with that "Oh, no, don't do that" thought in the back of one's mind - think Lowry's Under the Volcano but with Oscar Wilde as Geoffrey Firmin.

Madison Smartt Bell - Save Me, Joe Louis: Another writer who disappeared from my reading list. I loved his earlier novels The Washington Square Ensemble and Waiting for the End of the World (the latter [probably because of the Elvis Costello inspired title] linking with Bret Easton Ellis & the early 1980s literary Brat Pack). This novel is a strong literary thriller set in New York, Tennessee, & backwoods America. Would make a great film.

Not sure how often I'm going to post over the next few months, but I will when I am able. Cheers.

Love + Hate

2009-07-17T04:18:00.005+01:00

So, Wednesday night, I go over to Aoyama to visit my agent in order to pick up some free books. I get off at Shibuya because the train is so full & I can't be bothered to struggle through the crowd - Shibuya is the terminal, so everyone detrains - plus I like that the Ginza Line comes out from underground over the top of the buildings & if you look out of the right side windows you can see Shibuya crossing in all its neon mayhem. I take the correct exit out of the station - luck, really, it's a labyrinth in there - & I buy a beer from a convenience store & walk under the expressway towards Roppongi. I'm early, so I buy another beer and walk up past the Prada building to Omotesando & back to the office. Bang on time. I go through the stacks of books publishers & authors have sent the agency. Pick out Pilo Family Circus by Will Elliott (was thinking of buying that just the other day); Do the Creepy Thing by Graham Joyce (read & liked some of his other novels); I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan (looked at this before but never bought it); Milk, Sulphate, & Alby Stravation by Martin Millar (an old fave I've not read in years); Save Me, Joe Louis by Madison Smart Bell (used to like him); The King's Evil by Will Heinrich (looks interesting); Crimes of Art + Terror by Frank Lentricchia & Judy McAuliffe (crime, art, terror = my kind of thing); & A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror by Alfred W McCoy (ditto). Not a bad haul. I had another beer & left, making my way back to Omotesando metro station. Halfway there, a biddy came straight at me on a bike. With nowhere to go & with little hope of her stopping, I jumped over a small wall & smashed my toe as I landed - wearing flipflops, my toe burst open as if I'd been shot, the nail cracked in two. Ouch!

Love + Hate - I'm afraid I'm going to have to miss this gig. Sorry. Problems with visas & stuff. But please go: there's a great line-up - see flyer above - & my good mates John Murphy & Dave Power will be providing live music via Yardghost. I'm going to record a sound file to be played instead of my live appearance.

Cheers

Phobias & Perversions

2009-07-07T13:17:00.004+01:00

The other night, Thursday I think it was, I was out in Shinjuku with two friends. We spent the first part of the evening at/in/on a rooftop beer garden watching the sky blacken & threaten while those around us networked - some people called themselves "creatives" without really explaining what it is they do. Other people worked in "solutions"... Hmmm... After it closed, we went to Shomben Yokocho (Piss Alley) to drink more beer and eat yakitori. We mostly talked books, writing, & publishing but after a few beers & tequilas (not for me), the talk turned to phobias & then to perversions - &, woah, as I wrote that - it's three days on - a cockroach crawled out from beneath my AC unit - big fucker - V got it 12 hours later & we liberated it over the balcony. Now, phobias - I have a hard time crossing bridges, I hate when cheese gets wet & I can't pick it up, & chimpanzees... Perversions - fishnets, business suits, denim skirts, high heels, leather boots. Phobias are hate's perversions of love. Animals - this week, I've sprained my left index finger trying to kill a cockroach, been bombed by a crow, & today had my left thumb landed on & gripped very hard by a cicada - truly gross insects. Things. Animals. Things. Image.

Book Report - June 2009

2009-07-04T07:59:00.017+01:00

Great: I have a dose of miliaria rubra & it's not a Bolivian centre forward, nor something I picked up in Bangkok - it's prickly heat & it's annoying & itchy & mostly on my chest and arms. Even sitting on the balcony in what breeze there is isn't helping. But, anyway. June's book report. First admission - I gave up on my third reading of Gravity's Rainbow about halfway through - I think it was the heat - not enough energy, not enough patience - maybe like learning to fence & Japanese, I'll leave it for later. & don't ask about the font, I have no idea what's occurring. So...

Slavoj Žižek - Violence: Part of Picador's Big Ideas/Small Books series, Violence has Žižek in full-on high/low-culture riffs with his take on institutionalized violence - not so much an analysis of personal or subjective violence but six essays on the violence of economics, the state, politics, ideology, & religion. Sometimes, Žižek is controversial for being controversial's sake, at other times he is brilliantly luminous & forthright. Be good to see someone write a comparative study twinning this with Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down.

Jacques Roubaud - The Great Fire of London: Longer review coming on 3:AM. But for now, think Borges, Sebald, Chinese boxes, & Russian dolls.

Amélie Nothomb - Tokyo Fiancée: See my review in the Japan Times.

Denis Johnson - Nobody Move: This short novel was first published in Playboy. It's Johnson's No Country for Old Men. A lean & mean book with terse dialogue & great one-liners. Johnson's always skated close to the full-blown-thriller pond - I'm thinking Angels & Already Dead - but with this novel he glides perfectly across its icy surface, double-axeling all the way. Almost perfect.

Tess Callahan - April & Oliver: My agent gave me this to read - it's not my usual thing - but I had nothing to spend my early evenings with & thought I'd give it a go. It's an assured first novel, three-dimensional characters (although Oliver is a bit of a dick), an extended-family narrative, a love story with a twist, sometimes gritty, sometimes poetic, it has humour in the right places, just about the right side of sentimentality – I would have nixed last part of chapter 22 - bit too pat metaphorically; overall, a well-written and interesting novel that zipped by in reading - think Jonathan Franzen meets Lionel Shriver. Nice cover.

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa - Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories: One of my favourite books of all times - &, yes, I get overexcited when I talk about it. The famous ones are here - "Rashomon", "In a Bamboo Grove", "Hell Screen" - all short-story masterpieces. But my favourites are "The Life of a Stupid Man" and "Spinning Gears" in which the protagonist (a thinly disguised Akutagawa) is spiralling down into madness & suicide - a near contemporary of Kafka, Akutagawa's stories are as psychologically horrific & haunting.

Richard Price - Lush Life: Fantastic, funny, well-observed novel with elements of crime, family saga, & social realism. Not surprising really that the author of Clockers & co-writer for The Wire has spot-on dialogue, characters who step off the page into your thoughts, & plot lines as tight and exciting as a Johnny Thunder's guitar solo. Read Michael Chabon's article in the NYRB for a longer, better, & more thorough review than this one.

Sigmund Freud - The Psychology of Love: I haven't read any Freud since the mid-'80s but I had to read this in the name of research. It includes the famous "Dora" case & essays on sexual theory, the sexuality of children, & the psychology of erotic life. Weird in that, although I've read a few of these pieces before, I knew what the theories were; they've become ingrained in our unconscious - we grow up Freudians, only to challenge the appellation later when we come to know (whether consciously or not) Lacan, Foucault, & Freudbox.

David Peace - Occupied City: You're going to have to wait until my review appears in the Japan Times late this summer. For the time being, check out David talking about the writing of Occupied City here & here.

Right - off to scratch my itches, have a cold bath, apply calomine lotion, drink beer, & read James Sallis's excellent Driver. Next time.

Oh, & step up to Melissa Mann's Beat the Dust - very good. I love the cover of Heidi James' Carbon.

Image - which I love - is by Michał Karcz - it's called Ultima Thule. Check out more of Michał Karcz's work here.

Robo-Geisha

2009-07-03T04:41:00.001+01:00